Yanchuk/Gibson Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters are scouring the country for beneficiaries

of an estate worth thousands of pounds.

Hello, Hector Birchwood speaking.

Someone somewhere could be about to inherit a substantial sum of money.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

On today's programme:

saving lives under enemy fire...

You were treating the wounded

but you might very well become wounded yourself.

A case that goes right to the heart of World War II.

And an heir hunt with a sting in its tail

sends the heir hunters right back to square one.

It meant all the research we'd carried out up until now

had been a waste of time.

Plus, how you may be entitled

to inherit an unclaimed estate held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

Every year in the UK,

an estimated 300,000 people die without leaving a will.

If no relatives are found,

then any money that's left behind will go to the Government.

Last year, they made £14 million from unclaimed estates.

That's where the heir hunters come in.

There are over 30 specialist firms

who make it their business to track down missing relatives

and help them claim their rightful inheritance.

People are entitled to this money. We ensure they get it.

It's a busy weekday morning

and already, heir-hunting firms across the country are hard at work.

Heir hunter Peter Birchwood

has just received a tip-off about a man who died in 2004,

but whose case has remained unsolved for the past seven years.

I received an e-mail from a man

who thinks that he's related to a Brian Yanchuk

who died a few years back.

Although a lot of their cases come from the list of unclaimed estates

the Treasury publish every Thursday,

sometimes heir hunters receive information

from individuals who need help.

In this case, the person in question, Brian Yanchuk,

had died without a will in 2004.

His estate had been advertised

but had gone unnoticed,

but someone who believed he was his cousin

had become concerned and contacted Peter.

I told Peter that I thought Brian Alexander Yanchuk was my cousin

and there wouldn't be many Yanchuks in Milton Keynes.

Celtic Research have been in the heir-hunting business

for the past 40 years.

The company is run by father and son team Peter and Hector Birchwood

and they employ a team of regional heir hunters throughout the UK.

Between them,

they solve over 300 cases a year.

Yanchuk is an extremely rare name in the UK.

It obviously wasn't of British origin, so where did it come from?

There are a whole multitude of them back in eastern Europe.

There are villages full of Yanchuks in the Ukraine.

This could make the team's task much more difficult.

If Brian Yanchuk was born in the Ukraine,

many of the family records and certificates

would also be in that country

and the team would have to enlist the help

of an eastern European agent to access them.

Brian Yanchuk died on 17th December 2004

in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire,

leaving an estate worth approximately £12,000.

But he left no will

and only a couple of childhood photos of him survive.

For Gavin Sweeney, who grew up on Brian's Street,

Brian was a permanent fixture in the neighbourhood.

He was part of the furniture, you could say, part of the street.

I just remember him having a drink,

always having that can in his hand,

having a fag on the bottom of his stairs

and when I got older, later, it was always a "Hello,"

even if he had a drink or something like that,

sitting on his steps or on the grass or passing by,

it was always, "You all right, Gav."

"Yeah, Brian, all right, mate." And that was it.

Brian was proud of his flat on the estate,

and always kept it spick and span,

as his neighbour June remembers.

His flat was very clean.

He used to have spider plants in his bedroom and bathroom

and his living room, loads of them. And that's how I remember him by.

He was also a regular at the local pub,

along with his drinking buddy Jimmy.

And they used to chat, and tell each other their problems.

They used to go to the pub together.

Sadly, Jimmy died several years before Brian,

and without his friend,

Brian went into a downward spiral.

He just went downhill since then, you know,

he went downhill because he didn't have anybody to talk to.

You know, he only had Jimmy.

But Brian left his mark on the community he lived in,

and is remembered fondly by the people who knew him.

When you've lost someone that's been, as I say, part of the furniture,

part of the street, really,

and someone that's been there for a very, very, very long time,

sadly missed, as far as I'm concerned. God rest Brian.

In the office,

Peter Birchwood had been looking for a birth record for Brian.

He was worried that with a name like Yanchuk,

he might have been born overseas.

I was fully expecting him not to be registered

because he was from the Ukraine

or somewhere in eastern Europe.

But luckily, on this occasion,

his hunch proved incorrect.

No, here he is.

He's born in the Wandsworth area.

