Smith/Wise Heir Hunters

Heir hunters trace families of people who die without a will.

They hand over thousands of pounds to unsuspecting relatives

which would otherwise go to the Government.

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme,

the heir hunters struggle to trace a family with the most common surname in the country...

I don't believe this.

We've got the complete wrong family.

Everyone on Smith, stop.

..and in their search for heirs,

discover a brilliant economist whose grasp of money was far from usual.

Johnny had a theory that he could beat the roulette wheel

so he took a group of his students to the Playboy Club

and he took the bank to the cleaners.

Plus, how you may be entitled to a share in unclaimed estates held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

Every year in Britain, thousands of people die without leaving a will.

If no obvious family can be found, their money goes straight to the Government.

Last year, over £18 million went directly to the Treasury in unclaimed estates.

That's where the heir hunting companies come in.

Fraser & Fraser are one of the oldest heir hunting companies in the world.

They trace rightful heirs to unclaimed estates.

We're tracing family trees, delving back into people's history,

looking at the hidden mysteries around people's families.

The company is run by Neil, Charles and Andrew Fraser.

Over the years, they have reunited thousands of heirs with millions of pounds.

It's early Thursday morning and while the City of London is just waking up,

the researchers at Fraser & Fraser are already hard at work.

What about this one?

Just after midnight, the Treasury publish their weekly list of unclaimed estates.

Andrew Fraser is poring over the details with case manager David Pacifico,

trying to determine which estates might be of value.

Herbert Smith, died in a nursing home.

-But that's the previous address?

-Yes, it's that one.

The case of Harold Herbert Smith might have potential.

Previous to the nursing home she was in, she owned a property, or he owned a property.

So I want to try to speak to some neighbours.

Neighbours are sometimes the key to unlocking a case,

often revealing the deceased's wealth, age and even their relatives' names.

For the heir hunting companies, their information can make the difference

between solving a case or losing it to the competition.

OK, cheers, thank you.

Harold Herbert Smith died on 22nd December 2008.

He was known to his friends as Bert and worked as an accountant's clerk in London.

Although he spent his last year in a nursing home,

Harold had lived on his own for over 30 years in a bungalow on a leafy street in Epsom, Surrey.

A good description of him is a suit and waistcoat.

Terribly smart. Very clean.

And always very gentlemanly.

It's still early and case manager David Pacifico

has so far had little luck in finding any useful information on Harold.

Smith is the last name people would want to start researching.

Mainly working it because of the value.

We know he owns his own property.

It's a nice home - fingers crossed we're dealing with £200,000.

To begin the search for heirs, the team need Harold Smith's exact birth details

which can be found on certificates held by the register offices.

But they won't be open for a couple of hours.

David cannot afford to wait.

Not sure about this.

We've got a possible birth of the deceased, Harold H Smith.

The search for Harold Smith begins but it is like looking for one particular piece of hay

in a haystack.

There are Smiths everywhere they look.

And a lot of them are called Harold.

1910, that would make him about nearly 98.

David Pacifico has asked researcher Dominic Hendry to scan the records for Harold Smiths

who were born between 70 and 90 years ago.

Not only are we talking about the most common name that we can possibly get,

which becomes the most difficult search we can get.

I mean, every quarter, we're getting at least 20 or so Harolds and at least two or three Harold Hs.

What the team desperately need is some more concrete information so they can narrow down the search.

Time for David to call out the travelling researchers.

Fraser & Fraser employ regional heir hunters who are on standby

from 7am every morning, ready to go wherever the search takes them.

They make door-to-door inquiries, all in the race to find and sign up heirs.

Senior researcher, Bob Smith, is not too optimistic about this particular case.

We are looking for 10 branches of a family called Smith.

It's going to be hard work.

Bob Barrett lives in the south of England and is already heading to check out Harold's property in Epsom

to more accurately estimate its value.

Bob, hi.

-You're on the way to Epsom?

-That's right. I'll be there in five or 10 minutes.

-Thanks, Bob.

-Cheers.

-Bye.

After checking out the bungalow, Bob knocks on doors, hoping to find a neighbour of Harold Smith's

to speak to and help the office discover Harold's correct date of birth.

