Holt/Epstein Heir Hunters

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

If we don't do the work, then it's money which is going to go to the Government.

Often, solving the puzzle means delving back decades into a family's history.

We had a little bit of success there.

So he seems to be the right person.

The research can be complex and frustrating.

What the hell is going on here?!

But it can solve family mysteries...

Absolutely no idea about any of that at all.

..and help bring people together.

I think it would be nice if we could all try and meet or phone each other.

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

Could the heir hunters be knocking on your door?

Coming up... The heir hunters have to play catch-up after misreading a valuable document.

Just realised through looking online that there are some more children.

A global search to return artwork stolen more than 70 years ago.

Many items weren't reunited with their rightful owners at the end of the war

because they had already been circulated onto the international art market.

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

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

It's Thursday morning and heir-hunting company Fraser & Fraser

are busy working several potential cases

of names published on the Treasury solicitors' bona vacantia list.

I represent a company of probate researchers here in central London...

We specialise in tracing missing heirs and beneficiaries.

But they're also working another case that has been advertised in the newspaper -

an appeal for relatives of a man called Arnold Holt

who died in September 2011.

The deceased is Arnold Holt.

Arnold Holt was born at home in the Tottington area of Bury

two days before Christmas 1935.

He lived nearly all his life in the pretty cottage with a rose garden at the front

and only in later life did he and his wife Edna move to nearby accommodation

in an extended care scheme.

Manager Anne McGuinness knew the couple well.

Oh, description of Arnold!

Small, jolly...

er, glasses,

a smile that would just lighten up the room.

When I came here, Arnold was actually living with his wife, Edna.

And they actually lived in a bungalow just outside of the complex.

He was actually Edna's main carer at the time.

Both Edna and Arnold as a couple,

quite a dynamic pair together, really.

A lovable couple.

Both had totally different characteristics.

Edna was the strong character, was the boss.

And Arnold basically did as he was told,

whether it was the right thing or wrong thing, Arnold did as he was told.

Edna was 11 years older than Arnold,

and when she died in 2007, Arnold,

the devoted husband, was devastated.

Arnold, without Edna,

for quite some time was very much like he'd lost his right hand.

Lost all his purpose, really, of going out. Didn't have a need.

He would sit down in the lounge a lot and chat.

Very much again around where he used to holiday with Edna,

and they loved Blackpool and Fleetwood.

We arranged a holiday for him at Blackpool and it brought back a lot of memories for him.

He used to get very tearful a lot. Very emotional man.

In the office, the team is working flat out looking for Arnold's family.

I've been informed by one of your neighbours

that you may have known a person we're interesting in finding out a bit more about.

Because this case has come from a newspaper advert,

the team have slightly more information than normal.

The know Arnold's birth date and the value of the case - around £22,000.

They work on commission, and research can be expensive,

so boss Neil will want to solve this case quickly,

especially as there may be up to 40 rival heir-hunting firms hot on their heels.

We wouldn't really work many cases much smaller than this,

so we have to be very careful we don't put a huge amount of resource into solving it.

The investigation is headed by case managers Dom Hendry and Mike Pow.

The first thing the researchers have to do

is to find the birth records of the right Arnold Holt, in 1936.

But there are several possibilities.

An Arnold Holt born that day.

You look it up. There's no births in December '35. There's two in March '36.

One's an Arnold R and one's an Arnold S.

Looked up Arnold R in 2000 on the Electoral Register,

-living with an Edna M. It gives us the exact same date of birth as the advert.

-Yeah.

He dies, no issue.

Once the team confirmed Arnold's birth date,

they could trace his marriage to Edna Quinton in 1971.

But they could find no children from this marriage.

So Dom, Mike and the team will have to build up a picture of Arnold's parents,

any other children they had, or aunts and uncles of Arnold's,

because it's their living relatives who will be beneficiaries to Arnold's estate.

Just got the marriage of the deceased's parents.

Arnold's parents were Frances Brier and George Holt

and they married in 1920.

The witnesses to the marriage were Arnold's maternal and paternal grandfathers,

which helped the team trace the family back another generation.

His father's given as Matthew.

The certificate also details George's job.

He was working as a calico printer's assistant in Bury,

in the heart of cotton manufacturing.

Calico is a cotton cloth, and in the 19th century, and first half of the 20th century,

the textile industry was booming in the north of England.

Jim Kidd has been a senior manager in the industry for 35 years.

The industry employed literally hundreds of thousands of people,

typically in the north of England.

There were whole towns that just thrived on the textile industry.

Every community within the town would have been involved somewhere within textiles, whether it be weaving,

whether it be dyeing, finishing, printing. Textile was just massive.

George was working here in the 1920s, in his early 20s,

and he was responsible for preparing machinery for the printer

before the calico was fed through.

It was a young man's job,

because shifting tools and machinery was hard work.

In those days, there were no sort of manual handling regulations like we have today.

Everything was just done physically.

Cloth was pushed, colour was dragged, lifted onto trucks.

And by the time Arnold was born in 1935,

George's occupation, recorded on Arnold's birth certificate, was a calendar man -

a role which ensured the fabric had been given that all-important finishing touch.

And the object of a calendar

is to put a sort of finish onto the actual fabric.

It applies pressure onto the fabric, and it ends up with a nice sheen.

And that would have been George's job, to actually sort of just run the calendar.

I think maybe as George got older,

he's said, "I want something a bit less intensive."

And it seems the Holt family stayed true to the textile industry,

and it rewarded them with job security and romance to boot.

I understand met his wife in a textile factory in the north of England.

And George's son coming into the industry was certainly not uncommon.

I mean, in those days, whole families would be involved in working for the same company.

And all this was great when the industry was booming,

this was fantastic, because it creates employment for the whole of the family, or families.

Back in the office, research is well underway on George and Frances's marriage.

The team have found that they had two children -

Arnold and his sister, Alice,

who died in 2000.

Although Alice married twice,

she, like her brother Arnold, never had any children.

So the next step is to research Arnold's grandfathers,

named on his parents' marriage certificate,

to see if they had any other children.

Firstly, Aisha researches the paternal side,

but soon enough, she's worked out what's happened to them.

Oh! Oh, Dominic. Yeah, it's right.

The paternal side's right.

Cos his dad's Matthew.

-So it's dead?

-So it's dead.

-High five for Aisha.

-Yeah!

Come on!

It looks like George is the only surviving stem on this side of the family,

which, obviously, is the deceased's family, so,

therefore it looks like everyone on this side of the family has died.

This is bad news.

The paternal side of the family have died out,

which means the team can now only work the maternal side.

They're several hours in, and their chances of finding heirs

are reducing by the minute.

Now the office have to plough all their energies into the maternal side of the tree,

through Arnold's mother, Frances Brier.

Her father is James Brier.

And Frances is his mother.

By looking on the 1901 census,

the team have found Frances Brier

living with her parents and five siblings,

all stems of the family that will need researching

and could produce heirs.

Frances's five siblings were Arnold, James,

Ernest, Ethel and Leonard,

and two more siblings who died in infancy.

Researcher Aisha is working on one of the sisters.

I'm looking for Ethel Brier,

but I can't seem to find a death for her.

So I'm going to check all records and see if anything comes up.

And case manager Dom passes another one of the siblings to researcher Emma for her to work up.

Everything on this stem I'm sceptical about, so could you have another look,

see if there's any better marriages for James,

any better marriages for Joan, work them up and see if we can disprove them.

-All right?

-Mm-hm.

But hours into the research on this case,

Aisha realises the team could have made a very costly mistake.

What the hell is going on here?!

Heir hunters spend their lives tracking down relatives

of people who have died without leaving a will.

Often what's left behind is property or cash,

but sometimes heirs can find themselves inheriting rather unusual assets.

And this was the case when London-based Hector Birchwood,

co-owner of heir-hunting firm Celtic Research,

began tracing relatives of Jehudo Epstein,

a Jewish artist who had died in 1945.

Well, initially my agent in Vienna called me

to tell me that he believed there would be a family that would be entitled

to some paintings by an artist from Vienna,

whose name was Jehudo Epstein.

He asked me to see if I could trace them.

We had some clues in South Africa

and he believed they may have had descendants who emigrated to the United Kingdom.

The search for heirs to these paintings would reveal an astonishing story

of wartime theft on an industrial scale.

The case centres around Jehudo Epstein, a successful artist in the first half of the last century.

Jehudo was described as a kindly man, a sage man.

We don't know a tremendous amount about him.

