Hall/Morris Heir Hunters

Heir hunters specialise in tracking down people who are entitled to money from someone who has died.

If we don't do the work to inform them,

it's money which is going to go to the Government.

They hand over thousands of pounds to relatives who had no idea

-they were in line to inherit.

-If you get nothing, then we get nothing.

Their work involves painstaking investigation.

What the hell is going on here?

But it can rekindle long forgotten family memories.

He was a gentle, kind young man.

But most of all, the work is giving people news of an unexpected windfall.

I was absolutely gobsmacked.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up - the heir hunters grapple with the mammoth case of a man

who died over a century ago.

It's gone on to four, effectively five, pages now.

The mysterious case of a popular vicar who drifted

apart from his relatives.

I find it rather strange that a public figure like a reverend

would die without contact with his family

and also without having made a will.

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury.

Could a fortune be heading your way?

It's a Tuesday morning

and the team at heir hunting firm Celtic Research,

run by father and son team Peter and Hector Birchwood,

are getting stuck into a very unusual case.

Eventually, we'll have something to give to the heirs.

Case manager Saul Marks, who runs the firm's north west office,

has travelled 150 miles from his base in Liverpool to

the Northamptonshire Records Office,

where he hopes to unearth some vital information on a 113-year-old case.

-I'm here to look at some records for the village of Staverton.

-Come through, Mr Marks.

-Thank you.

Saul is on the hunt for relatives of a man called William Hall,

who died in 1899.

Right, I'm after some parish records for Staverton.

-OK.

-Erm, marriages for the 1800s, 1810s.

-OK.

-Up to about 1815.

And then baptisms probably from about 1770 to about 1890...1790, sorry. OK.

Because this case is so old, Saul has to trawl through

yards of microfiche records to get the information he needs.

It looks like he could have a long day ahead of him.

I'm currently in about 1794, so we need to move on a bit from that.

Most of the heir hunters' work comes from the Treasury's

bona vacantia list of unclaimed states.

But this job was different from the start.

The firm took on this case after being contacted by a woman

called Valerie Foley, who had spent several years trying to prove

that her family was entitled to inherit from William Hall's estate.

She started her research after the death of her great-aunt Sisi.

Sisi had left a large tin trunk, erm...

with lots and lots of family documents,

amongst which was the start of the research

to the link with William Hall.

Born in 1824, William Hall was a wealthy farmer

from the village of Staverton in Northamptonshire.

He inherited the farm from his father

and the Hall farm was really quite substantial.

At various times, he had bought up parcels of land

and property in the surrounding area and when he actually died, his estate

consisted of a number of properties and a large amount of farmland.

On 9th April 1899, 74-year-old William died a mysterious death.

The cause of death was listed as "found drowned in a pool".

Erm, we were actually able to look up some newspaper reports

from the time about this.

He was found on a Sunday morning and he'd been out walking on his estate

late on a Saturday night

and that was the last time he'd been seen alive.

In contrast to most of the cases that Saul's company deals with,

the deceased in this case did leave a will.

William Hall made a number of bequests in his will.

Once he'd completed making those bequests,

he divided the residue of his estate into six equal portions.

Each of those portions was bequeathed to the children of each

of his six aunts and uncles who had all already predeceased him.

But at least one portion, that belonging to

the descendants of William's uncle Thomas, has never been claimed.

And it's this Thomas Hall that Valerie Foley's great-aunt Sisi

had been trying to prove she was related to.

There were lots of Thomas Halls in the family.

Her own father was Thomas, her grandfather was Thomas

and her great-great-grandfather was Thomas Hall.

So I thought, "Let's have a see if we can find who Thomas Hall was."

Was he indeed the man mentioned in William Hall's will?

In 1899, the value of Thomas Hall's share was just over £381.

That's about £36,000 in today's money.

A substantial windfall for Valerie and her family,

if she could trace her bloodline back to Thomas Hall.

But after several years of trying,

she drew a blank and decided to call in the experts.

I initially got in touch with Saul,

because I think I'd got as far as I could physically go with the research

on William and the link to - maybe, maybe not - one of my Uncle Thomases.

I was limited in lots of angles of my research,

records too early for me to find.

So that was the reason I made the choice to say to somebody,

"Could you verify what I'd got already?"

In Saul's hands, the case took an unexpected turn.

