Evans/Dunalley St Heir Hunters

Welcome to Heir Hunters where we follow the search for living family

of people who've died without leaving a will,

hoping to unite them with a forgotten fortune.

Today the heir hunters are dealing with an estate which could be

worth an estimated £200,000.

They only need to go somewhere we don't know about and have a kid.

Somewhere out there are some long-lost relatives who have

no idea they're in line for a windfall.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up on today's programme -

a common family name proves a real headache for the heir hunters.

Evans in Wales is a worst-case scenario really.

A Victorian school produces a massive windfall

and an unusual challenge for the team.

Because quite a lot of the people concerned in these cases died in

the 19th century, a lot of the wills we have to look at are handwritten.

And I'll be delving further into the world of the written will,

both its history and its hilarity.

"I give and bequeath unto Francis Smith, my wife,

"the sum of one shilling of lawful money of Great Britain."

SHE GASPS

Wow.

He left it all to his mistress.

Plus how you could be entitled to unclaimed estates where

beneficiaries still need to be found.

Could you be in line for an unexpected windfall?

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 goes to the Government.

Last year they kept £14 million from unclaimed estates.

That's where the heir hunters come in.

They make it their business to track down missing relatives

and help them claim their rightful inheritance.

I do it because I enjoy meeting the heirs.

In our first case today, the heir hunters face a tough challenge,

identifying even the right family.

It's an unusually quiet morning at heir hunting company

Fraser & Fraser.

There are no cases on the weekly Treasury list worth pursuing today

so they are looking into one from a different source

and it's a bit of a challenge.

We're doing research under the surname of Evans,

so, a particularly hard name to research

and an even harder name in Wales so it's going to be a long day

I think, for people working on that case.

How are you feeling, old boyo?

Good.

You'll be used to a Welsh accent to go to do Evans in North Wales.

Victor Evans was 88

when he died in Bedford on 28th July 2010, without a will.

He spent the last 11 years of his life in this care home where

former manager Guy Tremonto remembers him fondly.

He was such a pleasant man. He was very caring.

He would always thank you for whatever you did for him.

Victor enjoyed following his daily routine.

After his breakfast he would read all the newspapers.

He would have some financial papers and also the daily newspapers.

He would take a whole day reading them.

He was very astute in his finances.

In fact, he made a lot of money out of the stocks and shares.

Victor's other love was cats and when he moved into the care home

he brought his cat William to live with him.

Sometimes he couldn't...

He wanted to stay in his room and he couldn't

really move out of the room because he was quite poorly.

He would shout from the bedroom, "William, William."

He would shout and shout.

But we could hear him so we used to get the cat and take it

to his bedroom and when he used to see the cat he just used to laugh.

"Oh, William, oh, William, come here, come here."

When he saw the cat he was another person really.

Before he moved into the care home, Victor lived in this house.

Heir hunters earn their money by charging

a percentage of the estate for their services.

And they confirm that he owned the property so they know it has value.

The property which Victor owns as a house in Bedford.

It's perfect commuterville to get into London which helps to increase

some of the prices but we're looking at a value of that of

about 180 to £200,000 if it's in reasonable condition.

But what worries the team is that Victor spent 11 years in a care home.

And he might have left bills that need paying.

It's a possibility that the property is going to be sucked up

and be used to pay for those care home fees but we know he's

been in a care home for quite a while and he still

owns his property, so he could have had a large amount of savings.

He could have sold a business or something like that.

So, we are going to work it. We are going to work it quite hard.

The team need to try and identify Victor's immediate family

as quickly as possible.

So that they can start to search for heirs.

They discover that Victor, a bachelor all his life,

was an only child and did not have children.

To trace any beneficiaries, the researchers need to go

further up the family tree.

They discover that Victor's father was Thomas Haworth Evans

and his mother was Gwendoline Eads.

Looking into the mother's family,

we've been able to tie this all up.

Tie it up because the mother's an only child.

She doesn't have any brothers and sisters,

therefore, we don't have any uncles and aunts.

We don't have any cousins descending from them

so from our point of view, this side of the family's dead.

But there's brilliant news on his father's side.

It looks like Victor has loads of potential heirs.

We've got a huge amount of research to conduct.

The researchers get to work looking for Victor's

paternal aunts and uncles.

But with a common name like Evans, it's hard to know where to start.

Evans in Wales is a worst-case scenario really.

Census-wise we're looking at ten uncles and aunts of the deceased.

So that's ten stems of evidence that we've got to work which is,

it's going to be very tricky.

And we, we've got some really quite common names as well.

William, Robert, Susan.

They're going to be very, very difficult to work.

I'm trying to find Abraham Evans who'll be the uncle of the deceased.

I'm just looking at one of the uncles of the deceased,

George James Evans.

-I don't think the Sheffield ones are right.

-No.

With a name like Evans, you can never be sure of anything.

