Konieczny/Wilkinson Heir Hunters

Heir Hunters make their living tracing people

who are entitled to money from relatives who have died

without leaving a will.

Often, the rightful beneficiaries have no idea

they are in line to inherit.

The amount of volumes means it's a needle in a haystack.

Their work involves detailed research.

14 children - 11 living, three dead.

Basically, we've got quite a lot of work to do at the moment.

And can often shed new light on family histories.

You could take a tea chest.

That was it.

But most of all, it's about giving news of an unexpected windfall.

Could the Heir Hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up - the remarkable story

of one of Britain's wartime meteorologists.

Largely, the weather later today, the weather for tomorrow,

was being generated in his head.

And one heir uncovers the missing pieces of her family tree.

I was just totally amazed, I couldn't believe it.

As far as I was concerned,

my mum was the last surviving relative on her side.

Plus how you could be entitled to inherit money

sat in unclaimed estates.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

It's Friday afternoon at heir hunting company Fraser & Fraser,

and the entire research team are busy trying to track down

beneficiaries on a case involving a huge family tree.

There's 14 children - 11 living, three dead.

So basically I've got quite a lot of work to do at the moment.

The team are responding to a tip-off that has just come in

about the case of Edith Konieczny who died without leaving a will.

They are straight in at the deep end,

especially as the team are up against a rather important deadline.

We are under a lot more pressure than usual on this one

because we have to get it done by 3.30.

Usually, we just carry on until we're finished.

We have to get it done because Grimble's retiring today

so I think there's a big drink, so we need to get it done.

After 32 years on the job,

it's veteran case manager Grimble's last day in the office,

and later, the team are planning to give him a proper send-off.

But for now, senior researcher Ewart Lindsay

is focused on the job at hand.

We've got quite a lot of staff working on it.

It's all hands on deck, to get it sorted.

Edith Konieczny died on 20 December, 2011,

aged 87 at her home in Carterton, Oxfordshire.

Hairdressers Lesley and Trish looked forward

to her regular visit to the salon.

I was really sad to find out that she'd passed away

and doubly sad that she's got no relatives.

We did go to Edith's funeral and it was quite sad

because there was just a handful of people there.

I think she did live through her husband and when her husband died,

I think she became very lonely and wasn't as outgoing as he was.

The light went out a little bit then.

After her husband Joseph passed away,

her weekly trip to the hairdresser

was as much contact with the outside world as Edith had.

She was quite a lonely lady

and I think we were her only port of call once a week,

so we used to make a bit of a fuss of her and she'd have her tea

a certain way and want her hair shampooed and rinsed a certain way,

which we tried to do.

Even into her old age, Edith was a glamorous woman.

Mrs K was very stylish.

She wasn't afraid to express her sense of fashion.

She would wear very loud colours if she wanted to,

usually with a matching hat.

Ranging from woolly hats to bandannas.

You name it, she would wear it.

She was a pioneer in the fashion stakes, put it that way.

And she was ladylike in more than just her dress sense.

To those who knew her,

Edith's polite, courteous manner will not be forgotten.

She always made a point of coming to the desk and saying,

"Thank you, that was very nice. Goodbye, see you next week."

That's how I will remember Mrs K.

Back in the office, case manager Simon Mills and the team

are making progress finding heirs to Edith's estate.

As she owned her own property,

they think the case could be worth a lot of money.

It's thought to be worth about 250, I think.

They've got hold of her death certificate and from that,

they've established that Edith died a widow.

Searches also show that she had no children.

I did Edith Konieczny.

That one came up. It was birth there so I went for it.

The team must now look to the wider family tree

to see if Edith's parents had brothers or sisters.

If any of these uncles or aunts of Edith had children,

they would be heirs to Edith's estate.

There's 11, I think, aunts and uncles on the maternal side

and four on the paternal.

And although it's only just landed on his desk, case manager Simon

is worried that another rival firm

may have been given the same tip-off.

It's a bit worrying at the moment because we don't know

if we're behind by a long way on the job or not.

It doesn't sound like it after talking to the neighbours,

but you don't know until you speak to an heir.

If the heirs have already been contacted,

all the team's hard work may be for nothing.

I've got the whole office working on it and for all we know,

we're weeks behind at the moment,

so we need to find an heir as soon as possible.