During my research, I was able to prove, beyond any question,

that Mrs Foley's family, sadly, weren't related to the deceased.

Although it was the same surname, Mrs Foley's ancestors, her Halls

and her Thomas Hall, came from the Edmonton area of north London

and the deceased's family were very deeply rooted

in the village of Staverton, going back many, many generations.

So, sadly, I had to explain to Mrs Foley that after all her work

and her ancestors' work that she wouldn't be entitled to inherit.

Far from being disappointed, Valerie was delighted that someone,

somewhere, might be in line for a windfall.

Thank goodness someone else has taken it on.

To be very honest, I was quite relieved.

I was battling something which I was never going to be able to achieve,

but then Saul can hopefully find the right people

and it would be such fun.

With a £36,000 estate still unclaimed,

it could be a job worth doing for Saul and the firm,

who work on commission for a percentage of the estate's value.

But finding the descendants of a man who died more than 100 years ago

is no mean feat.

And if the family turns out to be large,

Saul could have a lot of hard work in store.

Today, he's come to the Northamptonshire Records Office

to try to find out more about William Hall and his family.

Some of those are missing but that shouldn't, hopefully, be a problem.

Right, OK.

From the information provided by Valerie, Saul has drawn up

a rudimentary family tree showing William Hall's paternal grandparents

and some of his uncles and aunts.

But in order to prove his findings are correct,

he has to study parish records dating back more than 200 years.

The first part is to try and find the births of all these aunts and uncles,

which will be, hopefully, anywhere from about 1775 to about 1795.

It's an arduous task,

as the records are all handwritten they can be difficult to decipher.

What looks like Tamoulane Gulliman, there's the G, you see,

son of Thomas and Sarah Bulliman.

Hours later, Saul manages to find baptism records

for all of William Hall's uncles and aunts

and the marriage listing for their parents Samuel and Elizabeth Hall

reveals some interesting information.

I thought I'd have a quick look back and see

if I could find the marriage listing for Samuel and Elizabeth Hall,

that's the deceased's grandparents, and here I've got it.

Erm, and they married in 1778

and their first child was conceived before the marriage, as well.

These people, like one or two of the others we've come across,

were married by licence, not by banns.

It cost money to be married by licence, so it could suggest that

they were, perhaps, slightly better off than some of their neighbours.

Alternatively, getting married by licence was a much quicker way

of doing it than being married by banns and, as such,

you might want to get married quickly

if you were about to have a baby, like this couple were.

Saul has discovered that William Hall's grandparents

had 14 children in total, 12 of whom survived into adulthood.

Six of them went on to have families of their own

and it's their descendants that would be in line

to inherit William's fortune.

With this new information,

Saul is able to update William's family tree.

There's no doubt about it,

that coming to see the original records is

so much more informative than doing them from transcripts online.

Obviously, it's a long trek from our Liverpool office,

but it's definitely been very worthwhile today,

I've really been able to confirm what I had thought

about the make-up of this family and the construction of this family

and we can now move forward and see if we can contact the heirs.

Satisfied with his progress,

Saul heads back to Liverpool to continue his search for heirs.

But this already complex case is about to get even more tricky.

When we're dealing with a case where someone has died so long ago,

there are so many people who have died with a vested interest,

so instead of stepping from generation to generation,

we're stepping from will to will.

Heir hunters' work can come from a variety of sources.

Each week, the Treasury publishes a list of unclaimed estates.

But sometimes, cases are referred by solicitors

or friends of the deceased.

That's what happened when a reverend called Edward Morris died in 2011.

His case was passed on to the team at the country's biggest firm

of heir hunters, Fraser & Fraser.

Case manager Bob Smith was in charge.

We were contacted by solicitors,

a friend of the deceased had walked into their offices,

explained that he'd died, that they couldn't trace a will

and they had no knowledge of any family.

The job immediately struck Bob as an unusual one.

I find it rather strange that a public figure, like a reverend,

would die without contact with his family

and also without having made a will.

Reverend Edward Morris died on 4th March 2011.

He was 68 years old.

To friends like Father Nigel Griffin, Reverend Morris was

always known as Ted and he is remembered with great affection.

The first time I met Ted was when he came to dinner with another friend

and we had a wonderful evening together, he was a very amusing man.

He was really quite quiet, but once conversation started rolling,

he became much more expansive and had a fund of wonderful stories to tell.