It's such a very, very common name.

The only Robert Evans

is that one in 1916, which would be before the marriage.

Do you see my problem?

Evans is such a problematic surname we're going to need certificates on

this but we're trying to get as much up to date as we can without them.

The team will need help from on the road investigator, Paul Matthews.

While most of the research is done in the office, it's his job to

get certificates, find the heirs and sign them up before the competition.

It's a good name in Wales, Evans, so we could be in for a long day.

Case manager David Milchard, known as Grimble, has sent Paul to

Chester Register Office which covers part of the North Wales district.

I just want to get someone in the registry to get hold of some

certificates because we...

It's such a common name, it's all guesswork at the moment.

We're all running down little avenues but whether or not they are

right or not we won't know until we get the certs.

I wouldn't want to put any money on anything I've got at the moment.

Paul's arrived at the Register Office

and he checks in with Grimble.

There you go.

I'm at the Register Office but I don't know what I'm going to get.

I haven't got a clue.

We want certs to prove whether we're going down the right line or not.

That's all we need to concentrate on at the moment.

OK, just tell us what you want. I'll try and sort it out later. Yeah.

But as the whole team work flat out

looking for heirs, they get the worst possible news.

None of that... none of that tree is correct.

And that's what Dominic's doing.

The birth certificate ordered earlier for Victor's father,

Thomas Haworth Evans has come in and it's a bombshell.

The census we worked was of a Thomas H Evans

born at the right time, the right area.

Unfortunately, the parents of the Thomas H Evans they were

researching were William and Mary but the birth certificate of

Victor's father, Thomas, shows his parents were William and Sarah.

It now appears that they were two Thomas H Evans

born in the same area at the same time.

One is Thomas Haworth, the other one is probably

Thomas Henry or something like that,

but the census we were looking at was the wrong Thomas.

So the ten aunts and uncles they've been chasing are a dead end.

-So you've got the wrong family but birth and parents are right?

-Mm-hm.

-Have you got...

-No I haven't got anything, just getting to do the tree, haven't got any information.

It's 10:45 and Grimble calls Paul in Chester to tell him the bad news.

You what?

That's all no good then, no?

Basically all the work for the last few hours has been in vain

because obviously we've got the wrong family which is quite

easy to do when you've got a nightmare name.

So now the office have got to revisit it and start backtracking

and obviously find the right parents of the deceased.

So back to the drawing board, I'm afraid.

Coming up - they've lost loads of potential heirs.

Now it's back to square one.

We did a lot of work on the wrong family.

Let's hope we can do something with the right family.

Will Victor's real father finally lead them to his living relatives?

Heir hunters solve thousands of cases a year

and 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 unsolved.

"Bona Vacantia" is the Latin term for ownerless property.

There's two main types,

there's the property of now dissolved companies, and the estates

of those who die without a valid will, or entitled kin.

This is money which could have your name on it.

Money raised through Bona Vacantia

ultimately goes to the General Exchequer,

to benefit the country as a whole,

but it's important to remember the Crown doesn't want

to grab all estates it possibly can.

It's keen for kin to be found and for people to make wills.

That's the way to stop property becoming Bona Vacantia, make a will.

So could you be in line for a windfall worth hundreds,

thousands or even millions of pounds?

The estates stay on the list for up to 30 years

and today we're focusing on three names.

Are they relatives of yours?

Edward Stephen Connolley died in Leicester in 2002.

Although the surname Connolley is fairly common,

this spelling is very unusual.

Does it ring a bell for you?

Could you be related to Edward?

Leonard Smurthwaite died in Percy Main, Tyne and Wear, in March 2005.

The highest concentration of Smurthwaites

is in the North East of England.

If no relatives are found, Leonard's money will go to the Government.

Do you remember him? Can you help solve this case?

James Leask died in Westcliff on Sea in November 2000.

The Scottish name, Leask, is linked to the Orkney and Shetland Isles.

Do you share the surname Leask? Could James be a relative of yours?

The estates on the list could be worth a few hundred pounds

or many millions.

Only successful heirs will be told.

We never release details of the estate

or anything about the deceased

until a claim has been admitted,

and we will only then release it to

the person whose claim we have admitted.

If you think you might be entitled to an estate

and want to put in a claim,

the onus is on you to prove your family connection with the deceased.

We need to have a simple family tree showing how

they think they're related to the deceased person.

Then we can have a look at it,

make sure we're talking about the same family,

before we go off and ask them to supply various certificates

of birth, death and marriage, to actually substantiate the claim.

So do you recognise any of today's names? Here they are again.

If any of the names today are relatives of yours,

then you could have a fortune coming your way.

Our next case today is a complicated investigation for the team,

as their search for heirs spans over 150 years.

Occasionally, heir hunters stumble across a job

that is a little out of the ordinary.

The case of John Crewe wasn't about savings or property

but land donated in the 1850s to build a school, Dunalley Street.