The office has been split into teams to try to work

both sides of the tree at once.

Just try to get someone up-to-date.

Already, Isha's made a breakthrough and thinks she may have found

a cousin on the maternal side of the family, but the team won't be able

to confirm this until they can speak to her on the phone.

I've just found what I believe to be a first cousin of the deceased.

Ewart's just going to ring them.

It's an important call, as speaking to this potential heir

will hopefully also let them know if they're behind the competition.

PHONE RINGS

'Hello. Your call cannot be taken at the moment

-'so please leave your message after the tone.'

-She's not in.

We'll need to get someone on the phone

just to find out if this has been worked before.

Having hit a brick wall with the maternal side,

the focus is now on Edith's father's family.

Gareth is trying to track down the records of Edith's paternal aunts.

I don't know if this is right, I can't quite work it out

but I think she's married Henry Single.

And while the rest of the team might have found some potential heirs,

they're struggling with current contact details.

Me and Simon are concentrating on the paternal side,

and Simon's got a few up-to-date but they're not on the phone.

We're still trying to find one on the phone at the moment.

Getting close but it's just the last couple of years

they seem to have moved away.

Still trying.

Meanwhile, Isha has been working hard tracing children

of the 11 aunts and uncles on the maternal side.

She's found details of another potential heir

the only other first cousin still living

on Edith's mother's side of the tree.

Ewart gives her a call.

PHONE RINGS

But once again, there's no answer.

PHONE RINGS

But Ewart's constant phone bashing isn't all in vain.

The team have just discovered that the case may be worth

more than they thought,

as apparently Edith owned not one property but two.

Simon gives boss Neil a call to fill him in.

Ewart spoke to a neighbour. She owned a £250,000 house

and they had another property as well down in Dorset.

We were the first people to call the neighbour.

We can't get through to any heirs.

Suddenly, the pressure is really on.

The team now know that the case is worth well in excess of £250,000.

As they work for a percentage of the estate,

that could make this a very lucrative job.

With the 3.30 deadline looming, frustrations are beginning to show.

You'd think I wouldn't have trouble

finding people with the surname Treblecock, would you?

PHONE RINGS

Nobody is answering, nobody is answering.

Any more addresses, numbers?

But Ewart's bad luck continues.

PHONE RINGS

Also not in.

At last, it seems Simon and Mike might have made

a breakthrough on the paternal side.

How do you get Roger Webb?

Of all the names we've gone through, you get Webb.

September.

This one's got initials.

Pencil, I'll put it on in pencil. What's the address?

It looks like they might have found a cousin once removed

but Ewart needs to speak to him to confirm.

Mike's not sure because he's got an initial he shouldn't have

but he's in the right area. Born in the right quarter.

He's worth a go because we haven't got anything else.

Is this Ewart's chance to finally speak to an heir?

PHONE RINGS

It seems Roger Webb isn't answering

but Simon has managed to trace his brother.

Stuart Webb, yeah?

Number?

Ewart's straight on the phone.

He's calling a paternal cousin once removed.

We just tried to speak to his brother

but he didn't answer the phone.

Hopefully, we think they're right because they married sisters

so even though they seem to have acquired initials

which they shouldn't really have, it looks good,

but sounds like it's another that hasn't answered.

Finally, with the office about to close

for Grimble's retirement party,

the team have to call it a day.

We can't really do any more.

We've got quite a few numbers, nobody is answering, nobody's in.

Or the numbers aren't correct.

Having made no headway in the office, first thing next week

they're going to try and make some progress on the ground.

There's an address in Harpenden.

I'm going to go straight there on Monday.

If we actually get to speak to one heir, and they say,

"We haven't been called up by any other company,"

we'll know we're in.

Let's just hope he hasn't been contacted already

or it will have been a waste of everyone's time, really.

But for now, it's time to say goodbye to Grimble.

Since joining the company in 1980,

he's become one of the most senior and respected figures

in the business and has worked on some of their highest-value cases.

We have a few little gifts and something that, David,

you ask me every month whether I've got it.

-This time I have.

-A P45?

Lovely, I'll drink to that!

It's there for you to keep.

Enjoy your happy retirement.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

After more than 30 years on the job, for Grimble, it's the end of an era.

I'm looking forward to my retirement. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

But for the rest of the team, it will be business as usual on Monday

and that will mean trying to track down

the elusive heirs of Edith Konieczny.

And when Ewart discovers the competition...

It looks like they've actually written to people.

I don't think they've actually gone to make any visits.

..he still refuses to give up.

I'm quietly confident I'll sign these two today.

Sometimes successful heir hunting is all about taking a gamble.

In the case of Colin Wilkinson, the Heir Hunters had no choice

but to do exactly that.

You're working two sides of a family

and putting resources into locating them which could all be for nothing.

Colin Charles Wilkinson passed away on 17th December, 2011,

aged 83, in Noseley near Liverpool.

Neighbours Tony and Norma Hughes remember him

as a very smartly dressed man.

Little and bald. Very, very spotless.

Very spotless. And his shoes used to shine.

Always well groomed, always well-dressed.

A very smartly dressed gentleman.

Always walked upright.

He was one of them people, a very happy person walking along.

You'd say hello to him and he'd say hello back.

Colin's dapper appearance certainly made an impression.

He was a character, I think.

You could put him down right as a character.

One remarkable thing about him which I can't forget

was he always wore different coloured shoes.

Never black or brown. Always green, red or blue.

But he was a very private man

and remained a mystery to those around him.

I always said to myself,

he must have been in the theatre at some stage, or something like that.

Although for 25 years, they regularly bumped into each other

at the station, neighbour Dorothy Crosland

never knew what he did for a living.

Every Saturday, we'd get the same train

and we just used to gab but he never said where he was going.

Where he was going, Manchester, but apart from that,

what he did, he never, ever mentioned.

When case manager Ben Cornish started investigating the estate

of Colin Wilkinson, it looked like

it was going to be very straightforward.

Because it was a private referral,

rather than one advertised by the Treasury solicitor as unclaimed,

Ben had a whole lot more information to go on.

When I get cases through, we have just the date of death,

an area of death and a name, but in this case, we had a name,

date of birth, date of death and an address.

He also had a good idea of the amount of money involved.

What we usually go on, that indicates to us if there is value,

was whether the deceased owned his property.

We knew that it was a private tenancy

so there was no obvious signs of money there, initially.

Because Colin's estate was relatively low value,

Ben needed to find heirs quickly and easily.

Generally in my experience,

cases like this are approximately around £15,000.

If there's near kin involved, it's not too resource heavy.

Hoping that the heirs would be close family, Ben's first task

was to establish whether Colin had a wife or children who might be entitled.

Once we had the correct birth record,

we knew that he was born in West Derby.

We knew that he passed away in West Derby

so the next thing to do was to look for a marriage,

but we couldn't find any marriage for the deceased which suggests

to us that he was never married and probably didn't have any children.

The next step was to look for siblings.

I initially made some enquiries with the neighbours.

One said that there was a sister

and they didn't have any more details.

The neighbour also had some worrying news.

They said that a guy was looking for the deceased

in regards to the sister but I wasn't sure what that meant.

It wasn't very clear, they didn't really know,

so I took that as being

there was potential competition on this estate.

It seemed that a rival firm had also received the same tip-off

and were working the same ground.

Ben now had to race against them to reach heirs first.

Obviously, we needed to speed up the research

to try and find the next of kin.

The search now focused on trying to find Colin's sister.

In order to trace her, Ben first had to trace Colin's parents.

His birth certificate showed that his parents were Ellen Mary McEvoy

and Charles William Wilkinson.

Charles was born in West Derby in 1888.

When Charles married Ellen in Lancaster in July 1918,

he was a soldier in the Canadian Army.

Historian Taff Gillingham has uncovered his military records.

It's interesting that he comes from Liverpool

and it's interesting as well that he actually enlists

in the Canadian Army in Montreal. Both of those places are ports.

It says, "What is your trade or calling," when he joined the Army.

It says, "steward."

That tells us that he was a steward on a cross-Atlantic ferry.

Charles was sailing back and forth across the Atlantic

and after the outbreak of war,

he chose to enlist not in his own country but in Canada.

I suspect that he was quite shrewd because the Canadians were paid

a dollar a day plus ten cents field allowance when they got to France,

whereas the British soldier would only have got a shilling a day.

During his time in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,

Charles was involved in one of the most notorious conflicts

of the Second World War.

They make a major contribution to the third Battle of Ypres,

the Battle of Passchendaele.

