Luty/Casson Heir Hunters

Heir hunters spend their lives tracking down families of people who've died without leaving a will.

They hand over thousands of pounds to long-lost relatives with no idea they were in line for a windfall.

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme, the heir hunters research

a family's history in record time but have they got the right heirs?

There's a witness, Eric, who we didn't know about, wasn't on the tree at all.

And the story of a war-time evacuee who defied authority to escape the Blitz.

The Government would not have been interested in her being evacuated.

They wouldn't have given her any help at all.

Plus, with thousands of pounds sitting unclaimed in the Treasury vaults, could you be a beneficiary?

More than two-thirds of people die without leaving a will.

If they have no obvious relatives, their money goes to the Government,

who last year made a staggering £18 million from unclaimed estates.

Hoping to gain a commission, more than 30 probate research companies

race against one another to track down and sign up long-lost relatives entitled to inherit.

Hello, Sheila Kingsland?

-Yes. Hi, David.

-Hello there.

Fraser and Fraser have been tracing beneficiaries for over 30 years.

The company has successfully reclaimed more than £100 million for heirs.

But solving these cases can use up many hours of manpower and resources.

The work we have to do, whether a case is worth £5 or £5,000 or £5 million, is exactly the same.

With small cases, we don't want to throw the resources at it,

because we won't have the return.

This is because the heir hunters work on a commission basis.

So a large estate can make a big difference to paying for their overheads.

It's 7am at Fraser's Central London office

and the Treasury's list of unclaimed estates has just been published.

Because none are listed with their values, the first hour of the team's day is probably the riskiest.

They need to be mindful about which estates look more likely to bring in a commission.

There's sheltered accommodation but there's nobody we can get to speak to.

With no obvious big property cases to follow, Neil wants the team to look into a case in Leeds.

What we have here is the case of David Luty, which to me sounds a very, very good name.

Without looking a bit more into it, I won't know.

Looks like a very uncommon name.

Born in 1914. We've got that off the deaths. We know he dies in Leeds.

Now he lives in a council property.

I want to make sure, I'm going to do a bit more in-depth enquiries

and see where we go.

David Luty died in Leeds on April 1, 2008.

He'd never married or had children and had worked as an accountant for the Yorkshire Electricity Board.

Sadly, this picture of him, aged seven, is the only record left.

For the latter years of his life he lived at this address in Holbeck, as neighbour, Iris Spink, remembers.

David was a very quiet man who kept to his-self.

He would say good morning and things like that, like you do.

That's all I know. He wasn't one that would keep a conversation up.

I hadn't seen him for a while at the bus stop and some children

or somebody must have broke his window downstairs

and two police were walking round and they must've seen

the window broken, you see, and they happened to see me and talk to me.

I said to them I hadn't seen him for a while.

Then they went in and broke in and they found him.

He was dead upstairs in his bedroom.

Case manager, Fran Brett, has been appointed to run the investigation.

We need to find a record of his birth

and ascertain his parentage.

Luty is not a name that I've ever come across before.

It's an unusual name and we'll easily find a record of his birth.

A birth certificate should contain precise information about David's parents.

They can then begin to map out the family tree,

generation by generation, until they find David's heirs.

It doesn't take the team long to find out if David had any brothers and sisters.

I've just been told that our deceased, David Luty,

was the only child born to a Lawrence Luty

and a Carrie Elsie Wright, who married in Leeds.

They've managed to find a death record for Lawrence Luty...

in 1987 in Leeds.

Looking at that death record,

it gives him a date of birth

of December 1, 1908.

From the information they have, they can see David's father was born

in Holbeck, just before the 1911 census.

This population survey should give more details about David's father's parents and family.

Right, so...

we've got Lawrence Luty on the 1911 census.

It appears his parents are Lawrence and Ellen, who have been married for only two years in 1911.

So they're gonna have married around 1908, 1909.

And he's got one brother who's younger than him, he's aged one.

They're living in the Leeds area.

That's good, so we can crack on with them.

Gareth's now identified that David's dad, Lawrence,

had a brother called Henry, who sadly died when he was only a child.

However, there could be more siblings born after 1911, so the team need to check.