It was spotted by the team

and brought to the attention of partner, Charles.

We first became aware that beneficiaries needed to be traced

regarding the Dunalley Street School,

following a notice that was published in The Times in April 2002.

The advert appealed to the heirs of Victorian businessman,

John Crewe, to come forward and claim what was rightfully theirs.

Born in London almost 200 years ago,

John Crewe became a successful retailer in Cheltenham.

From the 1840s he ran a chain of grocery shops and bakeries.

Having done very well for himself he decided to give something back.

In 1858, he donated some land to a charity

so they could build a school for the poor.

In the mid-1800s, there was a great Victorian philanthropic era,

where the Victorians realised that they needed to educate the masses

and that education couldn't be reserved just for the elite.

And so as a result of that, they introduced

the School Sites Act 1841 which allowed people

to give land away for the creation of schools, or school houses.

The school, named after its address, Dunalley Street,

was opened in 1859 by the British and Foreign Schools Society.

One of over 100 across England, it was the brainchild of Quaker,

Joseph Lancaster, and took a radical new approach to teaching the poor.

Lancaster had to develop a system that was cheap.

He would like the education to be free

but they generally had to pay a master's salary.

But you couldn't afford any assistant masters.

So Lancaster's system was to introduce boys called monitors.

He would select the best, the abler, or slightly older boys,

who he would teach, and those monitors would then teach

groups of eight, nine or ten other boys.

It was like this school in Hertfordshire,

that's been preserved as a museum.

Over 200 children at Dunalley Street School were taught in one big hall.

And costs had to be kept to a minimum.

Paper was expensive. Ink was expensive.

Lancaster had to find ways of doing education cheaply.

He designed a sand desk.

It's a tray of sand, in which beginners can

practise their letters, rub it out, and practise again.

They moved on to slate. Slate, again, is very reusable.

It lasts for a long time. You can write on it and rub it out.

It's simple economy. Very low-cost school room equipment.

There would be no books either. Books were very expensive.

The solution, by Joseph Lancaster,

was to print one set of lesson sheets.

They would be hanging on the wall.

When a monitor took his group of scholars to learn,

he would take them to the wall,

take down from the wall a lesson sheet, and teach them from it.

He would then hang it back up and they would then return

to their seats to practise what they had learned.

Despite their financial constraints,

the schools proved both popular and successful.

At the time there was a need for education.

Businesses, commerces,

factories were springing up after the industrial revolution.

They needed children, they needed adults,

who could read and write and count things,

and the Lancasterian monitorial system fitted the bill perfectly,

educating large numbers of children fairly quickly.

Dunalley Street remained as a working school until January 1999.

The following year the land was sold

to a property developer for £126,000,

and the building was turned into flats.

That's when it became a case for the heir hunters.

One of the provisions of the 1841 Act

was that if the school should close,

then the land would go back to the original person who gave it away.

The people now entitled to those proceeds

are John Crewe's beneficiaries.

In a normal heir hunt, there is no will,

so the closest living family inherit the estate.

But this case would be based on wills

dating back to Victorian times.

Case manager, Simons Grosvenor, got to work.

The donor, John Crewe, died in 1872.

So the first step was to get a copy of his will

and see who he left the residue of his estate to.

In this case, most of the people concerned were quite well-to-do

and, therefore, they left wills and it was just

a process of following who they left their estates to,

particularly true where the people who benefit

were not members of the family.

Because quite a lot of the people concerned in these cases

died in the 19th century,

a lot of the wills we have to look at are hand-written,

which can make deciphering them quite complicated.

In his will, John Crewe left everything to his wife, Jane Turner.

On her death, he stated that his children should inherit

his money, and it should go to their children when they died.

John Crewe had six children, of whom five left descendants

and, therefore, it was quite likely we were looking at a large

family of potential beneficiaries.

One of John Crewe's daughters was Grace.

She was just 37 when she died.

Her inheritance went to her six children,

including her only daughter, Ada Grace.

Normally, daughters would miss out on an inheritance, because it

would be the sons, and generally the eldest son, who would inherit land.

Because John Crewe left the residue of his estate in a will to

the children of all his children,

that meant that daughters could inherit instead of sons.

And in this instance, therefore,

Ada Grace was entitled to a share of the fund.

Simon discovered that, like her grandfather,

Ada Grace was also keen to help those less fortunate than herself.

In 1914, when the First World War broke out,

she was a Red Cross volunteer,

and was elected as commandant of one of their hospitals,

Leckhampton Court.

The duties of the commandant would have been many and varied.

They would have covered everything from the most menial activity

to such things as interviewing patients on arrival,

appointing staff,

concern with hygiene, and ensuring that discipline was observed,

consistent with keeping a happy ship.

Ada Grace's job carried enormous responsibility.

To have been selected for the post of commandant

of this establishment,

she must have had considerable organisational skills.

