Pinner/Kennar 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.

Sometimes, the deceased has become estranged from their family.

Sometimes, they simply haven't left a will.

Either way, the heir hunters must make sure that any unclaimed money goes to the right people.

As soon as I realised they were phoning about a relative, I said, "Is that Joe?"

It involves painstaking research.

I knew at that point it was going to be a long struggle to try and find some heirs on this case.

But it can reunite people.

I'm just glad to learn more about her.

It's all about giving news of an unexpected windfall.

So, could the heir hunters be knocking on your door?

Coming up, the heir hunters deal with not one but two connected cases

to try and solve a 60-year-old mystery.

In all the years doing the job, I've never had an estate where the deceased died so long ago.

A story of incredible hardship and bravery.

They were very tough men indeed.

All sailors in that period were tough.

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

It's morning in London. At the offices of heir hunting firm Fraser and Fraser,

case manager Dom Hendry and senior researched Alan Riches

are busy on a case.

They're trying to find relatives of a lady called Winifred Daisy Moth,

who died in Colchester in 2008.

The deceased father is John Frederick Bergum, died in 1965.

Says he was born in St Luke's, which is Shoreditch.

-We know it's the right family.

-Yeah.

Winifred died without leaving a will.

As she had no obvious next of kin, her estate, which is estimated at £5,000,

has been advertised on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list as unclaimed.

That means heir hunters across the country could be competing to find and sign up heirs.

Dom and Alan have already established that Winifred was a widow and had no children.

But they've got a lot of work to do to find out who should inherit her estate.

As she died without any children, we believe,

we'll need to find her cousins on both her mother and her father's side.

Winifred died a few months before her 100th birthday.

And spent the last 30 years of her long life in care homes in Essex.

Carers who looked after her have find memories.

Winifred liked to look at the sea. We're lucky to be situated opposite the sea.

So she could take that all in. She'd spend hours looking at the scenery.

She was a jolly person. She was a great reader. A knitter.

She loved watching the TV quite a lot.

She had a good personality, friendly, kind.

She had a good sense of humour. She was easy to get along with.

In the heir hunters' office, the team is trying to build up Winifred's family tree.

They've established that she had no immediate family.

They're now looking to see if she had aunts and uncles

who may lead them to living relatives.

At the moment, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

-Seven including the dad.

-There could be eight.

Alan has established that Winifred's father, John Bergum, had eight brothers and sisters.

He's now looking to see if they had children, who would be Winifred's cousins.

The team reckons because Winifred was living in care homes for so long,

the chances of her owning a property, or having a valuable estate, are slim.

The children have good names. We've got a couple of stems that I picked up marriages for, which we'll work.

It looks as if the Bergum side of the family is going to be large.

That's not good news for the heir hunters.

They'll only earn a percentage of the modest estate.

And a large family tree means a large workload.

We were hoping for less family. But the family seem to be popping up.

The beneficiaries are going to be entitled to a really small legacy.

It's not going to be big money for them.

Fortunately, the family name is making their lives a little easier.

The name Bergum is not a common name at all.

And it just makes things so much easier to identify when you've got a good name.

Although Winifred's name had been advertised by the Treasury,

the team found out about it in an unusual way.

They came across Winifred while working another much older case,

which dates back 60 years.

This is the estate of John Henry Edward Pinner.

This came through a firm of solicitors

who found this estate from 1951 that had never successfully been dealt with.

John Henry Pinner died in December 1951

in the London suburb of Southall.

He didn't leave a will. His case was referred to different solicitors

until Dom and his team were called in to help trace relatives.

In all the years doing the job, I've never had an estate where the deceased died so long ago.

The two cases are connected because John Pinner is Winifred's uncle.

Her mother, Adeline Bergum, was John's sister.

The first thing Alan and the team learned

was that John had been survived by his widow Laurie.

Normally, a wife would be a beneficiary to an estate.

But in the 1950s, when he died, the inheritance laws were very different.

Because he had no children, his wife was only entitled to a percentage of his estate.

And his surviving siblings, namely five sisters,

were also entitled to a share under the intestacy laws of the time.