Searching later birth records, it doesn't take long to find

that Henry wasn't the only brother.

Having ascended it after the 1911 census, we found one in 1918 of a William.

We found him being born in 1918, in the right area,

with the right surname, so we're fairly sure it's the right one.

He seems so far to be the only other sibling.

What we're going to do now is look for a marriage of William, to see if we can locate him

and his wife, or failing that, any kids they might have.

At the same time Dom is looking at the paternal side of the family,

Gareth is searching on the maternal side,

under the mother's name of Wright.

Wright as a surname is actually quite a common name, but, Carrie, Christian name, is very unusual.

Right, here are the Wrights.

That's quite interesting, it looks like they've had three children.

So the parents of Carrie are John Arthur and Daisy Wright.

They've been apparently married for seven years and had three children,

but the peculiar thing is there's clearly four children here.

We've got a Filma Lushington Wright, aged eight.

So we're gonna have to work out where he fits in

but Carrie also has, who are definitely going to be her brothers, a John Arthur and a Lena Ellis.

We've certainly got three people to follow up.

It turns out that Filma was Daisy's illegitimate child, born before she married.

Although a half-blood sibling, Filma wouldn't be an entitled heir.

John Arthur Wright died when he was only nine years old.

With these two siblings now eliminated from their searches,

the team can now concentrate on looking for a marriage

for Lena Wright and whether she had any children.

Back on the paternal side, Dom was looking to find a marriage for David Luty's uncle, William.

Right, found William Luty's marriage to Irene Sharp and looked on the computer, like they've got two kids,

William and Michael. We've got William up to date.

Up to date, brilliant.

The team has discovered that William Luty was married to Irene Sharp

and they had two children, Michael and William.

Further research shows that Michael died when he was just 18

but with William still alive, the team have a positive result.

At the moment it's one heir on the Luty side.

That's brilliant,

and relatively easy as well.

So that's good.

It's been a productive morning.

In only an hour they found a cousin for David.

The Luty name and Leeds location really speeded up their research.

It's helped because they're staying exactly within the same area.

Whenever we found anything, we found a marriage for William Luty in Leeds, it's our William Luty.

We found a birth of a child, William Luty, in Leeds, it's our William Luty.

I think that's what's made it very easy.

Back on the maternal side, the team have found a marriage in Leeds for a Lena Wright to a John Walton.

If they had children, they will be heirs.

What we'll do now is we'll start doing a birth search from 1933

going up for about 20 years, to see if we can identify any births.

It may be that we'll find a couple, it maybe we'll find quite a lot. So we'll just see as we go.

The researchers find five children with a mother whose maiden name is Wright.

What they still don't know is if they're all Lena's.

The shortcut to working out who Lena's children are will be via her death certificate.

The death certificate will be extremely useful

in the hope that one of her children will have registered that death.

Now I'm not sure whether I'm going to have anybody to send to the register office in Leeds.

Unfortunately it will be tomorrow

before we can sort out which of these people were her children.

And the case is about to reveal something even more interesting for the heir hunters.

The indication is that there may be a little bit of money in this,

reports up to almost £50,000.

On the 5th of April, 2008, Sylvia Casson died in a North London care home, aged 97.

She came from a Jewish East End family and appeared to have no heirs or beneficiaries.

Her case was passed on to the Treasury's estates division

and was advertised on their list of unclaimed estates.

Her details were picked up by heir hunter, Peter Birchwood of Celtic Research.

Celtic is one of over 30 companies who specialise in trying to solve

these difficult cases, in order to earn themselves a commission.

As a family-owned firm with researchers in Wales, Scotland

and Ireland, it's run by Peter and his stepson, Hector.

Researcher, Saul Marks, investigated the Casson case.

With an expertise in Jewish genealogy, Saul loves the thrill of solving a mystery.

One of the best parts of my job is the detective work, the sleuthing.

You start off with just a scrap of information, a name or a date

or something and turn it into a whole tree with all the different branches. It's really creative.

To create something like that is really wonderful.

Very, very satisfying. The other side is the heir hunting side,

visiting families and explaining to them

that they're entitled to something which they perhaps never expected.

It's really great to explain that and share knowledge, really.

Although Sylvia had spent the last years of her life in a care home, for most of her life she lived

in Dron House in Stepney in the East End of London.

She'd been a popular resident, as estate manager, Michael Punter remembers.

She was quite a character, she was.

She was a very nice lady.

She often used to carry a packet of sweets around in her pocket which she would give to children.

There's a picture of Sylvia on the wall.

That's Sylvia in the middle with her friend, Lily.

She was quite a cheery lady.

She liked going out, she liked socialising and she had many friends.

This network of friends seems to have become something of a surrogate family for Sylvia.

One of the unusual things about the Casson case was the fact that, although this was a Jewish family

and many Jewish families are close-knit families, this one was much more fragmented.

Saul's starting point was to check whether Sylvia had married,

and if she had, whether her husband was alive.

Many Jewish families put in notices in the Jewish press

for births, marriages, deaths, engagement - anything like that.

So we had a look in the Jewish press and here is a death notice of a Leonard or Lou Casson in 1983

and the death notice is put in by Sylvia.

So it looks like he's the right man.

Finding Lou's death notice had given Saul hope that Sylvia and Lou

may have had a family who would be entitled heirs,

but Saul made a gloomy discovery.

There's a very important phrase that I noticed in this notice, it says, "Now at peace with our dear son."

So they've clearly had a son who's died and obviously that son's surname would be Casson.

With a bit more digging, we've gone to a death notice

for a Robert Casson on March 7, 1972, the only son of Louis and Sylvia.

We know they had only one son and he died, which really proves

she had no heirs from her line of the family.

Just to prove that, his death certificate here,

proves the date of death and that he died at their house in Stepney

and to collect his birth certificate,

it proves that his parents were Louis Casson and Sylvia, formerly Greenblatt.

Now that Saul had proved there were no heirs from Sylvia's marriage,

he had to see whether Sylvia had any brothers or sisters.

Looking back over Sylvia's birth certificate, he was able to find

Sylvia's parents names, Joseph and Rebecca Greenblatt.

Armed with this information, he was then able to look up the family's details on the 1911 census.

This is the census return showing Joseph and Rebecca Greenblatt,

her parents, and all Sylvia's brothers and sisters.

And one of the interesting things is that her parents

were Russian Polish immigrants.

The story of Sylvia's parents is not uncommon.

From the early 1880s up to the start of the First World War, millions of impoverished Russian, Ukrainian

and Polish Jews fled their homeland, fearing persecution at the hands of the Russian Tsar.

The random and often murderous attacks on the Jewish community

came to be known as pogroms, the Russian word for devastation.

For the families who fled to save their lives, they headed west

to the UK and America, in search of a better life.

In England they migrated to London's poorer districts.

During 1887, a staggering 17,000 Jewish immigrants ended up

in the Whitechapel area and it soon became known as the Jewish quarter.

At the time the 1911 census was taken, Sylvia's parents were living

in Spitalfields, close to Brick Lane.

We can see from the census return that Sylvia's parents and her family

all lived together in three rooms and there were nine of them.

When Sylvia was born, that would make ten.

Ten people living in three rooms, in the East End of London, in relatively poor conditions,

surrounded by a great many other immigrants.

Sylvia would have had to do quite a bit for her parents.

But the language of the street would have been Yiddish and Joseph and Rebecca would have spoken almost

entirely Yiddish and it would have been their children who would have interpreted for them and helped

them learn a bit of English, because the children were born here and went to school here.

Along with giving Saul a picture of the family's social standing,

the census also enabled him to fill out the family tree.

Joseph and Rebecca Greenblatt had eight children.

As the youngest, Sylvia had five older sisters and two older brothers.

Now all Saul had to do was try and track them down.

Once again, finding Lou's death notice provided Saul with clues.

From one of the friend's tributes, he found Carol Levy, the daughter of Sylvia's best friend, Kitty.

Sylvia played an important role in Carol's life.

When I was growing up she was always there, because my mother and Sylvia worked together as teenagers.

My dad and her husband were also friends.

So she was always in our home.

We were always there.

To me she was little Auntie Sylvie.

She was quite an intelligent lady.