I imagine a sort of Mrs Fix It.

As wounded soldiers began arriving from the front, the volunteers had

to cope with injuries and conditions they had never seen before.

The injuries and complaints presented to the staff will have been

mostly quite novel, beyond their previous experience.

Such things as gas gangrene, trench foot, gas poisoning,

malaria that had been brought back from the Far East,

and in the latter days of the war

influenza was beginning to present itself.

A total of 1,700 patients passed through Leckhampton Court.

And they are incredibly successful,

in that there were no deaths as the result of wounds.

The success of the hospital did not go unnoticed

and Ada Grace was awarded an MBE for her work.

When the hospital closed at the end of the war,

she wrote about her experiences.

A souvenir booklet was produced in 1919

and Ada Grace writes a lovely foreword to it.

"We are all proud of our soldier boys, of their tenacity,

"courage, and cheerfulness.

"And I believe there is just as much honour due to our girls.

"I can say with grateful pride that I have never seen a black look,

"never heard a grumble, at any order given.

"We've done our best not only for the patients but also for each other.

"The result has been a very happy hospital.

"Personally, I am more than proud to be commandant of such

"a splendid detachment of willing and capable workers.

"And I trust that the future holds much happiness for everyone

"who has worked so untiringly, and with such generous spirit

"to make Leckhampton Court Hospital a happy memory."

It's an unusual case

and I want to understand how schools like Dunalley Street came about.

So I've come to meet historian Alex Windscheffel, who can tell me

more about the laws the Victorians created so the rich could give

away their land for schools, and also, what motivated them to do so.

Why was the School Sites Act created in 1841?

The School Sites Act is an act of Parliament which tries to

create a legal framework to permit local landowners,

local benefactors, local groups of citizens,

to donate areas of land for the purpose of building schools,

usually with the explicit concern of education for the poor of the parish.

The School Sites Act, or, to give it its full name,

An Act To Afford Further Facilities

For The Conveyance And Endowment Of Sites For Schools,

allowed wealthy benefactors to

give away up to one acre of land to charities to use for schools.

The Act applied to England, Scotland, and Wales.

Why were wealthy people of the time keen to contribute to

the School Sites Act?

There's two reasons.

Firstly, often because they are wanting to give something back

to their local community.

At the start of Victoria's reign there's no such thing

as a national system of education.

Where education was provided, it tended to be for the very rich

or occasionally, for the very poor.

It also fits into the desire to give a religious and moral education

especially to the children of the poor at a time when Britain was

experiencing rapid industrialisation, urbanisation,

has a growing child population and there are moral concerns

and political concerns about the state of the nation.

-Did charity as a concept grow at that time?

-Very much so.

The Victorian age is the great age of philanthropy,

the flowering of charity if you like.

What other forms did this take?

You also get institutions such as Barnardo's providing for orphans,

in particular, trying to provide a better life

as well as a form of moral instruction

for these children, removing them from the streets.

A lot of Victorian charities also directed towards widows,

people whose circumstances have caused their poverty

rather than being in poverty because of their own actions.

And a lot of Victorian charities also directed towards, for instance,

fallen women, so it's a way of trying to address moral concerns

within the country.

So what brought about the end of the School Sites Act?

The School Site Act largely becomes redundant

because in 1870, the great reforming Liberal government of the time

introduces the 1870 Education Act

and this means responsibility has now passed to the local state.

Schools are now funded out of the rates

and there's no longer the need for this patchwork voluntary initiative.

By the 1870s, the modern education system as we know it was born.

The School Sites Act may have become irrelevant thanks to this

later piece of legislation but its legacy lives on.

A legacy that is proving tricky for the heir hunters.

Coming up - having traced the family tree through three generations,

Simon was finding the case a challenge.

There's quite a lot of legal jargon that we have to make sure

we've got correct so that we know we've got the right people.

Would he manage to find any of John Crewe's living heirs

to claim the £126,000 that is rightfully theirs?

Here are some more unsolved cases where heirs still need to be found.

The Government list of over 2,000 unclaimed estates is money

that is owed to members of the public.

My division isn't allowed to make a profit, we don't make commission,

we don't get huge bonuses for passing lots of money to the Treasury.

In fact, the Treasury's more interested in "Are we finding more kin?" Which we are

and, "Are we good value for taxpayers' money?" Which we are.

The Government wants this money to go to its rightful owners

so let's try and solve some of these cases.

Do these names mean anything to you? Are they relatives of yours?

Ernest David Weiss died in Paddington, London, way back in 1975.

The Weiss name is of German ancestry and actually means "white".

Is there an Ernest Weiss on your family tree?

Could you be related to him?

Next, James Bernard Lanigan. James died in January 2007 in East London.

Lanigan is a very well known Irish surname.

Was James a relative of yours?

Could you be an heir entitled to a share of his unclaimed estate?

Or finally, did you know Herbert Richardson?

He died in November 2005.

The list records his last address as Northwick Park Hospital

but we've conducted some more research.

I've got Herbert's death certificate here.

It contains more information about him.

It says that he lived in Wembley.

Was Herbert a neighbour of yours?

Did he ever talk to you about any family?

The death certificate also reveals Herbert's date of birth.

It says he was born on 24th May 1918.

Was there a Herbert in your family with that date of birth?

If you think you are related to any of the names today,

you could be entitled to their estate.

If people want further information about Bona Vacantia and what we do,

the first port of call would be our website which has information

about who's an entitled relative, how to put in a claim,

how we deal with estates, and things like that.

A reminder of those names again.

Ernest Weiss, James Lanigan and Herbert Richardson.

If any of the names today are relatives of yours

then you could have a fortune coming your way.

The heir hunters are investigating the case of Victor Evans.

Can the team overcome their earlier setbacks and find living relatives?

In the office, they've been working hard on Victor's case.

He died in Bedford in 2010 without leaving a will.

Researching an Evans from Wales was never going to be easy.

With a name like Evans, you can never be sure of anything,

it's such a very common name.

The team quickly discovered there were no living heirs

from Victor's mother's family.

Then, having found a huge number of possible heirs through his father Thomas Evans,

his birth certificate revealed the bombshell that

they weren't relatives at all.

'We had the wrong family altogether.'

So we'd done a lot of work, all to no avail really.

So it's back to the drawing board as far as the father's side

of the family's concerned.

Now the team are pinning their hopes on finding the correct Evans family.

They have a lot of work to do.

Former care home manager Guy Tremonto remembers Victor as a bright man.

He passed an entrance exam to Bedford Modern School which is

a very good school in Bedford.

He left at 16 or 17 and passed seven O-levels

and he'd always mention that.

Victor was an accounts clerk by profession,

a skill that was to prove useful in the Second World War.

He was sent to Sierra Leone in Africa...

..and then, I think he was transferred to Egypt as well.

He was a messenger boy and he fought under Montgomery,

and he said that he actually gave Montgomery a letter

of how the war front was going on in North Africa.

The heir hunters may have a battle on their hands finding his heirs

but Victor had his fair share of drama in his life.

We know that Victor Evans arrived in the Middle East sometime in 1942

and that's at about the time that General Montgomery takes over

the British force out there, which is called the Eighth Army.

Field Marshal Montgomery is better known to the world as "Monty,"

and he was Britain's premier general, really, in the Second World War.

Victor worked in Monty's tactical headquarters behind the front line.

We know that he was some sort of messenger or clerk

and this is the days before e-mail,

where you physically had to take a piece of paper from one room to another.

I think Victor had the luxury of probably having

a bigger understanding of what was happening in the war,

where they were, how much closer they were to beating

and defeating the Germans,

and for someone with an educated background, as he clearly had,

I think that's quite satisfying.

It's rewarding to know what your part is in a war and whether it's making

a difference and I think Victor would have been hugely aware

of the contribution he was making,

perhaps more so than a soldier at the front.

His face clearly fitted and he was clearly very good at his job.

Montgomery had no time for fools

which meant that none of his staff officers would have either.

Anyone saying or doing the wrong thing, getting their paperwork

in a mess, being rude, even smoking or drinking - because Montgomery

didn't like that - would have been out of the headquarters very quickly.

The three caravans that Montgomery took on his campaigns have been

preserved at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.

These are the very vehicles that he would have been working around

each and every day.

In one of them, Montgomery himself slept.

In another, is his map room and in the third is his office.

One can picture Victor bringing messages to the field marshal

in his office and watching a stream of important visitors

come to see Field Marshal Montgomery while the campaign is under progress.

These include Winston Churchill and even more famously,

King George VI.

So, Victor's life in the Second World War is actually gilded in a way

that not many soldiers experienced.

Victor's wartime experience was a positive one

and back on the hunt for his heirs, things are looking up too.

The team have discovered that his father Thomas had a sister -

Victor's aunt, Annie.

She married Pryce Morris in 1916

in the West Derby district of Liverpool.

If they had children, they would be Victor's cousins

and beneficiaries to his estate.

If they were no longer alive,

their children would be next in line to inherit.

Now we've got the correct census,

we've found the deceased father on the 1891, the 1901

and the 1911 census

and throughout that period, he's only with one sibling

who is Annie Billington Evans

and that looks to be his only sister.

This is a much smaller family than the ten aunts and uncles

they believed there were before.

It's good news but there's a catch.

You've got nine possible children,

none of which we know are the right ones or the wrong ones

so we're working them all speculatively

and hopefully, we'll get through to someone

and they can tell us whether they are the right family or the wrong family.

As the hunters now move to Liverpool, Grimble contacts Paul.

How would you like Liverpool on a cold, wet day?

Ah, Paul.

Hello. Who's that?

'It's Grimble.'

I know, go on!

Can you sort of turn your car and go towards Liverpool?

Okie.

We're now going on the correct line.

It looks like there was an aunt of the deceased

who married in Liverpool.

She died around 1972 and it looks as though she had children

but it's moved over to Liverpool

so I thought if we get you heading that way...

OK, speak to you soon. Cheers. Bye.

If the team can confirm that they have the right family members,

Paul can make contact with them and hopefully, sign them up.

I'm working a son of Annie. I don't know if he's definitely a son.

We've gone through all the births after the marriage of Annie in West Derby and everyone's working one.

After the disappointment of losing their first set of heirs by chasing

the wrong family, the team have come up with phone numbers for numerous

possible relatives but contacting them is proving frustrating.

Can you believe, all those numbers

and I can't get through to anyone?

We've got, what...

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

nine potential children of the aunt of the deceased.

Now, they could all be part of the family

but it means Mum was having the last child quite late in life or

only a few of them might be right and the others may be part of another family.

It would just be nice for one of them to answer the phone.

With no joy on the phone,

the only way to prove who's who is with birth certificates.

It's over to Paul on the road.

'How are you doing?'

I'm just arriving in Liverpool.

'Oh, right.

-'Can you head to the registry to begin with?'

-Yes.

'I've got half a dozen addresses and nobody's answering the phone.

'So nobody can confirm whether we're on the right track or not.

'They said they can do it in a couple of hours.

'So when you get there, give us another call and I'll tell you what we want.'

Whereas I was hoping to go knocking on somebody's door,

I've got to go to the registry office now, get some certificates

which will prove that we've got the right family.

So, a little bit frustrating

but nothing new there, is there, with this type of work?

Finally, Grimble gets through to one of Victor's possible heirs.

Hello, there. I'm sorry to trouble you. My name's David Milchard of Fraser & Fraser in London.

We're desperately trying to trace a family by the name of Morris

in connection with an estate that my company's dealing with.

Unfortunately, the name Morris is quite common,

particularly up in the North Wales area.

I'm not sure if I have the right family or not

but we were, in fact, trying to trace the children of a gentleman

called Pryce Morris and his wife Ann Billington Evans.

Does that ring a bell with you and your family at all?

Finding Aunt Annie's possible children from their list

of nine names is a process of elimination.

It certainly looks as though...

That's definitely not part of our family because

your mum would of had to have been the daughter of a Pryce Morris

and an Annie Evans

so I think we're getting mixed up with the other marriage there.

Anyway, thank you very much. I'm really grateful to you.

One down, eight to go.

PHONE BEEPS

Hi, Dave, it's 12:25, I'm parked up near the registry office,

just waiting for an update from you.

So give us a call when you've finished talking on the phone, please.

She's recognised some of the names of the children

born from the marriage that we're looking at,

so that would indicate about half the births that we've got.

We've got nine kids and five of them are obviously not connected to our family.

Still no actual heirs yet. Grimble works his way down the list.

It really looks as though your husband's part of the family isn't correct.

But you've helped us a lot and we've ruled out a lot of information,

otherwise we'd be going completely down the wrong path.

It's not looking good.

After finding numbers for the aunt's nine possible children,

the heir hunters have one last possible hope.

We've got one guy called Eric Morris that nobody that I spoke to recognises,

so if we've ruled out the family we've spoken to as not being ours,

and they don't recognise Eric then Eric is a good chance

of being perhaps the only child of the aunt of the deceased.

Now, he died in 1997 but he is survived by a daughter.

She could be the only heir to Victor's estimated £200,000 estate

and the frustrating thing is, she isn't answering the phone.

Hello, Paul?

Any joy?

We've got a possible address but she ain't answering the phone yet.

OK, tell us what you want while I'm in a position to write it down.

The first thing I want you to do is to check

the birth of an Eric Lynn Morris...

Yes.

..who was born on the 12th October 1916 in West Derby.

If I'm to be correct...

he's got to be the son of Pryce Morris...

Yeah.

..and Annie Billington Evans.

OK.

Before we go knocking on the daughter's door,

while you're there, best check his birth, make sure it is right.

After a false start,

this entire case now hangs on what Paul can find out.

He's going to check the birth of Eric

and then we're going to check, if possible,

all the other eight births that we looked at,

just to make sure that none of them are also in our family.

So...

we should know in a little while.

Can he prove that Victor has a last remaining heir?

Hello, Dave. Paul.

Er, all those Morris births are all wrong.

It's a disaster for the team.

After an exhausting day,

having chased up countless potential heirs, they've ended up with none.

Aunt Annie had no children,

so when Victor died, his family tree died with him.

It's finished off a huge disappointment.

A lot of man-hours and we've ended up proving that it's a dead case.

As no heirs were found in this case,

the true value of Victor's estate will never be known.

This is a case that is going to go back to the Government now.

And just not a dickey bird for us.

Still to come -

the intriguing story of a Victorian school that was put up for sale.

But, as we know,

things are never straightforward in the world of probate research.

Unusually for an heir hunt, the heirs to Dunalley Street

inherit through a series of wills written by each generation,

rather than through blood ties.

'So how did wills come about? And how did they change over time?

'I'm meeting genealogist Paul Blake,

'who's going to take me through their history

'and show me some interesting examples of wills.'

When did wills become established in England?

Well, in England, what we traditionally think of as being a will,

probably not till the 12th and 13th century.

But there was, before that, really quite a long tradition

of people making their wishes known, probably in front of witnesses

and those wishes being put into action.

But, on the whole, it wasn't until the late Norman period, the Middle Ages,

that you actually start getting this tradition of making a formal will.

It was during the Middle Ages that the Church actively prompted

and even stipulated that people left a written will.

This wasn't a completely selfless act for the good of the common man.

There was an expectation by the Church

that you would leave a tenth of your estate to them.

Of course, if you died without leaving a will,

that wouldn't happen.

So no wonder they were keen!

But the Church's powers went to last for ever in the world of probate.

So what was the 1857 Act and what impact did that have on wills?

It was a major change.

I mean, before 1858, which was when the Act actually came into force,

everything to do with probate, everything to do with death,

to some extent, was handled by the Church.

So if you had a will,

then your executors would have had to take that will to the church courts

and they would then have processed the will,

made sure that the bequests in it

were doled out to whoever was actually mentioned.

And it was a very complicated process.

By the time you get to the 19th century,

Government's been getting a bit fed up with the Church having so much power

and therefore it brings in this law, the Probate Act in 1857,

to change everything to do with probate

from being a Church jurisdiction to being a civil jurisdiction.

So those 300 courts, probate courts, are abolished

and you simply have the one single principle probate registry,

which is based in London,

and a number of district registries around the country.

So the whole process is simplified.

So what interesting examples of wills

have you brought along for us to look at today?

Well, we've got a couple here. Let's see here.

The first one is Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's will.

Yeah, the handwriting's not that easy, is it?

But probably the best-known will in the English language.

He's got within it probably one of the best-known phrases in any will.

"I leave to my wife my second-best bed."

-Which sounds an enormous slight on his wife, doesn't it?

-Yeah!

But I think the truth of it is really that this was her own bed,

it was the bed which they used.

Because the best bed, like the best crockery and all that,

is only brought out on special occasions

when important visitors come or the in-laws come or whatever it might be.

-So he's left his wife her bed.

-He's left his wife her bed, yes.

She's not mentioned very much in the will,

which again people often think is because they weren't getting on terribly well.

But she's mentioned enough so she will inherit what is necessary.

What else have we got? We've got another will, a little bit later.

And this is the will of Isaac Merritt Singer.

Now, Singer was a man who formed the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

Right. Yeah.

He didn't actually invent the sewing machine,

but he improved it beyond anything that had been seen before.

And he was a man who, shall we say, um...

I'll say "roamed."

He...married twice.

He had a marriage at the beginning of his career

and at the end of his career.

But he also probably had a bigamous marriage.

And he certainly had two other liaisons.

All of which gave him children.

-Right.

-22 children in all.

-22?!

-22 children.

Only about half of them from marriages.

But he mentions all 22 children in there.

And his wives and it's fairly unusual, I think,

that someone who had illegitimate children

is actually so open about it and actually gives so much information.

They got £10,000 each and I think, at the end of the day,

he left something in the region of about a quarter of a million pounds,

which for the time was an enormous amount of money.

The last one is just an extract from a will.

This is the will of somebody called Charles Smith.

He is nobody well-known, but I'll read out what it actually says.

"Item - I give, devise and bequeath unto my respectful friend,

"Elizabeth Morgan, all my household furniture,

"ready cash and all other my estate and effects for her own sole use.

"Item, I give and bequeath unto Francis Smith, my wife,

"the sum of one shilling, of lawful money of Great Britain."

Ha!

-Wow!

-He left it all to his mistress, yes. Well, his best friend.

-His best friend.

-His best friend. Absolutely.

It is interesting, entertaining.

But there's a reason for it.

He HAD to mention his wife.

He HAD to leave her something.

You often get the phrase, "Cut off with a sixpence,"

or, "Cut off with a shilling," and the reason is because now...

..Mrs Smith can't turn around and actually contest the will.

Because she is mentioned, she has been given something

and therefore she has no case for any argument.

That's why you do often get people mentioned as being given very, very little.

It's just so they can't turn around and say, "Oh, they forgot me."

-Wow.

-And then contest the well.

So, there we are, three examples of the sorts of things you can find.

Wills can give fascinating insight into the lives of both

the famous and the ordinary people of our history.

They're also invaluable to the heir hunters,

as the information contained in them

can provide vital clues about a specific family and its dynamics.

Just remember to do yours.

A series of wills are being used in the hunt

for beneficiaries to an estate in Cheltenham.

Can the team find people entitled to inherit?

In 2002, the Heir Hunters were looking into the case

of 19th-century entrepreneur John Crewe.

In 1858, he had donated his land to a charity

to build a pioneering school for the poor - Dunalley Street.

In 2000, the trustees sold the land

to a firm of property developers for £126,000.

But, by law, when the land is no longer used for a school,

the original owner, or his descendants, must be reimbursed.

Case manager Simon's challenge was to find John's living beneficiaries.

Through their wills, he had traced one stem of the family tree,

from John Crewe to his daughter, Grace,

and to her daughter, Ada Grace Ward.

He found that when she died in 1951,

she left everything to her only child, Kenneth.

We identified a death for Kenneth Ward in 1964, in Cheltenham.

And, in his will, he left his estate to his wife, Patricia.

Patricia, when she died,

left a portion of her estate to her daughter, Angela.

Angela was the great, great-granddaughter of John Crewe,

and his first heir.

But, following a major car crash 17 years earlier,

Angela had been left paralysed with severe head injuries.

When Simon contacted her, she asked her husband, Brian,

to act on her behalf.

Her condition was very difficult.

Er...

She had a full vocabulary and could understand everything,

but had no idea of figures at all.

Couldn't count and couldn't read.

When we took the phone call,

Angela thought that someone was having a joke

and didn't believe that there was even a firm called Fraser & Fraser.

But, on looking at some paperwork, we realised it was quite serious.

Angela knew very little about her family background.

It was, um...quite an old family, in relation to herself.

Her father was quite old when he married

and her mother didn't say anything at all

about that side of the family.

So, again, we were completely surprised to hear anything.

Angela signed an agreement as heir to John Crewe's estate.

But, sadly, she passed away soon afterwards.

As beneficiaries in her will, Angela's son and her husband, Brian,

have inherited her share.

He's keen to learn all he can about her Victorian ancestor

and the land he donated for the Dunalley Street School.

I didn't know anything of John Crewe,

except that his name has been mentioned as a distant ancestor...

of my late wife.

Having spoken, in years gone by, to various very elderly people,

some of which had been ex-employees of the family's,

they had hinted that the land that John Crewe had donated for the building of the school

had possibly been used as market gardens.

Brian is meeting Cheltenham historian Dr Anthea Jones at a market garden.

This is what John Crewe's land may have looked like

before he gave it away.

The land that John Crewe donated had been used, at some time,

for some commercial growing.

Yes, I think that's quite likely.

Nobody seems to be exactly sure as to how large the growing area was

or what he was doing with it.

Well, I think the early maps of Cheltenham will show you that...

that area was completely fields and open until 1806,

when there was an Enclosure Act.

And, after that, it began to be developed

but the point about enclosure is that various people who had rights

in the field were given small plots of land.

All they could really do with that land was either develop it

for building, which gradually did happen in that area, as we know,

or they could use it as a market garden.

By the age of 45,

John Crewe had made enough money to give his land away to charity.

And Brian's keen to find out more about his business.

When John Crewe came to Cheltenham,

the population was something like 30,000.

It had grown enormously in the early 19th century -

from 3,000 at the beginning of the century,

it actually zoomed to 30,000 by 1841.

So there were new houses, there were more people coming in.

There was a good opportunity for him to open a shop.

He started off in Winchcomb Street as a grocer and tea dealer.

And that was quite common, for grocers to be tea dealers as well.

And then, gradually, he becomes a baker and grocer.

-He diversified into being a baker as well?

-It seems so, yes

because he only advertises himself as a grocer to start with

and then he adds the baker bit.

Maybe he found that he wasn't making money out of tea,

so he looked for something else to add to his profitability.

But despite his success, John Crewe wasn't driven by profit alone.

And Brian wants to see for himself the school he helped create.

It is quite strange to think that,

after all of the children that have been educated in it,

it's now luxury homes for half a dozen families.

It's quite surprising, really, when you see how well it was built in those days...

..compared to modern schools.

It will still be here in 100 years' time,

whereas, many will have dropped into rubble.

By inheriting his wife's share of John Crewe's £126,000 estate,

Brian has also become part of Cheltenham's history.

My impression of John Crewe is that he was one of these people

that did everything he could to help the poorer areas of the town

and his work has stood the test of time.

Angela would've been extremely pleased to have seen all this

and I think she would have been proud of him.

After an epic search, the heir hunters found over 20 beneficiaries.

They were all entitled to a share of the money,

from hundreds to thousands of pounds.

It's thanks to the great Victorian philanthropic era

that our beneficiaries today are benefiting from land

that was given away over 150 years ago.

Join me next time for some more fascinating family stories

and investigations into our past.

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