The law was brought in after the First World War with the aim of protecting widows

whose husbands hadn't left a will.

It guaranteed widows like Laurie would inherit the estate up to a maximum of £1,000.

There's an expectation that husbands should look after their wives.

So where, under a will,

a husband hasn't protected his wife,

that seems to be quite problematic.

But because the law was capped at £1,000, it didn't keep up with the cost of living.

And the government began to realise it needed changing.

There was a real concern that it was outdated.

The primary reason why the law was outdated was because of inflation.

That was the number one reason.

£1,000 really wasn't covering most estates.

Because John Pinner owned a house, by the time he died in 1951,

his estate would have been worth considerably more than £1,000.

But, thanks to the law, it was out of reach of his wife Laurie,

and would instead go to his five sisters,

all because he hadn't left a will.

John might not have written a will because he assumed she'd get everything.

A lot of research shows that people don't make wills, don't write them,

because they just assume that they're going to get everything.

In 1952, the law was changed to allow widows without children

to inherit up to £20,000 of their husband's estates.

It was too late for Laurie.

But all was not lost because she was allowed to carry on living in her and John's home.

This meant the full estate couldn't be passed on to John's sisters

until Laurie died in 1976.

But, by then, John's sisters had also died.

Because no other relatives could be found, the case lay unsolved for decades,

until the heir hunters were asked to look into it.

It is a little bit more involved than it normally would be,

simply because, obviously, I wasn't aware of what the intestacy laws were in 1951.

Nonetheless, Alan and the team set about finding descendants from John's five sisters.

Adeline, Elizabeth, Grace, Jane and Martha.

They found that all five had children,

some of whom had children of their own.

And this led them to ten heirs.

But it was when they were looking into John's sister Adeline that they made a surprise discovery.

They saw that she had married a John Bergum

and had a daughter called Winifred.

Winifred is John Pinner's niece.

And, therefore, heir to her mother's share of his estate.

This lady, Winifred Bergum, married Osmund Moth.

She was a beneficiary on the job we were working on.

However, a check of the death records revealed that Winifred had also died

-without leaving a will.

-Ah-hah.

Because of this, the case has now turned into a more complex investigation.

I've worked out that she's become a Treasury job in herself,

-which is why I couldn't find her the last few years.

-OK.

She hasn't left a very large estate but we've got to actually work

her father's side of the family now as well.

Just looked for the children and the children of the children in the way we'd normally work.

We were having to really trawl through all the legal documents,

all the probate records, letters of administration, wills,

to see where these people are leaving their money to.

The team believe they have traced most of John Pinner's heirs

but Winifred's estate remains unsolved.

Because it's been published on the Treasury's list of unclaimed estates,

the team know they're competing against rival firms.

What it means is, we're going to have to be more urgent,

make sure we get all the letters out today to everybody.

Really work this up as quick as possible.

Make sure that we sign all the beneficiaries before the opposition.

Heir hunters trace the relatives of people who have died without leaving a will.

Sometimes, the journey to find heirs can be a long one

with many unexpected twists and turns.

And that was the case with Thomas Kennar

when his estate was investigated by heir hunting firm Hoopers.

It was quite unusual, with unique obstacles

and hurdles to overcome.

Thomas Kennar, known to his friends as Ken,

died in August 2010 at his home in Brighton.

He lived a quiet life, but his friend Peter Rogers remembers him well.

Well, I met Ken, as he's known to me,

about 35 years ago.

It was in connection with the RAF Association.

Ken's connection with the RAF stretched back to the Second World War.

Although he was demobbed in 1945,

he was keen to join his local association.

He was a popular club member and was known by an affectionate nickname.

He became famous because he'd be the only member in here most nights

with one can. And I used to describe him as Ken the Can.

Well, we'd chat generally

about everyday items.

On rare occasions, we might mention the RAF.

And he did say that he'd been to Canada

during the war for RAF training.

He probably went as a pilot to start with.

But I seem to vaguely remember him saying that he ended up as a navigator.

Peter remembers that, as the years went by, Ken became more solitary.