But can he succeed where David failed earlier?

It's still only just past eight o'clock and the street is deserted.

There is a bedroom curtain still drawn.

People are obviously still in bed, I'm loath to disturb too many of them unnecessarily.

While Bob waits for Harold Smith's neighbours to wake up,

it's all hands on deck in the office to try to make a break on the case.

We've got staff working on different bits of family trees.

We'll have to work several different births until we're able to focus in on a single family tree.

All the other family trees will be ripped up and thrown away and we'll concentrate on one family tree.

There's a Herbert H, Harold Herbert.

He could be born as Herbert H.

-Wandsworth, 1912.

-Let's look at that one.

Can you work on that one? Can you two work on that one?

The atmosphere in the research room is one of frustration.

This is wrong, all this.

The Smith name is just throwing up too many possible Harolds.

We need that birth...

Andrew, there are several Harold Hs round about 1911, 1912.

-Doesn't make it easy, does it?

-It's not easy. We're stymied on that. I think this is going to be wrong.

While they try everything they can to narrow the search,

over in Epsom, Bob has finally found people to talk to.

He must have been 90 something.

94, 95, I think.

He had one sister in Kent.

Oh, right, no, we didn't know that.

-So a sister in Kent?

-That's as far as I know.

I'm not 100% sure.

It was worth the wait. Bob rings the office with what he hopes is a good lead for the team.

-Hello, Bob.

-Hello, David. I've just been knocking on a few more doors, talking to a few more people.

The question is, we've got several potential births for him.

-I think you'd mention to Andrew that one neighbour said he was 96, yes?

-He's certainly...

Another neighbour's talking about 94, 95, so... They used to be a sister in Kent,

and possibly nieces and nephews somewhere in Kent.

That's interesting. Well, I presume she'd be dead by now.

-I should think so.

-There's also...

-Competition have been knocking on the same doors or ringing the same bells.

-Well, I'm not surprised.

-And it's a nice little detached bungalow.

-Mm-hm.

I would imagine £400,000, that sort of amount.

-If it's that valuable, we'll be working on it hard.

-Not in very good condition.

-The registry office doesn't open till when?

-9am, and I'm en route to it now.

I might get the date of birth beforehand,

-so I'll leave that with you and see what happens.

-Okey-doke. Speak to you later.

£400,000. This is more than they had originally hoped for.

It may be just 8.30, but now thanks to Bob,

the team can focus in on Harold Smiths born at least 90 years ago.

Right, let's have a look at these. Do you know what I fancy? I fancy that Edmonton.

-Yep.

-Yep.

David has finally been able to narrow it down to two births of Harold Herbert Smith.

One is born in 1912 in Godstone in Surrey.

The other possible birth is in Edmonton North London in 1910.

The Godstone birth seems much more likely to the team

as it is only 15 miles from Epsom where Harold was living.

That family is now the priority. And they've made an early breakthrough.

On the basis, and it is speculative, if the birth we've got four Harold Smith is right in Godstone,

he had several siblings including a sister, Ellen EJ Smith,

who, if this is right, married a Leonard Theobald.

And of that marriage, there's a son, James.

So, in theory, we could have a nephew of the deceased.

The team could be getting closer to their first potential heir and it's only 9.30.

All they're waiting for is confirmation that they are on to the correct family.

Bob Barrett has arrived at the Leatherhead register office to pick up the corresponding certificate.

You'll be wanting it today, presumably?

If I've got it, it will be £12.

Unfortunately, he's going to have to wait.

Meanwhile, researcher Debbie Howe has jumped in a cab to Haringey register office.

Her job is to make sure that they can confidently rule out the Harold born in Edmonton

and she's just got the news.

I don't believe this.

Right, we've got the wrong family here.

Right, hang on.

Neil, Neil!

Dom, stop it. Hang on. Is Neil there?

The complete wrong family we've got.

Right, we're going to hang fire, then, a minute, Debbie.

-Wrong census, is it?

-Yes. ..Thank you, bye.

The Godstone family where the research was almost complete is the wrong one.

-Actually, Bob Barrett, I can tell him to stop now.

-Everyone on Smith, stop.