Father Griffin and Ted worked closely together for six years

at the Imperial College Healthcare Trust in west London.

Ted was here as the lead chaplain,

so he was in charge of about half a dozen chaplains, and we all

were an ecumenical team, I happen now to be a Roman Catholic,

he's Church of England,

but we worked hand in glove and were very close colleagues.

As a hospital chaplain, Ted's job was to provide patients with

spiritual support and friendship.

A role in which he excelled.

Ted was particularly good with, what you might call, the lost souls,

people who were right on the margins of things,

people who really didn't seem to have any hope in them.

And he was wonderful at being able to give them encouragement

and really give them the sort of support that they needed.

Ted left the hospital in 2008, after 20 years' service.

But sadly his health began to deteriorate and he moved

into a residential community for retired clergy in Surrey.

I knew he'd gone to the homes of St Barnabas,

because his health had meant that he really,

really wasn't coping by himself,

and I thought moving there would give him a new lease of life,

so it came as really quite a shock to discover that he'd suddenly died.

I don't really know why Ted didn't make a will.

I think, very probably, he really didn't think he was about to die

and, probably like so many of us, I think,

something he always intended to do, but didn't get around to.

Although Bob and the team were working on a referral,

there was always the chance Reverend Morris' case

could crop up on the Treasury's list of unclaimed estates,

where rival heir hunting firms could pick it up.

To stop this happening, Bob had to act fast.

But at the start, he had very little to go on.

The only information we had about the Reverend Morris was that

provided by his death certificate.

That he died on 4th March in 2011 in Lingfield in Surrey.

That he'd formerly lived in London and, I think, Gloucestershire.

Although Reverend Morris died in a retirement home, Bob and the team

soon discovered some information which made the case worth working.

He actually owned a flat in west London.

The value of that flat - obviously properties in London -

is, you know, pretty good.

And on that basis, we were more than willing to try

and locate the family members and prove their entitlement.

The firm works on commission for a percentage of the estate,

so the higher the value, the more potential profit.

But it only gets paid if the team finds and signs up heirs.

Having established that Reverend Morris never married

and had no children, the next step was to find out

if he had any siblings, who would normally be next in line to inherit.

As the death certificate had provided us with a place and date of birth,

we were able to obtain a copy of the Reverend Morris' birth certificate,

which obviously gives us the names of his parents.

Once we'd established their names, we could find their marriage

and see if he had any brothers or sisters.

Reverend Morris' parents were Edward Alfred Morris

and Agnes Mary Murray Beck. They married in Middlesbrough in 1931.

But records show they had no other children, which meant Bob

and his team were now looking for aunts, uncles and cousins.

There's two ways of looking at the fact that there were no near kin,

ie, brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces.

There's more chance of a more distant relation being happy with us

to represent them, obviously, a brother or sister.

So in that respect,

I was quite pleased that there were no near relations.

But, of course, when you are looking into the extended families,

it means more research and more man-hours.

By looking at his father's birth certificate,

Bob established the names of Reverend Morris'

paternal grandparents as Joseph Morris and Alice Shilvock.

From there, they were able to look for the family on census records

and he uncovered some interesting details about their lives.

The paternal family actually

originated from the Worcestershire area - Stourbridge, Worcestershire,

but had ended up in Middlesbrough by the 1911 census.

Worcestershire to Middlesbrough is some distance,

particularly at that time.

I can only assume that the paternal grandfather's occupation

as a blast furnace foreman had taken him

to some sort of job in the Middlesbrough area.

In the second half of the 19th century,

Middlesbrough was the fastest growing town in Britain.

Its population swelled from just 5,000 in 1851

to around 140,000 by the turn of the century.

People came to the town from all corners of the country,

searching for work in its thriving iron industry.

The main factor that led to Middlesbrough's growth, of course,

was the finding of iron in the Eston Hills

and later in the Cleveland Hills to the south of Middlesbrough.

And this then led to the erection of a whole series of blast furnaces

in and around Middlesbrough and along the banks of the River Tees.

And, of course, to provide the labour, the skills

and the workers for these ironworks,

you needed workers who weren't available locally,

so they had to be brought in. And as iron production expanded,

then, of course, the population expanded very rapidly.

By the mid-1870s,

Middlesbrough was producing around one million tonnes of iron a year,

a quarter of Britain's total output.

The town had become not just the biggest iron producing district

in the country, but the biggest iron producing district in the world.

In its heyday, Middlesbrough primarily produced railway iron.

So the thousands of miles, well, there were thousands of miles,

of railway track around the world -

America, South America, South Africa, India and Australia and so on,

they were supplied by Middlesbrough companies.

Census records show Joseph Morris and his family moved to

Middlesbrough around the turn of the century.

By then, it was a well-developed iron and steel town

with plenty of opportunities for work.

But his job as a blast furnace foreman

was not for the fainthearted.

Joseph Morris would work long hours, would be very hot,

very dirty atmosphere.

It would be a long, hard, arduous working day.

It could be dangerous.

Remember, the temperature inside the blast furnace would be

somewhere around 15 or 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

There was potential for lots of accidents and for explosions

and of course if you look at local newspaper records,

you can find many examples of workers who'd been killed

or injured as a result of these accidents.

In the early 20th century,

Middlesbrough became a major force in steel production.

The material was widely used in ship and bridge construction

and it's likely that Reverend Morris' grandfather Joseph

could have had a hand in building some major landmarks.

Middlesbrough's company was famously known for the Sydney Harbour Bridge,

but also for the Tyne Bridge, the Auckland Harbour Bridge

and many other bridges across the world.

The 1911 census showed that as well as Reverend Morris' father Edward,

Joseph and his wife Alice had nine other children,

six of whom survived into adulthood.

These would be Reverend Morris' aunts and uncles

and they or their living descendants

would be entitled to a share in his estate.

It was a daunting task for case manager Bob Smith.

Having six branches of the family to research can be quite complicated.

Families become fractured, lose contact with each other

and also Morris is quite a common surname.

Common names and big families can slow research down.

And the pressure was on for the team to find heirs

before this case reached the Treasury's unclaimed list.

Could they solve the mystery in time?

Heir hunters track down thousands of beneficiaries every year.

But they can't crack every case.

The Treasury's unclaimed list still contains many

that have yet to be solved.

So, we'll administer the estate

and then when the administration is completed,

we'll put the case on the unclaimed list,

so that people may still come forward and claim it.

Today, we're focusing on two cases

which have so far eluded the heir hunters.

Could you be the beneficiary they're looking for?

Could you be in line for a cash windfall?

First is the case of Denise Lucie Octavie Jeane Janovtechnik

who died in Wimbledon, south-west London on 28th November 2005.

Despite her unusual name, the heir hunters have

so far been unable to track down any of her relatives.

Does this name ring any bells with you?

It could suggest a French connection,

is it a name you recognise?

Next is the case of Ronald Arrowsmith

who died on 21st October 2011, in Sandwell in the West Midlands.

The Arrowsmith name is most common in the north-west of England.

Are you an Arrowsmith? Could Ronald be a long lost family member?

If so, thousands of pounds could be coming your way.

Both Denise and Ronald's estates remain unclaimed

and if no-one comes forward, their money will go to the Government.

When considering a claim for an estate,

it is very important that a person puts forward a very good case.

And it's all based on the evidence.

What we need are the birth, death, marriage certificates,

perhaps something on adoption.

And then we consider the evidence very carefully.

Those names once again -

Denise Lucie Octavie Jeane Janovtechnik and Ronald Arrowsmith.

In Liverpool, Saul Marks,

a case manager with heir hunting firm, Celtic Research,

is trying to track down beneficiaries to the estate

of a man called William Hall who died more than 100 years ago.

It's very interesting for us to work cases

where we are in a completely different timeframe from normal.

William Hall, a farmer and grazier from the village of Staverton

in Northamptonshire, drowned in a pool on his land in 1899.

An inquest at the time heard that he may have become disorientated

in the foggy weather that night and stumbled into the water.

A bachelor, with no children of his own,

William made a will which divided up most of his estate

between the children of his six paternal uncles and aunts.

But one portion belonging to his uncle Thomas' children

has not yet been claimed.

The value of Thomas Hall's share of the estate, his one sixth,

in 1899 was just over £381.

In today's money, we believe that's about £36,000.

So, if we can find heirs to Thomas Hall's branch of the family,

then they will hopefully be sharing about £36,000.

Saul was asked to look into the case by a woman called Valerie Foley,

who believed she was related to Thomas Hall.