She was a machinist. A dress machinist in the East End of London

and I think that she probably worked all her life.

In the Jewish community in the East End, at that time, probably everybody knew one another.

My mum, Kitty and Sylvia were friends. They worked together.

They were best friends but they were like sisters.

Although not a blood relation, Sylvia was like an auntie to me.

She was always part of my life.

Birthdays, anything, there was always lovely presents.

She would take me out.

She was just a little lady with the biggest heart,

kind to everybody, even though sometimes life wasn't kind to her.

Until Sylvia's death at 97, the East End remained her much-loved home.

But it could so easily have been very different.

In 1939 when she was only 28 everything was about to change.

Suddenly life as Sylvia had known it was under threat.

It was the height of the Blitz.

The sustained bombing of London by Nazi Germany in World War II.

The first phase in 1940 saw the Luftwaffe bomb the city for 57 consecutive nights.

In anticipation of this, the Government embarked

on the biggest mass movement of people in the country's history.

An estimated three million people were transported

from towns and cities under threat from enemy bombers to places

of safety in the countryside.

James Rothy, Chief Executive of the Evacuees Reunion Association, was evacuated from London.

In the first big evacuation

it wasn't only school children that we evacuated because

the Government also made provision for mothers with children

under school age - they could be evacuated together.

Expectant mothers, they could be evacuated.

Infirm, blind people.

A lot of the mental hospitals, they were evacuated.

One of the reasons for that was to get the hospitals empty,

ready in case there was bombing and they could cope with the casualties.

Still in her early 20s, and yet to have children,

Sylvia didn't fall into any of these categories so she was forced to tough it out in her own home.

Fortunately she and her family survived the worst of it but over

21,000 Londoners were killed and over one million houses destroyed.

After the defeat of the Luftwaffe in 1940, the threat of bombing tailed off

and London life returned to something like normality again.

But the calm wasn't to last.

By 1944 the Germans had developed a new and lethal weapon, the long-range missile.

Once again, Londoners found themselves under attack,

this time from V1 Doodlebugs and V2 rockets.

This new menace saw a second wave of families being evacuated.

This time, Sylvia's best friend, Kitty and her baby daughter, Carol,

qualified to be evacuees.

I was born in 1944 in East London.

My mother always tells me the story of how her parents and Sylvie were evacuated.

My dad was in the Army here and Lou, Sylvia's husband, was in India.

So Sylvia came with my mother and my grandparents to Nottingham

and in Nottingham, where we all lived,

I've got here my identity card and it shows we went to Nottingham

in 1944.

We were there for a year.

It has the address where I lived in London and it has the address in Nottingham, which was Zulu road.

I don't remember anything about it, obviously, at six weeks old.

I was a very fat baby, my mother tells me and Aunty Sylvie

would wheel me in the pram and everyone would think I was hers.

As a mum with a newborn baby, Kitty would have been regarded

as a priority evacuee but it's unlikely Sylvia would have qualified.

Although married she had yet to have children, so would have had to make her own way to Nottingham.

Throughout the war, as well as the government evacuation schemes,

there were thousands of people who made their own arrangements.

Everybody was war weary and also the tremendous housing shortage, which was being made worse again,

more and more houses being destroyed.

An awful lot of people decided to leave London at that time.

Sylvia's case was... There must have been a lot like her.

The government would not have been interested in her being evacuated.

They wouldn't have given her any help at all.

They would have probably discouraged her

because they would want her to work in a factory.

She would have had to find her own employment, accommodation and so on.

She wouldn't have got any help from the government.

Thanks to her dressing-making skills, Sylvia was able to find work

in Carol's aunt's Nottingham dress-making factory.

She and Carol stayed there for a further year before eventually

heading back to try and resume their lives in the East End.

It's where Sylvia lived for another 60 years before her death in 2008.

As well as uncovering something of Sylvia's past, Carol also

knocked Saul's research sideways by revealing some startling news.

She actually told me that Sylvia had actually made a will.

Which is absolutely unheard of because all these cases are about people who didn't make wills.

So rather nervously I said to Carol, "Well, you better tell me what it says."

Sylvia's will effectively meant that Saul's job was over,

but it was to have another lasting effect when Carol

found herself reunited with someone from Sylvia's past.

Hello, it's been a long, long time.

Come on in. How are you?

For every case that is solved there are still thousands that stubbornly remain a mystery.

Currently over 3,000 names drawn from across the country are on the Treasury's unsolved case list.

Their assets will be kept for up to 30 years in the hope that eventually

someone will remember and come forward to claim their inheritance.

With estates valued at anything from £5,000 to millions of pounds,

the rightful heirs are out there somewhere.

Thomas Joseph Clark died in Birmingham in November 2004.

Was he a friend or neighbour of yours?

Could you even be related to him and entitled to his legacy?

Villis Horns died in Wisbech in Cambridgeshire in January 2006.

So far every attempt to find his rightful heir has failed.

If no relatives are found, his money will go to the Government.

Do you know anything about him? Is he your long-lost uncle or cousin?

Is there a fortune out there waiting for you?

It's day two on the case of David Luty.

This photo of David, aged seven, is all that remains to remember him by.

Tragically, he died in his Leeds home in 2008.

But Fraser & Fraser feel his professional job as an accountant

for the Yorkshire Electricity Board, could mean value in the case.

The inquiries are coming back now and the indication is there may be a little bit of money in this.

Reports of up to almost £50,000.

It really goes to show that you can't tell anything from where someone lives.

But this tantalising figure of £50,000 is still just that - tantalising.

The team has done the research and found a potential heir on the paternal side

and five possible maternal heirs but what they don't know is whether they're all Lena Wright's children.

To shortcut their research, they hope Lena's death certificate

will show one of them as the informant

and be able to confirm the siblings.

But without a traveller free to instantly collect the certificate from Leeds' register office,

the team has turned to the next quickest option,

ordering an express certificate from the General Register Office.

Located some 250 miles north in Southport is certificate HQ.

The office is the central repository for all of the birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales.

It currently holds over 260 million records.

This is growing at a rate of 1.5 million a year

and they issue between 5,000 and 7,000 certificates a day.

The process of recording these civil events provides a remarkably

complete record of the population's history.

Civil registration in England and Wales began in 1837 and, obviously,

much has changed since then.

I don't think anybody dreamed all those years ago, when events were

being registered, that the interest would be there 170-odd years later.

People would be so interested in obtaining copies of those events.

For the heir hunters, whose hard currency is certificates,

the General Register Office is key to their work.

Every time they present a case to the Treasury, they need

the certificate to prove that the heirs they have found are entitled.

Have you ordered with us before?

Good morning, Rachel speaking. Can I help you?

We have a lot of customers who are probate researchers who regularly use our services.

Some local authorities can issue certificates over the counters.

For others, there's quite a delay.

So a lot of companies use us.

Primarily for the ease at which they can

order certificates from us, because we have an online ordering service.

A company can order from us up to 4pm and have a certificate ready for collection at 10am the next day.

It's 9.30am in Fraser's office.

While they wait for the arrival of Lena Wright's death certificate to, hopefully, find one of her children,

they want to keep the Luty case moving forward.

So far, it's been an easy piece of research to find David Luty's potential heirs

but if it's been easy for the team, then it could also be easy

for the other companies.

We're going to have keep a close eye on the competition for this one.

Everybody likes a straightforward case, but,

you know, when they're difficult, it makes it harder for everybody else.

To try and keep one step ahead of the competition, the team decide

to make a move before actually knowing where the informant lives.

But first, they need to get someone on the road.

The office employs a squadron of travelling heir hunters

who are ready to go wherever the hunt takes them.

Based up and down the country, their job is to sniff out clues to potential heirs.

Once heirs have been found, the travellers hot-foot it to meet them.

If the heirs choose to sign up with them, the company earns a percentage of the inheritance.

Manchester-based, Dave Mansell, is being sent towards Leeds.

So we're heading across the border into the wild west Yorkshire.

Hopefully by the time we get there,

Francis in the office will have some information

with regard to some certificate applications she put in overnight.

But without confirmation, heading off to Leeds could be a risk.

It's now 10am. The urgent death certificate they ordered yesterday from Southport has just arrived.

I've got the death back of Lena Alice,

and there's a witness, Eric, who we didn't know about.

He wasn't on the tree at all. I can't find his birth.

But...

he appears to be alive and well at the same address and on the phone.

Brilliant.

Although finding Eric Walton is not exactly what they were expecting, if Francis can get traveller,

Dave Mansell to see him, then he should be able to confirm who Lena's children are.

The good news is their hunch about the informant being in Leeds is correct.

Dave quickly makes his way to see Eric Walton and his wife.

Is your full name Eric?

-Yes, it is.

-It's enough, isn't it?

Yes.

Where were you born and in what town?

I was born in Leeds as far as I'm aware.

What did you used to do for a living?

-I worked for Yorkshire Electricity Board.

-Did you?

Dave's hoping this meeting will sort out whether Eric is actually an entitled heir.

-So your grandfather was John Arthur Wright and your grandmother was Daisy?

-Just Daisy...

But what he really wants to know is who are Lena Wright's children.

Right, your mum was Lena Alice.

-That's right.

-And you said her maiden name was Wright?

-Yes.

-Was your mum born in Leeds as well as your dad?

-Yes.

-How many children did your parents have?

-They had three.

There was Sylvia and John Michael.

There was no Jean and no William?

No.

John Michael, he died about 13, 14 years ago.

Was your father married more than once?

No, not as far as I know.

No. Right.

-Is Sylvia...?

-My sister.

Five years younger than me.

She's the next eldest, isn't she?

Yes. She's the only one surviving, sort of thing, now.

Is she on the telephone?

Dave's research has confirmed that although they initially missed Eric

off the family tree, he is in fact one of only three children.

It finally removes any speculation.

Eric's also able to reveal a little more about David Luty's life.

Even though at this stage in his inquiries, for professional reasons,

Dave doesn't tell him that it's David Luty who has died.

-He were into folk music and guitars and that sort of thing.

-Right.

Quite a clever lad, he was, in his way.

-Was he? How long is it since you've seen him?

-30 years.

He'll still be around, I think,

but probably a bachelor.

And after my aunt Elsie died,

he...he lived at Beeston with his father.

His father were a bit of a nut case, really.

Was he?

-Thanks for your hospitality.

-It's been very nice.

Especially the Yorkshire tea and the Harrods biscuits!

It's been a successful morning for Dave.

Eric has agreed to Frasers taking his claim forward.

Dave wastes no time in updating the office.

Hiya, Fran, I've seen Mr Walton.

-'Yes.'

-And he's signed up.

Now, there's only three of them, not five.

-'OK.'

-So there's no William and there's no Jean.

-'All right.

'Thank you very much for that.'

'OK. I'll speak to you later.'

-Bye now.

-'Bye.'

Thanks to Eric's information, Frasers were eventually able

to trace four heirs in total on the maternal side.

In addition to Eric and Sylvia, their deceased brother John's children, Paul and Timothy.

For Neil, his hunch about David having money seems to have paid off for the team.

What we're going to look back on with this case of David Luty is that

you can't judge a book by a cover and you can't judge an estate by the name or even where someone lives.

Sometimes the people you least expect to have savings and savings accounts

because of where they live are the people with hundreds of thousands stashed away in the bank.

This is just one of those cases.

In the end, despite his lonely death, David's family,

rather than the Treasury, will now benefit from his estate.

Along with the four maternal heirs, Frasers also found one paternal cousin, entitled to inherit.

They will all share David's £70,000 legacy.

Back on the case of Sylvia Casson, who died in the East End of London in December 2008.

Heir hunter, Saul Marx, had started unravelling Sylvia's family tree.

Using the 1911 census, he had found that Sylvia had seven older brothers and sisters.

This discovery meant Saul was fairly hopeful

that someone would have married and be able to find entitled heirs.

To try and shortcut this process, found family friend, Carol Levy,

but Carol gave Saul some startling information.

When I rang Carol, explaining that Sylvia hadn't got a will, she said, "No, she does have a will

"and I've got it here and I've never opened it." Because she didn't know that Sylvia had died.