He was trained in the academic way of painting and he looked rather academic,

in a three-piece suit. He was balding, he was a small man, but he was also said

to be very good-humoured, very kind and very intelligent.

Jehudo was born in Minsk in 1870.

He had a very stable Jewish childhood.

The area was very poor

and there was quite a lot of anti-Semitism against Jews at the time.

However, it was a coherent, cohesive community

and he remembered particularly

the enjoyable Friday night suppers.

But by the time Jehudo was 20, he had moved from his native Belarus

and was living in Austria, studying at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art.

It would have been very prestigious for him to enter the Academy.

It was highly regarded

and not only did he prosper in terms of the teaching he absorbed,

but he was later to be honoured by the Academy with a professorship.

And Jehudo took inspiration from memories of his earlier years

growing up in Belarus.

He focused on Eastern European Jewish life, and his paintings were informed

by the memories he brought with him of his childhood in Minsk -

the ceremonies he'd observed and the closeness of the Jewish population.

All of this fed into the painting that he did when he was in Vienna.

And it was very important, perhaps, for him to be able to recreate that life

in his paintings, as it was the life he'd left behind.

And it was the Vienna Academy, where Jehudo had been a student, who first

raised the question of whether they may still hold one of his works,

which rightfully belonged to his family.

The painting is an unnamed painting of a blonde girl,

painted by Jehudo Epstein back in 1921.

It appears that the painting was given as a gesture by an art dealer.

But the Academy suspected that before it was given to them,

the painting may have been stolen and now they wanted it to go back to Jehudo's family.

An article in a local paper was spotted by Hector's agent,

and intrigued by the challenge of finding heirs to an artwork,

Hector decided to trace Jehudo's relatives.

We have to prove the provenance of a particular artwork,

as well as the family relationship.

And unlike a public administrator case,

the assets are not held in one place.

They may be dispersed, not just within one country,

not just within a single set of galleries. They may be dispersed

all over the world and held by very many different people,

many of which may have perhaps bought the painting or accepted the painting

as a gift without knowing that the painting was actually stolen.

Nonetheless, Hector began the task of building up Jehudo's family tree.

He was able to establish that Jehudo had been married to Augusta,

but they never had children,

which meant he would have to look to the wider family tree

to find heirs. And so he began to look for details

of Jehudo's parents.

Jehudo Epstein was the son of Jacob Epstein.

He had a sister, Francesca Esther.

Esther, like her brother Jehudo,

had moved from their native Belarus to live in Vienna.

And there, it seemed she had married and had a son called Hans.

But by the late 1930s,

Austria was becoming an increasingly dangerous place for Jews like Esther and her brother Jehudo.

Life would have been very difficult for Jehudo and artists like him

in Vienna. As Jews, they could be stripped of the professorships,

forbidden to work, unable to sell their paintings, so basically,

unable to make a living.

Jews were actively persecuted. This persecution

ratcheted up throughout the '30s,

culminating in the annexation of Austria in 1938,

after which, many Jews were sent to concentration camps.

So life would have become impossible by 1938,

and it's likely that Jehudo actually left before that.

Jehudo, who had made Vienna his home for 40 years, fled to South Africa.

Perhaps in choosing South Africa, he chose a country out of Europe,

which would, hopefully, not be so affected

by the spreading world war.

Jehudo decided to place his art collection in safe hands,

and entrusted his Jewish friend, Bernard Altman, to keep hold of it in Vienna.

But when Austria was annexed by Hitler in 1938,

Bernard's businesses and all his assets were seized by the Nazis,

and Jehudo's paintings, stored at one of his factories,

were looted along with everything else.

The Commission for Looted Art in Europe was set up to research,

trace and return art stolen by the Nazis in 1930s and '40s.

I think the looting of art was part of the process that the Nazis

established in 1933, when they came to power.

Which was that they started first of all

by stripping the Jews of their professions,

and it moved on to stripping them of their possessions, and then

ultimately of their lives. So it was a tripartite process, if you like.

The Nazis said, "OK, we'll give the museums first right

"to the best works, after we - the Nazi leaders - have taken what we want"

because Hitler and Goering were building up their collections.

The very best of these paintings were photographed and they were sent

to Hitler in bound albums, so he could take his pick

of the best of the world's art.

He and Goering vied as to who would get the best paintings.

And even art that the Nazi regime did not rate was useful to them.

They had very clear ideas of what they thought was good art and bad art,

and art that was desirable and art that was undesirable.

So what they would do was, in order to obtain the works of art that they loved,

which were Old Master paintings,

they would set up these exchanges through swaps through Switzerland.

Goering was generally in charge of them.

So they would exchange perhaps 20 Impressionist paintings, three Van Goghs,

two Cezannes, four Renoirs, and so on, for one Old Master painting.

And Switzerland acted as the kind of entrepot for this,

the launder, the place where you could launder the art.

It's impossible to put an exact figure on how many pieces of artwork

were plundered by the Nazis. The Commission has reunited families

with 4,000 pieces during the past decade.

But there are many tens of thousands more missing items scattered across the world.

Many items weren't reunited with their rightful owners at the end of the war,

because they had already been circulated

onto the international art market.

If things had been auctioned, as many were,

then it was very hard to go and find out

who it was who'd bought it at that auction.

Also, remember that you're in a post-war period

where there's still a lot of very unpleasant feeling about.

The denazification process which went on took an awful long time,

and it wasn't a very easy prospect for anybody without any resources.

Remember that everything had been taken from them. They had nothing to...

They had to start their lives all over again, these people.

So having learned that Jehudo had fled to South Africa,

Hector began his search there to see if his sister Esther and her son Hans

might have followed him to this country.

He couldn't find them in South Africa, but eventually tracked Hans down in Britain.

But then Hector faced a new challenge.

When you're dealing with Jewish genealogy, you always have to be mindful of the fact

that people adopt different names at different stages of their lives,

so you may have a religious name being used,

you may have a secular, Gentile name being used.

Sometimes there'll be anglicised names. So, in this case, um...

Hans became Harry.

But what had become of Harry? Hector had to trace his family

in the hope that it might lead him to Jehudo's descendants -

the rightful owners of his paintings.

And as Jehudo's family were traced, there were fascinating details

for them to learn and discover.

Absolutely no idea about any of that at all.

Heir hunters track down thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year.

But not all cases can be cracked.

There are thousands of estates on the Treasury's unclaimed list that have eluded the heir hunters

and remain unsolved.

To claim an estate of someone who's died intestate,

you need to trace your relationship in a direct line

from the deceased person's grandparents.

They need to supply us with certificates of birth, death and marriage,

and identity documents as well.

Today we're focusing on two cases which still have to be solved.

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

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

First is the case of Brian Gordon Scriven, who died in Haywards Heath

in West Sussex on the 19th of August 1997.

Researchers have worked hard on this case,

but have not been able to establish much about Brian.

Are you Brian's relative? Or perhaps you were a friend or neighbour

living in Haywards Heath in 1997?

Do you have any information that might solve this case?

Next, can you shed any light on the case of Joseph Dougan,

who died on the 26th of January 2006?

His last address was Titwood Road in Glasgow.

Because Joseph died in Scotland,

his name has been published

on the Queen and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer list.

And unlike the bona vacantia list, which publishes names of people

who have died intestate in England and Wales, the QLTR does publish

the value of estates.

So the list reveals Joseph's estate is worth...

Do you have any information that could help crack this case?

Both Brian and Joseph'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's very important

that the person puts forward a very good case.

And it's all based on the evidence.

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

perhaps something on adoption. Then we consider the evidence very carefully.

Do you have any clues

that could help solve the cases of Brian Gordon Scriven

and Joseph Dougan? If so, you could have a fortune coming your way.

At heir-hunting firm Fraser & Fraser,

the team is looking into the case of Arnold Holt,

a retired factory worker who died in Bury in 2011.

The team has already established that Arnold left around £20,000.

That's not a big-value case for the company, who work on commission.

And because they're competing against up to 40 rival firms, the team has to act quickly.

I'm quite excited.

Arnold spent the last few years of his life living in an extended care scheme,

where he was able to live independently, but with the added bonus

of 24-hour support if he needed it.

Manager of the home Anne McGuinness remembers Arnold as a sprightly resident.

Oh, gosh, you couldn't stop Arnold. Arnold would be

the first to get up dancing.

Arnold would be the first, if it was dressing-up, to dress up.

His thespian qualities used to come out a lot then!

He would dance with staff. Every day, first visit in the morning,

"You won't forget me today? I'll come in the lounge in the afternoon, won't I?"

"Yes, you will, Arnold."

But in the last few months of his life, Arnold's health deteriorated,

and he had to leave his home to receive round-the-clock medical care.

He did not want to leave. Cos he saw this as his home. And he also saw us

as his family, basically.

I think my lasting memories of Arnold will be...

There'll be shoes that'll never be filled here, with Arnold's characteristics.

He was a large character, but such a humble character,

and a very polite, lovable gentleman.

Yeah, and he is missed every day here.

In London, the team are focusing on Arnold's mother, Frances Brier,

because they've worked out there are no living family on Arnold's father's side.

Using census records, the team has already established

that Frances had five siblings -

Arnold, James, Ernest, Ethel and Leonard -

and two more siblings who died in infancy.

But just as they think they've found all of Frances's siblings,

it dawns on Aisha that they've made a big mistake.

Just realised through looking online that there's some more children.

-Was Annie the other one I was missing?

-Yeah.

-Is she the only other one?

Frances Brier had two more siblings -

a brother, Royston, and a sister, Annie.

Now the team has to start searching for them, because if they

had children, their living descendants will be beneficiaries

to Arnold's estate. But Royston in particular is proving very tricky

to pin down.

There's two Royston Briers, both born on the 29th of December,

one in 1885 and one in 1886.

But the baptism date...

One's in 1886 and one's in 1891 -

same parents but it's got a different address

and different job for the father.

So it's definitely not duplicated.

It's a different copy.

So, whether or not they forgot they baptised him and baptised him again, I don't know!

It's just... It's probably a red herring, but we'll have to have

a look anyway, see what we can find.

This just doesn't make sense. Why would Royston's parents baptise him twice?

Mike and Aisha try and find Royston and his father on the 1891 census.

They want to match the father's occupation

with the one recorded on the baptism, to prove that they have the right family.

-Here we go.

-What's his occupation then?

-He's only five, Michael!

-No, the dad.

-Oh.

He's a joiner, and a labourer, and a porter.

He gets around!

Bit of everything - a jack of all trades.

Work-wise, it seems James Brier

did a bit of everything, so this route hasn't helped them.

But as they have found Royston on the 1891 census with his family,

at least they've proved he was one of Arnold's uncles.

Royston is on the 1891 census, so he is real.

Experienced senior research Alan Riches is now searching

for Royston's sister, Annie. He thinks he may have got to the bottom of the mystery.

She's born as Hannah.

It turns out she wasn't an Annie after all.

Right, Annie Brier was on the 1891 census in Halifax.

I then did a death of all Briers

in Halifax only for a ten-year period, between 1891 and 1901.

Then I went through them all, looking to see if anything could be her,

because she might have changed her name a little bit. And that's actually what she did do.

Annie became Hannah.

I found a death for her in April 1891 in Halifax.

Realising Annie's stem died out means there's still no heirs traced

on this case, and the odds of finding one are diminishing all the time.

But Dom is hopeful that Arnold's uncle, James Brier, might have

married and had children.

I have got a marriage in 1920 to an Annie Cunliffe.

The son dies infant. The daughter, Joan Brier, of that marriage,

was born December 1922

in Halifax.

Now, simply because of those deaths, I went with a marriage in 1961

to a Matthew Shields.

Finally, there's a stem of the family

that seems to have produced heirs.

James's daughter Joan married Matthew

and they had three children of their own,

who are entitled to Arnold's estate.

And as they research Ernest's stem, they find more living beneficiaries.

Ernest married Beatrice in 1920 and they had four children.

One of their grandchildren is Janice Freeman,

and she's entitled to a share of Arnold's estate as well.

It was a real shock to find out that Arnold had died

and that I could be an heir.

Well, I know he used to play the piano,

because when we used to go for tea,

he used to sit and play the piano.

I remember him having dark hair. But he probably was a very quiet man.

Janice remembers that Arnold and his mother were a tight-knit family.

He used to show cine films of when Auntie Frances and him went on holiday,

and we used to have projector little shows.

But I remember it was really fascinating to watch these moving pictures on this projector.

It was fantastic.

Any money Janice may inherit from Arnold will be used to keep his memory alive.

I think I'll probably buy a piece of jewellery.

Rather than fritter it away on something,

then that's something that could be passed down

to my daughters. It's sort of a link, then, to the older end of the family for them.

With the help of the heirs they've spoken to, the company eventually

manage to trace and sign up seven heirs to Arnold's estate.

Although for now the elusive missing Uncle Royston has proved to be too difficult a puzzle to solve.

But in the following days,

senior researcher Roger has the most extraordinary piece of luck,

thanks to the diligence of an unknown official filling out a census nearly 100 years ago.

I couldn't find anything on Royston.

So I went back to looking at his mum and dad and trying to find,

um...trying to find the census.

And on one of the censuses for Frances,

his mother, it said "see notes".

So I looked up the notes. There was a massive McDanielson family history,

with lots of clues on it,

one being that, yes, he had a son called Royston,

born 1884, which we knew about. Then it also said in the small print that

"Royston Brier may be the same individual found on the 1920 and '30

"US census records under the name James Royston McDanielson,"

which was the maiden name.

So the mystery is solved. Royston was hard to track down

because not only did he change his name,

but he emigrated to America in the early part of the last century.

The team has been trying to gather as much information as they can about him.

He died in 1942 in Galveston, Texas, USA. We've attempted to try and get

his death certificate, which is proving a bit of a difficulty,

because, erm...American states are notoriously difficult for trying

to get any vital records out of them. You usually have to be a family member

or a solicitor. So we're still attempting to get that certificate,

in the hope that it may have an informant or a bit more family information.

We've still got a couple of heirs outstanding.

I think there are three we're still chasing up at the moment.

Hopefully we should get their signatures within the next few weeks.

At heir-hunting firm Celtic Research, Hector Birchwood had been working on a case

where he'd been trying to track down relatives

who were entitled not to money,

but a painting by an artist called Jehudo Epstein.

And it seemed the search would spread far and wide.

This case has a number of interesting facets to it, in that the family left

before the genocide began in Nazi-occupied Europe. So it does have

a different aspect from most of the Jewish cases that we normally deal with.

The case arrived on Hector's desk after an academy in Austria

became concerned that an Epstein painting in their gallery

may have been plundered by the Nazis during the war.

It appears that the painting was given as a gesture by an art dealer

to the university back in 1987. And they seemed to be very happy about

the painting going to its rightful owner.

Jehudo Epstein was born in Belarus, but became a painter,

making a successful living after moving to Vienna in the first half of the last century.

But in the 1930s, when life became very difficult for Jews living in Austria,

Jehudo emigrated to South Africa.

It must have been a tremendous wrench for Jehudo to leave behind the city

where he'd lived for so long.

He'd come there as a boy of 18, and he was

about 65 when he left, so his entire mature life had been spent

in the city. He'd done well there. He'd built up a reputation,

a body of work, no doubt friends.

And all of this he would have had to have left behind

when he went to South Africa.

Because Jehudo was forced to flee, he had no choice but to leave

his artwork with his good friend Bernard Altman,

who stored them in one of his Austrian-based factories.

But this would not be the safe place that Jehudo had thought it could be.

It's not surprising that Jehudo's collection was seized by the Nazis,

because this was very common at the time, particularly after

the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, in 1938,

when Aryanisation laws were brought in.

Which meant that property was taken over by the National Socialists

and many people found not just paintings but businesses

and homes were lost.

Hector was trying to trace living descendants of Jehudo, in the hope

of connecting them with the Academy in Vienna, who suspected

the painting had been stolen by the Nazis.

After searching through records, Hector had already discovered that

Jehudo had had a sibling who had died. But he hoped this discovery

would lead him to living relatives.

He had a sister, Esther Epstein, who then married Isaac Alexander Cemach.

They had one son, Harry, otherwise Hans Cemach. And then he came to England

and married. We were then able to find his two children

from that marriage.

Once Hector had realised that Hans had become Harry and married Ruth Stein,

he discovered they'd had two daughters, both of whom were still alive.

One of them was Anne Starkey,

and she and her sister were Jehudo's only living relatives.

I got a call to say they'd discovered some oil paintings done

by my great-uncle in Vienna, which were put in safekeeping when

the Nazis invaded. They'd done some research and found out that

my sister and I were the only two heirs, as far as we know,

and would we be interested in trying to recoup the pictures?

I'm feeling excited.

My sister's feeling excited. Purely because of the fact that we'll learn

more about our family history. Hopefully we will. We'll find out

things that we didn't know. And hopefully, it's going to be really,

really interesting.

Now that Hector has traced Anne and her sister, the family are keen

to find out if there are any other missing paintings by Jehudo.

News of her connection to Jehudo Epstein has piqued Anne's interest

in this part of her family. Since hearing from Hector,

she's got in touch with art collector David Glasser, who is an expert on Jewish art.

And today, she's come to see him to learn more.

-Thank you.

-How are you?

-I'm fine. I'm hear to find out about my great-uncle, Jehudo Epstein.

Your great-uncle was a very distinguished artist.

And he painted particularly portraiture.

He painted the scenes

that he remembered around him from his youth,

which was Jewish shtetl, Jewish village life.

But once he became more emancipated in Vienna,

he also developed that portraiture to become a portraitist,

and that's how he earned his living.

He would paint important members of society.

This was his means of making a living, and in a very distinguished manner too.

David is able to give some background on Jehudo's decision to leave Vienna.

1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed.

And that essentially

would strip Professor Epstein of his title and his position.

Nobody will employ him, nobody will give him exhibitions.

Where does he go?

For those Jews who saw and realised that, actually,

this is potentially fatal,

as of course it ended up, the issue was getting out. Where do they go?

Well, Jews went into Europe.

So, for example, many Jews from Austria would go to Poland

or go to Czechoslovakia.

But other Jews realised that,

actually, Germany was in an expansive mood, nobody was going to stop them,

and they weren't safe in Europe.

They will go as far away from Hitler as possible.

America, South America, China,

the Far East, and South Africa.

Anne wants to know about Bernard Altman,

the man with whom Jehudo entrusted his paintings.

His name keeps coming up, and I didn't know whether perhaps he was

somebody in the art world, or...

Not as far as we know. As you say, Altman comes up in the story,

and therefore we've taken note of his role in all this,

and for sure, we think he's a completely innocent party,

because ultimately, the Nazis actually closed him down,

as far as we understand, and took his belongings.

Then the question is, what happened to the artwork? Because remember,

the Nazis were not collecting works

by Jehudo Epstein or by Jewish artists.

But they wouldn't destroy them, particularly,

because there was money in it.

-Yeah.

-And remember, this was simply business. It was a money-making exercise.

-Yeah.

-So these works would have been, in all likelihood, sold.

It's not known if Jehudo's wife, Augusta, went to South Africa

with him. But David is able to shed some light

on what she did after Jehudo passed away.

When your great-uncle died in 1945,

-he was cremated in the Jewish cemetery.

-In South Africa?

-In Johannesburg.

-Oh, right.

-But his wife

-brought back his ashes to Vienna in 1948, I think.

-Right.

-Maybe 1949.

-So, at some point she must have been in South Africa.

-Right.

And maybe she did go to bring back his ashes.

And his ashes are now buried in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

I had absolutely no idea about any of that at all.

So that's been a revelation. It's been really, really interesting.

And there's another very special reason

why Anne has been invited to see David today.

I bought it because, A - I wanted a painting by Jehudo Epstein

for my collection and B - I thought this was a particularly fine example.

-This was certainly done 1915 or before.

-Really?

So it's right in mid-life, right in the peak of his career, OK?

He was already a professor. And you can already see,

if you look at the colour palette,

-it's no longer dark. He introduces white.

-Yes.

And shades of white. And captures that moment wonderfully well.

And what I want to say to you is...that if this painting is on a list,

and it is your property, then you will have it back.

Right. OK, thank you.

-Absolutely 100% guaranteed.

-Thank you.

And David has one more surprise for Anne - a copy of Jehudo's memoirs,

written in 1929.

It's in absolutely immaculate condition.

-It's called Mein Weg Von Ost Nach West.

-My Journey From North To West.

My Journey From North To West. And this is absolutely perfect condition,

and I'd like to give this to you as a memento of the occasion.

And I hope that when you come back to me and say,

-"David, the picture's not on my list" then you will accept the book with my pleasure.

-Thank you!

And if I have to give you the picture too,

-then maybe you might give me the book back.

-Deal.

-A deal?

-Thank you very much.

-My pleasure.

Although David has given Anne some answers,

it's clear she has only just begun her journey of discovery.

I'm just absolutely amazed

that we now can find out about this.

I know very, very little about the man himself,

and this is what's going to make it so interesting,

to find out all about him.

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