But Saul proved she wasn't, so the hunt goes on.

This means the real heirs to this £36,000 estate are still out there.

If Saul and the team can find them quickly,

it could mean a healthy profit for the company.

But this case is far from straightforward.

The problem with working cases like this is that many of the heirs

over several generations have actually died.

So instead of working down the families

generation by generation, we have to work down will by will.

When it comes to heir hunting, time is money.

The more work and effort required to solve a case,

the less profit for the firm.

So the pressure is on

for Saul to find William Hall's living heirs fast.

Now back from his trip to Northampton,

he's got his hands on some documents

that he hopes could unlock this tricky case.

Once we'd established from the trip to Northampton that the family

I traced was the right family,

I was then able to order some wills

of some of the descendants of Thomas Hall,

who I believed would have been heirs had they been alive.

So, I actually ordered four wills, which I've received today.

William Hall's uncle Thomas had seven children.

As all of them have long since passed away,

the money left to them by William will automatically go

to the beneficiaries named in their wills.

As copies of all wills made in England and Wales after 1858

are held at the Probate Service in London,

the team in the London office,

led by company co-owner Hector Birchwood,

has stepped in to help out with what's fast becoming a mammoth task.

One of the wills they've found is that of Jane Waite,

Thomas Hall's youngest daughter.

"This is the last will and testament of me, Jane Waite,

"wife of William Waite of Staverton in the county of Northampton, shoemaker."

It appears that Jane divided up her estate between her husband

and her five children.

The London office has also sent Saul a will for who they think

is one of her sons, Fred Waite.

It could hold the key to finding the first heirs.

So, Fred Waite of 20 Baker Street in the city of Leeds...

..Erm, died on 2nd November 1935. This is the wrong probate.

They've ordered me the wrong probate.

Oh.

The Fred Waite whose will Saul needed

died in 1934 in Buckinghamshire.

But it's a common name

and Saul has ended up with the will of a different man.

It's a setback, but Saul's determined to keep moving forward.

Even though we've hit this obstacle today in terms of not being

able to see Fred's probate, Fred's will,

Fred's branch is really only one small stem of this tree.

If we look at the fact that the deceased's uncle Thomas Hall

had seven children, Jane Hall was the youngest of those children,

so there are all her brothers and sisters' families to find.

There's a lot of heirs that are going to be found on this estate.

A few days later,

Saul is still waiting to receive a copy of Fred's will.

In the meantime, research has continued.

This is where we're at with Jane Hall's tree.

It's gone on to four, effectively five, pages now.

Obviously, there are quite a few people there who, hopefully,

should still be alive.

We don't know whether they're heirs yet,

because that depends on the probates higher up above them in the tree.

He's also started to trace the descendants of one

of Thomas Hall's other children.

Yesterday, we were able to crack open the branch of Charlotte Hall,

who was Jane's sister.

Now, Charlotte had seven children, I think,

and one of her eight children

and one of her children had all this many people.

So, we've been feverishly lapping up all these people called Gardner

and we've got to go through exactly the same process.

Their tree will be bigger than this one, many of them will be heirs.

But again we can't just trace the family down like normal,

because it all depends entirely on the probates.

With so many people to trace, the work is piling up

and it's clear that tracing beneficiaries

is likely to take some time.

And even if they do find the heirs,

there's no guarantee that they'll sign up with the firm.

It's a big gamble for Saul and the team.

As the day unfolds, Saul has news on the elusive will of Fred Waite.

We've spent most of today waiting anxiously for Fred Waite's probate.

It transpires I'd actually made a small mistake

in that he didn't leave a will, it's in administration,

which means that his estate automatically passes

to his three daughters in equal shares.

His eldest daughter Jessie was one of the probates that we picked up

a couple of days ago and she leaves all her estate to a charity.

So, her share of this will go to that charity in due course.

When the team looks into what became of Fred's youngest daughter, Annie's share of the estate,

they discover just how hugely complex this case is.

The money will end up in the hands of her third husband's stepdaughter.

The deceased in this case,

which is where this money will come to Jeanette from, will be her...

..second stepfather's first wife's first cousin, twice removed.

Now, if you want to get any more complicated

and distant than that, I challenge you to try.

Saul has also managed to make good progress

with Charlotte Hall's branch of the family.

By searching through her will, and those of her many descendants,

he's managed to trace Richard,

the great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Hall.

When Saul phoned, I was really quite surprised,

cos it's not the sort of call you expect.

The fact that he knew something about my family and my parents,

it was my dad he mentioned in particular,

and because he got some information on him,

the more interesting it became from my point of view.

And as luck would have it, Richard is an amateur genealogist

and has been researching his own family tree for more than 13 years.

When Saul called

and I mentioned I was interested in family history as well

and I knew some of the names,

he seemed a little bit surprised and he was quite pleased, I think,

that I was able to provide him with some more information

that he hadn't already got.

And, hopefully, can have a look at it

and if he comes up with any anomalies,

and I'm sure I've got some anomalies on what I've done,

we'll identify them and we'll get it straight.

And Saul was able to fill in some gaps in Richard's family history.

It was quite interesting that he'd got clearly a lot more information

on certain parts of the family than I'd gathered.

In particular, he was aware of the will of William

and to find out that we were potential beneficiaries

was quite interesting.

I suspect the amount of money that will be divided eventually

is not too great, but I don't think that's the interesting aspect,

it's the connection with someone that died 100 years ago

and how his family evolved.

Because Richard's mother left her estate to her grandchildren,

any money there is from William Hall's estate will skip Richard

and go straight to his two children.

I'm delighted to know that my children will inherit something

that they weren't expecting.

It might not be much, but it's something.

Finding Richard is a great result for the company.

But there's still a long way to go

before this difficult case is wrapped up.

These sorts of cases really are complex

and this is a prime example of this.

We have to work very methodically from one probate to the next,

to the next and it does take longer and it can be more complicated.

But we are managing it, it's fine,

it's something that we're used to doing

and we're clearly having some success, somewhere.

In London, the team at heir hunting firm Fraser & Fraser

was working the case of Reverend Edward Morris,

a former hospital chaplain who died in 2011 without leaving a will.

The company had been approached by a solicitor

who needed help in tracking down the Reverend's missing relatives.

Case manager Bob Smith was running the research.

We had no real indication as to the value of the Reverend Morris' estate.

The fact that he owned a flat in London was enough information

for us to decide that this was certainly a case that,

you know, we'd be more than interested in working.

Reverend Edward Morris was born in 1942

and grew up in the seaside town of Redcar in Teesside.

According to his friend, Father Nigel Griffin,

who knew the reverend as Ted,

he was in a very different line of work before he joined the church.

Well, Ted's original career was as a chemical engineer

with ICI on Teesside.

But in his mid-20s, he went to King's College in London

to train for the Church of England ministry.

It was to be the beginning of a long and illustrious career in the church.

Ted later moved to Oxford

where he became chaplain to St Edmund Hall,

one of the university's colleges.

Edward had a very strong academic bent

and whilst he was at Oxford, Ted did his DPhil,

his doctor of philosophy degree, in the philosophy of Heidegger.

And was very much an academic, but also somebody who wanted to

give a practical application to his academic understanding.

Later on, whilst working as a hospital chaplain,

Ted got the chance to do just that.

As well as being a chaplain working on the wards

and with the staff of the hospital, he was a lecturer in medical ethics.

He taught at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School of Imperial College.

Outside of work, Ted had many interests.

He was quite a rounded personality,

so he was very much interested in music.

In fact, he was a cello player himself,

and very much enjoyed attending concerts and listening to music.

And he was a popular man

with friends scattered all over the world.

I attended his funeral with quite a number of colleagues

from the hospital here.

Looking around the chapel at the funeral,

it was amazing to see how many different people there were.

I certainly hadn't realised

how many different connections with different people he had.

There was a lovely get-together afterwards and people were able

to exchange stories about Ted and really remember him with great love.

But despite his reputation as a warm and genial man,

it seems Ted had, for some reason,

lost contact with his relatives in the north-east of England.

It meant case manager Bob Smith had his work cut out

in trying to track them down.

From the 1911 census, Bob and his team had discovered

that Reverend Morris' father, also called Edward,

had nine brothers and sisters, six of whom survived into adulthood.

These would be the Reverend's uncle and aunts

and they or their living descendants

would be in line to inherit a share of his estate.

The team now set about trying to find marriages

and children for them.

And they had a strategy to help narrow down the dozens

of potential options.

When we're dealing with common surnames, it's usual to stick

to the area, particularly, where the family originated from.

In this case, it was Middlesbrough.

So, by doing that, we were eventually able to identify marriages

for some of those six branches of the family

and as a result of finding those marriages,

we could identify children, some of whom were still alive.

Reverend Morris' Uncle John married a woman called Annie May Phillips.

The couple had three children - Alice, Geoffrey and Bronwyn -

first cousins to Reverend Morris.

Alice and Geoffrey have now passed away,

but Bronwyn is still alive and well.

The team was on the brink of finding its first heir.

Bronwyn Morris is a rather, sort of, unusual combination,

particularly in the Middlesbrough area.

Her parents had married there, they died there.

She herself was married there and had stayed fairly local.

So it was quite easy to track her down

and once we had contacted her,

she provided a great deal of information

about the rest of the family.

Bronwyn is Reverend Morris' last surviving first cousin

on his father's side. She had no idea he had passed away.

I was very shocked to know what it was all about

and what had happened to Edward.

Because he was young, he was only, I think, in his sixties

and I wasn't expecting such an early death,

cos I think he was quite a healthy person.

Although she hadn't heard from her cousin for many years,

Bronwyn and Edward had been close as children.

I knew him as a little boy growing up,

being with his parents and with my parents.

So I'd had a lifetime of being with Edward as a little girl

and growing up with him.

I remember Edward as just a quiet boy

and a much loved son by his parents

and a nice gentle sort of man.

He was very, very polite, extremely polite.

Their friendship continued into adulthood

and Bronwyn was invited to attend Edward's ordination

at Durham Cathedral.

We had a lovely reception afterwards that he'd arranged.

It was a very jolly occasion, it was lovely.

I think Edward's profession suited him perfectly.

He was a gentle, kind young man

and I think he would be very interesting to listen to.

I think the community would like him very much.

Edward even conducted the wedding ceremonies

for two of Bronwyn's daughters.

He just took over the church and he was extremely good

and gave a lovely talk about it all

and made a very happy marriage for them.

I think having Edward there as the vicar

made it a very personal experience,

because, you know, he was there taking over the ceremony

and the whole family were there and it was lovely.

Bronwyn was one of 13 heirs

on Reverend Morris' father's side of the family.

But on his mother's side, it was a different story.

Given that the paternal family was quite large,

when we traced the maternal family on the 1911 census,

there were only five children,

so it was quite a relief to know that we weren't going to be faced

with the same problems of a common name and also a large family.

Reverend Morris' maternal grandparents were called

Thomas Beck and Mary Murray Beck.

Agnes, Reverend Morris' mother, was their youngest child

and out of her four siblings only one went on to have children.

The research on the maternal family of Reverend Edward Morris was very, very easy.

We were dealing with a very, sort of, unusual name, Beck.

They'd stayed in the Middlesbrough area

and one of the maternal aunts, Lydia, that's an unusual name.

We were quickly and easily able to identify her marriage

and find children from her marriage.

In total, case manager Bob and his team

found just two heirs on the maternal side.

I think the fact that we'd had to look to both paternal and maternal families,

the fact that we only have 15 heirs in total is relatively unusual.

You'd probably be looking to more, sort of, 30, 40.

So, I was quite pleased that we didn't have that much to do in the end.

Reverend Morris' property will have to be sold

before any of the heirs can receive any money.

But they could be in for quite a windfall.

Given the likely value of £200,000-£250,000

and the fact that we've only traced 15 heirs

means that most of those family members

are going to receive a sizeable sum.

Certainly something that will enhance their lives.

His cousin Bronwyn has no idea yet how much money she will get,

but whatever there is will come in helpful.

I think getting this inheritance, I would like to help my family.

A couple of my children at the moment,

have some very serious health problems

and a couple of the little girls are at university now,

struggling with their fees.

So it would be nice to give them a little treat as well.

I think Edward would be very happy to know that the money is going

to help the family in general with some nice little treats in store.

Because I think we all enjoy a little treat, don't we?

But for her, more important than the money,

has been the opportunity to remember the cousin

who drifted apart from his family so many years ago.

I'm so pleased that he's had a good life and it sounds to me

as though Edward has had a very happy life in his work.

So, I think that makes me feel contented to know.

And I think his parents loved him so much

that I think they would be very happy to know

that Edward's had a good, happy life and fulfilled what he wanted to do.

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