Harold Smith, born in Edmonton, matches the information in the office exactly.

So this is the birth certificate.

He's born 4th December 1910 and he was born 10 Eastfield Road, Hornsey.

It confirms the date of birth of the deceased but also proves that we were working the wrong family...

..and without the certificate, it's very easy to make mistakes.

It's not really a mistake or an error or something, it's just when you're working Smith families,

it's one of the things which happens.

It's now 11.05 and the team have now finally been able to confirm which is the correct family.

Harold Herbert Smith was born 4th December 1910 in Edmonton.

He was the son of Harold Herbert Snr and Adelaide Caspell.

The good news is that identifying Harold's mother gives the team another surname to work with.

Adelaide Lillian Louise Caspell.

25, she's a spinster.

Neil regroups the researchers.

Dominic, can you go for a 1911 census, please?

One team is working on the Smith side, while the other focuses on Harold's mother's name of Caspell.

At least it's not Smith.

It's almost lunchtime and the real work of tracking down the heirs

to Harold Smith's £400,000 estate can finally began.

Coming up, progress is frustratingly slow in the search for a heirs on the Smith case.

You make one leap forward only to hit another brick wall.

Researching cases advertised by the Treasury is only one part of Fraser & Fraser's business.

Some estates are referred to them directly by members of the public

with a relative who has died leaving no will.

Investigating this type of case is Simon Grosvenor's speciality.

He is one of the firm's case managers and has over 20 years of heir hunting experience.

We do get quite a lot of members

of the public who ring in and approach us.

Whether they're inquiries that we can actually do something with is a different matter.

In this case, Simon was looking at the estate of John Wise,

which had been referred to him by a cousin of the deceased.

Although he didn't own his own home, he had over £300,000 in the bank.

John Wise had died without leaving a will and without family of his own.

And the members of the family who knew about that

didn't know enough about the others to get the process sorted,

so it was something we could assist with.

John Wise had died from a heart attack in February 2008 at the age of 78.

It was his cousin, Brian Sanders, who first contacted Fraser & Fraser.

He knew he was potentially an heir,

but had few details about the rest of his family,

so needed help tracking them down.

The last time I saw Johnny was at my wedding, 1968.

He came with his father Arnold.

He was wearing a wonderful suit, shirt and tie.

But sandals with no socks on.

He was very eccentric. After that, I never saw him again.

John was a classic case of a working-class boy made good.

Born to Jewish parents in the East End,

John studied at the London School of Economics,

and was a brilliant academic, with an all-consuming passion for his subject.

Friend and former colleague Professor Marcus Miller remembers him well.

He was treated as something of a genius at LSE which was,

and is, the top economics department in this country.

When quite young,

published with top statisticians.

Was taken by a Nobel prizewinner to California.

So he was walking with these giants.

John Wise's mother was born in the East End of London,

just after her family had settled there from Poland.

At the age of 21, she married John's father Arnold,

a tailor's cutter who had only been in the country for five years.

Brian remembers his aunt and uncle.

Chalk and cheese. It must have been an arranged marriage.

I don't think it could have been anything else.

It wasn't a meeting of minds, I can tell you.

He was just a nice man. He never learned to speak English properly.

He used to follow her about.

Jenny was the genius.

Jenny got pregnant soon after they married in 1926,

but their first son died an infant, the day he was born.

Their second boy, John, was born in 1930 and was the apple of his mother's eye.

I think that was the one thing that drove her.

She had somebody there who could be somebody. She was right.

How had John turned out so differently from the rest of the family?

His cousin Brian believes it was thanks to his mother.

I always remember her as being very kind,

always very intelligent. She always had time for me.

She didn't used to throw her intelligence about.

But she saw something in Johnny.

She encouraged it, she nurtured it and she made sure

that he actually became somebody.

Otherwise, he'd have finished up a tailor...with brains.

And she wasn't going to have that.

Brian passed all the information he knew about the family to Simon at Frasers,

and asked him to find John's next of kin.

The father of the deceased, Arnold Wise, was Polish.

The death certificate for Arnold, on which his son informed, said Poland.

We've got no place in Poland and without an area, we can't do any work in Poland.