He was quite a sociable mixing sort of fella.

But in the later part of his life, he got a little bit more of a recluse.

He didn't like crowds.

He was a quiet fella in the end.

For heir hunter Mike Tringham, the case of Thomas or Ken Kennar

seemed to be nothing unusual at the start of the investigation.

All they had to start with was a name and date of death.

Well, we never know what the value of any estate is

that we investigate when we start out.

One of the first things we look at is to see whether there is a property involved.

If there is a property involved, we know there's going to be some value.

Heir hunters often start cases with very little information.

The first thing they have to do is to establish whether or not a person was married and had children

because, as next of kin, they would be the first to inherit.

A death certificate is a very useful document to us

because it gives us a few snippets of information, hopefully,

about the deceased. The deceased's death certificate didn't tell us a great deal.

It gave us his date of birth and his place of birth and his occupation.

He was retired. But that was about it.

Ken's birth certificate gave the heir hunters a little more information.

They learned the names of his parents.

Thomas Kennar senior and Helena Vile.

From there, it didn't take them long to find their marriage certificate.

The investigation was underway.

Because Ken owned his house, the heir hunters thought

his estate might be worth as much as £½ million.

So Mike needed his team to move very quickly.

There was likely to be competition from rival firms because there was so much money involved.

He sent his team out to speak to Ken's neighbours in the hope of finding a lead.

When we made enquiries, there wasn't a lot of information.

The usual thing about the deceased being a private person,

keeping himself to himself.

The heir hunters turned their attention to Ken's mother, Helena Vile.

They discovered she had a brother and sister, Ella and William.

If they had children, they would be entitled to a share of Ken's estate.

She had two siblings, a brother and a sister.

But, unfortunately, neither of them had any family

and died without issue.

The case now rested on whether or not Ken's father, Thomas Kennar senior,

had siblings.

If he was an only child, there would be no one to inherit.

The estate would go to the Treasury.

Having eliminated the maternal side of the family,

we concentrated our efforts into the paternal family,

the father and his family.

We soon discovered he was from a large family, one of twelve.

But typically with Victorian families,

many of them died either in infancy

or without issue.

So Mike and his team faced a huge task of finding living descendants from Thomas's siblings.

And it was while they were looking into Thomas's family

they discovered something remarkable about the man himself.

Thomas Kennar senior was born in Brixham in Devon in October 1876.

He was the son of a fisherman, another Thomas Kennar.

It's possible that Thomas first went to sea aged 11 on his father's deep-sea trawler.

But Thomas was destined to sail further than the fishing coast off Devon.

He joined the navy at 16 and, a few years later, earned his place

on one of the most historic expeditions of the 20th century.

The heroic age of Antarctic exploration was a period of about 20 years.

at the start of the 20th century when numerous nations

sent expeditions down to the Antarctic region to answer the great scientific questions of the day.

At the turn of the last century, very little was known about Antarctica.

And Britain became part of an international project

sending explorers and scientists to the region.

They're all remarkable stories as people struggled to bring back

the scientific data and explore the last unknown part of our planet.

Numerous nations pledged to share their findings.

But there was also a competitive side.

Everyone wanted to be first.

It was the space race of its era.

It was a race to the Antarctic to carry out the scientific research that was being demanded

and come up with answers to the big questions people wanted answered.

In 1901, legendary explorer Robert Scott set sail on board the Discovery,

launching the first British Antarctic expedition.

The Discovery expedition set sail from the Isle of Wight.

Among the 40-strong crew of explorers, scientists and sailors

was petty officer Thomas Kennar.

The men who sailed into the unknown would not see home for another three years.

They were very tough men indeed. All sailors in that period were tough.

Sailing around the oceans in sailing vessels was a very, very tough thing.

Felicity Aston is a modern-day explorer

and was the first woman to ski across Antarctica alone.

She has a rare insight into the harsh conditions Thomas would have faced.

I remember when I got dropped off by the plane,

the thought of those early expeditions were very much in my mind.

I think it's the closest I've ever come to really appreciating

how cut off and how vulnerable they must've felt,

how far from help they must have been at that time.

