Humphrey/Comaskey Heir Hunters

Today, heir hunters are searching for a family of beneficiaries in line to inherit a £50,000 estate.

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's programme,

a confusing birth certificate causes chaos for the heir hunters

as they search for beneficiaries to a five figure estate.

It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous.

And two brothers are amazed to learn how much they had in common

with a long-lost relative they'd never known.

Ship building and the sea, I think, have always been in the blood.

Plus, how you could be entitled

to some of the thousands of pounds held by the Treasury.

Could a windfall be heading your way?

Each year the British government receives around £12 million of bonus revenue.

This staggering amount comes from unclaimed estates left by people who have died without making a will.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

Throughout the UK there are over 30 companies competing to return

this money to the families it belongs to.

These people are known as heir hunters.

Working for a commission, heir hunting is big business

involving plenty of detective work.

So it's not 100% sure that this is the right one.

But to return family money to the rightful heirs

can be immensely satisfying.

What I originally thought was going to be wrong,

we were just trying for trying's sake, turns out to be right.

So quite a good result, really.

The sun's up, it's Thursday morning and across the UK,

heir hunting firms are scouring the Treasury's list

of unclaimed estates which has just been published.

The companies are in a race to find heirs

and until they do, they won't earn a penny in commission.

But the higher the value of the estate, the greater the competition

between rival firms.

At the offices of Fraser & Fraser in London,

one name on the list has caught the eye of case manager, Dave Slee.

Hello. Good morning. Sorry to trouble you.

We're trying to trace the next of kin of a lady by the name of Mrs Vera Humphrey.

All he has to go on is a name, date and place of death.

It doesn't sound like a lot but Dave quickly

puts his years of experience to use and gets on the phone.

She passed away, we believe, in 2003

and may have been a resident at Homefield House.

Vera May Humphrey, formerly Tovey,

passed away at the age of 86 in Southampton.

She married widower Arthur Humphrey in 1954 but they had no children.

Vera was quickly welcomed into Arthur's family

and is fondly remembered by them.

Alan Bates was Arthur's nephew

and he and wife Pam were close to Vera for nearly 50 years.

She was a very bubbly person. She had a lovely personality, actually.

-But she had an innate laugh, didn't she?

-Yes, she did.

She always, she was always very light-hearted. Children loved her.

I knew she was a shorthand writer, the same as myself.

She'd write notes in shorthand and she's the only one could decipher it.

She'd say, "I think I can do it faster than you."

I'd say, "I think I can do it faster than you."

Sadly Arthur passed away in 1975,

but Vera remained close to his family, until she too died in 2003.

In the office, it's 8:40am and Dave is on the phone trying to find

out whether Vera owned her property.

If she did they'll know this has the potential to be a high value case.

So would they own the properties, the people? They own the property. OK.

This is a cracking start.

If Vera owned her home,

the team reckon her estate could be worth at least £50,000.

It would've been a privately owned over 55s development.

I'm going to speak to the manager of the home now.

While Dave makes that call, he needs senior researcher Gareth

to find some concrete information on Vera's ancestry, fast.

Heir hunters need to build a family tree to establish their next of kin.

They do this by using public records including birth,

death and marriage certificates as well as census results.

Available online and in local register offices,

all this evidence helps heir hunters

build a family tree for the deceased.

And making use of these tools, research into Vera's family seems

to be unfolding very quickly now and Gareth has had a breakthrough.

We've got a brother of the deceased. Reginald F. Tovey.

We think we've found him in 1930s Canada.

Vera's parents were Percy Tovey and Bertha Alice Weare.

The heir hunters believe that as well as Vera, they also had a son,

Reginald.

Percy died in 1917 of pneumonia, when Vera was a year old.

Bertha then remarried a Sidney Brown.

We can go off to cousins.

We'll definitely have plenty of cousins to find.

But we'll be doing that without knowing what happened to Reginald, the deceased brother.

If Vera's brother Reginald is still alive

he'll be the sole heir to her estate and if he's died,

his children will be the next in line to inherit.

The team need to try and find out what happened to Reginald.

So it's time to head out onto the streets.

The company has a network of travelling heir hunters based

all around the UK.

They're ready to hit the road at a moment's notice,

following orders from the case managers in the office.

We need the parents' marriage certificate from Bishop Auckland.

Their main tasks are to collect certificates,

check records and sign up heirs.

Dave Slee has called on the services of ex-police officer Bob Barrett

and armed with his marching orders, he's hit the road.

I'm on my way to Southampton Registry Office

to try and get a death certificate of Vera Humphrey.

The certificate Bob's getting

will confirm the team are on the right track.

In the meantime Dave has some calls to make.

The manager of the sheltered accommodation where Vera lived

has given him a list of people who may have useful information.

Time to hit the phones.

Your uncle was Arthur. I presume that Vera and Arthur had no children.

No.

We understand that she owned her property in Homefield House.

I just wondered if you had a... No.

So you don't believe there'd be any,

she didn't own a property at the time of her death.

No.

It's good and bad news for the team.

The bad news is Vera didn't own her home,

but on the plus side, he's been able to confirm what the team suspected,

that she had a brother called Reginald.

Dave has also now got the phone numbers of Vera's stepchildren

Mike and Bob Humphrey, the sons of her husband Arthur.

Dave knows that as stepchildren,

they cannot legally inherit without a will.

But they might have more information about Vera

that could help the team in their search.

Dave immediately tries to call them

but he can't reach anyone at home.

"This number does not receive incoming calls."

That's no longer in service.

Last throw of the dice.

Hello. Yes, sorry to trouble you.

Finally, Dave gets through to one of Vera's stepsons.

The Homefield House, the manager there has very,

very kindly gave me your phone number because her first impression

is that you were the next of kin, of course, as the sons.

Mike and Bob Humphrey's father,

Arthur, was married to Vera for 20 years

and the two brothers have very fond memories of their stepmother.

My favourite memory of Vera is in her later years when I got to know

her better, I suppose, and visiting her in those years down in Horden.

-She was always good fun.

-We loved going down there.

She was always, I've never,

ever seen Vera without a smile on her face.

And she was certainly always pleased to see us.

She was, she was always, well she always said she's proud of her boys

but you know, that's just the way that she was.

Can I just ask when your father did pass away?

Dave's phone call to Vera's stepson is very revealing.

He learns that after Vera's father Percy died,

she and her brother Reginald were abandoned by their mother

and put into a home for orphans.

In the early 1920s there were still scores of orphanages in the UK

and it was common practice for single parents to put

children into homes if they weren't able to raise them themselves.

During the phone call, Vera's stepson is also keen

to express his frustration that her estate has been

advertised as unclaimed by the Treasury.

And of course unfortunately, legally, because you're the stepsons, you can't inherit.

Yeah, I know. It's the law.

The law is actually under review and may well change in the future.

Of course, it is frustrating.

Mike and Bob are particularly upset because they know that Vera

did actually make a will but sadly the solicitors

have since gone into liquidation and the will cannot be found.

There was will and she lodged it with a solicitor.

The only problem is there's no trace of it.

That money belongs to us.

It was Dad's money. It was Dad and Vera's money.

You know, by all the laws of the land and the sky, it's ours.

However, under British inheritance law,

the only people the heir hunters will be able to help make a claim

to Vera's estimated £50,000 estate are blood relations.

In the office, Dave has completed his phone call

and is about to receive even more useful information;

at the registry office in Southampton,

travelling researcher Bob Barrett has Vera's death certificate.

I can confirm date of birth 29th May 1916.

Widow of Arthur Edward Humphrey.

It looks like Weymouth is where a lot of this job's coming out.

We're definitely trying to find a closer kin than we've already found.

Gareth says go to Weymouth.

The information from the death certificate confirms

the team are looking at the right family

and their research suggests

there may be cousins in the Weymouth area through Vera's father Percy.

These cousins and their descendants would be heirs.

Bob heads for Weymouth, hoping that by the time he gets there,

the team in the office will have found cousins for him to see.

Let's see if we can get another address in Weymouth.

We've got 20 minutes to do it. Starting now.

But Dom might need more than 20 minutes,

it seems the Tovey family expanded at a rate of knots.

We've got lots of siblings, by the looks of it.

One who is one William Tovey who unfortunately,

from our point of view, has six children.

One of whom has three children, another has two.

One has six children.

So this is going to, we're looking at an awful lot of heirs, really.

We're just going through them one by one, trying to get them

up to date and beat the competition to their doors.

William Tovey, Vera's grandfather, married Martha Millard

and on the 1881 census they had 11 children.

The youngest, Percy, was born in 1880 and he went on to father Vera

and her brother Reginald.

But when Gareth digs deeper, something doesn't quite add up.

On the 1891 census, the 11-year-old Percy

is listed as the adopted son of a Robert and Amelia Fawcett.

But Robert Fawcett then went on to marry Ada, Percy's older sister.

-Robert, he adopted Percy.

-OK, yeah.

-And then he's subsequently gone on to marry Percy's sister, Ada.

-Yeah.

Who we think Percy is possibly the illegitimate child of Ada.

Ada was 17 years older than Percy

so Gareth has a theory he may have been her illegitimate son.

But this would have a dramatic effect on the research.

It would move Percy down a generation,

meaning the cousins in Weymouth would become second cousins,

and under English inheritance law, second cousins cannot inherit.

The only way they can confirm their theory is to see Percy's birth certificate

and fortunately Bob's perfectly placed to pick it up.

We need that from Weymouth. OK, he's on his way to Weymouth.

It's 12:30pm and frustratingly the team are no closer

to finding an heir.

Confirming Percy's parentage is essential and until they clear

this up or get any news on brother Reginald, they are at stalemate.

We need to get that birth.

Coming up:

The plot thickens when Bob gets hold of Percy's birth certificate.

Estates can remain on the unsolved list for up to 30 years.

This offers determined heir hunters the opportunity to return

and take a fresh look at those trickier cases

which stumped them the first time around.

The case of Arthur Frederick Comaskey

was first advertised by the Treasury in 2002.

The estate was valued at a healthy £60,000

so it seemed like a case worth investigating for Peter Birchwood

and his family run business, Celtic Research, based in Wales.

We have an awful lot of cases on our files that for some

reason or another haven't been solved

but we have a policy that we go over them regularly and Comaskey

was one that we picked out to do some research as soon as we knew we had a good, reliable agent

up in Edinburgh who could do the work for us.

Arthur Comaskey was found dead in his home in 2000

in Westcliff-on-Sea.

No photo survives of him.

Clive Johnson was Arthur's neighbour many years ago

and remembers seeing him regularly around the local area.

He was a jolly man. Well-dressed.

He always had sort of trousers and a shirt and a nice jacket.

He always gave the impression he had been a professional of some sort.

He used to just walk up and down the road and he used to say hello.

I never saw him with anybody else.

Maybe, as I say, he was always on his own.

The isolation that Arthur experienced is a common tale.

Every year, hundreds of people in the UK pass away

with no-one to take care of them

and when this happens there is a safety net in place.

It is the job of people like Gary Green,

a bereavement officer, to manage the death of someone like Arthur.

In the case of Arthur Comaskey,

we were informed of his death by the coroner's office

and the coroner's office were unable to trace any next of kin.

Part of Gary's job as a bereavement officer is also to search

the house looking for any family connections.

Firstly we would look at possibly all the mail that was on the floor,

if the deceased had been there for some time.

That is, that would give us

a telltale sign of their up-to-date life.

We would then go and look in cabinets, drawers, whatever.

Under the bed and even in the kitchen,

we've actually found, found some papers there,

in the kitchen cupboards.

If we find a will then normally it's bingo.

In Arthur's case, they found no will or evidence of family in the house.

Therefore they requested that the local authority actually

deal with the actual funeral arrangements

and we referred the estate to the Treasury solicitor.

It seems Arthur was a reclusive character

but he was committed to his profession

and worked at Johnson Controls from the early '70s

as a precision engineer until he was made redundant in 1991.

Former colleague, Alan Easter remembers Arthur from the factory.

Johnson Controls used to make car seats.

He used to go around every day,

checking the component parts were made correctly.

He was quite a quiet man. Kept himself to himself.

I don't know anybody who really knew him very well.

Well I know he used to be a member of St John's Ambulance.

He used to be doing that most weekends. That was his real life, I think.

When heir hunter Peter started looking for Arthur's family,

he was looking for aunts, uncles and cousins as beneficiaries.

As he could find no living relatives on his father's side,

he concentrated his search on the family of Arthur's mother

who were from Scotland.

Turned out to be Scottish.

We knew he'd been an engineer

but he wasn't born in the area where he died.

From that we just started trying to do the family tree.

Arthur's mother was Sarah Ann Stewart who married

Victor Comaskey in 1928 and in the same year they had their only

child Arthur Frederick, born in Wandsworth in London.

But work on the maternal side proved complicated.

This family, on the whole, were not consistent with spelling

so it did take us an awful lot of time to find the relatives,

also because the family jumped across the border to England and then back

to Scotland and then back to England again,

probably as work directed.

Arthur's maternal grandparents were Adam and Margaret Stewart

and they had six children, including Arthur's mother, Sarah.

But it was Adam and his employment in particular that determined

the fate of this family.

Adam Stuart, the grandfather, was by trade an engine fitter,

moving between Merseyside and Glasgow with the trade of engine fitter.

It's a pretty good assumption

that he's going to be working in the docks.

It was starting to look like Arthur

had descended from a long line of engineers,

and in the late 1800s the best place for an engineer was on the Mersey.

The Liverpudlian shipping industry at this time was booming

and as an engine fitter, Adam Stewart's skills were valuable.

It seems he took the decision to move from Scotland

to Liverpool for work

and this is where he met his wife Margaret Collie,

who was born in Birkenhead.

According to records from this period, Margaret and Adam

settled into one of the terraced worker's houses, close to the docks.

After marrying in 1884, they had their first child,

William, two years later.

The young Stewart family took advantage of the booming ship building industry

and Adam took a job with the renowned Laird Brothers.

In 1858 they'd built the world's first steel ship

and they did a lot of work for the Royal Navy.

Laird's was obviously the biggest employer in Birkenhead

and one of the biggest employers in the region.

The shipyard was huge and obviously,

it attracted workers from basically all over the country because

Birkenhead itself was growing and the shipbuilding industry was growing.

People with skills and trades would be attracted there

and they obviously worked and lived in the town.

An engine fitter's job would have involved obviously installing

the engines and other related machinery into a ship.

A lot of the time they'd be working in cramped, confined conditions.

It would be oily, hot, dusty and probably incredibly noisy.

A skilled tradesman like Adam would be paid possibly 25,

30 shillings a week.

At that time, it was quite a good wage

because he could raise a family and get by on that.

But a couple of decades later,

it looked as though the boom time for the shipping industry had sailed.

Immediately after the turn of the century were lean years

and it's entirely possible that Adam decided to try his luck

back home in Scotland.

Of course, that was also the early years of the motor industry.

The skills of an engine fitter could also obviously equally be

applied to motorcars as they could to ships

so I'm sure he may well have been among those early car engine builders

because car engines, in essence, are basically the same

as marine engines except they used petrol or diesel instead of steam.

Arthur's grandfather Adam was the main breadwinner

and with six young mouths to feed,

he had no choice but to take his family where the work was.

Which made the search for heirs that little bit harder.

They would maybe in one year be in Birkenhead

and a couple of years later, they'd go back to Glasgow, to Scotland.

Although it meant that we were looking in two different

sets of records, we could manage to follow them.

Coming up:

Peter Birchwood uncovers heirs to Arthur's estate

who find themselves unsettled by his revelations.

It's slightly alarming, I suppose, to know that we weren't

aware of somebody who has been so comparatively close in the family.

Every year, hundreds of cases are cracked by heir hunters

across the UK but there are always a few estates that remain a mystery,

finding themselves in the unsolved file.

Could you help trace the beneficiaries?

These cases could be worth anything from £5,000 to millions,

and they're waiting to be claimed.

Today, we have three names from the unsolved list,

could you be eligible to inherit a fortune?

Winifred Connie Bartholomew died in November 2003,

aged 85 in Reading, Berkshire.

Did you know Winifred? Could you be entitled to her estate?

Eileen Emmuska Lytton died in Lymington in Hampshire

in September 2003.

She was 95-years-old.

Eileen's surname is very unusual, does it sound familiar to you?

Philip William John Oldroyd died in Southall, Middlesex in October 2008.

Do you remember Philip from many years ago but maybe you lost touch?

Can you help find his beneficiaries?

If these three estates are not claimed, the money will go

to the government, but if the names mean anything to you

or someone you know, you could be in line to inherit.

In London the team at Fraser and Fraser

are trying to find heirs to the estimated £50,000 estate

of Vera Humphrey, who died in 2003.

Mike and Bob Humphrey have fond memories of their stepmother.

She'd sit in front of the TV all day watching Wimbledon

for the whole fortnight.

-Yes. Sports stuff, anything really.

-Snooker.

She loved, could name all the snooker players.

She knew what she enjoyed and she tried to indulge, which is great.

So far the team have learnt that Vera had a brother but they don't know what happened to him.

He could have died without having children, so the team are hedging

their bets and looking for potential heirs in Vera's wider family.

Vera's father Percy is also causing the team problems

as he may have been born illegitimately.

Bob Barrett has been sent to Weymouth to find Percy's birth certificate

and while the team wait for his update, they're hitting the phones,

calling the dozens of potential cousins who could be heirs.

Six pages and we've got miles to go.

Your father, I'm hoping, was George Henry Tovey

and he was married to Edith Ann, your mum.

This estate relates to someone who would have been a cousin

to your father so someone you wouldn't personally know.

Your father's entitlement would obviously pass down to his kids

so that would be yourself, Leslie, Patricia and Eileen, I think.

I don't know, was there any other siblings at all? Leonard.

With Bob still waiting for Percy's birth certificate,

Dave can't help but speculate

as to why William and Martha Tovey might have listed Percy,

Vera's father, as one of their own children on the 1881 census.

Obviously we're talking in the 1880s, it would have been highly

embarrassing to have an illegitimate child.

Totally frowned upon.

So by registering your child, your daughter's child as your own,

it's a smokescreen so that no-one would ever know that

that child was born illegitimately to your daughter.

Finally Bob has Percy's birth certificate,

will Dave's suspicions be on the money?

-All right, what have we got?

-I have one birth certificate.

-Percy Reginald. Father, William Tovey.

-Yeah.

-Mother, Ada Tovey, formerly Miller.

-Ada Miller?

Yeah. Miller.

Could it be Millard?

Well, no. It's typed on here, Miller, so...

That's odd.

Although Dave and Gareth suspected Percy might have been Ada's illegitimate son,

the very last thing they expected to find was her father, William Tovey,

named on the birth certificate as the father of her child.

It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous.

If William is the father as the team originally suspected,

the cousins in the Weymouth area would be heirs.

But the certificate doesn't make sense and the team are sure there's been a mistake.

They decided to cross reference Percy's birth

with another of the Tovey children, Archibald.

We're thinking if you can perhaps pull up a couple more certificates.

Right.

It was an afterthought from Gareth and it's a fair shout, actually.

-I think it's worth doing.

-So back to the registry office.

Yeah. Sorry, mate.

I've requested Archibald's birth certificate,

purely on the basis to see what the parents' names are.

It's a bit of a problem because I actually think,

I still think that Percy is probably the son

of Ada and she's gone in to register the birth and she's told a few fibs.

I need that documentation.

I need it in black and white to say, "This person was the son of X and Y."

And I don't want their brother and sister's certificate to show

a different parent because then I've got problems.

I still think Ada is probably the mother but we might find out now.

-Hello, Bob.

-Right, I've managed to get another birth.

Archibald. Father, William Tovey.

-Mother, Martha Tovey.

-Yeah.

Formerly Millard.

When the team compare the two birth certificates,

all the information matches apart from the mother's name

and company partner Neil has his own theory about why this might be.

We're looking at similarities.

The addresses and informants are the same,

the father and the occupations are the same.

It's a possibility it's just a mistake,

that for some reason the mother's

been put down as Ada instead of Martha.

Neil's theory means the family in the Weymouth area would be cousins

not second cousins, and so they would be heirs.

The team are now redoubling their efforts to find people

for Bob to see while he's still in the area.

Percy's story has been pivotal to the research and it's a story that

was cut tragically short when he died aged just 37.

According to Mike and Bob Humphrey, Percy's premature death

had a devastating affect on his wife Bertha

and young children Vera and Reginald.

What happened was that Vera's father died very young

and the mother had to go out to work.

They were in lodgings.

She was leaving the children there, in the lodgings.

She was frightened of her children not being fed properly and so on

and she was going out to work and she was simply unable to cope.

Seeing no other way out, Vera's mother Bertha, was desperate.

She turned to The Muller Foundation,

a Christian based organisation

formed by evangelist George Muller in 1836.

Children who were full or partial orphans like Reginald

and Vera were most likely to be granted places

and could stay from infancy through to their mid teens.

During their stay they were fed and clothed,

being raised and educated as God-fearing young people.

In 1918 Bertha wrote to the home asking for help and amazingly,

almost 100 years later, her appeal still exists today.

I have a letter here which says,

concerning Mrs Tovey, the mother,

"The above named woman is a widow

"working at a munitions store in Swindon.

"The children are delicate and the mother is conscious

"for them to be taken into some sort of institution.

"Would such a case be a suitable one for your home?"

So it would appear from that that having been widowed,

the mother just couldn't cope with looking after her children.

Admitted to the orphanage in 1918 aged just two and four respectively,

Vera and Reginald were housed in separate buildings

and would only have seen each other once a month.

Their mother Bertha re-married and it's not clear

whether she had any further contact with her children.

Life for Reginald and Vera certainly wouldn't have been easy.

Life in the homes was hard.

But it was much better than the alternatives that were open to them.

Vera spent a total of 16 years in the orphanage

and her elder brother stayed for ten years.

They were discharged separately,

Vera leaving in 1934 and Reginald in 1929.

Vera went off to be a maid in a house in Swindon

and Reginald went to be an apprentice to a nurseryman in Weston-super-Mare.

Shortly after, Reginald emigrated to Canada

and this was the last contact Vera ever had with her brother.

Bob is finally on his way to see one of Vera's cousins,

a potential heir, who lives in Gosport.

All I've got to show for the day so far,

I've got two birth certificates and one death certificate.

It'd be nice if this gentleman was in and signs an agreement with us.

After a hard day's work,

might the team's colossal efforts come good in the end?

Relief, it seems Ronald Tovey is at home.

-Her father's name was Percy.

-Percy.

-Oh yeah, Percy was probably the youngest.

-Right.

-Percy was born in Weymouth, when they moved to Weymouth.

-1880.

Ronald Tovey's father was Frederick Tovey,

a grandson to William and Martha Tovey.

This makes Ronald Vera's cousin once removed.

Luckily for Bob, Ronald is a keen genealogist himself.

William is registered as the father

but the daughter is registered as the mother.

Yeah. Very peculiar.

It's finally home time for Bob.

As Ronald doesn't have time for a meeting today,

the office will send him an agreement and, if he signs it,

they'll act on his behalf to help him claim a share of Vera's estate.

A few days later, Ronald's had time to reflect upon the surprise visit

and the revelation of a cousin he never knew, Vera.

We'd never come across Vera's name in our research into the family

so this was the first I'd ever heard of her.

I understand that she was my late father's cousin

from his uncle Percy,

who was the youngest of 11 children of the family.

Although we've traced a lot of the other brothers' marriages

and their children,

Percy is the very one that we haven't come across anything yet.

Ronald stands to inherit a share of Vera's estimated £50,000 estate

and he's already thought about what he may spend the money on.

2012 will be our diamond wedding.

We might go on a cruise for our diamond wedding anniversary.

After 60 years, it would be quite intriguing, wouldn't it?

A few weeks later,

the heir hunters are tying up the loose ends of their research

and Dave has finally found out

what happened to Vera's elusive brother Reginald.

It would appear that he went out to Canada

on what was known as the Manitoba Boys' Group.

It was a ship destined for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

It would appear that all the boys in the group were orphans,

probably destined for rural farm work.

After that, unfortunately the trail goes cold.

As it stands at the moment, I've located up to 60 paternal beneficiaries

who would be entitled in the estate

so the estate's expanding quicker than my waistline at the moment.

But crucially, Neil has had news from the Treasury

that the family's claim has been accepted.

The Treasury have now agreed with us and agreed with my theory, really,

that Ada is Percy's sister, William is Percy's father,

Martha is Percy's mother

and we're dealing with first cousins of the whole blood.

It's good news, really. There is however some bad news.

The value's come back at £13,000.

So we've got an awful lot of beneficiaries, all cousins,

but the estate's pretty small.

In 2002 Peter Birchwood of Celtic Research

began investigating the case of Arthur Comaskey, who died in 2000,

leaving behind an estate worth £60,000.

On the maternal side,

Peter traced Arthur's industrious grandfather Adam Stewart,

an engine builder, working in the Liverpudlian shipping industry.

In the late 1800s, Adam decided to return to his homeland of Glasgow

and jumped on the bandwagon of the next big thing.

Hot on the heels of the steam ship, was the motorcar.

Back then, manufacturing was done by hand, far from the mass production methods used today.

The first motorcar designed and built in the UK was

built by the Glaswegian Scottish company of Arrol-Johnston in 1895.

Glasgow was by the sea, of course.

In those days, canals,

ships were bringing things from all over the world.

Craftsmen were there, the power was there,

the iron and steel was there.

All the essential ingredients for an emergent motorcar industry.

The shipbuilding industry was tough. It was hard.

There were big machines, it was hot and smelly.

Motorcars were much lighter, much easier to work on and work around.

Of course you're working in sort of early garages

which would have been warm and dry.

It was a much gentler existence and so attracted a lot of the shipbuilding people.

Indeed, the motor industry also enticed Adam Stewart away from ship building.

And 100 years later, his grandson Arthur Comaskey found he too

had a career as an engineer in the motor industry.

Adam continued to live and work in Glasgow until his death in 1937.

Many of his six children, Arthur's aunts and uncles,

had children of their own

and they became the focus of Peter's search

for heirs to Arthur's £60,000 estate.

We started finding people,

one of whom is in his 90s and living up just north of Glasgow.

The rest of the family members we came across in England

and Scotland so they're all over.

Adam's son, John Stewart, married Lily McFarland

and had three children,

Dorothy, Lily and Harry, Arthur's cousins.

Lily died so her children inherit her part of the estate.

One of them, David Preston,

was taken aback at the discovery of his cousin Arthur.

It was slightly alarming, I suppose, to know that we weren't

aware of somebody who has been so comparatively close in the family.

And David's brother Robert was also intrigued to find out

more about their elusive relation.

It did make you think that it's sad that somebody has died

and didn't leave a will

and didn't have any friends or family to leave what they owned to.

It must have been quite sad circumstances for that to happen.

It wasn't until two years after Peter Birchwood initially

got in touch with the Prestons and they'd received their cheques

that they were able to learn about their long-lost cousin.

I found out about Arthur right at the end.

My aunt Dorothy contacted me.

She said, "Yes, I used to meet him when I was a young girl,"

in the '30s, I suppose it would be.

Dorothy's aunt lived with the parents

and was separated from her husband, Mr Comaskey.

So Arthur was the son and according to Dorothy, you know,

he was a slightly strange little boy.

Her description was that in today's terms,

he might have been suffering

from some degree of Asperger's or something like that.

Although the family knew very little about Arthur's life,

it seems Robert and Phillip had more in common

with their cousin than they first thought.

The shipbuilding link makes a lot of sense.

I can understand that if they lived around about Birkenhead,

that would've been a main centre for shipbuilding.

That's where my great-grandfather would have got his experience from

that would have enabled him to move in to working on motor mechanics.

I was an engineer myself. I worked in the chemical industry.

My brother, Phillip, is a civil engineer.

I've got a son who's a civil engineer as well.

Despite being a somewhat reclusive man,

Arthur clearly felt at home in the engineering world too,

much like his long-lost family.

Both of my brothers are engineers.

I, of course, benefited from a classical education

and moved into a non-engineering profession.

But yeah, it is, it's interesting that it does seem to have...

Shipbuilding and the sea, I think, have always been in the blood.

If you would like advice about building your family tree

or making a will, go to bbc.co.uk

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