This is a huge relief. Now the team know

that Brian was born in London,

they can begin the search for his heirs in this country.

Armed with his date of birth and his date of death,

they can move on to the next stage of their research.

Between those two periods, there's every possibility

he may have married, he may have had children,

so we look for those events,

we make sure that if he's married, we know who his wife is,

if he's got children, we know their names,

but in this instance,

Brian never seems to have married

so therefore, does not also appear to have had any children.

With no wife or children in the picture,

the team must now go up a generation to Brian's parents

to find out when they were married

and whether they had any children other than Brian.

Peter sends Hector to Wandsworth Register Office in South London

to pick up Brian's parents' marriage certificate.

-Hi, there.

-Hello, there.

I'm Hector Birchwood. I'm just here to pick up a certificate...

Certificates play a crucial role in the heir-hunting process.

They supply vital information

such as dates, names of parents,

addresses and occupations.

So a lot is riding on this one piece of paper.

The certificate's all done. It's in there.

-Thank you. Good afternoon.

-Bye-bye.

It will help the team first to establish

whether Brian has any siblings, and second,

to uncover more information about his parents' families.

If Brian has no siblings,

the team will have to look for aunts, uncles and cousins.

If they are still alive, they could be heirs to his estate.

The certificate tells Hector that

Brian's father, Alexander Yanchuk,

married Violet Smith

in Battersea in 1941.

Hmm.

And it also provides some surprising information about Brian's father.

"Alexander Yanchuk, bachelor,

"Private number H11058,

"Canadian Field Ambulance."

His home address is

in Fort William, Ontario, Canada.

Although he has a Ukrainian name, it appears

that Brian's father Alexander may have been born in Canada

and once again, this complicates matters.

While the team will need to look for records

of Brian's mother's family in the UK,

on the father's side,

they may have to turn their attention to Canada.

Heir-hunting cases often cross borders and continents

as families move around in search of work and a better life,

but how did Brian's father's family end up in Canada?

And what brought his father Alexander from Canada to the UK?

In the 1890s, the Canadian government

began to actively encourage immigration from eastern Europe.

Canada was underpopulated

and settlers were needed to come and occupy its vast prairies

and cultivate the land.

Keen to escape hardship in their own country,

and attracted by offers of free land in Canada,

tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants responded to the call.

Thus began a wave of Ukrainian emigration to Canada,

which continued until the Second World War.

Brian's paternal ancestors

were probably part of this Ukrainian exodus.

They settled in Canada, where Brian's father grew up.

He worked as a farmer there until the Second World War.

Then, when the war started,

he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps.

During the Second World War,

Canada made a terrific contribution to the Allied cause.

It had the third-largest Allied navy

and the fourth-largest air force

and an army of just over 700,000 men and women

and Canada lost 42,000 men and women killed during the Second World War.

Although Canada didn't introduce conscription for overseas service,

a vast number of people volunteered

to go and serve alongside the Allies in Europe.

Many of these volunteers were from Canada's immigrant population.

A large number of the descendants

and even immigrants themselves that had come from the Ukraine to Canada,

felt they too should play a part.

Britain was at war, Canada was at war,

and they should play a part in the fighting.

The Canadian Army numbered 730,000 men and women.

Of that number, 35,000 served in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps.

Brian's father Alexander was one of those 35,000.

He worked as a private in a field ambulance.

The field ambulance was the basic medical unit.

They were the ones that actually dealt with the immediate casualties

caused by enemy fire on the battlefields.

They would transport the wounded men to regimental aid posts

and from there to casualty clearing stations and ultimately hospitals.

Alexander's exact role in the field ambulance is unclear,

but it seems likely that he worked as a driver.

It may very well have been that Alexander, as a farmer,

may have driven a tractor on his farm

and of course, his driving skills would have been transferred

into the driving ambulances, jeeps or trucks

in transporting the wounded from the battlefield.

When the war ended, Alexander and Violet settled in England.

Brian came along seven years later

and they don't appear to have had any other children.

Now that Peter has established that Brian was unmarried

and had no children or siblings,

he must expand his search to look for aunts, uncles and cousins.

In order to do this,

he would normally go up to the deceased's grandparents

on both the mother's and father's side of the family

and then try to identify

all the children that these grandparents had.