I think I got a greater understanding of just how isolated they were.

Life in the freezing conditions was unbearably hard and dangerous.

And it was Thomas's job to help maintain safety by keeping the men in line.

Kennar was one of five or six petty officers on Discovery.

He had a fairly important role in maintaining lower-deck discipline and morale.

Thomas Kennar's career was firmly at sea.

But this way of life would later have lasting impact

on his young son Ken.

There are still thousands of unclaimed estates in the UK.

In Scotland, these are dealt with by the Queen's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer.

Or QLTR.

In England ad Wales, estates are handled by the Treasury's Bona Vacantia Division.

The Bona Vacantia unclaimed list is steadily reducing and we're pleased with that.

We think it's because a lot more people

are involved in tracing now because there's more interest in the work.

Today, we're focusing on two cases that stumped the heir hunters.

Could you be the heir they've been looking for?

Could you be in line for an unexpected windfall?

First, is the case of Pattie Fenella Lawson

who died in the Yorkshire town of Halifax on the 25th May 1996.

Heir hunters have tried hard to trace her relatives

but they've been unable to establish who her father was.

Did you know Pattie or her father?

Do you have any information that might solve this 16-year-old case?

Next, can you shed any light on the case of Robert Alexander Craig Baillie

who died in Glasgow in Scotland on the 25th November 2005?

Robert's estate was advertised by the QLTR in Scotland

and is valued at around £6,000.

He was born in Glasgow on the 13th September 1929.

Before he died in the city's Victoria Infirmary,

he lived at Cathkinview Place. Were you a neighbour?

Perhaps you're the heir the QLTR have been waiting to hear from.

Both Robert and Pattie's estates remain unclaimed.

If no one comes forward, their money will go to the government.

To gain information about Bona Vacantia estates' work,

the first port of call would be the Bona Vacantia's dedicated

website, it has a lot of information on it for people and guidance.

Do you have any clues that could help solve the cases

of Robert Alexander Craig Baillie

or Pattie Fenella Lawson?

If so, you could have a windfall coming your way.

In London, heir hunters Fraser and Fraser

are in the highly unusual position of working two connected cases.

They're trying to find living descendants of Winifred Moth who died in 2008.

And they are hoping that this will help them wrap up the estate

of her uncle John Pinner who also died without leaving a will

way back in 1951.

I've never dealt with anything like this matter.

The fact that the deceased is 1951 makes this much more challenging and much more interesting.

Winifred's estate was advertised by the Treasury Solicitor,

so the team is competing against rival firms to be the first to find and sign up heirs.

They're working flat out to try and trace her relatives.

The research has gone really well.

However, there are clearly several large gaps in the family tree.

Winifred Moth died just a few months

before her 100th birthday in Colchester.

She spent nearly 30 years in care homes.

When she first moved into one, she was well known for being an animal lover.

She used to live in a village called Jaywick.

I know she had a lot of cats down there.

It wasn't one or two cats. Probably 20 or 30 cats. She was a cat lover.

Winifred was a private person who revealed very little about herself.

She never mentioned any family to us.

We didn't push the subject either.

She was happy where she'd been and where she was.

That was about all she would let us know.

She never had no brothers or sisters come down and visit her or cousins

or anything like that.

She didn't let it affect her. She liked talking to the staff and other visitors. She was friendly.

On her 99th birthday, her carers and fellow residents threw her a special party.

We organised an entertainer to come and sing songs and they all joined in.

The cook made her a birthday cake with her name on, which she thought was fantastic.

She really enjoyed herself.

In the office, the team is focusing on Winifred's father's side of the family.

Her father, John Bergum, had eight brothers and sisters.

They've established that one of them, Frederick, had seven children of his own.

Two of John's sisters died in childhood.

And another, Blossom, married but didn't have children.

Researcher Dan has been looking into John's sister Elizabeth who married a Peter Leppington.

Managed to find that he had two children, Peter and David.

And Peter passed away in 2001.

As Peter died without having children,

his brother David is the last hope of heirs on the Leppington side.

The other child of Peter, David, he has died a bachelor.

Having ruled out any heirs from Winifred's aunt Elizabeth,

Dan turns his attention to her uncle William Henry Bergum.

Yep, got him on the 1911 census in Warrington as a drummer in the army.

And we've got him dying on the 18th of April 1916.

The census doesn't show whether William was married or had children.

So instead the team turn to his army service record.

Wife was a Sarah. We can't work out her surname at the moment. It looks like he was married

in November 1898 in Ireland, which is why we can't find him on the census.

William Henry Bergum was born in 1879 in Shoreditch in London.

And enlisted in the British Army had the shockingly young age of 15.

At around this time, the army was enjoying real popularity

following successful military campaigns.

We're never going to know why he particularly enlisted.

But it may be that it was simply an option

when there were no other options available to him.

There was always a correlation in the Victorian period

between the rate of unemployment and enlistment.

We're talking now about the 1880s, the 1890s,

imperialism is at its height.

For many, it could be an attractive adventure. Er, it's...

Also, the army was becoming more respectable.

His records say he was a drummer boy.

That didn't mean he played the instrument but rather he was a musician in the army.

Cleary, at one level, he's there to play the bugle.

But in war, on active service, traditionally the musicians do have a number of other roles.

They have been used as stretcher bearers for example.

It wasn't long after William joined the army that he saw active service.

He was sent to South Africa in 1902 during the last few months of the Second Boer War.

Fighting had broken out in 1899 and claimed the lives of more than 65,000 people.

It was a conflict between the British Empire and the two Boer republics.

The British wanted control. It was a brutal war.

Clearly, you would have expected the war to finish very quickly with a triumph.

And it didn't. It lasted a long time.

William arrived five months before peace was settled

and spent his time in watch-out posts called blockhouses.

By the end of the war, these blockhouses are linked by telephone, most of them.

They've got electric searchlights so you can beam it across the wire at night.

It's a very elaborate system by the end of the war.

But they're about 1,000 yards apart.

So these six-seven men are sat in one

and then 1,000 yards away there's another six or seven men.

So there's very little opportunity for recreation.

It's a very boring mundane tedious business.

For William and his comrades, it wasn't the enemy who claimed the most lives.

Even if we consider Bergum's battalion, which was the 4th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade,

it's only their for five months, it has three men killed or die of wounds,

eight are wounded but sixteen die of disease.

The real killer both in the camps and for the British Army is enteric, which we would now call typhoid.

Back home, it wasn't a popular war, even though it was a British victory.

It was a success because you had achieved what you had set out to do.

But it had been very costly to do it.

But lessons were learned from the conflict,

from how to deal with an opponent who has gun power

to how to treat disease out in the field.

These lessons were to prepare the army for even greater challenges ahead.

There are major reforms of the administration of the British Army,

the organisation of the army, after 1902.

And, indeed, I think it is the case that the relatively small

British Expeditionary Force that went overseas in August 1914,

including William Bergum, is probably the best army that Britain's ever able to out into the field.

William had left the army in 1906

but was called up as a reservist in 1914

and served with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

The record shows that when he did go back to France, he was a sergeant.

Tragically, like hundreds of thousands of others, William didn't see the end of the First World War.

It's thought he was injured in France and brought back to Liverpool where he died.

He was 37.

Although he died in 1916, he still gets the three medals.

He got the 1914-15 Star because he'd served overseas.

Then, automatically, a serviceman in the First World War

gets the War Medal and the Victory Medal.

We call them Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, if you have all three.

In the office, the team is focusing on Winifred's father's side of the family.

Her father, John Bergum, had eight brothers and sisters.

They now know one of the brothers, William, died during the First World war.

But they're trying to establish if he and his wife Sarah had children.

Alan has been checking cemetery records in Liverpool but they haven't come up with any answers.

In this case, because the guy was in the army,

he's been buried in an army section. It hasn't given us a great deal.

It confirmed it's the right guy because it's the right age.

By checking his wife Sarah's death certificate, the team make a breakthrough.

On Sarah's Death, she had a daughter Mary F Cannon.