So it was a dead end.

We're completely stumped.

While there could be heirs to John Wise in Poland,

they cannot be found without a place of birth for Arnold.

On the mother's side of the family tree, there were Polish ancestors too.

But this time, the research was more fruitful.

We did find Jenny on the 1911 census,

which, in fact, told us that her father was Barnett.

It told us that her mother's name was Eva,

and that she had siblings Samuel, Annie, Lasareth and Yeta.

The census is a fantastic research tool for the heir hunters.

Produced in the UK every 10 years, it lists all members of a household,

and in the case of the Sanders family, has useful clues about their history.

Also indicated on the 1911 census is the ages of the various people concerned.

And it tells you where they're born, or at least roughly where they're born.

Barnett and Eva are both born in Poland when it was part of Russia,

as, indeed, is the eldest son, Samuel.

The others, Annie and Jenny herself and Lasareth and Yeta,

are all born in Commercial Road in London, in Shoreditch.

The census records suggest that Barnett and Eva moved to London

some time between the birth of Samuel in 1895 and Annie in 1902,

and that the family were part of the mass emigration of Jews

from the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century.

From 1850,

mass immigration of Jews started.

They were coming from what we now call Poland, and from that area that bordered Poland and Russia.

That was where the persecution was at its worst.

When John Wise's grandparents, Barnett and Eva, first came to London,

they lived in Hessel Street, just off Commercial Road, in the heart of Jewish London.

It was a poor neighbourhood with terrible living conditions by today's standards,

but it was still the safe haven they'd been longing for.

They came here for a better way of life.

They couldn't wait to get here.

You couldn't give them anything better than that. They had freedom.

And for them, that's where their life started.

Eva and Barnett were a hard-working couple.

To supplement the family's income, Eva ran a fruit stall on Hessel Street,

where there was a bustling market.

Barnett, as the main breadwinner, worked in tailoring,

an industry which employed around 60% of Jewish men in London at that time.

If you want to carry the tools of your trade with you,

what could be simpler than a piece of chalk in your pocket

and a couple of needles in your lapel of your jacket

and a thimble in your waistcoat pocket?

That's all you need.

Tailors like Barnett, and also John's father Arnold, had a thriving business in the East End

and would have worked hard to support their families.

Having now found records for John Wise's mother's brother and sisters,

Simon Grosvenor was beginning to make good progress with the Sanders family tree.

We identified marriages for all of the children of Barnett and Eva.

They all seem to have got married in the East End, and, we think,

well, with two exceptions, they all had children

including, of course, Hyman, who was the father of Mr Sanders.

We then had to determine whether any of the other aunts' and uncles' children

were still alive and locate what happened to them.

According to Brian, who was one of these cousins, the deceased, John Wise,

a bookish, academic type, stood out like a sore thumb in the family.

As a talented economist with £300,000 in the bank,

one thing about this case really didn't add up.

It was a surprise that John Wise didn't leave a will.

You'd have thought that he'd have done that.

It may just be it wasn't the sort of practical, everyday thing he spent time thinking about.

Still to come - John's life outside the academic world reveals his secrets.

Johnny had a theory but, like all mathematicians,

from theory, we have to put it into fact. And he took the bank to the cleaners.

For every case that is cracked, there are still many thousands which remain a mystery.

These cases sit on the Treasury's unsolved list, and can remain there for up to 30 years.

The estates can range wildly in value, from £5,000 to many millions,

with the rightful heirs completely unaware of the windfall they could claim.

Today, we've got two cases heir hunters have so far failed to solve.

Could you have the answer?

Could you be in line to inherit?

Stasys Narbutas died in Denmark Hill, London, on 12th January 2008.

Was Stasys a neighbour of yours?

Perhaps you remember relatives who came to visit.

If his heirs aren't found, his money will go to the Government.

Kathleen Nixon died a spinster in Sheffield on 25th June, 2008.

Was Kathleen a relative of yours?

So far, all effort to trace her relatives have drawn a blank.

Could either of these two estates be meant for you?

Fraser & Fraser don't just investigate cases advertised by the Treasury.

Sometimes a case of someone who has died without a will comes to them.

Simon Grosvenor has been asked by a family member to track down the

heirs to academic John Wise's £300,000 estate.

Brian gave me quite a lot of information about the various

uncles and aunts, which enabled us to start looking into the family.

The first steps seem to be to check whether anyone other than Mr

Saunders who contacted us, was also aware that Mr Wise had died and see if they had done anything about it.

In fact, Mr Saunders cousin, Eric, had been aware.

He had handled all the initial

work involved with the funeral and finding out what Mr Wise's assets were.

He had in fact put the money in the bank where it has been earning interest

and he then didn't really know what to do with it.

Searching out John's cousins, the potential heirs, was proving quite simple on his mother's side

but it was John himself who was the enigma in this case.

I first got to know John Wise

when I was a young lecturer at the London School of Economics.

He was quite noticeable because he sat near the front

and was one of the pack who tried to ask

the most devastating questions of the speaker.

He was described by his peers as a genius and had studied at LSE

and all over the world but he had never taken the next step.

Most academics like to pass on what they have to students, that

is the next generation and you feel that is your job.

For some reason, John didn't have this desire.

I think he liked to talk but not to teach.

In that sense he was a pretty odd academic.

John had offers from universities all over the globe to research and teach and countless invitations to

publish in major journals, but he didn't want to.

He felt like someone has come from somewhere else,

this wandering scholar and was unsettling and wanted to

somehow disrupt things.

John didn't play the academic game by the rulebook and it seems he treated his family the same way.

He was hard work.

I was eight years younger than him and every time he

would say hello to me, he would ask me some silly question like, do I know the ratio of people in Rwanda?

What do I know about things like that?

When I couldn't answer the question, it was finished, it was over and he would go away.

He only knew about his own subject, mathematics and economics.

Even though he was an economist, money it seems was a mystery to him.

I think he'd rationally allocate what money he had earned, but as far as I could see, the money

went into some bank account, earned no interest and didn't get spent.

When we went to cafes to talk, I would always pay the bill, I never saw him

handle much money.

He was just like a schoolboy really, wandering round a plastic bag.

Money wasn't an important part of his life, nor was it something he has studied too much intellectually.

He looked at markets but that is often to do with prices and incomes,

not with money and how to spend it directly.

Even though he never bought a house or invested any of his money,

it seems John did use his intellect and cash in other ways.

Unlike pure mathematicians, he was interested in the real world but he tried to see patterns and

see explanations and he would try to use his mathematical insight to give you some way of understanding it.

I very much enjoyed spending time with him in which he would do this.

Johnny has a theory that he could beat the roulette wheel.

Like all mathematicians,

from theory, you have to put it into fact.

He went down from Southampton to the Playboy Club,

he got on the roulette table and he took the paint to the cleaners.

He wasn't playing to win,

he was playing to prove his theory.

It was almost like a form of art.

It was as if the data was out there and he was trying to fit something to it

and when he got it fitted, you understood what was going on.

It was actually a mathematical equation.

But roulette, like life itself was just another game to John.

His academic life was a simple one,

but in the end gained him few friends and separated him from the family that he had.

Anything to do with mathematics, that was Johnny's game.

He used to tell countries

what to produce.

You have to be some kind of a genius and he was obviously very well paid for it.

What to do with your money when you don't spend it?

What surprised me was the amount he left.

John's final estate was valued at £340,000 and was remarkably all in hard cash.

It was up to Simon at Fraser & Fraser to work out where this should go.

By now he had been able to map out John's maternal

family tree in its entirety, finding all the entitled heirs.

I think we have found 15 cousins in total and bearing in mind how much

we believe the estate to be worth, that is going to be quite a nice windfall for all of them.

In particular, it is nice to know that Brian,

who got in contact with us originally, is going to share in that.

Brian has now been put in contact with the cousins he had lost touch with,

but the cousin he had been most interested in was the one on his mind.

I felt very guilty and very sad because I had neglected him all these years.

It was up to me to look for him, it wasn't up to him.

He would never have done that.

The family are planning to spend some of their inheritance on a memorial for John Wise.

A tribute to a man who left very few traces of his achievements in life.

In a way, it is symptomatic of the man.

He gradually disappears, not wishing to leave an epitaph or any papers.

He just lets it all drift away.

It is sad but it is also

true of the man and

what you have to do is remember what gifts he gave you.

Back at Fraser & Fraser, the team are working on the case of

Harold Smith, an estate worth £400,000 thanks to a property in Epsom.

When we are stuck on something like Smith, we are racking our brains on everything.

We have to make sure we read every little piece of paper and every

little hint on something twice, three times even.

After many wrong starts, the team have finally found the right Harold Smith.

Now the hunt begins for his brothers or sisters.

Unfortunately they have the surname Smith too, and could be very difficult to find.

Harold, we don't know, Adelaide, Lilian, Louise...

Thankfully, Harold Smith's birth certificate has told the team that

his father was in the Army and that opens up a fresh avenue of research for Neil.

He is a sergeant in the Army Pay Corps, died aged 42 in 1917.

It has quite a lot of information about him, more than I have seen before.

It says here he has a long service and a good conduct medal

and he is the son of William and Emma Smith in Southampton and the husband of

Ms ALL Smith of Morley Avenue in Wood Green.

Served in the South Africa Corps.

Certainly our man.

He was killed in the war aged 40.

Obviously a career army man.

The father of the deceased, Harold Herbert Senior had joined the Army as a young man.

He belonged to a cavalry regiment, which still exists today, the Queen's 9th Royal Lancers.

The 9th Lancers were a prestigious regiment.

They were formed in 1743

and eventually they attained the name of the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers.

In 1899, the regiment travelled to South Africa to join the British Army's effort in the Boer War.

There is one reference in the diary of the 9th Lancers at that time.

"A patrol under Sergeant Smith on the right of the advance came under heavy fire at about 300 yards.

"Private Croft's horse was shot.

"Sergeant Smith got Croft up behind him and they got safely away.

"The horse, being subsequently retrieved by RSM Grant and the party at the time."

The fact that Sergeant Smith rescued Private Croft was one distinctive act

of bravery, but then for them to rescue the horse as well, because

the horse in those days was probably considered to be as valuable as the man.

The young Sergeant Smith did well to survive the perilous battlefields in South Africa and he and his family

went on to travel the world with his Army career until he died in the First World War.

He left his wife alone with three children.

Harold was seven at the time.

The team can now search for records of the Smith family overseas

to tie them in with Harold Senior's time in the Army.

On the case of Smith, I've just found the birth of Adelaide M in South Africa.

It's a great discovery for the team.

At the moment we believe there's two sisters, one of whom...we're working

on the basis that she died as a spinster in Thanet Kent and the other sister, who

is Irene Lilian Smith, very, very common name, also in Thanet in Kent.

It turns out that both sisters of the deceased were born in South Africa.

The teams know that Adelaide died a spinster, so all eyes are now on Irene.

If she had children, they would be the only heirs to Harold Smith's £400,000 estate.

In the office, the researchers have been looking for a marriage for Irene.

They might just have had a breakthrough.

-Fantastic.

-What?

Well, we know her name now.

Yes, I know. No other people mentioned?

No, just the brother Harold Herbert Smith and the sister Irene Lillian Ings.

-Where did she get married?

-Who is off...

-Oh, so there's no...no near kin on this?

We need to check the address just to see who is, when she was...

Married in 1976.

Born in 1909.

We've just got back with the... We've got a probate back for the sister of the deceased.

The Smith to Ings marriage is in 1976.

Irene is down as having the surname Smith at that time.

If that's the case, she's a spinster getting married at the age of 65-ish.

Which sort of puts a stop on her having any children.

If that's true, that's all of our near kin out.

So Irene never had children. But it seemed she was the only one of the Smith family to escape the nest.

Harold and his sister Queenie lived with their widowed mother,

whilst Irene left home to become a missionary in China in 1940.

Despite three years of internment by the Japanese during the war,

she carried on her work in China until 1951.

Then she went on to Malaysia and Singapore, before finally returning home.

With Irene only marrying in her sixties after returning from her travels,

both of Harold's sisters died without having had children.

The team are going to have to trace both sides of Harold Smith's family all the way back to cousins.

It's a huge job for the researchers, but Neil has seen it coming.

The office have been working on the cousins all morning.

By now they are wrestling with large family trees on both the Caspell and the Smith sides of the family.

What quarter was it, Rog?

That's not to say the job is done.

But working with the most common name in the country, the Smith side, unsurprisingly, is not looking good.

Jamie Smith to an Outen. Now, that marriage would appear to be wrong.

On the maternal side, the research is in much better shape.

You'll see on our tree we've got one, two, three, four, five, six...

I'm guessing we'll have in the region of 25 or 30 beneficiaries on.

Now's a question of...taking a little step back for David and he's got to evaluate where people are,

who he's got on the road and who he can get to hopefully visit these people and sign them up.

Bob Smith's free, Bob Barrett's free, Debbie will stay in the registry offices.

We may be able to bring Ewert on to this as well. We may be able to get three travellers on to it.

Neil's strategy for cracking the Smith case has paid off.

The team have finally got the Caspell family tree up to date,

which is no mean feat.

It turns out that the deceased's mother, Adelaide, was one of ten siblings.

All of their descendants are entitled beneficiaries.

One of Adelaide's brothers was Horace. He had a daughter, Evelyn.

David Pacifico is hoping he has got her on the phone.

Could she be their first heir?

Hello, Mrs Turner? This is Fraser & Fraser here.

We're trying to trace the members of the Caspell family.

Evelyn has agreed to a meeting and Bob Barrett is on his way to try to obtain her signature.

Hello, Mrs Turner?

-Yes.

-Bob Barrett from Fraser & Fraser.

Thank you for seeing me.

First of all, Bob has to verify the information

he has for the Caspell family, to make sure that Evelyn is indeed an heir to Harold Smith's estate.

What I'd like to do now is record your

brothers and sisters, please.

I don't know whether you want to start with the youngest, eldest or whatever...

-I'm the youngest.

-Right.

-John was the eldest.

-We'll start with, so that's...

You're going to ask his birthday...and how old he was.

Meanwhile, Bob Smith is instructed to see a second heir on the maternal side of the family.

Now, the person in Emsworth is a first cousin.

She's a cousin and she might have some knowledge about other stems that we're still try to get on to.

Is she an only child?

-'I think she might be, yes.'

-OK.

-'All right, thanks Bob.'

-All right.

-Cheers, Dave.

-'Bye.'

Bye.

Whether Fraser & Fraser will get their commission is now in the hands of the travellers.

In Stevenage, Bob Barrett's meeting with heir Evelyn is going well.

So, I'll give that to you.

That's very kind of you.

And I'll drink my tea.

Is it still drinkable? That's the question.

-It certainly is.

-Yes.

Oh, yes. Gosh, what a job.

-Well, thank you very much. Very nice to meet you.

-Thank you.

I hope at the end of the day it's a nice amount that comes to you.

-Thank you very much.

-Thanks very much for the tea.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Evelyn is fortunate to be entitled to a share of Harold Smith's estate.

But an added bonus for her is the chance to find out a bit more about the Caspell family.

When you lose your parents, they drop off.

You know, you lose the rest of their family off...unless,

you know, you all move apart, move in different areas of the country.

And contact is lost,

which is... It's a shame.

It's the end of a long Thursday in the office.

Neil took a huge gamble by throwing all of his team at the case of Harold Herbert Smith.

But it seems to have paid off.

And thanks to much painstaking research,

the team have found at least 20 heirs so far to the £400,000 estate.

We're just finishing up, really.

We've got a couple of letters being produced to go out to beneficiaries we haven't been able to see today.

It looks like we're about to get onto the Smith side.

We've got some certs coming back on that. That'll be coming in tomorrow.

Altogether, it was quite a good day.

Although they have yet to find the Smith cousins, the heirs they have found are definitely entitled.

Which means that Harold's money will not be going to the Treasury.

Knowing Bert, I am absolutely certain he will be thrilled to bits,

that we had managed to find close relatives and to not see that it just

went to a Government department

to be sorted out, willy-nilly by a faceless mandarin who had nothing to do with him.

If you would like advice about building your family tree

or making a will, go to...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]