Toms/Loraine Heir Hunters

Heir hunters track down the families of people who have died without a will.

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

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme...

The team try to find heirs for a woman who died penniless in a domestic fire,

and discover a tale of secrets, burlesque and resistance fighting.

Sometimes, it was the most... improbable people, really,

that became secret agents.

And the heir hunters encounter a case of multiple marriages and divorces

that separated a family for two decades.

I knew straight away it was my father.

He knew straight away it was me.

We introduced ourselves, talked like total strangers.

And we'll have details of some of the hundreds of unclaimed estates.

Could you be in line for a windfall?

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.

That's where the heir hunters step in.

What we couldn't find was a marriage for your parents.

There are more than 30 heir hunting companies who,

for a share of the estate, make it their business to track down the rightful kin.

Last year, they claimed back £6.5 million for unsuspecting heirs,

who would otherwise have gone empty-handed.

You can see the smile on the beneficiary's face as they know

they're going to receive tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds.

It's 7.00am at Fraser and Fraser, one of London's largest heir hunting companies.

The team's early start is to make sure they don't waste any time

looking over the Government's newly published list of people who have died without a will.

They have already earmarked a case to research from the names on it.

The case we're looking at is William John Toms.

The information we have so far is that he died in Leighton Buzzard

but I haven't been able to pin down the address.

William Toms died in 2008, aged 77.

His last residence was a Swiss Cottage nursing home

in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire.

Violet is the deputy manager and looked after him before he died.

We do have quite nice memories.

He used to be a very happy gentleman.

He was quite a charmer, I would say.

He looked, a very nice-looking guy.

Always having a smile on his face, with a good sense of humour.

Before he retired, William used to be a bingo hall manager.

But his possessions point to an interest he nurtured in his spare time.

He had ornaments.

I presume he liked birds during his early years of life

because there were so many ornaments of birds in his bedroom.

No-one knows how much money William left behind after his death.

As he died without a will,

his entire estate will go to the Treasury unless heirs can be found.

Heir hunters work on commission so they need to ensure their costs will be covered by the estate.

But sometimes, they work cases before they know how much they're worth,

just in case they turn out to be valuable,

which is exactly what they're doing with William's.

In my past experience, I've often found that the deceased has

lived a life where the neighbours have fed and clothed them,

then they've died and they've found they've left a considerable amount of money.

It's no indication to lifestyle as to what wealth you've got.

All the team knows about William's lifestyle is that he was in a care home.

So the researchers are cracking on in the hope of a surprise windfall.

The first stage in finding heirs is for the team to get the birth,

death and marriage records for the person who has died.

They use this information to start building up a family tree, layer by layer,

which could lead them to siblings, uncles, aunts or cousins,

any of whom could inherit.

Early research has already found a potential close relative.

We're running with a birth we think is correct.

With this speculative work, this would make the deceased have a brother called Bernard.

We're just phoning up, now, neighbours to see if this Bernard, the brother, is still alive.

But it's very speculative at the moment.

Case manager Tony Pledger

has got through to an ex-neighbour of William's brother.

We're looking into a family by the name of Toms

and the Bernard Toms that used to live up the road from you,

we think might be a relative. What did they bang him up for, then?

Oh, blimey. Right, OK.

That doesn't mean he's not the bloke we're looking for but thanks ever so much indeed. Bye.

Old Bernard Toms is in his 70s. The reason he's not there is because he's in prison.

Bernard being in prison is an unusual turn of events.

However, in most cases, including William's,

it doesn't make any difference to the laws of inheritance.

The only way you can stop inheriting as a blood next-of-kin

is if you actually murder the victim, murder the deceased.

That cuts off your entitlement.

Just being in prison doesn't cut off your entitlement.

So it makes no difference in this case at all.

But although Bernard is close kin,

the team has made another discovery

that may lead them to even closer family.

I just identified where the deceased married.

Totally out of area so it was very difficult to locate.

It's actually in Brent in north-west London.

William married Winifred May in 1975 but she died before him.

However, if there were sons or daughters from the marriage,

they would inherit rather than William's brother.

David has just spoken to the care home

to see if they knew of any children.

What was very helpful from the nursing home - the gentleman

had a daughter called Pamela but they have no contact with him.

It was under the Court of Protection up until the time of his death.

So now, what we're trying to do is to locate his daughter, Pamela.

If William's finances were under

the Court of Protection, it would mean that they were being handled by the state.

This normally happens when a person cannot look after themselves or has no family.

Why would this be the case if William had a daughter?

Perhaps they were estranged.

The team will need to unravel the mystery

so they're going back to the marriage records for Winifred and William

to see if this will give them any clues.

So she's 45 then when she gets married.

-She's not going to have a first kid, is she?

-It's possible, isn't it?

I bet you that's either his second marriage...

Or she's adopted or she's from her first marriage.

How do they know at the nursing home then, that her name is Pamela Toms?

Because she's from his first marriage and that's his second marriage.

That's a better shout than being a child from her because it would be Pamela...

There's no Winifred M Slade.

William married Winifred in 1975 when he was 44 and she was 46.

So the team think that Pamela was born from a previous marriage.

We need to try and locate the birth of a Pamela Toms.

She's a child of the deceased.

We think it's of the first marriage so we don't know who he married firstly...

Second marriages are an increasingly common feature of heir hunting

but make genealogy more complicated because they can result in

name changes and children from different parents.

Careful research is also required to double-check divorce records.

A spouse inherits before anyone else.

A divorced spouse does not inherit at all.

But it's only more recent cases that tend to feature second or

third marriages because in the first half of the 20th century, divorce was much less common.

In the 1950s, the process of getting a divorce

was much more difficult than it is today.

The parties would have to go to court before a judge

and only certain judges were allowed to grant divorces.

In addition, because divorce law was fault-based,

those faults actually had to be proved to the satisfaction of the court.

In the 1970s, this changed and something called the special procedure was introduced.

This meant you could get a divorce without going near a court.

You simply filled in the forms, sent them to the court.

The court would scrutinise them and would grant the decree

without the parties ever having to attend the divorce.

This was extended to all undefended divorces with the result that today,

over 99% of divorces are dealt with in this very simple, almost administrative way.

So, William's second marriage to Winifred in the '70s

was unsurprising in the context of divorce trends.

Now the heir hunters need to find out what they can about William's previous marital history.

Tony is putting in another call to William's care home to ask some more questions.

I know that Mr Toms was a widower when he died.

I think his wife had died quite a few years ago but I was thinking he might have been married twice.

I don't know how much you know...

Ah, the stepdaughter, was she called Pamela?

Would you possibly be able to give me a phone number for her so I could contact her?

Clearly, she would know more about Mr Toms' family than most people would.

It's not entirely good news for Tony.

Pamela was a daughter from the first marriage but not William's.

His second wife was also married before and had three daughters,

Pamela, Cary and Rona, so they're not blood relatives and therefore, not entitled.

There's some more bad news about the estate.

She also thought that it might not be very substantial.

She thought maybe less than £20,000. So we'll see how we go.

William's estate is potentially much smaller than the heir hunters had hoped

so the sooner they can find heirs for it, the better.

As it may not be worth much, other cases will take priority

and Tony will have fewer resources to draw on.

But with a brother, at least two wives, three stepdaughters and potential children,

Tony's small team have got their work cut out

and there may be some difficult phone calls ahead.

The worst thing would be to tell someone their father's dead and it's the wrong person.

Unfortunately for the heir hunters, the William Toms case is far from being solved.

There are several large heir hunting companies in London but few that have been going as long as Hooper's.

Founded in 1923 by Alfred Hooper,

the company has nearly 90 years experience in finding heirs for tough cases.

So, that's that solved.

But while experience and resources can give a company the edge, a dogged determination to get

to the bottom of a case can also go a long way,

as senior case manager Kevin Edmondson found out with the estate of Mary Lorraine.

This was a rather unusual case.

This lady, Mary Lorraine, died in a fire in a flat in Brighton.

This was in 1973 and it's rather unusual for us to be dealing with

cases of people who died in 1973, rather than in more recent times.

Mary Lorraine died tragically in her Brighton flat 30 years before her case was advertised.

She was just 59 when a fire swept through her home.

Mary was a virtual recluse, living in poverty.

The fire broke out just hours before she was due to be evicted for owing £55 on her rent.

She was obviously in dire financial straits.

So it was a great surprise to find, when the case was advertised by

the Treasury Solicitor, that her estate was valued at over £100,000.

Years after Mary's death, it was discovered that

there were £2,600 worth of government bonds in her name.

Because the case wasn't advertised for another 30 years, the bonds matured to a value of over £100,000.

Even at the original value, the money would have lifted Mary out of poverty,

but as it was, there was a possibility that even her heirs might not benefit from it.

The rule in cases advertised by the Treasury Solicitor is that you have

up to 30 years after the date of death of someone who has died,

to claim their state.

The unusual thing about this one was that they advertised the case

almost 30 years to the day after this lady died.

The researchers had no idea what had taken so long for the case to come to light.

But as it was valuable, they hoped to the Treasury would allow some extra time to solve it.

As Mary had died so long ago, they couldn't rely on talking to neighbours

or people that had met her so they had to use other sources to get information about Mary's life.

We found from a newspaper report that was published at the time of her death, that it was believed

she had been involved in the Resistance in Belgium and Holland during the Second World War.

Mary was thought to be a recruit of the Special Operations Executive,

or SOE, which was set up in 1940

while the Second World War waged through Europe.

The brainchild of Winston Churchill, SOE was a resistance movement

which worked in conjunction with MI5 and MI6.

Unlike them, however, it also took on and trained people with no intelligence experience.

One of the reasons that women were recruited was because

in occupied Europe, young men were a scarcity.

A woman was much less conspicuous.

A young man agent would automatically have had perhaps excited the unwarranted interest of the Gestapo

whereas a young woman wouldn't have had the same effect.

The walks of life and the skills that SOE agents had were very varied

but basically, it had to be a familiarity with the country

which one was going to operate in, its customs and obviously, its language.

Sometimes it was the most improbable people, really, that became secret agents.

Special Ops recruits would have had full weapons training

although Mary's contribution may not have involved combat.

Women SOE agents that were dropped into occupied Europe -

their role was mainly that of couriers or radio operators, rather than actually engaging

in military operations, though in some cases, that did happen.

Whatever role Mary played, she would have been likely to feel the impact of the war for the rest of her life.

It's said that a lot of people that work for SOE in the special forces

generally found it very difficult to return to civilian life.

If you've been trained almost to act as a criminal,

it's very, very difficult to return to an ordinary life.

The researchers were unable to find a record of Mary's precise activities during the conflict

so instead, they focused on finding any other information that could lead to her near relatives.

The article which appeared in the paper also said that she was reputed

to be the daughter of Mabel Love,

who was a very well-known music hall actress in the Edwardian and late Victorian times.

This was good news for the researchers.

Finding Mary's mother meant they would potentially

be able to check for siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins.

Like her daughter, Mary, it seemed that Mabel Love had had an interesting life.

Mabel Love was a popular young actress on the London stage at the end of the 19th century.

She was known for appearing in burlesque productions

which were parodies of classical plays or operas.

Mabel Love started her career at 12 in a version of Lewis Carroll's

Alice-in-Wonderland, which was obviously a big success

and she became known as a burlesque actress.

As a woman, I think, certainly actresses earned more

than they might have done in other occupations that were open to them.

One photographer, Frank Foulsham, had the idea of making postcards of actresses.

Postcards were becoming popular and he realised that you could sell

a lot of lovely young actresses.

An actress could sell the rights to her appearance

for a year for a certain sum of money.

Somebody like Mabel Love, who was obviously very beautiful,

was known by writers of the period as the pretty girl of the postcard.

One year's postcard sales would have earned Mary's mother

the equivalent of £78,000 in today's money.

But for a beautiful actress, there were also other means of ensuring a comfortable lifestyle.

There was a certain glamour obviously about the stage and about actresses.

Some of them were certainly pursued by people who were very wealthy or very grand and very aristocratic.

But many of these girls certainly had protectors, rich men

who housed them, looked after them, paid for their expenses

and who would have given them the opportunity to live

in a much grander style than they ever would have done

in their lives before that happened.

There were great opportunities for actresses in those days.

But not all of them took them, of course, but some obviously did

and Mabel seems to have been amongst them.

Mabel enjoyed 30 successful years in the business so Mary would have

had a comfortable childhood, thanks to her mother's wealth.

In Mabel's will, she arranged for money to be set aside for her daughter

in the form of government bonds to be administered by her sister.

Perhaps Mabel's sister died before she could tell Mary about them.

Perhaps she thought she was aware of them.

No-one knows why Mary didn't gain access to her money

but tragically, the bonds lay untouched and she died in poverty.

The researchers were pleased to trace Mary's mother but there was an even more useful discovery to come.

We had a big breakthrough when we finally discovered that Mary had married,

not only once, but twice.

Firstly at the age of 21 in Cairo in Egypt to a 53 year-old widower.

It was a great finding for Kevin.

They traced Mary to Cairo where she married Richard Emrys Thomas at the age of 21.

It's unclear what she was doing there

but neither husband nor life in Cairo would be permanent fixtures.

We then discovered that she had married for a second time in 1948 in Montreal in Canada.

Finding two marriages was great news for the heir hunters as it meant they could then look for children

who, after the spouse, are next in line to inherit.

The really big breakthrough was that we discovered she had a child by her first marriage.

A son called Richard David Thomas who was born in 1936 in Cairo.

The mystery of Mary Lorraine was intensifying.

Now it seemed she had a son but why was there no will?

Where was he? With the estate advertised so long after her death, would he even inherit?

With £100,000 in danger of going to the Treasury, finding heirs

for Mary Lorraine would be a race against time for the heir hunters.

For every case that is solved, there are still thousands that 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, somebody 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.

Clara Brooks of Nottingham died in July 2006.

Does her name ring any bells?

Could you be the one person entitled to her estate?

Kathleen Pradzynski died in Paddington, London, in October 2005.

The heir hunters have run out of leads.

Do you know anything about her? Maybe she's your long-lost aunt or cousin.

Could your help get the heirs of Clara Brooks and Kathleen Pradzynski

and thousands of cases just like these?

Is there a fortune out there waiting for you?

William Toms died in 2008 in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire.

Tony and Gareth are the only ones working on the case because the care home where he lived

have estimated that his estate is relatively small.

It might not be very substantial.

It might be less than £20,000.

So, while the rest of the office are busy on other cases,

Tony is trying to figure out William's family set-up.

He was married twice and had three stepchildren from his second marriage.

Tony has tracked down one of them, Rona.

So we know he was born in Plymouth in 1930 and I think he married Winifred Slade in 1975.

My assumption would be that Winifred would have been your mum.

-Oh, OK...

-Rona could be the key to the team finding heirs.

Do you think he might have had children from his first marriage?

Oh, he had a son?

According to the stepdaughter, he had a son, Keith,

from his first marriage,

from whom he got divorced. So we'll now have to go back and redo everything again.

Stepchildren are not entitled to inherit

because they are not blood relatives but if the team can trace William's son, they may have found their heir.

We've had a bit of a change of plan.

Whereas we were looking for Pamela Toms,

we are now looking for the son of the deceased, called Keith.

So Pamela is in fact Keith?

No, Pamela is Rona's sister.

But he has a son, Keith?

Yes and he got divorced from his first wife.

She doesn't know who the first wife was.

The team waste no time in tracking down William's first marriage details.

It seems he married a Joan Evans in 1956 and had a son, Keith.

But the marriage was doomed to failure and William divorced Joan for adultery in 1964.

Now the office have these dates, they can use them to trace William's son and probable heir, Keith Toms.

We've been trying to confirm whether Keith is the son of William and I think I've done it.

We knew that William, or we had hoped William was married to an Evans

but now it looks like her maiden name was Berry.

She was born as a Berry and was married three times.

It's looking good at the moment.

I'm just going to go and give Tony this news and maybe we'll go and see Keith.

It seems that William and his wives kept the divorce courts busy.

His first wife, Joan, was married three times.

William was her second husband.

After they divorced, both Joan and William subsequently remarried.

It's now 3pm.

Trying to untangle William's marital history has meant that Tony

and his team are taking longer to complete the case than hoped.

You've got multiple marriages, loads of in-laws, etcetera,

and the whole thing gets little bit complicated to understand anyway.

The multiple marriages mean that Tony could always have

missed someone and double checking whether a child is related by blood or marriage

is key because it makes all the difference to whether you can inherit.

In addition to this, the heir hunters have to take extra care before speaking to close kin.

Until you find out the history of the family, you can never tell how someone is going to take the news.

We have to be very careful that the information we're telling them is correct.

The worst thing we could do is tell them,

we think your father's dead, and we've got the wrong person.

Ordinarily, the team would deploy a travelling researcher to go out

and meet any heirs, especially in the case of very close relatives.

-Hi Christine, Paul Matthews, Fraser and Fraser, a bit unexpected?

-Yes!

A face-to-face approach is the preferred option for speed and tact

but it's a costly way of doing things.

But as William's estate is so small, the heir hunters can't afford the expense of sending someone

in person to meet his son, so Tony is going to have to break the news of William's death in a phone call.

I'm hoping that you will be able to help and that you are the chap we're looking for.

Would your mother have been Joan?

She was born as Berry, I think but I think she then married a Mr Evans,

then she married a Mr Toms and then she probably then married a Mr Manning.

Keith is able to confirm a lot of the team's work

but as his parents divorced when he was just three,

he knows very little about his father

which may help lessen the impact of what Tony is about to say.

I appreciate that, that the Toms family, you don't know a great deal about.

When they died, they don't appear to have left a valued will.

I have to tell you that that person would have been your dad,

William Toms.

Now, he, it would appear, after he got divorced from your mum,

married again and from her first marriage, there were three children.

I've spoken to some of those today

and they then told me vaguely that there was you, Keith, because they vaguely remember that.

Having run through Keith Toms' mother and father's various marriages,

Tony is confident that Keith is the right heir to William's estate.

And despite the complexities in researching the case,

the estate will ultimately be passed down simply from father to son.

We didn't expect to find children of the deceased when we first started.

Certainly, the people in the care home had no knowledge at all of these children or of his earlier marriage.

They only knew about his second marriage, they knew nothing about his first marriage.

So, hopefully at the end of the day,

it will prove beneficial both to the heirs and to us.

This case has been a lot harder to work than some of the big cousin cases we work,

where we break on to them very easily. This has been one that has taken a while

to pin down the addresses, to track people down,

to confirm we have the right names and families.

Quite hard work even if it is quite close relatives.

I think it will be one we remember.

I don't think it's one that will actually make the firm any money.

Although it doesn't seem surprising for a father's estate to go to his son,

Keith Toms, or David as he is known, was certainly not expecting it.

I must be honest, it was a complete shock because my father, I haven't spoken to for a number of years.

I lost contact about 25 years ago. I didn't know who, what, where or when.

William divorced David's mother for adultery

and left the home when David was just three years old.

Joan brought up her son as a single mum.

We were constantly moving from one place to another, on trains, moving from one city to another.

I think we lived, from conversations with my mother before she died,

we've lived in places such as Plymouth, Portsmouth, Wrexham, Coventry, all over the place.

Pretty much a nomadic sort of lifestyle.

Then she met another chap, Ron Manning, who brought us up from

approximately the age of 9 or 10 years old,

all through adulthood. Obviously, he was regarded as my father.

With David constantly on the move as a child,

it may have been hard for William to stay in touch with his son

and it wasn't until David was in his early twenties that he heard from his father again.

William saw his son in a national newspaper and was inspired to get in touch.

Their first meeting was in a cafe near where David lived.

I knew straight away it was my father.

He knew straight away it was me. We both made a beeline for each other

and we just sat down, introduced ourselves and talked like total strangers.

I was unsure at that time whether we were going to meet again.

I was of the opinion that, fine, we've met.

Was he then going to lose interest in me, was there going to be an interest carrying on,

was I going to be interested in keeping in touch with him?

As it happened, or as it transpired, we did stay in touch, all but briefly

and then lost contact again at a later date.

It wasn't until his death that I actually knew where he was

or what he'd been doing for the the second gap.

So there was no real emotion with regards to it

because I couldn't find emotions, to be honest,

because he was to all intents and purposes, a stranger to me.

Inheriting his father's estate has brought his fleeting relationship to a close.

But it is not the money that will have a lasting impression on David.

Our family has been pretty fragmented

and I've made it a concerted effort to stay with my children, make sure that we are a complete unit,

a complete family and once the family do segment,

which they're bound to do as they grow older,

they get married, they move away from home,

I'd like to think that we've done enough

for the family to stay in touch.

I'm hoping, fingers crossed,

that it will be completely different from how my father and myself were.

Mary Lorraine died in 1973, aged 59.

She left over £100,000 in government bonds which had been set up for her

by her burlesque actress mother, Mabel Love.

But as Mary had died 30 years before her case came to light,

the researchers had to work fast to find heirs in case the Treasury refused to accept the claim.

All the time we were working on this case,

we knew there was a distinct possibility

that even if we found the heirs, in the end, they wouldn't be any benefit to the heirs or ourselves.

The heir hunters had a breakthrough when they discovered

that Mary had been married twice and had had a son

by her first marriage so they put all their efforts into tracing him.

They discovered that Richard Thomas was born in 1936 in Cairo,

a year after Mary was married but he had severe learning difficulties and was put into care at an early age.

In the late seventies, Richard was moved to The Old Rectory care home in Somerset

which has since closed and sold for redevelopment.

Elaine Cridland worked there for 26 years

and was Richard's key care worker.

Richard loved life, he lived life to the full.

He was placed with us and he was there for 24 years and he was just like part of the family.

He had a good rapport with all the other residents and the staff.

He just enjoyed life there.

Elaine and her sister, Linda, who also worked at the home,

have kept hundreds of photos from their time there, including many of Richard.

That's a nice one, isn't it?

That's when me and Paul took him down to Cornwall and he always liked

to sit at the front of the minibus and Paul got him some sunglasses.

That's a nice one.

I'm not sure if that's Torquay

or the one that we went to Cornwall as well.

This one's really old, I think it's Christmas.

That's got to be back in the eighties.

Every Christmas, he always wanted a jumper.

I remember that. The trouble with Richard,

he opened his presents and then quickly took them upstairs

because he didn't want anybody else to have them!

It was the care home workers and residents

who became Richard's family for the time they were there.

Now as the building undergoes a complete overhaul, the sisters have come back for one last visit.

In all the years we've worked here, we've never known Richard

to have any contact with any of the family, have we?

No, he never even talked about anybody, did he?

No, he was quite a private person.

We've been in care for 26 years and we've never

known any family or relatives to come and visit him, have we?

No, I think it's quite sad.

Very sad.

Although he may not have had a lot of contact with his mother,

Richard was her sole heir but unfortunately, as the heir hunters were about to find out,

he wouldn't be able to inherit her £100,000 estate.

Sadly, we discovered that he had died a few years previously.

At the time of his death, nobody knew who his next of kin or relations were.

Richard died in 2001, aged 64. Without a living heir,

there is now a real possibility that Mary's money would go to the Treasury.

But because there was a 30-year gap between Mary dying and her estate

being advertised, the heir hunters took a gamble and planned to argue

that it would have passed to Richard in that time and that it should now pass on to his family.

Mary's son had died without leaving a will so really, the search began

all over again to find out who his next of kin were.

If Richard had inherited Mary's estate, the search for possible

heirs could include his father's side of the family

who were not blood related to his mother.

This would include aunts, uncles and cousins.

We did know that his father had been previously married and so the first step was

to find a record of that marriage and to discover whether there had been any children from that marriage.

We eventually established there weren't, so the next stage again was then that we had to find out about

Richard's father's brothers and sisters.

If Richard's father had brothers and sisters,

this could lead to cousins and potential heirs.

Do you think you could do me a search please

for the birth of a Richard Emrys Thomas?

1881, Pontypool.

If it's not there, you could go on to the next quarter.

But the name wasn't the easiest to research.

It's a very common name and finding Thomases is often like looking for needles in a haystack.

Thomas is the eighth most common name in England and Wales but despite this,

the heir hunters refused to give up

and their tenacity was rewarded with a lucky break.

Fortunately, we found out that the father of Richard Emrys Thomas

was a schoolmaster called David Sadwin Thomas.

Even more fortunately, from our point of view, when he died in 1901,

he left a will which, very conveniently for us,

named his five children.

Richard's grandfather's will set out the names of all Richard's uncles and aunts.

Although heir hunters make their living from people with no will,

finding one in the process of their research can be a godsend, because they often list entire bloodlines.

We were then able to follow down the lines of the children

to eventually trace the heirs of Mary's son, Richard.

Kevin's team found five heirs who were all children of Richard's cousins.

They were related to Richard through his father, Richard Emrys Thomas.

As his mother, Mary Lorraine, had divorced him,

these heirs would not have been eligible

had the team still been searching for Mary's heirs.

But as they made the claim for Richard's heirs

on the basis that he should have inherited her money in his lifetime,

the Treasury accepted the case.

One of Richard's heirs was Paul Thomas

who was surprised to discover this relative he never knew he had.

I think I have very mixed feelings because there is a sadness

that I never knew him and yet, he was alive, well within my lifetime.

It would have been nice to have met him.

Paul's father kept a family scrapbook

with newspaper clippings and photos of all their relatives.

That's a photograph of my grandfather in his regiment in Egypt.

That is his brother,

his younger brother,

Emrys Thomas, who is the husband of Mary and father of Richard Thomas,

Richard David Thomas.

I think there's a very marked resemblance between Emrys and Ithel, my grandfather.

I like to think that Richard probably might have looked rather like Emrys.

The resemblance goes down through the family.

Mary Lorraine and in turn, her son, Richard,

provided Paul with a material legacy as well as an opportunity to reflect on his family ties.

There were five heirs in total, to an estate worth over £100,000, which was shared between them.

Well, the money came as a complete surprise and so I was able to realise a long-cherished dream.

I always wanted to live by water and get a boat but what I really wanted, ever since I was a small boy,

was a Rolls Royce, so I bought it.

Paul may have realised a lifelong dream but is rueful that it may have been at his cousin's expense.

The big sadness is that really, we don't deserve the money.

Richard ought to have had it and he may not even sadly have known that his mother died.

Had he done so, the money would have come to him and it might have made quite a difference to his life.

The purchase of the Rolls Royce is the final stage in the heir hunters'

quest to connect Mary Lorraine and her son, Richard's estate, with its rightful beneficiaries.

It was a pursuit that led them to a glamorous burlesque acting heritage,

a tale of wartime resistance, a son who inherited too late and a forgotten fortune.

Stories that all told, paint a picture of an extraordinary life.

If you would like advice about building a family tree or making a will, go to -

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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