William and Sarah's daughter Mary is the lead they were hoping for.

But it's not long before their hopes are dashed again.

Problem is, in 1953, they all emigrate to Canada.

Because the team reckon Winifred's estate is only worth £5,000,

they cannot afford to take their research to Canada.

So, for the time being, they're turning their attention to other parts of the tree.

We're really keen at this point to get the family information because we're hoping that all these gaps,

these people with common names we've not been able to find,

we're really hoping that, once the family get in contact,

we'll be able to pick their brains and actually fill in all these gaps.

Fortunately, the team is having a little more luck

as they look into William's bother and Winifred's uncle Harry Bergum.

We found a family tree online that the family told us about.

A lot of the information we know about is missing.

But it does make interesting reading because it mentions that there's a child

from one of Henry's supposed marriages that we can't find.

The family tree has been put online by an amateur genealogist in the family.

These can be useful for heir hunters as long as they are accurate.

Looking at the online tree, the team believes it's found Winifred's cousin once removed.

And Dom gets straight on the phone.

I'm glad you said that. You've confirmed we're talking about the same family.

Dom believes the woman he's speaking to is an heir.

But it turns out he's not the first heir hunter to contact her.

Bye-bye.

She says she's been contacted by one of our opposition.

I'm not entirely surprised because we originally wouldn't have looked at this matter anyway.

What it means is, we'll have to be more urgent,

make sure we get all the letters out today to everybody.

Work this up as quickly as possible, make sure that we sign all the beneficiaries before the opposition.

Fortunately, the team is already ahead on the maternal side of the tree.

Winifred's mother, Adeline Pinner,

was one of John Pinner's sisters.

Another of their siblings, Elizabeth, married an Ernest Hall.

And his grandson Brian is an heir to both Winifred's £5,000 estate

and John's estate, which is valued between 35 and £60,000.

Dom has spoken to him and he has agreed that the company will help him

make a claim to part of Winifred's estate.

I was sort of flabbergasted

and shocked that this sort of thing would happen to somebody like me.

I remember visiting my grandmother with my mother

when she lived at Potters Bar near South Mimms.

I lost contact with her after that.

Brian is one of many heirs to the two estates,

so he won't be in line for a large payout.

But, even so, for him, it's a reminder of the importance of family.

My immediate family is important to me because, when you get married and you have children and that,

life is all about families.

After several weeks of research, the team has finally managed to crack the cases

of both Winifred Moth and her uncle John Pinner.

We've been successful in identifying grants for people on the top line.

They've signed up 28 heirs to the two estates.

It's been one of the most unusual cases they've ever worked.

But it has finally solved a 60-year-old puzzle of who should inherit John Pinner's estate.

I'm not surprised in the least that this was never successfully dealt with.

Clearly, it's one of those ones that's got missed for many years.

And by reviewing John Pinner's case, the heir hunters have also solved

the mystery of who should inherit from his niece Winifred Moth.

Her estate may have been small but she does leave a lasting impression on those who knew her.

It was quite a shock to me when I did hear that she passed away.

It was quite a shock to all of us

because she was quite dearly loved by a lot of people.

Heir hunting firm Hoopers were looking into the case of Thomas Kennar, known as Ken to his friends.

He was an only child who never married or had children.

He was a retired telephone engineer

but his social life centred around his wartime connection

with the RAF.

He was a regular visitor at his local Royal Air Force Association.

People there have fond memories of him.

He came in quietly, had his drink, we had a little chat.

We spoke about his private life round where he lives

because he had a cat.

The cat was known as Squeaky.

And Squeaky, I think, was a bit more of his life than round here.

He often spoke about the cat.

But, other than that, he was just a quiet bloke.

The key to solving the case centred on Ken's father Thomas Kennar.

He took part in explorer Robert Scott's

historic Antarctic expedition in 1901.

There were thousands of applicants in the Royal Navy. A lot of volunteers wanted to go on this expedition.

You needed to be a good sailor, or good at your scientific work,

or whatever your discipline was going to be,

you need to bring skills to the expedition.

Until the heroic age of Antarctic exploration,

very little was known about the area.