Two whole British army corps have been smashed trying to get there.

The Anzac core of Australians and New Zealanders, they've been smashed

to pieces as well, and finally the last unit left is the Canadian Corps.

After five months of trench warfare in horrific conditions,

heavy rainfall had turned the battlefield into a swamp

and made the use of tanks impossible.

By the time the Canadians are committed,

the fighting at Passchendaele's been going on for months

and it's been a real slog.

The conditions have been appallingly bad.

It's been mud, it's been rain.

By the time they actually get to the fighting towards the end,

the conditions are not quite so bad

but it's still a very, very nasty place.

It's uphill nearly all the way

and the Germans have got perfect observation over them

and it was not the best place to be at the end of 1917.

But the Canadians weren't deterred by the terrain

and after a successful assault to capture Passchendaele Ridge,

they brought an end to the long drawn battle.

Charles survived the war and shortly before he was discharged

from the Army, he married Colin's mother, Ellen Mary McEvoy.

We know that we have a birth record of the deceased.

We know the father's name was Wilkinson,

the mother's name was McEvoy.

We then have a look to see if there are any marriages

of Wilkinson to McEvoy and we did find one in the area.

From that point, we will then search for any siblings

and there was one that popped up - an elder sister called Kathleen.

This was great news.

If Colin's sister Kathleen was still alive,

she would be set to inherit his whole estate.

All Ben had to do now was find out what had happened to her.

First, we would look to see if she had maybe died in infancy.

She hadn't. We also try to look for a spinster death,

but we couldn't locate that either.

His next challenge was to try to find a marriage certificate

for Kathleen, but he had a mountain to climb.

In this particular case,

there were far too many records to look at every one of them.

Without knowing where to start,

he seemed to be facing an impossible task.

It's going to be difficult to find her if she married out of the area.

The sheer amount of volumes means it's a needle in a haystack.

Things were not turning out to be as simple as Ben had hoped.

As he dug deeper into the mystery of Kathleen,

he was forced to take a huge gamble.

You're working two sides of a family,

putting resources into actually locating them,

which can all be for nothing.

Despite the efforts of the Heir Hunters,

there are still thousands of unclaimed estates in the UK.

In Scotland, these are dealt with

by the Queen and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer, or QLTR.

In England and Wales, estates are handled

by the Treasury's Bona Vacantia division.

The Bona Vacantia division has its own dedicated website

and I'd encourage anyone interested in this field of work

or feels they have a claim to go to that website first.

Today we're focusing on two cases that were both advertised

by the QLTR and are yet to be solved by the Heir Hunters.

Could you be the beneficiary they are looking for?

Could you be about to inherit some money from a long-lost relative?

First is the case of Susan Robertson.

Susan died in Scotland in 2005.

Could you be related to her?

She was born on 7 January 1913 and when she died aged 92,

she was living on Constitution Street in Edinburgh.

Were you a neighbour?

Perhaps you are an heir who is entitled to a share of her estate

which is worth over £11,000.

Next, can you shed any light on the case of Patrick Brady?

He died in Prestwick, Scotland on 12th December 2005.

Patrick was born in 1922 and he lived at Limonds Court in Ayrshire.

Did you know Patrick?

Both Susan and Patrick's estates remain unclaimed

and if no-one comes forward,

their money will go to the Scottish Government.

Do you have any clues that could help solve the cases

of Susan Robertson or Patrick Brady?

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

The team at Fraser & Fraser are having a frustrating time

tracking down the heirs to the estate of Edith Konieczny.

Nobody is answering, nobody is answering.

Having established that she had no close kin, the team have been

trying to trace Edith's cousins on a huge family tree.

We have got 11 children, potential aunts and uncles on one side.

And after one day's work cut short

because of Grimble's retirement party,

it's now Monday morning and they're back on the case.

To date, senior researcher Ewart Lindsay is taking no chances

and is hitting the road to try to speak to the heirs in person.

Unfortunately, his worst fears have been realised

and he's discovered that a rival firm are already on the case.

It looks like they've actually written to people.

I don't think they've gone to make any visits.

All he can do now is hope that he's not too late

and that a face-to-face visit will persuade Edith Konieczny's heirs

to sign with him.

Edith Konieczny was 87 years old when she passed away

at her home in Carterton, Oxfordshire.

Hairdressers Trish and Lesley grew fond of her over the years

and remember her weekly visit to the salon well.

We used to have to towel dry her hair a certain way

and always give it a good rinse.

We always referred to her as Mrs K,

primarily because we couldn't pronounce her surname,

but she always responded to Mrs K and that's how we always remember her.

By all accounts, Edith was a completely devoted wife.

She did talk about her husband quite a lot

and obviously she was a Forces wife years ago.

I think she must have done a little bit of travelling around.

Her relationship with her husband was really important.

She was very, very close to him.

She didn't have any other family because she never talked about

any other member of her family, only her husband who she idolised.

Edith married Joseph Konieczny, the love of her life,

in Cirencester in 1954, aged 30.

It transpires that he played an important and fascinating role

in the Second World War.

After leaving Poland in 1940,

Joseph worked as a meteorologist forecasting weather for the RAF.

Weather forecasting was vital to the war effort.

Is still vital to the war effort.

We have meteorologists in Afghanistan today.

War is carried out in the open air

and therefore weather is very important, particularly for aviation

because you're flying up amongst the clouds

and if the temperature's below zero centigrade -

32 Fahrenheit during the War -

then the aircraft gets covered in ice.

If you want to go from A to B, the wind may be blowing you off-track.

You need to know about the wind at the level you're going to fly.

These were the sorts of things that you needed

for flying to the targets, there and back,

and you needed to know what the weather was going to be for landing.

Whilst today, advanced technology means that predicting the weather

is a very precise science,

for Joseph, it was a very different matter.

Today we run global models of the atmosphere on our computers.

We did not have anything like that during the Second World War.

Joseph Konieczny would have had forecasts coming

from the central forecast office, forecast charts,

but largely, the weather later today, the weather for tomorrow

was being generated in his head.

The forecasting of changes in weather patterns by meteorologists

like Joseph made history.

This chart behind me is the chart for midday on 6 June, 1944, D-Day.

The forecasting for that event would have been pretty critical.

It resulted in D-Day being postponed by a day.

After weeks of fine weather,

the conditions on the eve of the planned attack were impossible

with wind and high seas preventing a naval attack

and low clouds also affecting targeting from the air.

With all the troops poised and ready to go,

it looked like the whole operation was in jeopardy

until chief British meteorologist James Stagg stepped in.

Using the detailed forecasts of weathermen such as Joseph,

he predicted a respite in the weather

if Eisenhower could just delay by a day.

It was a window of opportunity, that was the phrase that was used,

and that's exactly how it worked out on the 6th of June.

Despite a long happy marriage, Edith and Joseph had no children

meaning there are no immediate heirs to her estate.

But the Heir Hunters have discovered she came from a very large family.

Edith's father Charles Hewer was one of five.

His sister, also called Edith, married Henry Rigsby Webb,

and had one child, Maurice.

As Maurice passed away 10 years ago, his two sons, Stuart and Roger,

Edith's cousins once removed,

are now entitled to a share of her estate.

Senior researcher Ewart Lindsay has managed to arrange a meeting

with them. He calls case manager Simon to give him the good news.

Roger Webb, I'm seeing him and his brother at 11 o'clock. All right.

Roger received a letter and thought it was a scam

and threw it away last week.

But he's willing to see me.

Although they have decided to ignore a letter from a rival firm,

Roger and his brother Stuart have agreed to see Ewart.

Quietly confident I'll sign these two today.

But although he's feeling positive, unless Stuart and Roger

are happy to sign with the company, it will have been a wasted journey.

After all their hard work on Friday,

are they about to sign their first heir?

-Hello, Mr Webb.

-Come on in.

Thank you.

At their home, Ewart takes Roger and Stuart

through what he knows about the case so far.

-Charles Joseph Hewer married... Do you know who he married?

-No.

He married Nelly Curtis.

And they had the deceased. Edith.

Edith would be a first cousin to your father,

so this is where the estate is coming from.

-Then it's time to go through the tree.

-Let's start from the top.

Let's get your details and then we can work ourselves down.

The brothers then decide they are happy to sign with the company.

There's your copy, have a read of it. That's your copy, Mr Webb.

-All the best, bye-bye.

-Cheers then, bye.

It's a great result. After all their hard work,

they finally signed their first heirs, and for Roger and Stuart,

news of an unexpected windfall has made their day.

It's a bit of a surprise, we'll wait and see what comes out.

We don't usually have that sort of luck so would be nice

if we get something. More the merrier. Larger the sum, the better.

In the case of Edith Konieczny, we started a day later than some

of the competition but we were able to send Ewart

and other researchers out to see people face-to-face and that really

helped us to catch up and often when you see people face-to-face

that puts them at ease

and we managed to get a good result out of it in the end.

Eventually, the company managed to sign 13 heirs who are all entitled

to a share of Edith's estate, now estimated at over £250,000.

Colin Charles Wilkinson passed away on 17 November 2011, aged 83.

Neighbours Norma and Ted Hughes remember him as a private

but very polite man.

He was a lovely person.

He used to say hello and that was it.

I couldn't see him having any visitors or anything like that.

I think he just kept to himself.

As Colin grew older and fell into ill health,

his reserved nature meant that he found it hard to reach out

to friends such as Dorothy Crosland.

We found him to be a lovely chap.

I'm only sorry I couldn't help him in some way

because his house just went to rack and ruin.

The curtains looked as though they hadn't been washed for years.

All the growth was past the windows

and plants and shrubs were going right over the driveway.

Ben's research had reached a dead end.

If he wanted to continue with the case, Ben had no choice

but to take a huge risk and expand the search.

He needed to look further up the tree to trace aunts and uncles

and then down to cousins to see if he could find out

more about what happened to Kathleen.

If it did turn out that she had passed away and had no children,

any cousins he found could be heirs.

When you're tracing two family trees at the same time,

you've got the cost of researchers doing the work.

You have no idea of the value of the estate.

You don't know if there is going to be a near-kin factor in the end.

It could be the fact she moved to the States and had three children

who were still alive. It was a bit of a risk for us to do this

but I thought eventually we would come to the bottom

of where Kathleen actually was.

Colin's father Charles William Wilkinson was one of three children

and tracing cousins on that side was relatively simple.

When it came to Colin's mother however,

her family presented a bigger challenge.

When we are tracing the McEvoy family, two stems stayed in the UK.

One stem, they married here but it seems that they had

a lot of children and they were quite hard to trace.

We found out one of the stems went to Australia.

Colin's mother Ellen Mary McEvoy had five brothers.

Two of them died with no issue but the other three all had children

of their own, cousins who Ben now needed to trace.

One of Louis McEvoy's ten children, Philip McEvoy,

was proving particularly tricky to find.

In the early 1950s, Philip McEvoy made a momentous decision.

Disillusioned with life and austere post-war Britain,

where rationing, housing shortages and economic depression

made life tough for his young family,

he chose to emigrate to Australia

and become what was known as a Ten Pound Pom.

The Ten Pound Pom agreement was initiated between Britain

and Australia in 1947.

Essentially, the two governments heavily subsidised the sea passage

of migrants over to Australia and the migrants themselves

only had to pay £10 and children could come for free.

The scheme ran alongside an extensive advertising campaign.

It was quite an active campaign for its time.

It was quite something. A lot of money was put into it

and I suppose the three main themes of the campaign

were sun, sea and sand, which would obviously appeal to British people

in austere Britain following the Second World War.

Over one and a half million Brits jumped at the chance to make

a better life for their family.

There was a sense that it was a better place to raise children

because of the climate, because of the lifestyle,

and also the lack of food rationing,

which for families is quite a practical issue.

When Philip and his wife Margaret bought their £10 ticket

to a new life, they had four children all under the age of seven.

It seems they set sail across the globe

in search of a brighter future for themselves.

By tracing Colin's cousins in the UK and all over the globe,

Ben was hoping that he could find someone to tell him

more about Colin's sister Kathleen, but he had no such luck.

We discovered quite quickly that there were no first cousins left

on either side of the family, so we went down to cousins once removed

but they had no information about Kathleen or the deceased.

He had reached a stalemate.

The distant cousins he had found would have been heirs

to Colin's estate if Kathleen had passed away

but until he could prove that she had, all his hard work was in vain.

Suddenly, in a conversation with one of Colin's neighbours,

Ben had a huge breakthrough.

She confirmed the story of this gentleman coming to visit her

regarding the sister.

This gentleman was visiting or attempting to visit the deceased.

To tell him that the sister had passed away

and that she had left him a property.

We'd been working on the fact this case was a minimal amount of money

but this one phone call changed everything.

Not only did we find out that the deceased's sister had passed away,

the estate was a lot more valuable than we initially thought it was.

The risk had paid off.

The 32 distant cousins that Ben had contacted were now beneficiaries

to an estate that was now valued at £150,000,

ten times what he had believed it was originally worth.

Beauty therapist Michelle Davies is one of the heirs to Colin's estate.

I had to give them a few details and they asked me

about other family members.

They explained about Colin to which I was just totally amazed.

I couldn't believe it.

News about her surprise windfall was a shock on more than one level.

Up until Heir Hunters contacted me,

I didn't have a clue that Colin had existed or his sister.

As far as I was concerned, my mum was the last surviving relative

on her side and that was it.

Michelle does know a little about her immediate family history.

It was during the war when my mum was born

so she always had stories about the war and things like that.

Coming home to a tank that crashed into the front of the house one day

and things. Make do and mend, living off rations and all things like that.

And she's tried to find out more.

I've done a bit of research into my family history

on several websites and things like that.

I think as an amateur you hit a point where you don't know

how to go any further without having somebody to help you.

The call from Ben Cornish turned out to be just the helping hand

Michelle was after.

She is now keen to explore more about her extended family.

My mother passed away in 2007 and my dad last year

so the family were starting to shrink.

I didn't think there was anybody else on my mother's side

so to hear about Colin, I was really excited there was going to be

other family members out there I can get to know.

Hopefully fill in some blanks.

But it's the discovery of her ancestors' emigration to Australia

that has been one of the biggest revelations.

Until she was contacted by the company, Michelle had no idea that

her distant cousin Philip McEvoy was one of the famous Ten Pound Poms.

She's keen to try and understand what it would have been like for him

and his young family arriving in Australia to start a new life.

And today, she's come to meet Mark Peel,

an expert in Australian history

whose own parents settled down under as Ten Pound Poms.

We need to recognise the courage it took to undertake this migration

and people had to get through some pretty hard times.

OK, wages were higher, there was all the sunshine and lots of space,

but there were ups and downs for people.

Women especially often felt isolated and of course

there were quite strong restrictions in the 1940s on what you could take.

My mother for instance, you could take a tea chest, and that was it.

A life packed into a tea chest.

Would they have to find their own housing or was that provided

-on the £10 scheme?

-It wasn't provided, there were no guarantees.

This is a picture of me as a child in our front garden,

the house we rented in Elizabeth.

Most of the housing was council housing

but to English people, it was palatial.

I can see how it was appealing to your families

coming from the terraced housing and overcrowding into these big gardens.

Whilst many Britons might have been lucky with housing,

finding employment was a different matter.

Would most of them have jobs arranged for when they got there

or was it a case of no employment

and then having to find it when you got there?

-How long would it take them to find a job?

-It varied.

My mother couldn't get permanent work for a couple of years

as a teacher so she sold ice creams on the beach one summer.

-She worked in various...

-It must have got very disheartening at times.

I think people could get very disheartened,

really question what they'd done.

There was some real unhappiness in those first few years for people.

I'd never thought of that side of it.

I always thought they arrived there and there's a house for you,

you'll get on really nice, but there's this other side to it.

The picture that Australia painted of itself was a very optimistic one.

It was one that was deliberately designed to appeal to what

they thought British people wanted, which was a place of sunshine,

a place of space.

Work, opportunity for your children,

and all that was true but it took a while.

Despite the difficulties of settling in, some of Michelle's family

did stay and make a life for themselves in Australia.

Two generations later, Michelle still has relatives all the way

across the globe and she can't wait to get in touch with them.

I definitely want to find out more about my family tree now.

I'm full of enthusiasm again.

I want to go home and get on the laptop, see what's out there.

Especially the family that's in Australia,

I want to know more about them.

For case manager Ben Cornish, it's also been a rewarding experience.

I think that the strategy did pay off in the end

because we've got the case.

We've managed to find all the heirs

and sometimes it's good to run two things concurrently.

Sometimes it can work against you but in this case, it worked.

Colin's £150,000 estate will now be divided between all 32 heirs.

If you would like advice about building a family tree

or making a will, go to...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd