Yanchuk/Gibson Heir Hunters

Welcome to Heir Hunters,

where we uncover long-forgotten family secrets and help unite people

with family money they never knew was theirs.

Today, the Heir Hunters are scouring the country for the 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?

Coming up 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.

I find out about wartime romances.

Did British girls really fall for the charms of foreign soldiers?

They were exciting, often taller and better-looking

and there were a whole load of romances

and marriages between British women and troops from overseas.

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've carried out 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 make sure they get it.

Today, the Heir Hunters are investigating the case of a man

from Milton Keynes who died years ago without leaving a will.

Despite an unusual name, no family have been found.

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 he is related to a

Brian Yanchuk, who died a few years back.

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

that the Treasury publish every Thursday,

sometimes they 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 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 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 17 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,

there was always a "hello", even if he had a drink

or something like that, or if he's sitting on his steps, 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, you know.

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.

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.

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.

We've lost someone, like I say, that has been part of the furniture,

part of the street, really, and someone that's been there

for a very, very long time, sadly missed as far as I'm concerned.

God rest Brian.

In the office,

Peter Birchwood has 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 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, doesn't 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. Good afternoon.

-Hello.

-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.

That's right. The certificate is all done for you. It's in the envelope.

-Thank you. Have a good afternoon. Goodbye.

-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.

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 in 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.

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 have come from the Ukraine to Canada, felt that 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 he worked as a driver.

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

drove a tractor on his farm and of course, his driving skills would have

been transferred into 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'd normally go up to the deceased

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

and then try to identify all the children 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 takes him from one of the most uncommon names in Britain,

to one of the most common.

But how does an English girl with the surname Smith

end up with a Canadian soldier?

Brian Yanchuk's parents, Violet and Alexander, married in 1941

and settled in England after World War II, but they weren't

the only wartime sweethearts.

I'm meeting historian Dr Lucy Noakes, who I am hoping

can tell me more about wartime love affairs.

-Hello, Lucy. Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

Brian's dad, Alexander, was a Canadian soldier,

so why was he over here in 1941?

He would have been one of many, almost half a million Canadian men

who came to Britain during the Second World War.

Most of these came over as members of the Canadian forces

and many came over just before D-day in 1944.

But many others came over early on in the war and joined as members

of the British forces. Because of Canada being a dominion,

Canadian men had the opportunity to join the British Army,

the RAF and the Navy.

How might Violet Smith and Alexander Yanchuk have met?

Violet Smith was a young, unmarried woman

and although conscription for women wasn't introduced

until late 1941, before that period, many young women were employed

in war work, working in the factories, on farms, in services.

If, like Violet Smith, you were a young woman

without domestic responsibilities, you were classified as mobile.

That meant you could be asked to go wherever you were needed,

such as a munitions factory a long way from home.

Lots of these women for the very first time were a long way

from parental control.

They had a greater degree of social freedom

than they would have had before the war,

so there was much more opportunity for women to meet young men,

who were also away from home, for example at dances,

at army bases and air force bases.

There was also a lot of social disapproval of this, as well,

particularly of young women, who were seen by some as being

more interested in romance and excitement than war work.

Is it true that British women at the time loved the foreign soldiers?

It seems so.

They were slightly different, there were exciting,

they were often taller and better-looking,

because they were better fed, and there were a whole load of romances

and marriages between British women and troops from overseas.

Whether they met at a dance hall or through war work is unknown,

but the relationship between Canadian soldier

Alexander Yanchuk and Violet Smith from England flourished.

The couple married on 20 August 1941.

Why might the couple have married in 1941 and not waited

until the end of the war?

There were lots of people who married early on in the war, lots who didn't

wait until after the war and there were several reasons for this.

They might have married purely for practical reasons, or at least

partly purely for practical reasons, it might have been a way of

ensuring that she had some money, she got a separation allowance.

She would've got a small widow's pension if he had been killed

in action, and she'd have been certain of being informed as his

next of kin if he had been killed, if he was missing in action,

if he'd been injured.

Also, at the end of 1941, the Canadian government introduced an Act

which meant that all Canadian servicemen, if they were planning to

marry a woman abroad, had to declare proof that they weren't already

married, because we think there'd been some cases of bigamy already.

They also had to prove they could support that woman

when they were released from military service, and crucially,

they had to provide ten dollars a month from their military pay,

in order to pay their bride's travel to Canada after the war.

If this couple were thinking already of staying on in Britain, after the

war, they may not have wanted to spend that money

and then, of course, they may just have fallen in love.

It was wartime, it was exciting

and you never knew what was around the corner, so lots of people

married very quickly, early on in relationships during the war.

There were many wartime romances

and marriages between Canadian soldiers and British women,

and around 45,000 war brides

left their homeland for a new life in post-war Canada.

Alexander and Violet, however, settled in England.

And why would the UK have appealed to a Canadian soldier so much,

after the war?

Canada had particularly strong links to Britain. It was a dominion,

part of the Empire, there had been a lot of migration

from Britain to Canada,

both at the end of the 19th century and after the First World War,

so there were often strong family links.

However in Alexander's case, he didn't have strong family links

to Britain, so maybe it was just because he fell in love

and they wanted to stay here.

Still to come...

the search for heirs to Brian Yanchuk's estate goes right

to the heart of war-torn London.

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

And 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.

Next the team investigate the case of a man from Sussex,

who died without leaving a will.

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.

We were originally contacted by the solicitors who had 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 then assumed he had no children.

With no wife or children in the picture, the next thing

the team had to do was to 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 had to determine whether they'd had any other children.

We then began a search to look to see whether our deceased had any brothers

and sisters, and 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 their 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 into 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 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 father's side of the family and the list of their children,

who, of course, would 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,

John, Florence, Eliza, Charles, Lilian, Ethel and May.

Of the seven maternal aunts and uncles,

five of those had 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 believed 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 & Fraser,

it was a complete shock and I was surprised.

I wondered, erm...

secondly, if it was a bit of a scam

but then the 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 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 we believed 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,

the 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 other family members

that we had just contacted.

Every heir hunt depends on identifying the correct records

to trace back through the generations and help identify living family members.

One of the ways heir hunters do this is through the census.

I'm meeting genealogist Anthony Adolf who can tell me how this important set of records came about.

-Hello, Anthony. Nice to meet you.

-Hi.

So when was the first census?

The first of the censuses we are talking about

was taken in 1801 and it was really a government response to complete

panic at the thought we were going to be invaded by the French.

They were going to call up as many men as they could to fight the French

and they suddenly realised they had no idea how many people were living in this country.

There was also a general concern for public health

and the Government began to realise they had to know more about who they were governing.

So they decided to have a census - a headcount - to find out how many people there were.

So the Government just wanted to find out more information...?

Yes, they realised they were completely ignorant.

They had no idea how many people there were in the country.

So, they made a count. They chose a rather odd way of doing it, though.

They counted the people leaving the Church of England on Easter Sunday

and they came up with a figure of about nine million.

They then had another census in 1811 because they sort of wanted to keep tabs on things.

This time, they chose a different method.

They counted the number of people in each parish.

Of course, they got a completely different figure.

They got more people as they picked up all the non-churchgoers. They came up with over ten million.

That meant that the population had gone up, they thought, by a million people,

a tenth, in ten years.

So there was a huge panic about the country being completely swamped with people

and we would all starve.

They decided they had better have censuses every ten years to keep tabs on this growing population,

which, of course, wasn't growing as fast as they thought.

When was the first modern census taken?

-Well, 1841 is the first census that we use for genealogy.

-Oh, OK.

-The ones before then were just headcounts.

-OK.

The 1841 census went hand-in-hand

with an improvement in record keeping at this time.

The General Register Office of England and Wales

was founded in 1836 with civil registration commencing in 1837.

Looking at it now, how useful is that census?

Well, it was a good start, but there were a lot of things they didn't do at that stage

which they then implemented later.

For example, although they listed every single person in the country,

they didn't list how they were related to each other.

So, that's a bit of a nuisance from our point of view.

Instead of writing down exact ages,

they said, let's round your age down to the nearest five years.

Well, that's all very well, but not very useful for us.

Then, maddeningly, instead of asking the question "Where were you born?",

they just said, "Were you born in this county?"

So, if somebody came from Staffordshire and was living in Cornwall, his answer is "no".

That's no use for us, is it?!

By the next census a decade later,

the questions asked had been refined.

The 1851 census did ask people in a household how they were related,

their exact ages and where they were born.

Why are censuses important to modern genealogical research?

It's mainly because they tell you how people are related to each other,

which is basically what genealogy is.

The other main backbone of genealogy are the birth, marriage

and death records.

But to find the right birth, marriage and death records,

you often need to know when was someone born?

You need to know where were you born?

As soon as you know specifically where someone was born,

you can find a birth record.

To do that, the best thing is to look in the census cos they'll tell you.

They are tremendously useful.

Nowadays, census records can be found on various websites.

The latest census available to view is 1911,

as the records are kept secret for 100 years to protect

the personal information of living people.

Is there anything particularly interesting about the latest census?

That's a very nice one.

Partly you can look at the forms which the people themselves

filled in because the previous ones were filled in

by the census enumerators, the people who went round counting.

You can actually see your ancestor filling in a form

and signing it and writing down what he thought should be listed.

It gives very good extra information. Particularly useful are,

they asked married couples how long they had been married.

That's interesting in itself.

In some cases with big Victorian families

they might have been married for 20 years so it's very useful.

You know when to look for the marriage record.

It also asked a very moving question.

They asked how many children the couple had had,

and how many of them were still alive.

They were very concerned with public health and infant mortality.

Infant mortality was very high.

That's often the first time in a family tree you'll suddenly

realise that one of your ancestors had lost a child, or in some cases,

it's heartbreaking, they'll have two children alive and ten had died.

A very interesting, quite moving question.

It's one of the many things about a census that really brings you

and your ancestors much closer

because you do in these records see them as real people.

The fact that they go every ten years from 1911 back to 1841 means

you can follow a family through, decade by decade.

You can see how they develop, you can see when the children appear,

you can see when they get married.

That gives you a really good structure on which to base any other research

and, indeed, the censuses often tell you the story of the family.

You can follow their fortunes and learn all sorts of things about them.

No wonder the heir hunters find census records such

a valuable tool in tracking down families.

Now it's your turn to research your own ancestors.

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 Bona Vacantia Division has a list of over 2,000 unclaimed

estates where heirs still need to be found.

Bona Vacantia is the Latin term for ownerless property.

We deal with two types,

we deal with property of now dissolved companies

but in this context we also deal with the estates of those who die

without a valid will or anyone entitled to inherit.

These cases could be worth anything from a few hundred pounds

to millions and they are waiting to be claimed.

Monies raised through Bona Vacantia ultimately go to the general exchequer

to benefit the country as a whole.

It's important to note that the Crown doesn't want all the estates,

at all costs. It's not how it operates.

It wants kin to be found and that's what we work very hard to do.

Here are some names from the unsolved list.

Could you be eligible to inherit a fortune?

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?

Could you be Daisy's heir?

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 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.

Don't forget, distant relatives can't inherit from unclaimed estates.

So the people that are entitled

are those that trace their relationship in a direct line

from the deceased person's grandparents.

So a spouse would be entitled, children would be entitled,

aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, first cousins.

A reminder of those names again.

Daisy Barnes, Benhilda Tandi and Dorothy Geddes.

If you are a relative of anyone on today's list,

you could have a fortune coming your way.

Let's return to the hunt for living relatives of Brian Yanchuk,

who died in Milton Keynes without leaving a will.

Peter Birchwood from Celtic Research has been investigating Brian's case.

Brian died back in 2004 and the team have established that he

never married, or had children.

So they are 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 a 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 the family is 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.

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 managed 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, Battersea

Registry Office, for any other Smith births in that specific subdistrict.

There are a lot of them but it's manageable.

The team's painstaking research pays off.

They discover that Violet's parents, Albert and Nelly Smith,

had one son, Albert, and five daughters, Violet herself,

Beatrice, Rose, Lilian and Ivy.

So a family of six, all born within the same general area,

all born really within a couple of streets of the original address.

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 Ann Smith is a cousin of the deceased,

she is 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.

-Thank you.

-Hello.

This way he can be sure he has identified all of the correct family members.

They'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. It was Nelly Potter, yes.

-And they married in 1908 in Wandsworth.

-Mmm.

-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.

-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.

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,

was my gran and grandma on the bottom, Aunty 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 poor, really.

When they used to have chops they used to scrape the bone with

a knife to get every little bit off.

When they used to have butter, they used to share it.

They used to weigh it all out so that everybody

had their own bit of butter.

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

but they all 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 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.

Thank you very much.

-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 Beattie moved out of London.

They moved them out to Milton Keynes.

That's how Vi and Beattie became Milton Keynes

because they moved a lot of Londoners out

because it was a new town in them days.

It was a new town, 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 appear to have spent the rest of their days there.

The disadvantage was that they lost touch with their family.

I suppose with my mother moving away

and Lilian moving away from home and the two sisters going to

Milton Keynes, we didn't see much of each other 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.

You know, 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 get anything. It was just anything.

It's a bonus, really.

I was more interested in the facts of what had happened,

than any inheritance.

But the experience has stirred up memories for Mike of playing

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

You was working class in them days.

You were happy with whatever you'd 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.

For Peter it's a satisfying end to a fascinating case.

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

That claim is going to go in immediately

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

and then we can get the administration started,

get the whole thing moving and make sure that there is no

delay in recovering the assets for the family.

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.

Cases get on our unclaimed list after a little while.

The procedure is that initially the case will come in, we will make some

inquiries ourselves to see whether we can trace relatives or a will.

If those initial inquiries don't bring forth anything,

we will then advertise on our website initially

and then in the national and local press.

Here are three more unclaimed estates from the list.

Do these names mean anything to you?

Are they relatives of yours?

Elsie Sparrow died on 17 December 2000 in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The surname Sparrow is particularly common in East Anglia and is uncommon in the North.

Was Elsie from East Anglia?

Was she perhaps a member of your family?

Margaret Schmit died in Holloway in London back in March 1998.

With German heritage, the name Schmit is historically linked to metalworkers.

Were you a friend or neighbour of Margaret's back in the day?

Could you help solve her case which has remained

unclaimed for over a decade?

Or did you know Gerald Ford?

He died on 2 January 2006 in Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth.

I've got Gerald's death certificate here which

shows his date and place of birth.

It says he was born on 1 September 1927 in England.

Was there a Gerald Ford in your family with that same date of birth?

The death certificate also shows that Gerald was a dockyard worker.

Did you perhaps work with him on the docks in Portsmouth?

Can you help solve this case?

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

to prove your link to the deceased in order to claim their estate.

If someone thinks they're entitled to an estate that we're dealing with,

then they need to contact us.

They can do that direct, or via an agent, it's entirely up to them.

We need to have a simple family tree,

showing how they think they are related to the deceased person.

Nothing complicated, just something straightforward and simple

and then we will be able to make sure that we're

talking about the same family and then we will ask them

to provide certificates of birth, death, marriage

and also documents of identity to prove they are who they say they are

and then we can look at the claim.

A reminder of those names again.

Elsie Sparrow, Margaret Schmit and Gerald Ford.

If today's names are relatives of yours,

then you could have a forgotten fortune coming your way.

Finally today, let's return to the search for living relatives of Alexander Gibson.

Heir hunter Bob Smith was looking into Alexander's case.

He died in Brighton back in 2004.

Alexander had never married and had no children

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

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 had 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 had 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 actually 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 an 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 would be halfway to finding the right heirs.

As hoped, their search turned up trumps.

There was an Ethel Clift born on 18 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 showing 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 and 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.

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 seemed to have gone back to live with their own parents.

The child might grow up thinking that 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 Aunty Ethel,

my mother's elder sister by one year.

I only found out that Ethel wasn't my aunty when

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

"You know, Aunty Ethel isn't really my sister,

"she was in fact Aunty 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 and 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, erm...

he sort of turned into a bit of a recluse,

so he became rather unsociable and didn't want any visitors.

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 Aaron'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 all his other aunties used to send

him a shilling for his birthday and Aunty 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 the car.

Andrew also reveals some fascinating information which deepens

the mystery of his mother, Ethel's, true parentage.

Our mother told us that Aunty Win, who was really her mother,

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

and that led to our 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 closer relatives than

the 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.

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 a 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 and 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 naturally 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