But as Brian's father's side of the family

are likely to be back in Canada or the Ukraine,

Peter turns his attention to the maternal family

in his search for heirs.

And now he really has his work cut out.

Brian's mother's maiden name is Smith,

so his search has taken him

from one of the most uncommon names in Britain

to one of the most common.

Smith is not a good name to work on.

The mother - Violet Smith -

is a very common name, unfortunately.

Coming up...

the search for heirs leads right to the heart of war-torn London...

I remember these old tenements

and they were three storeys high.

There used to be families on every floor.

How one London family coped after the Blitz tore their city apart...

They wanted somewhere to live and there wasn't anywhere

because half of London was destroyed.

Sometimes families are keepers of secrets,

passed down from generation to generation.

Once these secrets come out into the open,

they can turn an heir hunt completely on its head.

This is what happened in the case of Alexander Gibson.

Alexander died on 22 July, 2004

in Brighton in Sussex.

He was 82 years old.

He spent the last seven years of his life in a nursing home

in neighbouring Hove, just a stone's throw from the sea.

Prior to this, he lived with his mother

in a flat in the Preston Park area of Brighton.

Alexander left an estate of £70,000

but died without leaving a will.

His case was taken up by heir hunter Bob Smith

at probate research firm Fraser and Fraser.

We were originally contacted by the solicitors

who'd been acting on behalf of our deceased during his lifetime.

The deceased had died.

There were no known family members and they'd sought our assistance

to try and locate a family member who could administer his estate.

Bob's first step

was to establish whether Alexander had a wife and children.

We tried to identify any marriages of the deceased.

He was born in Kent and died in Sussex

so we stuck to the south-east.

No marriages were identified so we assumed he had no children.

With no wife or children in the picture,

the next thing the team had to do was track down Alexander's parents.

We then obtained a copy of his birth certificate,

which gave his parents details

as John Gibson and Winifred Daisy Gibson, nee Clift.

As we now had the names of the parents,

we then identified their marriage which took place

in 1920 in Medway

and determined they had died before our deceased.

Since Alexander's parents had both passed away,

the team now had to determine whether they'd had other children.

We then began a search to see if our deceased had any brothers and sisters

and we discovered he was an only child.

Alexander was born on 20 September 1921

in Gillingham in Kent.

His mother, Winifred, was a tailoress and his father, John,

worked in the Chatham dockyard.

Chatham dockyard on the River Medway,

began its life in the 16th century,

during the reign of Elizabeth I.

It was here that the Queen's ships were built,

repaired and maintained.

Chatham dockyard developed

wooden sailing ships

until they were second to none

and they took part in quite a few major battles

which ended up with being the envy of the world

and foreign countries.

Over the next 400 years,

Chatham provided over 500 ships for the Royal Navy.

Wooden sailing ships were gradually replaced by iron ships

run by steam engines and in the early 1900s,

when Alexander's father John worked there,

Chatham began building the Royal Navy's new weapon of war -

the submarine.

Captain, I have the ship. Clear the bridge for diving.

This was an exciting time in the dockyard's history.

Submarine construction would span two World Wars,

enter the nuclear age and provide continued work for Chatham dockyard

until the mid-1960s.

'Diving now, diving now.'

Alexander's father, John, was employed as a clerk -

a job which was essential in keeping the dockyard running smoothly

at such a busy time.

The clerks in the dockyard either worked for the cashier,

doing the accounts and the money for the men,

or for the store superintendent,

which would keep an account of all the things

that entered the dockyard and left the dockyard on ships.

It was considered a job for life

and the skills you learnt in here,

in some cases, couldn't be learnt anywhere else.

After Alexander's father retired, the family moved to Brighton.

Alexander appears to have spent some time in the Royal Air Force,

where he was in employed as an engineer.

He then worked for Brighton and Hove Council,

delivering school dinners.

Having established that Alexander was unmarried

and had no children or siblings, the team now had to expand their search

to look for more distant relatives.

We then looked for the grandparents on both the mother's

and the father's side of the family

and the list of their children

who, of course, will be aunts and uncles of our deceased.

The grandparents on Alexander's mother's side of the family

proved easy to find.