Obviously, most of the profession we're in revolves around the fact that there is no known will

but sometimes a will does come to light, especially if that will hasn't been lodged with anyone.

Sylvia's will left her £35,000 estate to a number of people

and Carol and Peter Layton were named as executors.

Peter was Sylvia's nephew and had stayed in contact with her right up to the end of her life.

When I spoke to Carol on the phone, she was very upset that she had not been informed of Sylvia's death.

She couldn't understand why Peter hadn't informed her and the office

did some further research and found out that Peter Layton had actually died and he had died before Sylvia,

which explained why Carol had never known.

Peter Layton died in 2007, a year before Sylvia.

His death turned the case around again for Saul.

Just as the will had made Saul's services redundant, Peter's death

meant that, as a beneficiary, his portion of Sylvia's estate was effectively intestate again.

Once we knew that one of the beneficiaries had died, and he had no will either, it was then possible

to simply work as if he had been the deceased and use his

and distribute his portion of the estate amongst Sylvia's relatives.

Saul had Carol to thank for putting him in touch with Sylvia's niece and an entitled heir, Nina Herman.

I had a call from somebody called Saul Marx, completely out of the blue asking me if I was related

to one Sylvia Casson and I said, "Yes, she was my aunt."

He told me that she had passed away and I might be a beneficiary from her will.

I was absolutely gobsmacked.

I didn't even know she had died because I had lost contact with her over the years.

Carol's tip-off about Nina really helped to unlock Sylvia's family tree.

It was a shortcut without having to research all of Sylvia's brothers and sisters.

It was much quicker to be able to be given a link into the family

and then to ask Nina all the questions and she was very helpful.

Nina's additional family information helped Saul discover who would be

entitled to Peter Layton's £15,000 portion of Sylvia's estate.

Seeing all her family listed on the tree has been something of an eye-opener for Nina.

Looking at my father's parents, I had no idea what their names were

and I was bowled over to see that they were both born in Russia.

I think they must have come here to escape the pogroms

and I feel proud that they felt they could make this journey which couldn't have been easy one

in those times and also to have the money to pay for the trip here.

So it's fascinating and I feel proud that

having come from a generation that obviously had to run away from somebody wanting to kill them

and, obviously, a lot of the people with whom we mixed had the same experience with their grandparents.

Nina, and many third generation British Jews,

have their grandparents' bravery and determination to thank for the start they've had in life.

Arriving in the East End as refugees, with next to nothing,

Joseph and Rebecca Greenblatt

must have worked extremely hard to better their family's fortunes.

For many families, as they began to prosper, they also looked for a better life away from the East End.

Nina's parents went west to Willesden, while many other

Jewish families headed north to the more leafy middle class suburbs.

For Nina, the move undoubtedly made it harder to keep in touch with her remaining East End family,

but hearing about Sylvia again has prompted her to want to get back in touch with Carol.

Meeting up with Carol again will give Nina the chance to share some family recollections.

Hi! Lovely to see! Long time no see.

Come on in, come on in!

Thanks.

This is interesting because it's my mum, my dad and Sylvia, probably in their twenties.

-and this is exactly the same pose in their 70s.

-Gosh. Amazing.

I have been given a family tree of Sylvie and my father's family.

-Oh, how interesting.

-Which I'd like you to have a look at because I was gobsmacked on a few occasions.

There were two sisters here that I had never even heard about.

Sadly, they died when they were young.

The only two I remember is Rose and Milly.

Milly lived along the way from Sylvie in the same house.

Rose was my children's third grandmother.

She doted on them and then what gobsmacked me more than anything else that my late grandparents,

Joseph and Rebecca, my eldest son has two children and what are their names?

Joseph and Rebecca, quite unrelated to this.

Oh, my goodness.

That's amazing. That is amazing.

I don't know if you've seen this.

This photo was taken at a family gathering in my house

and I think I'd like to remember

Sylvie like that because she looked so happy and always smiling.

-She was lovely.

-Amazing.

Amazing lady.

For both Carol and Nina, the heir hunting process has been able to let them lay Sylvia's memory to rest

and Auntie Sylvia has also helped bring their two families closer together again.

If you would like to find out more about how to build a family tree or write a will, go to -

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