And Ken's father Thomas would have played his part supporting

the explorers and scientists on sledging trips.

He was part of a team headed by geologist Hartley Ferrar

who uncovered fossils in the freezing conditions,

which proved the Antarctic had had a warmer or even tropical climate millions of years before.

Out there, I often thought about the early explorers

because it was the centenary while I was in Antarctica

of those first men who got to the South Pole.

And, although lots of things have changed, so the kit that we use,

perhaps our attitudes have also changed a lot,

it's still the same cold, the same mountains, the same weather,

the same sounds that you're experiencing.

And so I think it is possible to try and put yourself in their shoes a little bit.

Thomas was also known for his sense of humour.

And was a regular contributor to the ship's newspaper.

One account described how the crew caught emperor penguins.

Kennar makes some very wry comments in the South Polar Times

about people were supposed to be hitting penguins over the head and ended up

hitting him on the knee instead with their sticks.

And this really wasn't very good form.

The Victorian scientific findings still have lasting effect today.

They made a breakthrough in nearly every branch of science.

This was the first time people started to enquire into Earth's systems, Earth's ecosystems

and how they work. The data that these expeditions brought back

were an important part in starting people thinking and recognising

that what happened in an Antarctic storm could influence the weather in the United Kingdom.

People had no idea about that at the time.

And Thomas left his mark in another way too.

A small area of Antarctica has been named the Kennar Valley.

Three years after returning from the Discovery expedition,

Thomas married Helena Vile.

Tragedy struck the family in 1938 when 15-year-old Ken's mother Helena died.

He was sent to live her sister Ella Vile and her husband Gilbert Wilson.

Their house in Russell Square in Brighton became Ken's home for the next 72 years.

Ken's father, Thomas, served in the Second World War.

Tragically dying of heat exhaustion on board the Ninella off the coast of Karachi in 1945.

He had spent most of his life on board ships and it seems fitting

that the 69-year-old Thomas was buried at sea.

For heir hunter Mike,

solving this case rested on what happened to Thomas's brothers and sisters.

Taking in the disappointment of the maternal family dying out,

we were relieved to discover that the deceased's father was one of 12.

And there were a number of branches of the paternal family

that survived and had living descendants.

Of Thomas's eleven brothers and sisters, eight reached adulthood.

Five - Alfred, George, Harry, John and Ellen had children.

But Alfred's only child died during the Second World War without having children.

Concentrating on the remaining four led them to 25 heirs,

including Angela who is Ken's first cousin once removed.

Angela never met Ken but she does have memories of her parents meeting up with him 30 years ago.

Mt father went down to Brighton and met him with my mother.

And they thought he was very nice, they didn't have a lot in common.

There would probably be no further contact.

I believe we had Christmas cards for a few years and then they just fizzled out.

But Angela is proud of her great-uncle's part in Scott's Discovery expedition.

Aunt Bessy and Uncle Arthur used to talk about it and Auntie May and my father.

It's been a family legend. It's just always known.

I'm extremely proud to be related to Thomas Kennar senior,

after all, he was one of the true Victorians.

For Mike and his team, the hard work was done.

But there was another twist.

His flat, shortly after he had died,

obviously became empty and was taken over by squatters.

We do find this is an increasing problem

with some of the estates that we deal with when there is a property involved.

The delay means the estate might not be finalised for another year.

But the 25 heirs can look forward to a share of somewhere in the region of £400,000.

I'm extremely grateful, it will make a big difference to me.

It might not be a vast amount but it will give me some peace of mind.

I think, for my son, it's especially important to know where he comes from.

When I look at photographs of Thomas Kennar senior,

I can see a real resemblance to my son Ted.

But it's not just about the money for Angela and her son.

The real journey has just begun.

Yes, it's been very interesting finding some of the relatives

I didn't know I had and reconnecting with ones where we'd drifted apart

to where it got to the stage where it was just Christmas cards.

So it's lovely to get to know them all again.

And we're looking forward to meeting up in future.

If you would like advice about building a family tree or making a will,

go to bbc.co.uk/heirhunters

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd