Hall/Cundall Heir Hunters

Every year in the UK,

thousands of people die with no will and no obvious relatives.

Tracking down their long lost families

is a job for the heir hunters. Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme, an old inheritance law causes tempers to rise.

We're British, why haven't we all got the same laws? Why does it have to be different?

And in tracing the heirs to a £300,000 estate,

the researchers uncover a woman's glamorous and fascinating past.

It was exciting.

You had foreign travel, you had this aura of racehorses and royalty.

And we'll have details of some of the hundreds of estates still waiting to be claimed.

Could you be in line for a windfall?

In the UK, two-thirds of people don't have a valid will

and therefore no record of their last wishes.

If they die without having made one and 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.

-Pleased to meet you.

More than 30 heir-hunting companies make it their business to track down long-lost relatives.

It can be rewarding for the unsuspecting heirs.

In the last ten years alone, one of the oldest companies in Britain, Fraser and Fraser,

has enabled a whopping £100 million to be inherited.

It's Thursday morning, the office's busiest day of the week.

The Treasury's latest list of people dying without leaving a will

has just been released, and the office is starting to research cases.

Company partner Neil Fraser has identified one he would like to investigate further.

I think what we're going to look at today is an estate called Hall.

It's Alan Lewis Edmund Hall, dies in Leicester,

but we think we've identified an address in Oakham, which is Lincolnshire, just on the border.

It looks as though he owns a property but there's a mortgage on that property

so I don't know about the value at the moment.

Hopefully when we get a decent enquiry done, we'll have a better idea.

Alan owned a house in the village of Whissendine in Rutland

that is estimated to be worth around £150,000.

As heir hunters work on commission, it's important for them to establish the value of the estate.

Neil starts the ball rolling by asking case manager David Slee

to see what he can find out from Alan's neighbours.

Bye-bye.

Really, really nice guy, who was a good friend of the deceased

and the deceased had lots of friends, no family but lots and lots of friends, and really sadly missed.

Alan had lived in the village of Whissendine all his life.

He was very popular and a regular visitor to the local village pub.

Alan spent most of his life in the village - he grew up in the village and went to school in the village.

It's just such a nice place to live

and Alan was somebody who made it a nice place to live as well.

Alan had worked in a local factory but after taking early retirement,

he threw himself into village life.

He just had this presence of a gentle giant

because he was quite a tall, big man, but he was so knowledgeable

and he just loved talking about the day's events, the world events,

sport, planning where he was next going to travel.

Alan was obsessed with horse racing and planned to visit every single racetrack in the UK.

He was only three away from achieving his goal when he was taken ill.

Alan had just felt a bit unwell, unfortunately, and he'd gone in for some tests and they'd sent him home,

and then they called him back in about a week later

and unfortunately it was only a matter of a few days before he passed away

so he didn't have time to dwell on his illness.

Alan died at the age of just 52.

Although none of his immediate family was there, his closest friends made sure they gave him a good send-off.

Alan's funeral was arranged by a group of his close friends from the village,

organised to have marquees put up here at the back of the pub

because we knew there'd be so many people coming.

There was at least 177 people at his funeral and they were all back here

and celebrated his life with a toast and a drink.

Alan had died unexpectedly, so hadn't made any provisions for his estate

that was now destined for the Treasury coffers unless heirs are found.

Believing this estate may be one of value,

Neil put case manager David Milchard, aka Grimble, onto the case to work alongside David Slee.

Grimble's first task is to draw up a family tree,

so he seeks out Alan's birth certificate to verify the names of his parents.

It shows his mother's maiden name was Harrison.

The marriage, we've got the maiden name as Reames,

so it's either the wrong birth or it's possible she was married before.

Grimble's initial research brings up two conflicting maiden names

for the woman they believe to be Alan's mother - Reames and Harrison.

Until they can find out which, if either, of them is the right name,

it's difficult for them to work up the family tree. Neil is equally flummoxed.

We can't find an Alan LE Hall birth,

and the best we've got is one which is a year out that puts the mother's maiden name as Harrison.

Now Harrison is nothing like Reames, so we're not sure where that fits in at the moment.

If we ignore the birth of the deceased

and we've possibly found the right parents of the deceased,

we can shoot away, but it's a bit risky just to ignore the birth of the deceased.

The office can only speculate at the moment

and know if they start tracing the wrong Alan Hall, they will lose this case.

They need hard facts and people on the street to find and talk to people face to face,

so it's time to call in the cavalry.

Up and down the country, there is a troupe of travelling heir hunters

just waiting to be dispatched to wherever the case sends them.

They play an invaluable role in the whole operation -

picking up records, gathering information from neighbours,

and once an heir is found, making sure they sign on the dotted line.

Today, they need someone to confirm who Alan's parents were and to establish the value of the estate.

Paul Matthews has been tracking down heirs for the past eight years

and lives close by, so he's assigned the task.

Today, we're on the estate of an Alan Hall who passed away in Leicester in May 2008.

We know very little. We've got an address to go and visit in Oakham

so, yeah, that's all we know so far.

We don't know the value of the estate -

provided there's some value to it, we'll be off to the Registry Office.

Back in the office, the mystery of Alan's birth certificate still rumbles on but Grimble has a theory.

There's a possibility we may have an adoption here,

which if it's an adoption, then of course it's the adopted parents whose family we'll be looking for.

Under English law, once someone is adopted, they are treated in the same way

as a natural child of the adopted parents.

This means that it is the adopted family and not the birth parents' family

that are entitled to a share of the estate.

But the office still don't know if this is the correct direction they should be going in.

-And out on the road, Paul has also lost his way.

-I've got a blank screen.

This wasn't in the plan.

As Paul resorts to using a good old-fashioned map,

the breakthrough the office has been after also comes from tried and trusted methods.

David has spent the last hour calling up Alan's neighbours and is finally able to confirm his parentage.

Deceased bachelor, owned property,

one sister who died aged 15 or 16, lifelong villager,

knew that the parents died, those dates are about right, Lewis and Joyce.

David has found out that Alan wasn't adopted

and that his parents were Lewis Arthur Hall and Joyce Dora Reames.

He had a sister called Gillian,

but tragically she died of a brain haemorrhage

when she was 17 years old.

The maiden name Harrison had been a red herring.

His maiden name is indexed wrongly,

so it's a problem of computerised records, really.

In recent years, the office's research team

has been helped by the emergence of an abundance of genealogy websites.

But sometimes information can be inputted incorrectly and this can lead heir hunters down blind alleys,

and unfortunately so can sat navs.

Yeah, well, the sat nav decided to have a bit of a sulk,

all the information for where we were disappeared off the screen, no roads or nothing.

So I've had the map out, turned it back on again,

and all of a sudden, it can find out where we are again.

But Paul's sat nav has sent him to a level crossing he can't access,

so maybe he should have stuck with an old-fashioned map after all.

Oh, well.

One of those days.

Coming up, as Paul gets on the right track,

back in the office, Grimble makes a shocking confession.

I'm too lazy to do it, it's just something you keep putting off

and it's something most of us are guilty of doing.

Not all cases appear on the Treasury's list -

sometimes they are referred directly to probate research companies.

When Kathleen Joy Cundall's family solicitors were unable to settle her £300,000 estate

because they couldn't locate all of her next of kin,

they called for specialist help from heir hunting company, Hoopers.

The company, based in London, is one of the oldest in the United Kingdom

and they've reunited rightful heirs with millions of pounds.

Mike Tringham, the company's chairman, took on the task of finding Kathleen's missing beneficiaries.

Well, the solicitors knew of one or two lawful heirs

and we had a little bit of information about a skeleton tree

where potentially there were a number of other relatives,

and obviously they couldn't ignore that information.

They couldn't settle and distribute the estate

without at least making some effort to try and find any other relatives.

The solicitors also told Mike that Kathleen Joy Cundall,

who preferred to be known by her middle name Joy,

died age 83 in a nursing home in Herefordshire.

Before she moved into the home,

she had been living with her late sister Marjorie, known as Billie to her friends.

Norma Boddington lived next door to them.

It was a funny relationship.

They were hard to live with each other but couldn't manage without.

They were sweet people but different, very different.

Sadly, the sisters both became ill with Alzheimer's at around the same time.

They became unwell both of them, first Billie and ultimately Joy,

and they really couldn't manage in the house any longer.

They had nurses there for quite a while looking after them

and they stayed in their house, which they loved, for as long as they could.

The sisters also moved into the same nursing home together and ended up dying within months of each other.

Sister Billie died first and her estate,

which included her home in Herefordshire, was passed on to Joy.

By the time Joy died a few months later, the sisters' entire estate was valued at £300,000.

But this money was still in the hands of solicitors

and would remain there until all of Joy's heirs were identified.

It now became Hoopers' prime focus to plot her family tree,

so Mike started to look through the records to see if he could find any clues about Joy's past.

We discovered that Kathleen was an officer in the RAF for many years,

which potentially could help us with our enquiries and research.

Mike had uncovered that Joy, or Kathleen as she was known during her time in the Forces,

joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, or WAAF as it was commonly known,

in July 1944, when she was 20 years old.

The WAAF was formed in 1939 and by the end of the war,

more than a quarter of a million women had served within its ranks.

Taking on a huge variety of roles, women like Joy could find themselves

working as meteorologists or wireless operators,

taking on intelligence work or even repairing aircraft.

Nina Burls is a curator at the RAF Museum

and has recently put together an exhibition about the role of these women during the war.

The WAAF offered women the opportunity

to do their bit during the war and it also offered them

an escape from their current life

and opportunities that they wouldn't necessarily have available to them.

We know that Kathleen was posted to the Administration and Special Duties branch,

and this may have been really interesting for her

because this dealt with a lot of the intelligence work which was going on.

Although it's not certain what Joy's special duties involved,

what is known is that the WAAF played a vital role in the control of aircraft,

both in the radar stations and as plotters in the operation rooms.

During the Battle of Britain, they directed fighter aircraft

against the Luftwaffe, mapping both home and enemy positions.

Joy's care workers, who'd looked after her in later life, loved learning of her earlier career.

I could definitely imagine Joy in the RAF,

organising people and making sure that everything was done right.

She was just such a great organiser.

But while living through the war, Joy also suffered her own personal hardship.

She never married because she said, "You only have one love and I lost my love many years ago."

She lost him during the war,

so whether that's when she was in the RAF as well, I don't know.

Sadly, Joy was one of thousands of women and men who lost loved ones in the war.

Because of her loss, Joy chose never to marry and as a result she also never had any children.

Back in the office, this meant that Mike looked to the extended family for heirs.

His initial enquiries showed that Joy was born in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex

and was the daughter of Thomas Cundall and Kathleen Coleman.

She only had one sister, Billie, who didn't have any children either.

Mike decided to look into Joy's father's side of the family tree first.

Once we'd identified the father's birth record

and who his parents were, the paternal grandparents,

we were then, through birth records and census records, able to identify

that the deceased's father had four siblings.

Mike's research showed that Joy's father, Thomas Cundall, was the son of Richard Cundall and Ada Pilling.

As well as Thomas, they had four other children...

Mike decided to investigate Thomas's siblings further.

One of the father's siblings was an Alfred Cundall,

so we thought we'd have a look and see what happened to him

and we were able to establish that he married and had children,

including a daughter called Phyllis,

later Phyllis Seymore.

Mike discovered that Phyllis, one of Joy's first cousins,

was the only surviving heir from this stem of the family tree,

as her elder brother Alfred had died ten years earlier.

After tracking her down relatively easily,

he called her with the news most people dream of receiving,

but didn't get the initial reaction he was expecting.

I was rather short with Hoopers on the phone

because I thought it was a cold caller,

somebody trying to sell me something or find out something.

But once Mike had convinced her that he wasn't trying to sell her anything,

her initial frosty reaction turned to one of surprise.

I'd thought that everyone had long gone because they were at least ten years older than me

and we hadn't been in touch for many, many years,

so naturally I was a bit shocked.

Phyllis remembers meeting her cousins Joy and Billie a long time ago.

I only met them once when I was about five or six.

There was a photograph, which I so wish I could find,

it's somewhere up in the archives, of the two cousins

and of me about so high.

I remember I fell that day at the party, grazed my knee,

so the picture was of me trying to conceal my grazed knee in the photograph.

Phyllis also remembered how her father, Alfred,

had been close to his brother Thomas, Joy's dad.

We were all on the telephone

and, as I say, I think my father used to write to his brother and get news from the family then.

But after Phyllis's father died when she was ten years old, the families had ended up losing touch,

so it had come as a shock for Phyllis to be hearing about the cousins now, nearly 70 years later.

I would be interested to find out what happened to them in their later life,

where they went, what they did, what sort of jobs they had,

because I had no contact at all so it would be quite fascinating to know what happened.

Still to come -

armed with questions about her father's side of the family, Phyllis visits the heir hunters' offices.

I would never have dreamt that I was going to see all this today.

And her cousin's glamorous past is revealed.

She used to do facials and go around the hotels,

some of the film stars, I think, and had quite an interesting life at that period.

For every case that's solved, there are still thousands on the Treasury's list that remain a mystery.

The deceased's assets are kept for up to 30 years

in the hope that eventually someone will remember and come forward to claim their inheritance.

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

the rightful heirs are out there somewhere.

Today, we've got two cases that heir hunters have been unable to crack so far - could you know the answer?

Maybe you are in line for a windfall.

Charles Alfred James Mitchell died in Gillingham, Kent on 11 February 2008.

Do you know him?

Did he live in your neighbourhood?

Maybe you are even related to him and one of his beneficiaries.

Hugh Murray passed away on 18 July 2006 in Dorchester, Dorset.

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

Could you be entitled to his legacy?

If no relatives are found for Charles Mitchell or Hugh Murray,

their money will go to the Government, but could it be meant for you?

Heir hunters Fraser and Fraser are still investigating the case of Alan Hall.

He died aged 52 of an unexpected illness,

leaving behind a mortgaged property worth an estimate £150,000 in Whissendine in Rutland.

He'd lived in the village all his life and was very much loved by the local community.

I miss Alan every week now, even though it's over 18 months since he passed away.

When the boys walk in a Friday night, I'm always looking for Alan

to walk through after them because he used to be the last one through the door out of the group.

Alan was very popular.

Over 170 people attended his funeral,

but there wasn't a single relative of Alan's amongst them,

so that's why the heir hunters have stepped in.

They need to establish who is entitled to his estate,

otherwise it will end up going into the Government's coffers.

Jo is one of the team's researchers and she's looking into Alan's father's side of the family.

We found the paternal grandparents, Edmund Hall and his wife Minnie Birkett,

and we found a possible two children of that marriage.

Jo has found out that Alan's father's parents, Edmund Hall and Minnie Birkett, had two other children,

Edith and Harry,

but unfortunately Edith died in infancy

and Harry died a bachelor without having any children.

With no sign of any heirs in the office,

is travelling heir hunter Paul Matthews faring any better out on the road?

Well, I was having my doubts we'd ever get there,

but I think we've, by doing two different loops,

put about an extra three-quarters of an hour on my journey,

I think we're actually nearly there.

'You have arrived at your destination.'

Back in the office, case manager Grimble is now focusing his search

on Alan's mother Joyce's side of the family tree.

Mum Joyce, it looks like she had one sister, Gwendolyn,

we're trying to see what happened to her.

She only needs to have one child and we're home and away, really.

If she'd died with no children,

then we're really going back to hoping there's half-blood.

If they are unable to find any full blood relatives,

the team will then start to look into half blood relatives.

This is when a person is related to another by one parent only,

so if either of Alan's parents had any half-brothers or -sisters,

they could be entitled to a share of the estate.

On the road, Paul's door to door enquiries are going well.

OK to spend five minutes having a chat with me?

I've spoken to a neighbour of the deceased Alan who knew him well.

He's been here a few years

and apparently Alan has always lived his life in this village,

his parents used to live down the road.

The property was owned by Alan.

The gentleman seems to think it's worth about £150,000 but there may well be a mortgage on it.

But it's an estate that's certainly worthwhile pursuing.

As Paul has been able to confirm from one of Alan's neighbours that the estate is valuable,

the search for his next of kin is starting to intensify.

Researcher Dominic is focusing on finding Alan's aunt Gwendolyn.

The chances are that the death search,

which is one of the more slow searches that we do, will turn up that she died a spinster.

It's the most likely thing but if that does turn up nothing,

we won't have wasted all this time, really, and in the meantime,

we might even be able to find something before they do.

We're trying to do everything, absolutely everything we can on this search at the moment,

but are getting nowhere very quickly.

While Dominic perseveres with his hunt, Gareth looks into the deaths of Alan's grandparents.

He wants to find out if any of them died young and may have been able to have children with another partner.

We're hoping that there's going to be someone that we haven't accounted for yet,

maybe another child or something like that,

and also maybe there'll be some wills to look at as well.

So if we can establish the deaths of the grandparents...

..it'll either finish off the case or maybe give us an heir that we didn't know about.

Meanwhile out on the road, has Paul got the breakthrough they've all been searching for?

-He calls Grimble.

-Hello, Paul.

-How are you going, Dave, all right, mate?

I'm all right, how are you?

It's been a nightmare but anyway, I got there eventually.

I've got a name and a phone number for you - Valerie Hutchinson.

-Yeah.

-She did know the deceased, said she was related.

Finally, a neighbour had given the office a lead to a potential cousin of the deceased.

Valerie Hutchinson lives in Kirby Muxloe, not too far from Alan's home.

The last time she spoke to him was ten years ago.

I lost touch with Alan after his mother died

and he rang me to say that his mother had passed away

and that was the last time I spoke to him.

Valerie was shocked to hear that Alan had died when he was only 52 years old.

I couldn't believe, because he was such a young lad, that he would die.

It turned out that Valerie's grandparents

were Alan's great-grandparents, making her Alan's second cousin.

Unfortunately, this means that she won't be entitled to a share of Alan's estate

as the law states that only first cousins can be beneficiaries, not second ones.

Law Commissioner Professor Elizabeth Cooke is an expert on inheritance law.

Every legal system makes a choice about how far that range of relationships goes

and it so happens that a decision was taken back in 1925

that we would stop with grandparents and their offspring.

Current legislation means that only first cousins

or first cousins once, twice, or three times removed

are entitled to inherit.

Great-grandparents and any of their descendants have no rights.

This rules second cousin Valerie out as an heir to Alan's estate,

so has the office been able to find anyone else?

Unfortunately, one of the last hopes to find living beneficiaries on this was Gwendolyn,

she's an aunt of the deceased, the only maternal aunt.

All indications are it's pretty dead.

The team have now traced every viable stem of Alan's family tree.

On his father Lewis's side,

they found that his aunt Edith died in infancy

and his uncle Harry died without having children.

On his mother Joyce's side,

they have discovered that her only sister Gwendolyn died when she was just eight years old.

Sadly, their investigations have concluded that there is no-one left alive

who can put forward a claim on this estate,

so it will go to the Government.

So this is the one we lost, the beneficiary's going to be the Government,

who are going to have Alan's estate, which will probably be over £100,000.

It doesn't matter much now because there's nothing in it for anybody,

there's no heirs to find so Mr Treasury's won this one.

So one up to the Government today, but we do normally win.

Alan's estate will now go to the Treasury.

This has frustrated Valerie, Alan's second cousin, as in other countries, she would have qualified to inherit.

Why the law in this country is different from Northern Ireland and Scotland

where the second cousins can claim on an estate if there's no will made,

but not in England?

And I would like to know why is this.

Evidently, I have been told, in 1925, this law changed - why? For what reason?

This is not the first time this question has been asked.

Law Commissioner Professor Elizabeth Cooke

has been assessing whether current inheritance laws need to change.

How many second cousins do we all have?

We might have hundreds if you count it all up.

When the current legislation, the 1925 Act, was debated in Parliament way back in the 1920s,

an example was mentioned of an estate where actually there was a will

and an estate had been left to second cousins -

there turned out to be hundreds of them

and the whole estate was absorbed in the costs of tracing them.

So I think there's a lot to be said for stopping somewhere.

I wonder if first cousins, relationships traced through grandparents,

is the right place to stop.

So as the law currently stands in England and Wales,

there is nothing second cousin Valerie can do...or is there?

If a relative feels that they should have inherited and they haven't done, there are two possibilities.

One is that if they can show a relationship of dependency,

that they were a dependant of the deceased,

then they can apply to court under the Family Provision legislation

for an order for a rearrangement of the estate.

If they can't show dependency and if the estate has passed to the Treasury Solicitor

because there are no family members within the intestacy rules,

then it is possible to apply to the Treasury Solicitor for a discretionary payment.

So the only way Valerie could inherit any of Alan's money is to appeal to the Treasury.

It would have been so much easier if he'd just left a will,

but Alan is in the majority as two-thirds of people in the UK don't have a valid will,

and surprisingly that also includes one of Fraser and Fraser's longest serving members of staff.

I haven't made a will and I should have done,

the reason being is I'm too lazy to do it.

It's just something you keep putting off and I think most of us are guilty of that.

You go, "Oh, yes, I must make a will,

"and I'll go home and do it tonight," but you never do.

The only way you can guarantee where your hard-earned money goes after you die is to write a valid will,

but don't leave it too late.

Alan's friends were surprised that he didn't leave a will

and put it down to the fact that he died unexpectedly early after a short illness.

His estate, which includes his house, could be worth in excess of £100,000.

It may now be going to the Government.

But Alan will always leave a lasting impression on his friends in the village.

It'd always be Alan that would come out with a one-liner that would make everybody laugh,

a kind-hearted, well-liked man.

Everybody always spoke to Alan and liked Alan, and I miss just his general presence.

Mike Tringham from Hoopers has been investigating the estate of Kathleen Cundall,

known as Joy to her friends.

She died in a nursing home, leaving behind an estate worth £300,000.

Even though she was in contact with some of her first cousins on the maternal side of the family tree,

because Joy died without leaving a will, the estate couldn't be settled until all heirs had been found.

Mike had already found one of her first cousins on her father's side.

So Phyllis Seymore was the first relative on the paternal side of the family we managed to locate,

and I contacted her.

My objective, obviously, apart from informing her of the death of her cousins,

was to ask her some important questions from our point of view

as to what she knew about the Cundall family.

But unfortunately for Mike,

Phyllis couldn't add to the information Hoopers had already

as she'd lost touch with that side of the family after her father died when she was ten years old.

So Mike had to delve deeper into Joy's background.

Investigation showed that after serving in the Second World War, Joy moved down to London

and swapped her role in the Forces for a more glamorous career as a sought-after make-up artist.

She used to do facials and go around the hotels,

some of the film stars, I think,

and had quite an interesting life at that period.

Joy ended up working for one of the most prestigious cosmetic companies at the time, Elizabeth Arden,

and could even count royalty amongst her clientele.

At one point, she did make-up for the Queen Mother.

She was a make-up artist and I just got a feeling she was a career woman.

When Joy started her career, the beauty industry was just starting to expand.

Lindy Woodhead, a social historian, had written books about the emergence

of the make-up business after the Second World War.

1950s London, I think, conjures up visions of,

"Oh, the war's over, isn't it marvellous?" Great happy feeling.

In fact, in the early '50s you couldn't have been further from the truth.

1950s London was still a pretty grim place to live, bomb damage was massive,

urban regeneration hadn't even begun, people still had ID cards, rationing was still in place.

It's hard now for us to think "rationing",

but it didn't come off until 1954.

But from the mid-1950s onwards, women wanted to emulate the stars they saw on the screen,

so the cosmetic industry started to develop rapidly.

Around this time, there were two major players.

The two brand names that really mattered,

the two women who started this and became, I might add,

the richest self-made women in the world, were Elizabeth Arden,

whose real name was Florence Nightingale Graham...

..and Helena Rubinstein.

They were pioneers, the only word I can think of to describe them.

Joy worked for Elizabeth Arden, but getting to be an Arden girl wasn't easy.

You had to be quite special.

You very often had to have an introduction

and if you wanted to train as a beauty therapist, as they were called,

very often you paid for the treatment,

the equivalent of an apprenticeship or a bond, so it was highly competitive and very sought after.

Joy often spoke about how much she loved her job.

This doesn't surprise Lindy.

It was exciting.

You had foreign travel, you had all this aura of racehorses and royalty. What more could you want?

Joy had lived during a glamorous era and even when she was in her 80s, she still liked to look her best.

Joy was very particular about what clothes she needed to put on,

and if it didn't match, she would say to you, "I don't want to put that on."

She always had to comb her hair, make sure her face was clean, her teeth.

She wouldn't come out of her room unless every detail was done.

And she wasn't just particular about her own clothes.

You'd often see her going along and straightening somebody's jumper

or their collar, just to make sure they had the finishing touches.

Whereas Joy was a career woman,

her sister, Billie, settled down to being the wife of a surgeon and lived in Herefordshire.

It was from her home that the bulk of the £300,000 estate came from,

but Joy's money couldn't be released until all heirs were found.

It turned out to be a surprisingly large family tree

as Phyllis was only the first of many heirs Mike ended up finding.

In the end, we traced,

including the heirs already known to the solicitors, a total of 13 beneficiaries,

and they each will receive a sum of varying amounts,

ranging from probably about £20,000 up to £50,000 or more.

On the paternal side of the tree, Mike had found seven heirs in total.

As well as Phyllis, who was descended from Thomas's brother Alfred,

Mike discovered that his sisters Emma and Mary both had children,

so their descendents were also heirs to the estate.

In the end, Mike's quest for heirs had taken him all over the world.

This is an interesting case because it illustrates just how far flung a family can be.

We ended up tracing relatives in Belgium,

in America,

in Australia and New Zealand.

It just shows you that a family can spread far and wide

and they all have to be found, and it's not always an easy job.

Having completed their task in finding all the heirs on the Cundall case,

Mike decided it would be nice to invite Phyllis to his offices in London

in order to help piece together some more of her family history.

After all, before this investigation began, Phyllis had always believed

that she was the last living family member with the Cundall name.

So this is our paternal tree for Cundalls.

We'll just spread it out, it's not as big as some of the trees that we have sometimes.

We've got one on the go at the moment with over 150 beneficiaries.

Good heavens. How many cousins once removed are there now living?

-On the paternal side?

-On the paternal side, yes.

-There are one, two, three.

-Three?

-I mean, you're a first cousin.

-Yes.

Am I the only first cousin?

Actually, yes. On the paternal family, yes, you are the only first cousin surviving.

Yes. This is really fascinating, Michael.

I would never have dreamt that I was going to see all this today, especially all these cousins.

-All these different names.

-Different names and different locations around the world,

I had no idea that I had any living relatives on my father's side at all,

and certainly not spread around the globe as they are.

Is it possible that I could have a copy of this?

-Oh, yes, I think so.

-Oh, wonderful.

Yes, I mean once our job is done,

this we would just consign to our archives.

-Quite.

-So I'll be more than happy to let you have a copy.

-Oh, lovely, thank you. And then I can perhaps drop them a line and make their acquaintance.

-Yes.

Phyllis left Hoopers with a spring in her step, armed with the new knowledge about her family.

For her, the revelations meant as much, if not more,

than finding out she was set for a windfall, thanks to her cousin Joy.

It's quite fascinating, really.

It is fascinating.

It's always nice to put a name to a face,

but after so long and thinking that, you know...

I thought they died long before they did.

Phyllis now has the chance to get in touch with her living relatives.

I didn't think any member of the family was alive, I really didn't.

I thought that I was literally the last member of the Cundall family,

so to learn that they're scattered around the world is quite incredible.

So I must drop them a line when I get the family tree and make some sort of contact.

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

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