John Clift married Mary Ann Brain

in Medway in Kent in 1893.

They are listed as having eight children -

Alexander's mother Winifred and seven others.

Of the seven maternal aunts and uncles,

five of those have married and had children themselves,

who would be first cousins to our deceased.

We then had the task of tracking them down.

One of Alexander's maternal aunts

was May Clift, who married a Leslie in 1939.

They had three children including a daughter, Christine.

Christine would be a maternal first cousin

and we believe would be one of the family members

entitled to a share of our deceased's estate.

It looked like all the team's hard work had paid off.

Bob had found his first potential heir

and he wasted no time in getting in touch.

When I opened the letter from Fraser and Fraser,

it was a complete shock. I was surprised.

I wondered, erm...

..secondly, if it was a bit of a scam,

but then the, sort of, optimist in you takes over

and you feel quite excited, thinking you might be inheriting.

Christine was Alexander's first cousin.

She didn't know Alexander very well,

but she thinks she may have met him once or twice as a child.

He was always a rather shadowy, reclusive figure

and I rather heard more about him

than actually had any contact with him.

Christine agreed to sign with the heir hunters

and the team then set about contacting the other cousins.

In total, we had 20 first cousins

who we believe would be entitled to a share of our deceased's estate.

We then began contacting those first cousins.

But just as they were about to sign up the last heir,

one of the cousins dropped a bombshell.

Alexander might have a closer relation

who the team had not discovered.

We were told the surprising news

that a maternal aunt was, in fact,

an illegitimate daughter of the mother of our deceased.

Coming up...

all the team's research so far is thrown into disarray

as it looks like Alexander may have had a sister after all.

If this information was correct, she would have a prior entitlement

to all the family members that we've just contacted.

Heir hunters work hard to solve thousands of cases a year,

ensuring millions of pounds are paid out to rightful heirs.

But not every case can be cracked.

The Treasury has a list of over 2,000 estates

that have baffled the heir hunters and remain unclaimed.

These estates stay on the list for up to 30 years

and each one could be worth anything from £5,000 to many millions.

Today we're focusing on three names from the list.

Are they relatives of yours?

Could you be in line for an unexpected windfall?

Daisy Violet Lily Rose May Poppy Fern Barnes

died in Fulham in London in March 2008.

Does this distinctive selection of floral names ring a bell with you?

Benhilda Tandi died in Lewisham in London in August 2008.

Benhilda is an unusual first name in the UK,

as is the surname Tandi, spelt with an I instead of a Y.

Do you remember Benhilda?

Can you help solve this case?

Dorothy Caroline Geddes

also died in London in December 1996,

but the vast majority of Geddes live in northern Scotland.

Were you a friend or neighbour of Dorothy's?

If no heirs of hers are found,

her money will go to the Government.

If the names Daisy Barnes,

Benhilda Tandi or Dorothy Geddes

mean anything to you or someone you know,

you could have a fortune coming your way.

Peter Birchwood from Celtic Research has been looking into the case

of Brian Yanchuk who died in Milton Keynes in 2004.

The team have established that Brian was unmarried

and had no children or siblings,

so they're now looking for aunts, uncles and cousins

who could be heirs to Brian's estate.

As Brian's father's side of the family

appear to have settled in Canada,

the team are concentrating their attention on the mother's side

whose surname is Smith.

We're looking for the birth of a Violet Smith,

who was 18 years old in 1941.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of people

with the surname Smith in Britain, but the marriage certificate

that Hector picked up from Wandsworth Register Office

provides two clues which will help them track down the right family.

We know that families

in the Battersea area

which is really

within three separate registration districts -

that's Battersea, Wandsworth and Lambeth.

So the team are able to narrow their search down to this area,

just south of the Thames in London.

The second clue is the name of Brian's maternal grandfather.

And we know from the marriage certificate that Violet's father

is Albert Smith

and he works on the railways.

We might well have several Violet Smiths,

but we can buy each certificate,

just to make sure that one of them

has got a father's name which is correct.

The team eventually manage to identify the correct birth

for Brian's mother - Violet Smith.

They can now go on to find her brothers and sisters.

We know what street they were living in

in the Battersea area,

so based on that street address,

we know that we can look in the registry office,

in Battersea Registry Office,

for any other Smith births

in that specific sub-district.

Now there are a lot of them,

but it's manageable.

The team's painstaking research pays off.

They discovered that Violet's parents - Albert and Nelly Smith -

had one son - Albert - and five daughters...

So a family of six,

all born within the same general area,

all born, really, within a couple of streets

of the original address.

So they stuck fairly close to home.

Peter quickly discovers that all of Violet's brothers and sisters

have passed away, but four of them have had children,

including Brian's aunt, Ivy.

She married a Cecil in 1935 in Battersea

and they had two children - a son and a daughter, Ann.

They are both potential heirs to Brian Yanchuk's £12,000 estate.

Peter needs to confirm that his research is correct

so he's arranged to go and visit Ann, who lives in Birmingham.

Mrs Anderson is a cousin of the deceased.

She's the oldest of the first cousins

by maybe five or six years

and we found her by

finding her mother's marriage...

..and from the mother's marriage, just who the children were.

Peter wants to meet Ann face-to-face

to go through the family tree with her.

-Hello.

-Hello.

This way he can be sure

he's identified all of the correct family members.

I've got the family tree here

and you might tell me if I've got anything wrong.

-Certainly I've got your grandad as Albert...

-Yes.

..marrying to Nelly Beatrice Lilian Potter.

Yes, that's right. It is Nelly,

yeah, it was Nelly Potter, yes.

Yes, and they married in 1908 in Wandsworth.

Wandsworth then covered Battersea.

-Yes.

-It was only a little bit later

that Battersea became its own registration district.

Ann is able to provide

some more information about the family's life in Battersea.

St Philip Street, Battersea.

Yes. Do you know that street?

Yes. That's where they all lived.

Ann's grandparents Albert and Nelly

moved to St Philip Street during the Second World War,

probably after their own house was bombed,

and when their children grew up and married,

many of them stayed in the same street.

At one point, they even shared the same house.

When we used to go down there,

I remember these old tenements, and they was three storeys high,

and there used to be families on every floor.

And in the first one I remember going to,

it was me grandma on the bottom, Auntie Beatrice in the middle,

and Violet Yanchuk on the top one with her husband and her child.

During the Second World War,

millions of British homes were destroyed or damaged by bombs.

This, coupled with a post-war baby boom in the 1940s,

led to an acute housing shortage.

As a result, people often had no choice but to share accommodation,

with several families living under the same roof.

In many cases, houses had no bathrooms

and no central heating or hot water.

In them days, they were poorer, really, and when they had chops,

they used to scrape the bone with a knife to get every little bit off.

And when they had butter, they shared it, they weighed it all out,

so everybody had their own bit of butter.

I know they used to all live on top of one another,

but they got on, they always seemed to get on all right.

Having been through the family tree with Ann,

Peter can now confirm that she is definitely an heir,

and that she shares her inheritance with six other heirs

on the maternal side.

I think that's about it.

-I'm confident that we've got all of the Smith family together.

-Yes.

I would hope within a fairly short time,

although I have to say it might be a year,

then you'll be receiving a little bit of good news,

but there you are.

-Thank you very much.

-Well, thank you for seeing me.

-Thank you.

For Ann, this has been a trip down memory lane.

After the Second World War, the Smith family began to lose touch

as Brian's parents and his Aunt Beatie moved out of London.

They moved them out to Milton Keynes

and that's how Vi and Beatie

became Milton Keynes,

because they moved a lot of Londoners out of the suburbs,

because it was a new town in them days, Milton Keynes was.

In 1946, the UK government passed the New Towns Act

to tackle the problem of congestion and poor quality housing

in the inner cities.

Areas of land were designated for the construction of these new towns,

with improved housing, schools,

healthcare facilities and shops.

The new towns were a world apart

from the dirty, smog-ridden streets of inner London.

People were enticed there with promises of low-rent council houses

with indoor bathrooms

and hot running water,

and access to extensive lakes, parkland and green areas.

Brian's parents and his aunt signed up for this new life

and appeared to have spent the rest of their days there.

The disadvantage was that they lost touch with their family.

