Wardley/Sinclair Heir Hunters

Every year, around 500,000 people die in the UK.

Over half leave no will and thousands have no known family.

In all of the time I've been here,

I've never seen a single person visit him.

If no relatives come forward to claim the estate,

their money will go to the Government.

And that's where the heir hunters come in.

They specialise in tracing beneficiaries who have no clue

that they're entitled to an inheritance.

I just was in shock really, I just couldn't...take it all in, really.

I thought this happened to other people.

The heir hunters face fierce competition from rival firms

as they investigate cases worth thousands of pounds.

There is talk that there could be upwards of £50,000

in savings accounts.

And they can reunite families and long-lost relatives.

This is wonderful, I found a family I never knew I had.

Above all, it's about giving people news of a surprise windfall.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up, a valuable case is proving a tough nut to crack.

We've still got quarter-of-a-million pound estate

to try and find a home for.

Everything will hinge on a single record

and it's just a matter

of finding that single record to put us in the right direction.

And a family secret is finally revealed.

I didn't find out until she died,

but my sister and cousin - somehow or other down the line they knew -

but I never ever knew, so it was quite a shock.

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

Monday morning,

and as much of the country eases its way into the working week,

the heir hunting team at Fraser & Fraser

have hit the ground running

on a new case which was published on the previous Friday

by the Government's Treasury Solicitor.

The estate they're looking at

belonged to a man called Eric William Wardley

and case manager Mike Pow thinks it could be a good,

lucrative case to get their week off to a flying start.

We think there's a property involved which is

valued at about £200,000...

but that's just a rough estimation at the moment,

we don't know what else the deceased had.

So I'm going to do some phone enquiries

and hopefully pick up some more information.

Eric William Wardley died in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex,

on 21 March 2013 aged 83,

leaving an estate estimated at £200,000.

Unfortunately, there are no surviving photographs of Eric,

but neighbour Sue remembers him well.

He had...

He still had his own hair, it was dark and curly, he wore glasses.

We used to call him the "carrier bag man" because he always had some sort of carrier bag with him

and every day he walked up to the public library to read the papers.

Long-time neighbour Louise had been concerned about Eric

and was the one who raised the alarm.

We hadn't seen him for a couple of days,

so my husband phoned the police and they came round

and unfortunately, he was found upstairs.

He had fallen over and unfortunately,

he was in quite a bad way.

The paramedics came and brought him out, he was still alive,

but unfortunately he died later on in hospital.

My wife and I went to the funeral

and there was nobody else there

apart from the neighbours

and the minister conducting the service.

In the office,

company boss Neil must ensure that a high-value case like this

is given priority status.

The bigger cases and the cases with property and things are...

of such importance that we throw everything at them,

we put all of our researchers on them

and we are determined to solve them.

But determined or not, it seems this case is already testing the team.

I'm going to ring some neighbours of the deceased.

Hopefully some of them may have known him, it might give us

a bit of insight into his family and then we can work it out from there.

-"NUMBER NOT RECOGNISED" TONE

-Nope, didn't work.

Everything I've look at so far, we're not getting anywhere with.

Everything will hinge on a single record

and it's just a matter

of finding that single record to put us in the right direction.

Eric worked as a typist in London, he was a bachelor

and never moved away from the family home he shared with his parents.

I've lived here for 38 years.

As far as I know, he's always lived there,

so over 30 years, I should think.

I think he lived there with his mother

and I don't really know, 100% sure,

but I think he lived there with his mother.

But as far as I know, he didn't have any family.

I lived next door to Eric for 19 years, obviously,

so he's known my three children since they were born.

And he used to be quite interested in what they were doing at school

and how old they were, and what they were going to be doing.

It looks like...

It's all go as the team search for heirs to Eric's valuable estate.

They are only too aware that they will not be the only ones

hunting for Eric's beneficiaries

and so the pressure is on to solve this case before the competition.

So far, they've managed to establish through Eric's birth certificate

that his parents were Hilda and Edwin.

And they also know that both Edwin and Eric were only children.

Finding someone is an only child can be bad news for any heir hunt.

When we find that the deceased is an only child,

it means we've ruled off all of near kin.

We're no longer going to be able to find brothers/sisters,

nephews/nieces, great-nephews/nieces.

So, for us, the near kin's out of the way, much harder research,

and an extra generation further back in time.

Establishing that Eric's father was also an only child

means that the paternal side of the tree is now dead.

So the key to the case

will be finding heirs on Eric's mother's side.

But this is proving surprisingly difficult.

We're still pretty stuck. We're waiting for the marriage certificate,

but now we're just going to expand the searches that we're doing.

Even though the death says she was born in 1897,

we're just going to have a look at everything within a ten-year period,

just in case it may have been registered wrong

and she wasn't born in 1897...

purely because everything that we've got around that time

we've managed to disprove.

So frustratingly, despite throwing all their resources at this case,

the team is coming up empty-handed.

They can only hope that rival firms have also reached a similar sticking point.

If they can't find a record of Eric's mother's birth,

it will be impossible to find heirs on the maternal side.

Boss Neil remains optimistic.

Hello, Michael Pow speaking. >

I'm confident that we've got the right parents' names,

the issue comes of why we can't find the birth.

We've worked up three or four so far and all of them

have been proved wrong.

Which leads us to scratching our head - "Where could she come from?"

Although they can't find a birth date for Eric's mother,

they have found several deaths in the name of Hilda G Wardley.

The team are taking a big gamble by working a few of them up.

The most likely one is a Hilda Wardley who died in 1957,

but if it turns out to be wrong,

any work they've done on it will have been a waste of time and money.

Thanks, Brian.

The team work on a commission basis and earn a percentage

of the inheritance, which is agreed with any beneficiaries they find.

But they won't earn a penny unless they find heirs.

There was four of us on Friday, so we probably had ten hours

looking for this birth already and not being able to get it, so...

quickly mounting up our time without any results.

With nothing showing up on any of the databases,

the team have to turn to old-fashioned research.

Boss Neil has gone to the company's library,

which houses historical directories,

listing people living at an address in the UK in any given year.

They believe Eric's parents

had lived in the family home for many years,

so they're hoping that Hilda will be listed,

and if she is, there might be a clue which will help them to confirm

that the Hilda who died in 1957 IS the Hilda they're looking for.

Now, these books which we're going through are

similar to electoral rolls

or similar to telephone directories, really.

They're nowhere near as good as an actual roll

because we only get one person per household.

Ideal world for us would be that the father,

who's the person registered in the '40s in the books,

would pass away and then the mother would come on

and we'd get some change in name.

We know that Edwin Arthur, the father, dies in '65,

which is why he stops being in the books in '65.

So far, so good.

But what Neil really needs

is Hilda's name to show up with a variation,

such as a different middle name or different spelling

in order to help them narrow their search.

He's hoping the following year's directory will help.

And we do have another Wardley...

Down as "Mrs," M-R-S.

No initials, so we have a change in 1966.

It may be a change, but it's not the change Neil was hoping for.

Far from it, in fact.

There may be no middle name listed,

but it's the discovery of a Mrs Wardley -

registered at the house in 1966 -

that completely contradicts the research they've already done.

We thought the mother dies in '57, so she shouldn't be in it in '66.

Saying that, in '67 it's back to Eric,

so have they just made a mistake in it one year

or have we got the wrong death?

It looks like another false start

and more hours of expensive research going nowhere.

Neil heads back to the office

to have a confab with senior researcher Noel.

She's only in that book for a year.

The very next year is Eric and the year before, it's his father.

-So...

-Just a random?

..is it just an error?

With a £200,000 inheritance at stake,

will the team manage to crack this case before the competition

or will it be the one that got away?

It's a bit annoying, this one, because we are stuck.

Everything that we've looked at we've proved wrong.

Tricky cases can take years to solve

and two things heir hunters need in abundance

are patience and determination.

And someone who knows this only too well

is Kevin Edmondson, of heir hunting firm Hoopers in London,

who has over 30 years' experience tracking down missing heirs.

There's the thrill of the chase, I suppose.

The finding out what wasn't known before

and that's what keeps it fresh.

And one case which took up almost an astonishing 20 years

of his and the team's time is that of Veronica Sinclair.

We first heard about the case of Veronica Sinclair

when it was advertised by the Treasury Solicitor in 1991.

One of the reasons we looked at this case was that it was

reasonable value,

this was in the days when the Treasury Solicitor

DID advertise the values of the estates

and this was advertised at approximately £110,000.

With a valuable case

comes a lot of competition from rival firms to find heirs.

So the pressure was on to solve the case as quickly as possible.

But as the team were about to find out,

this was going to be a lot harder than they could have imagined.

And the first hurdle came

with the very first piece of information they looked at.

We were puzzled by the fact that the person who was the informant

on Veronica Sinclair's death certificate

was described as her niece, because if she was a true niece,

she would have been one of the next of kin and the Treasury Solicitor

wouldn't have needed to advertise the case at all.

The informant on the death certificate in this case

was Margaret Watts

and she had been very close to the lady

she had always known as her Aunt Vera.

Vera was fun, you know, she used to make you laugh.

Happy, happy person, she was.

She was sort of a bit petite, really, and always made-up.

She always had her hair done,

she went to the hairdressers every Saturday.

She always had jewellery on, nearly always pearls

and she sort of liked going out, she didn't like staying in much.

89-year-old Veronica Mary Sinclair died on 30 December 1989

at the Central Middlesex Hospital in West London, near her home.

If Margaret had been Vera's true niece,

she would have been an heir to her estate,

But Kevin's team soon established that wasn't the case.

One thing we quickly learned was that

Mrs Watts was not a blood relation of Veronica Sinclair.

Veronica had been brought up by a foster mother

from when she was born in 1900 to the age of about seven,

but then her foster mother had died and Mrs Watts's grandmother

had taken Veronica in and brought her up with her family

as one of her own children.

This news came as a huge revelation to Margaret.

We never really found out or I didn't find out until she died,

but my sister and cousin - somehow or other down the line they knew -

but I never, ever knew, so it was quite a shock.

We'd always been told that my grandmother had adopted her,

but in actual fact, she didn't,

she just took her in as a young baby, I believe.

When I found out that Veronica wasn't my proper auntie,

I didn't change in the way I thought about her at all,

she was still my aunt to me, she always had been.

I just thought it was just strange that nobody ever sort of knew

anything about it.

With Margaret ruled out as an heir,

the search was on for Vera's blood relatives.

We quite quickly obtained a copy of Veronica's birth certificate

and found that her mother was Mary MacDonald,

but there was no father's name shown, so Veronica was illegitimate

and this would, presumably,

explain why she was not brought up by her own mother.

It was highly unlikely

that they'd ever find out who Veronica's father was,

but they DID know that her mother was called Mary MacDonald.

And Margaret was able to give them

information about her grandmother, Elizabeth Hammond,

that gave them a good head start to tracing Vera's maternal side.

We discovered there was a link between Elizabeth Hammond

and Veronica's mother, Mary MacDonald.

The link was that they had actually been brought up together

in a Scottish convent.

I always knew that she'd come down from Aberdeen

because she married an English fella, my grandmother,

and I knew she came down with two friends

and I knew one was called Mary and that's all she'd ever told us.

But how had Mary ended up in the convent in Aberdeen?

Illegitimacy and poverty were two key reasons why children

were left in orphanages in the first place.

With no loving parents or family to support her

in her formative years,

growing up in the strict environment of a convent can't have been easy.

Because the convents were often reliant upon charitable donations,

living conditions tended to be very basic.

Clothing and food were very simple.

The girls would have been expected to have undertaken

a daily routine of chores and, as well,

if they stepped out of line they could expect corporal punishment.

After such a hard upbringing, the girls made a courageous decision.

The two friends packed their bags

and made the 400-mile journey to London in search of a better life.

And they soon found work as domestic servants.

In London, sort of the mid/late 19th century,

you have this burgeoning middle-class

who are looking for domestic servants

to reinforce their status

and the wages were infinitely higher than they were in Scotland.

But it wasn't long before Mary became pregnant with Veronica

whilst working as a domestic servant in Marylebone.

Company boss Mike Tringham is a seasoned heir hunter

and he has seen cases like this many times over the years.

It was almost the norm that domestic servants...became the...

The mistress of the head of the household

and there is...

There is, or was, a lot of illegitimacy as a result of that.

Particularly during Victorian times.

Mary was in a very difficult situation

and had to give Vera up to foster care,

but after seven years, Vera's foster mother sadly died,

leaving Mary once again in the unhappy position

of having to find a home for her daughter.

Vera's mother must have had sort of, more of a...sad sort of life,

I think, really.

As far as I know, I don't think Mary had any relations in London

or even went back to Scotland again,

so she just sort of worked all the time.

The friendship between Elizabeth and Mary

that had started so long ago as children

in that cold convent in Aberdeen

had since become an unbreakable bond

through their shared experiences in London,

and Elizabeth came to the aid of her dear, old friend.

By then, Elizabeth was married and had a home and growing family,

and so was able to bring Vera up as her own, in a loving environment.

We just all assumed that they were just one big, happy family,

we didn't realise that it wasn't her daughter.

She was just brought up the same, used to call her Mum and everything.

Vera was never formally adopted by Elizabeth.

If she had been, Margaret would have been an heir.

So whilst her mother continued working as a domestic servant,

Veronica grew up, and at the age of 20, she married Lionel Sinclair.

In their free time they enjoyed walking together

and weekend outings in their car.

After being born illegitimately,

Vera finally gave birth to her own son, Roy.

But just two years later, fate would deal a cruel blow.

We think he might have drank some paint, or turps, or something...

cleaning fluid, because they were working in the cleaners.

I think he was only about two and a half when he died,

so it was really very sad, but she hardly ever spoke about him.

So I think it's something that she wanted to keep in the past, really.

And so there were no direct heirs from that line.

After the tragic loss of their son,

Vera and Lionel had no more children,

so the only blood relatives on this case

were going to come from Vera's mother,

Mary's branch of the family,

and Kevin's team soon ran into trouble.

Mary MacDonald is a very common name, which is a problem for us

when trying to identify the correct Mary MacDonald.

We would need to find out where and when she was born

and who her parents were,

but the censuses which could have helped us -

the 1901 and 1911 - weren't available.

Frustratingly, there was only one thing they could do.

We really couldn't make any progress unless we did identify

Mary MacDonald's birth certificate, so we closed the case.

With an estimated £100,000 legacy at stake, it was frustrating,

but the team's only option was to stop work,

but almost 20 years after starting the case, would the release of the

1911 census finally give the team the lead they so desperately needed?

The breakthrough in this case was finding Veronica living with

Elizabeth Hammond's family.

Heir hunters trace thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year,

but not all cases can be cracked.

There are over 10,000 estates on the Government's own list

of unclaimed estates

that have eluded the heir hunters and remain unsolved.

A case will stay on the list until it is claimed

or for 12 years

is the legal limitation for claiming an estate.

Today, we're focusing on two cases that have yet to be solved

by the heir hunters.

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

First is the case of Beryl Joan or Joanna Leonard,

who died on 25 August 2011 in Chelmsford, Essex, aged 85.

Beryl was born on 3 July 1926, but it is not known where.

She never married and was also known as Beryl Leonard Helliwell.

Although Leonard is a common English name, it has both Old German

and Irish origins.

Could Beryl have had any family connections either in Germany

or Ireland?

Next, do you have any clues that would crack open the case

of Abdul Jabbar Othman Al-Rawendouzi?

Abdul was a bachelor, born on 21 July 1937 in Diwaniya, Iraq.

Known as Jabbar or John Othman, he died a long way from home

in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, on 5 June 2002, aged 65.

Hatfield has a long association with Iraq.

In 1931, the newly-formed Iraq Flying Corps

started its official flying operations

with a flight from Hatfield to Baghdad.

Could there have been an early family connection that drew

Jabbar or John to this particular part of the UK?

Did you know Jabbar? Or do you have any information about his family?

Both Beryl and Jabbar's estates remain unclaimed

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

The money raised by the Bona Vacantia Division is passed

annually to the Treasury and it goes into the Consolidated Fund,

therefore to benefit the country as a whole.

Do you have any clues that could help solve the cases

of Beryl Leonard or Jabbar Othman?

Perhaps you could be their next of kin.

If so, you could have thousands of pounds coming your way.

The heir hunters have spent many costly research hours getting

nowhere, trying to solve the case of the estimated £200,000 estate

of 83-year-old bachelor Eric Wardley.

The team at Fraser & Fraser still cannot find a birth date

for his mother, Hilda Roberts.

It's a very frustrating time for case manager Mike.

It's a bit annoying, this one, because we are stuck.

Everything that we've looked at we've proved wrong.

They thought they'd found the right death certificate,

but have not been able to match the birth date with Eric's mother,

living in Essex.

Drawing a blank online,

they've even trawled through the company's library of reference books

to confirm the year they think Hilda died - 1957...

..only to discover

that a Mrs Wardley pops up in the records in 1966.

We've got the wrong death. She should be dead by now.

Boss Neil is determined this case is not going to beat them.

We've still got a quarter-of-a-million pound estate

to try and find a home for and I'm confident we will solve it,

but it's... not quite with our usual speed.

There are no surviving photographs of Eric,

but the team have been able to establish that he had always

lived in the family home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.

He remained there as a bachelor after his parents died,

some 40 years before his death in March 2013.

Unfortunately, the neighbours have no knowledge of any family members

which could help the hunt.

He was a very private person,

so he didn't sort of talk to us about his...his past.

We've certainly never seen anybody come to visit

in all the time we've known the house.

All hopes of finding heirs to this quarter-of-a-million pound estate

rest on discovering relatives through Eric's mother,

Hilda's family, because the company have already ruled out heirs

from his father Edwin's side of the family.

They have, however,

made an interesting discovery about Edwin's father.

Eric's grandfather was called Arthur.

He worked on the railway as a railwayman.

He died in 1924, aged just 67.

Before the 1920s,

there were over 120 separate railway companies in the UK.

The Railways Act of 1921 required them

to group themselves into just four companies.

Arthur worked in the wagon repair shop

for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway or the LMS,

which thanks to the merger,

had become the world's largest transport organisation

and was also the second largest employer in the UK

after the Post Office.

To give you some idea of the size of the LMS railway company,

they carried 461 million

and a few odd people in 1929

on their trains and they roughly accounted

for something over a third and the other three companies did the rest.

The number of people on the LMS workforce was mind-boggling.

In 1931, they were employing 231,617 people in all types of grades,

including loco drivers, shunters, station staff

and the like.

It seems that Arthur was working on a tree-cutting machine,

making manageable lengths of timber that could be used

for carriage and station repairs.

It was quite a lot of danger involved in the heavy machinery

and heavy wood machining industries and therefore,

they would have to take great care to make sure they were not injured.

There were no real health and safety rules at that time

like we have today,

but the LMS had to make sure it protected its employees

because, obviously, if they didn't and someone died,

clearly there would be an inquest and so therefore,

they wouldn't want to be seen as negligent.

But just before Christmas in 1924, while working at the Grimesthorpe

sidings in Sheffield, Arthur was involved in a horrific accident.

A guard's brake van bore down on him

while he was busily working next to the tracks.

He didn't stand a chance,

as the train carriage crashed into him, killing him instantly.

As Arthur and his wife Mary had only one child -

Eric's father, Edwin - there are no aunts,

uncles or cousins who could be heirs,

which means there are no heirs to be found on the paternal side of the family.

So the key to solving this case all hinges on

finding out information about Hilda, Eric's mother.

But with such a common name,

the team have multiple Hilda Roberts to work with.

I could not get her date of birth.

Senior researcher Noel is guiding new girl Sinead

through the process

of trying to find a date of birth for Eric's mother.

Oh, it's the wrong birth.

Michael, that's wrong.

But she's a spinster, right?

Well, it's just a surname, Roberts,

we're not sure where she's from because there's no obvious birth

in Essex for a Hilda G Roberts born about 1897,

which is what the death says.

The two that we found that looked half decent,

we've managed to rule out, so we're just going back to see

what we can find and if anything else ties in.

With all other avenues exhausted, it's time for the team

to bring in some extra troops, even though this will mean extra expense.

Dave Hadley is one of the company's most experienced travelling

heir hunters and he's been sent to Brentwood, Essex,

to apply for Eric's parents' marriage certificate.

Hopefully we should get it this morning. That looks like it'll

unlock the family at the moment, cos we're ruling everything out.

It seems Dave's got some news for case manager Mike.

Arthur Robert... Arthur Roberts the farmer.

OK, mate, brilliant.

Mike's hoping that the information on the marriage certificate

about the people who attended Eric's parents' wedding

will lead them to some new connections to his mother,

but it's not quite the full picture he needs.

Dave has got bits and pieces from the certificate

that they've given him, he hasn't got the full certificate,

so we are waiting for him to get the full one so we can find out

the witnesses and the addresses of where they were married...

So then even that could indicate maybe

one of the sisters of the mother of the deceased has married someone

and she's a witness on there, so then we can tie in through that.

If one of Hilda's siblings

is listed as a witness on the marriage certificate,

it would be a vital breakthrough for the team.

And it's not the only reason they have to be hopeful,

because Dave has also managed to speak to a friend of Eric's,

who has revealed a potentially vital nugget of information.

He let us know that the deceased may have had a cousin called Kath

or Kathleen.

This is very exciting news and the team immediately begin searching

for this potential cousin or her children.

They discover that the Kathleen they're looking for died five years ago,

but they find a telephone number for someone they think could be her son.

Could this be the team's first real breakthrough to a possible heir?

I'm hoping that Elliott would be the son of a Richard Wardley

and a Kathleen Wardley?

No, he's not? OK, no, sorry to have troubled you. Take care, bye-bye.

It's not Kathleen's son.

So once again, it's a disappointing dead end.

Still stuck.

The team have exhausted nearly every option in their search

for Eric's heirs, but they want to have just one more roll of the dice.

Hilda's full marriage certificate has come in

and it lists her father as Arthur Roberts.

The team think they've found records for the same Arthur Roberts

and if they have, it should lead them to aunts, uncles and cousins.

But the only way they can be sure

that they've got the right Arthur Roberts

is to send researcher Sinead to the British Library.

The directory from our library - earliest date - has one person from each household,

whereas in the British Library

they have the electoral rolls which have everyone within that household.

But Sinead is under no illusions.

It's our last chance to really find the deceased's mother's father

as we've not managed to find any trace of her birth.

We only have her death and the year that she's born -

which is on the death certificate -

but apart from that, we haven't found any trace of her.

Sinead heads over to the British Library,

hoping to find an electoral roll that lists Arthur and Hilda

living together at the same address, proving he's her father.

But after hours of trawling through records with a fine-tooth comb,

things are not looking good.

Well, unfortunately, Arthur was not Hilda's father.

We've had a look at the electoral rolls and he is not the father,

they just weren't related in any way,

so it takes us back to square one with Hilda,

that we don't know where she was born or who she really is,

we just have her death certificate.

So for whatever reason, it appears that Hilda made up her father's

details on her marriage certificate.

It's the final blow to the team's five days of intensive research.

It's a bitter pill for boss Neil to swallow,

but it's time to face the truth.

You have to cut your losses, we have to draw a line and say,

"Right, we've got to take this back."

Weeks later, the team did find the mother's birth,

but the search for heirs continues.

In 1991, one of the country's oldest heir hunting firms

had taken on the search for heirs to an estimated £100,000 estate

left by 89-year-old Veronica Sinclair.

Brought up by her mother's friend and raised as one of her own,

the family she grew up with knew nothing

of her secret, illegitimate past.

I didn't find out until she died, but my sister and cousin -

somehow or other down the line they knew -

but I never ever knew, so it was quite a shock.

But even with over 30 years' experience as an heir hunter,

case manager Kevin Edmondson and the team

soon found themselves at a dead end.

All we had was the statement from Margaret Watts,

Veronica's birth and death certificates

and nothing else really to go on to help us

to find out about Veronica's mother's family.

They had no choice but to close the case in 1991

and although they checked the 1901 census when it was released in 2001,

there was no further information that shed any light on the case.

The only hope then was that when the next census was released in 2009,

further clues would come their way.

We know from experience that cases have been solved...years after

we first start them, so we put them

away in the hope that something will come to light at a later date.

Not only is it frustrating for the team

when they're forced to shelve a case, but it also means

that they won't get paid for all the hard work put in up to that date.

And in the case of Veronica Sinclair,

the team had to wait an agonising nine years

for fresh information to become available.

When the new record was published,

it seemed it was just what the team had been waiting for.

The breakthrough in this case was finding Veronica,

or Vera as she was known in the family,

on the 1911 census record,

living with Elizabeth Hammond's family.

With new information from the 1911 census, the team were able to

pinpoint Elizabeth Hammond's birthplace to Aberdeen.

They then trawled back through the 1891 census,

which gave details of the convent in Aberdeen,

which had been home to both girls

and showed the birthplace of Vera's mother, Mary MacDonald,

as Montrose, Forfarshire.

It also gave us her age, so we knew that we could narrow down

her date and place of birth quite significantly.

We then examined the birth records for Montrose

and found that there was only one fit for a Mary McDonald, and this,

strangely enough, was a Mary MacDonald who was also

born as an illegitimate child.

Her mother Elsie was, in fact, a widow.

The team began to feel they were finally on a roll,

as they also discovered that Mary's mother,

Veronica's grandmother, Elsie,

had married a John MacDonald and had two children by him.

Mary was born approximately three years after Elsie's husband died.

She decided to keep the two boys at home with her

and sent Mary to grow up and be educated at the convent in Aberdeen.

The two children that Mary's mother had...from her marriage with

John MacDonald were called George and John.

John died as a child, but we found that George did survive

and did marry, so we wanted to follow down that line to see

if there were any descendants there.

John and George were Mary's half-brothers

and although their descendants would be Vera's half-cousins,

they would still be heirs to her estate.

We discovered that George MacDonald had four children and that three

of them had still been alive at the date of Veronica Sinclair's death.

This means that their estates could claim

a share of Veronica Sinclair's estate.

The team were finally on the verge of pinpointing their first heir.

One of George MacDonald's children was a son, John,

who had died a few years previously, leaving his own heir

who was a half-blood relative of Veronica Sinclair.

The informant on the death certificate of John MacDonald

was his son, Ian,

and we quite quickly after that managed to trace Ian.

I think it was quite a surprising moment for Ian as well

when we explained our reasons for contacting him.

Finally, after 20 long years, the team had managed to solve

this elusive case, and for Vera's long-lost relative and heir, Ian,

the news of his legacy came as a complete surprise.

Well, we had no idea.

I didn't know much about the family history beyond my grandfather.

I didn't... I knew there was a brother

and I knew that there had been a sister that went to Canada,

but I didn't know anything about Mary

who was the mother of the deceased.

It transpires Elsie had gone on to have

three more illegitimate children after Mary,

but while the others were brought up in the family home

and remembered by Ian,

he'd never known of Great-aunt Mary's existence.

He was, however, close to her brother, his grandfather, George.

Every summer I was packed off to Stonehaven

to live with my grandparents and Grandfather George

I became very attached to,

because he introduced me to fishing, he made my first fishing rod.

I'd very fond memories of Grandfather George.

But it seems Ian's grandfather was no ordinary grandparent.

Grandfather George had been

the pipe major of the 5th/7th Gordon Highlanders.

He was recognised as an outstanding piper

and actually wrote two books of pipe music.

The Gordon Highlanders was one of the most famous

Highland British Army regiments of all time.

It was raised in 1794 to fight Napoleon Bonaparte

and the role of the pipers was to pipe the men into action.

It must have been a horrendous experience,

but also an exhilarating one.

We have accounts of pipers drawing lots to have the

honour of piping the men into battle, so it was a prized position.

These pipers were completely unarmed,

all they had were their bagpipes,

but they were a powerful instrument of war,

they were there to inspire the men of their battalion forward

and also to strike terror into the enemy.

But being a piper was a particularly dangerous role.

Something like 500 pipers were

killed during the First World War with 600 being wounded

and they were dreadfully exposed and very courageous men.

For Ian, becoming an heir

has also opened up a part of his family history

he never even knew existed.

It was hard to take it in to begin with,

but it did cause a bit of reflection

and a bit of family research, trying to find out what we could.

The heir hunters managed to establish that two of Elsie's

other illegitimate children died with no issue.

But one married, emigrated to Canada and had children,

who will also be beneficiaries.

The team are in the process of locating those remaining heirs,

but having broken the back of the case,

Kevin can reflect on a job well done,

even if it did take an astonishing 20 years of determination

never to give up the search.

This has been a particularly satisfying case to work on.

The thing about this case that attracted me and made me want to solve it

was we put an awful lot of effort into it

in the first time we looked at it, and personally,

I felt...a desire to see it through to a conclusion.

That's why it was very satisfying

when we did actually make a breakthrough.

Vera's heir Ian has come to Stonehaven, where the story began,

to reflect on what he now knows about his family history

and to revive some precious memories of his beloved grandfather George.

During the war, this area here is where the sandbag emplacement

and the Observer Corps lookout point was, and I used to come up here

and visit my grandfather and get to see everything that went on.

It seems rather tragic that had we known about her,

she could at least have been part of the family.