Well, I suppose with my mother moving away

and Lilian moving away from home,

and the two sisters going to Milton Keynes,

it sort of all went mislaid,

we didn't see much of each other, really, after that.

But for Ann, becoming an heir

has allowed her to reconnect with her long-lost family.

I've got in contact with a cousin

that I hadn't seen since he was young

and I've even spoken to his son, which I didn't know existed.

It's nice to get in touch with people.

We've exchanged e-mail addresses

so we can keep in touch that way as well.

'It's been very good. I'm really overwhelmed with it, really.'

For Mike Smith, who originally contacted Peter

to say he thought he was related to a Brian Yanchuk,

the gamble has paid off. Peter has proved that like Ann,

he is an heir to Brian's estate on the maternal side of the family.

Mike's father Albert was a brother of Brian's mother Violet.

Albert had two children, Mike and one other.

They are Brian Yanchuk's first cousins.

Mike wasn't expecting to inherit any money.

I didn't think I would ever get anything. It was just, anything...

I mean, it's a bonus, really,

but I was more interested in the facts of what has happened, really,

than any inheritance.

But the experience has stirred up memories for Mike

of playing with Alexander back in St Philip Street in the 1950s.

When you was working class in them days,

you were happy with whatever you got.

There was no jealousy of somebody else

because everyone was pretty much in the same boat.

Peter has now signed up all the heirs to Brian Yanchuk's estate

on the maternal side of the family - seven in total,

and research on the paternal side is continuing in Canada

so for Peter, it's a satisfying end to a fascinating case.

We've got everything now that we need to put the claim in

and that claim is going to go in immediately

so I hope we'll have it accepted within a few days.

Then we can get the administration started, get the whole thing moving

and make sure that there's no delay

in recovering the assets for the family.

Bob Smith at heir-hunting firm Fraser and Fraser

was looking into the case of Alexander Gibson,

who died in Brighton in 2004.

Alexander had never married and had no children

and initially, he didn't appear to have any siblings,

so the team had been busy signing up cousins as heirs to his estate.

But one of these cousins then dropped a bombshell

when she told Bob she thought Alexander had a half-blood sister.

This revelation was obviously a bit of a shock.

It meant all the research we'd carried out up until now

had been a waste of time.

The family members that we contacted would no longer be entitled.

The half-sister in question was Ethel.

She was brought up as the daughter of John and Mary Ann Clift,

alongside her seven supposed brothers and sisters,

but it now appeared that she was not their daughter at all

but their granddaughter,

and her mother was actually Winifred,

who'd been passed off as her sister.

So it was back to the drawing board for Bob and the team,

who now had to find a birth certificate for Ethel

to prove she was the daughter of the deceased's mother Winifred.

When we originally tried to identify her birth,

we couldn't, because, of course,

we were using the surnames of both the grandparents.

With this new information, we began looking for a birth of Ethel Clift,

daughter of Winifred Clift,

between 1911 and Winifred's subsequent marriage in 1920.

This new search would make or break the case.

If the team could find the correct birth for Ethel, they'd be halfway

to finding the right heirs.

As hoped, their search turned up trumps.

There was an Ethel Clift born on 18th March 1917

and her birth certificate gave her mother as none other

than Winifred Daisy Clift.

This birth certificate proved that Winifred had had another child.

As there was no father shown on the birth certificate,

it suggested that Ethel was actually an illegitimate child of Winifred.

But there was something strange about this birth certificate.

On the birth certificate of Ethel,

Winifred's address was shown as in Chatham in Kent.

However, Ethel herself was born in Hanwell in London.

Why did Winifred go all the way to London to have her baby?

Why did she not have her in Chatham in Kent?

Pat Thane is a professor of history at King's College London.

She's carried out extensive research into unmarried mothers

and the attitudes they faced in early 20th-century Britain.

Winifred probably wasn't unusual in having her child away from home.

This seems to have been quite common.

Very often, it was because

they didn't want everyone to see them heavily pregnant

in their neighbourhood

because some people might be hostile or disapproving.

It was also sometimes hard

for women to get medical attention in their own neighbourhoods.

There were some midwives

who wouldn't deliver the children of unmarried mothers, for example,

and some places where there were fewer midwives and doctors

and it's possible that in the middle of the First World War,

when her child, when Winifred's child was born,

that many doctors and nurses would have been off at war.

What is certain is that once Winifred had had her child,

she came back to live with her parents.

And her daughter Ethel was brought up as her sister.

It was very hard for a woman to earn enough

to support herself and a child.

A lot of them seem to have gone back to live with their own parents

and the child might grow up thinking the grandmother was their mother.

In Ethel's case, this family secret

was passed down through the generations,

as Alexander's cousin Christine can confirm.

I knew Ethel as my Auntie Ethel,

my mother's elder sister by one year.

I only found out that Ethel wasn't my auntie,

when I was with my mother one day and my mother said to me,

"You know, Auntie Ethel isn't really my sister."

She was, in fact, Auntie Winnie's daughter.

To save the family name,

my mother's parents had brought Ethel up as their own child

and then, to make the story even more convincing,

they'd had my mother,

so that it would look more natural.

Now, the team knew that Alexander had a half-blood sister,

their next step was to see whether she was still alive.

We were able to confirm that Ethel had passed away,

in 1991 in Portsmouth,

but she had married and had two children.

We now had the task of trying to track those two children,

because they would be the entitled family members

from our deceased's estate.

The team were finally on the right track.

Alexander's half-sister Ethel

had married a Cyril in 1940 in Medway.

They had had two sons,

who would be Alexander's half-nephews

and his closest living relatives.

The team managed to find these two sons,

Andrew and David, living in Portsmouth

Finally, they had the right heirs.

For Andrew, who knew Alexander as Alec,

the news of his death came as a bit of a shock.

'My brother and I were both very sad that Alec had died.'

My mother died in 1988 and we lost touch with Alec,

because he, sort of, turned into a bit of a recluse,

so he became rather unsociable

and, sort of, didn't want any visitors,

so it sort of fizzled out after that.

Andrew's mother Ethel knew that Winifred was her real mother

and that Alexander was her brother.

That's at Alan's wedding.

But Andrew and his brother David grew up thinking

that their Uncle Alexander was their cousin.

And their grandmother Winifred was their aunt.

Well, we used to call Win "Aunt",

because I suppose they wanted to live the lie.

My brother often used to wonder

why his other aunties used to send him a shilling for his birthday

and Auntie Win used to send him a pound!

But Andrew does have some happy memories

of spending time with Alexander as a boy.

Me and my mother used to go to visit Alec on the train in Brighton,

in the late '70s and that was quite a pleasant memory for me,

because it was one of the first times I went anywhere

on a day trip, and then, a little bit later, in the early '80s,

I passed my driving test and we used to go in my car.

Andrew also reveals some fascinating information,

which deepened the mystery

of his mother Ethel's true parentage.

Well, our mother told us that Auntie Win,

who was really her mother,

had an affair with a Russian seaman during the First World War

and that led to my mother.

Who was this mysterious Russian sailor?

Was it a fly-by-night affair or something more serious?

Andrew believes his grandmother Winifred

may have paid tribute to her sailor, in her children's names

When Fraser & Fraser told me

that Alec was actually called Alexander,

perhaps this was taken from the Russian sailor's name,

because my mother's middle name is also Alex.

Andrew and his brother will now be the sole beneficiaries

of Alexander's £70,000 estate.

As nephews of Alexander's, they are of a closer bloodline

than cousins the heir hunters originally found.

For one of these cousins, Christine,

being told she was a beneficiary and then she wasn't,

was something of a disappointment.

Well, I wasn't surprised that I wouldn't be inheriting.

I was disappointed,

because everybody would like to inherit something.

But, of course, I realised that

David and Andrew were closer bloodline than I was.

But for Andrew and David,

any happiness they feel on becoming beneficiaries,

is tinged with sadness.

We would have liked to have gone to the funeral and so on.

So... we were very sad about that.

For heir hunter Bob Smith,

it's been a case of surprises, twists and turns.

We had no way of knowing that Winifred had had another child.

We would normally look for children from a marriage

and there was no previous marriage

and you wouldn't assume that someone would have had an illegitimate child.

Despite all the twists and turns and disappointments

to the family members that we'd originally found,

I'm very pleased that we have identified

the correct family members, who will share from our deceased's estate.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd