Stout/Lynsdale Heir Hunters

Every year thousands of people die with no known family

and without leaving a will.

Nobody knew very much about him.

He was one of these guys, he seemed to keep himself very much to himself.

If no relatives come forward, their money will go to the Government.

And that's where the heir hunters step in.

Hello, Mal.

They are experts in tracing long lost family members

who are entitled to part of an estate.

It came as a bolt out of the blue, really.

Their work involves detailed research.

Because you're in a competitive process there is a time constraint.

And there are often thousands of pounds at stake.

We've since discovered that the pearls found in Marion's house

actually belonged to the Duchess of Windsor.

But it's also about reuniting families

and bringing people closer together.

I didn't know what I know now about my own family.

Above all, it's about giving people news of an unexpected windfall.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up, the heir hunters take on a huge gamble.

We've really got to establish

whether this case is worth looking at financially.

And the tale of one family driven apart by war is revealed.

Suddenly our whole world was completely shattered.

Plus, have you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed

estates held by the Treasury.

Could a fortune be heading your way?

Tuesday afternoon in central London,

and the team at heir hunting firm Fraser and Fraser

are hard at work on a new case that has just come out.

I've got the late Doris Stout.

I'm wondering if I could speak to someone who may have dealt

with her affairs or knew the lady?

Thank you, bye-bye.

We've picked up a case or a potential case of Doris Stout. Erm...

Now, it looks like she was possibly in a nursing home,

although maybe her property was sold.

In which case, although she'd been in a nursing home for a couple of

years, there is potential for there to be a reasonable estate remaining.

We are going to look into this quite urgently, because it's got potential.

Doris Stout passed away in March 2013 in a nursing home in Essex.

She was 90-years-old.

Together with her husband, John,

she had lived in the seaside town of Southend-on-Sea for many years.

According to neighbours,

they were a couple who loved a night out on the town.

Sometimes they would be practising,

because we could hear the music, they would be practising dance steps.

They used to go out every night, it didn't matter what the weather.

Snowing, raining, whatever, and they used to go to the pub.

She would go out in a lovely dress, wouldn't she? She'd be all done up.

They didn't go out scruffy, they went out done up nicely in the evenings.

Fantastic, fantastic people.

And it seems the pair were the centre of each other's world.

They were a devoted couple.

She worshipped John, and John was, you know, cock-a-hoop.

They were a good couple.

They lived, basically, for one another.

Doris was born Doris James in February 1923

in Poplar, east London.

As she died without leaving a will

and as no family have come forward, her case has been advertised as

unclaimed by the Treasury Solicitor's Bona Vacantia department.

Cases are referred to the Bona Vacantia division by all

sorts of people, usually the local authority who will have dealt

with the funeral, sometimes hospitals,

sometimes friends of the deceased will refer cases.

They can also come from private firms and solicitors,

so really anyone can refer an unclaimed estate to us.

The Bona Vacantia list

is a common source of work for the heir hunters.

And until recently,

the minimum value of any estate appearing on the list was £5,000.

But lately all that has changed.

Generally speaking, everything had some money,

and had enough money to work it through and complete it.

Now that value has dropped. That value has dropped from £5000 to £500.

The Treasury do not publish the exact value

of any estate on their list,

so the team have no idea whether cases are worth £500 or £5 million.

They work for a percentage of the estate,

which would be agreed with any heirs they sign up.

And if they don't find any heirs, they won't earn a penny.

Any chance of getting that over the phone?

Case manager Gareth Langford and the team believe that Doris had owned

a property and have estimated this estate could be worth £175,000.

But they know that Doris spent at least two years

living in a nursing home,

and it's possible her house was sold to pay for her care.

So the team can't be certain of the case's true value.

On face value the estate has possibly got some good value.

Actually, it's more likely that most of the value of the estate has been

swallowed up by nursing home fees.

Which is sadly often the case these days.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the value of her estate,

the team have already made good progress

and established that Doris married John Stout in 1946 in East Ham.

As John died before Doris and they had no children,

the team need to look for any siblings she might have,

as they or their children would be next in line to inherit.

The heir hunters have discovered that Doris's parents were

George James and Annie Harbour.

They believe George and Annie had at least one other child,

a daughter called Marjorie,

who was born six years before Doris in 1917 and died in infancy.

But surprisingly, Doris

and Marjorie were born a long time after their parents married.

The deceased parents married in 1903.

So we've got a birth in 1923, a birth in 1917,

but there's obviously all that time in between 1911 in 1903

where there could be other siblings of the deceased.

It's these siblings and their children who the team now need to

trace, as they or their children could be heirs to Doris' estate.

As the team get to work trying to trace more siblings,

using censuses and birth records, Gareth gets a phone call

which might shed some light on the value of her estate.

Thank you, bye-bye.

Right, that's a bit of background information.

Basically, Doris went into care after her husband passed away.

It's not good news for Gareth.

As Doris' husband died seven years before her,

Doris lived in a nursing home for a lot longer than they thought.

So even though she owned a property, potentially worth £175,000,

her entire estate may have been spent on her care.

So that could have quite a dramatic effect on the value

of the estate from our point of view.

Because at this stage we've really got to establish

whether this case is worth looking at financially.

Meanwhile on the research side, the team have been able to

establish that Doris did indeed have more siblings.

In fact, it seems she came from a very large family.

I found a 1911 census that had five children.

We were aware that there were two additional children born after 1911.

As the result of some research, I found an additional

three other children as well, born between 1911 and 1920.

It gives us a total of 10 children.

We've established that one of the children, Marjorie,

died in infancy, but several of them married.

Six of those went on to have children.

A big family means the company

must invest more resources to trace heirs.

So with any case they take on, boss Neil must try to assess

whether the commission they will earn from an estate is enough

to pay for their work.

The bigger the family,

the greater chance we have of finding that one person.

Once we've found that one person, then we don't want any more.

Once we found the first beneficiary, then we have to be careful.

We have to then start looking at estate size.

If we are dealing with a relatively small estate,

maybe £15,000-£20,000, and we suddenly start getting hundreds

and hundreds of cousins, then we've got a problem.

For now, the team are pressing on with their research,

but they know it's a risk.

Not going there then. Focus on marriages.

Grab another stem. There's hundreds of them.

They've discovered Doris had nine siblings,

all of whom seemed to have died.

So they are now looking for their descendants,

who would be heirs to Doris's estate.

The case isn't going very well really.

We've got an awful lot of nee kin, but we're not getting any heirs.

Erm... We are either getting marriages

but they are not having children,

or brothers passing away as bachelors.

To add even more pressure to the team, they know that any

number of rival heir hunting firms could be working the case.

It's urgent because we've got to beat the competition.

I know there will be lots of companies looking at this case.

Whatever the value of Doris' estate may be, if a rival firm

reaches the heirs first,

Gareth and the team won't make a single penny.

And as the search continues, will all their hard work pay off?

At the moment we're fighting quite a big battle with lots of heirs,

lots of competition, and what we need to do is get them all on our side.

While most heir hunts remain in the UK,

some can be truly global affairs.

And that was certainly true when probate research firm Finders

took on the case of David Lynsdale.

Based in London,

the company is one of the largest air hunting firms in the UK.

And for managing director Daniel Curran,

it's a rewarding business.

There's a big plus on some cases

where you find people that have a life-changing experience,

whether that's through money they inherit

or through the family they get to know about that they never knew about before.

When the firm got to work tracing heirs to Derek Lynsdale's

£270,000 estate,

it was up to case manager Ryan Gregory to lead the team.

We started the case of Derek Lynsdale at the beginning of 2011.

We found out it was with the Treasury Solicitor's Office, the Bona Vacantia Division,

and we started work on it pretty soon after that.

Derek Lynsdale died in October 2010 at home in Welling, Kent.

A regular churchgoer, it seems he was a man who kept himself to himself.

He'd been coming here since before I arrived,

and I came here about six years ago.

And he would sit very quietly at the back

and just take up the collection,

that was his bit, you know.

Since he passed away,

I discovered that he had been living with his mum until she died.

And she'd been a university lecturer or something in Burma.

And after she died, he lived on his own in the house

and he was a bit of a loner really.

As Derek had no wife, children or any close family,

it was up to Ryan and his team to track down heirs.

Their first job was to establish if Derek had any siblings.

And to do this,

they needed to trace his parents via his birth certificate.

We started with the name of the deceased and the date of death.

From there, we can usually go back

and find the birth entry of the deceased.

But in this particular case,

looking for a record of Derek's birth

was not going to be straightforward.

Whilst he died in Kent, he had been born a lot further away,

in the colony of Burma.

Fortunately for the team, however,

as Burma was first colonised as a province of British India,

many of its records are held alongside the Indian ones

at the British Library in London.

Rather than travel all the way to Burma,

the team could start work a little closer to home.

Once we knew the records were held at the British Library,

we sent a junior researcher down to the India Office Records section

of the British Library to research the baptism and marriage indexes.

But there was a limit to how useful these records could be.

The records held at the British Library for Burma stop in 1937.

After 1937, Burma actually became

a separately administered colony of the British Empire.

Unfortunately for the heir hunters, Derek was born in October 1937,

meaning they had no chance of finding his birth there.

We couldn't find any records at all,

so the next logical step was to try and find out who his parents were.

Lynsdale is a very uncommon surname,

so it was almost easier for us to research the parents.

And Ryan was soon able to track them down.

The deceased's parents were George Lynsdale and Jean Phipps.

They married in 1936 in Rangoon, the before he was born.

Jean and George were both from Anglo-Indian families

and it seems they'd both grown up in Burma,

which at the time was an important part of the British Empire.

Burma is on the eastern border

of India, and in the 19th century,

as a result of three wars -

one in the 1820s,

one in the 1850s and one in the 1880s -

the British annexed Burma.

They did so principally to protect that eastern border of India.

It is, to use a phrase, the Jewel in the Crown.

So in terms of the amount of wealth that Britain extracted from India,

it's huge, it is the core possession.

Under British rule, Burma itself

was transformed both physically and economically.

Rangoon changes from basically a rather muddy town, really,

into the capital of British Burma, the major administrative centre,

the government centre, the commercial centre.

And of course, a city dominated also by foreigners.

The Burmese aren't there, it's a European, it's an Indian city.

It was at the University of Rangoon that Derek's parents met.

Jean went on to become a zoologist

and George got a job as a secretariat to the British Government.

For the senior levels of the administration, they lived well.

They had servants, they had guards, it was as it was in India proper.

In the physical sense, it could be incredibly luxurious.

One was surrounded by servants, one had all sorts of amenities,

one played polo, one drank gin,

it could be a life of extraordinary luxury, comparative to the time.

Now they knew Derek's parents were, they could now check to see

if he was an only child.

Because we couldn't find any siblings of the deceased,

we went back and looked at the wider family

to try and find aunts and uncles, and therefore cousins.

On the maternal side of the family, we were able to identify

the fact that the deceased's mother only had one sibling.

It was a brother and he died shortly after being born.

So effectively that side of the family had died out.

All hopes of finding heirs to this £270,000 estate

now rested on the paternal side.

If Derek's father George had no siblings,

all the teams research would have been for nothing.

Before they could look for George's siblings, however,

they first had to trace his parents.

From the baptism entry of the deceased's father,

we were able to identify the occupation

of the paternal grandfather, Henry Lynsdale,

which showed that he was actually a doctor

in the Indian army based in Burma.

Henry Lynsdale began his career at Madras Medical School

and went on to become a doctor in the British Indian Army.

Working in both India and Burma, it was a career that placed him

at the heart of the ongoing expansion of the British Empire.

By the time Derek's father was born,

Henry had been posted to the Andaman Islands,

a group of 200 islands in the Bay of Bengal,

which at that time were being used as a British penal colony.

Working as a prison doctor there in a jail that still stands today,

his Anglo-Indian heritage gave him unique status.

Henry Lynsdale seems to have been one of the Anglo-Indians

who was used as a buffer between the establishment

and the Indian convicts.

Because most Anglo-Indians could speak Hindustani or other languages,

they were very familiar with culture, with food,

with ways of life and so on.

And so it was felt that they could associate with Indian convicts

successfully, whilst remaining fairly separate from them.

To further his career,

Henry and his family would have had to make some serious adjustments.

Anglo-Indians were urban people, they lived in cities,

they enjoyed the good life - theatre, dancing, bingo,

all these things - and it wasn't an easy transition

to a very isolated, hostile,

uncleared environment in a tropical island.

And it seems the job required a man of strong character.

The large majority of convicts were convicted of crimes of violence,

mostly murder or violent robbery.

And in the case of women, who constituted about 10 percent

of the total number of convicts, infanticide.

So these were violent offenders.

The key thing for the heir hunters, however,

is whether Henry and his wife Mabel,

Derek's grandparents, had more than one child.

If they did, there was still a chance of finding heirs

to Derek Lynsdale's estate.

The paternal grandparents had four children in total.

One of those died without issue,

one was the deceased's father.

Derek's father George had three siblings.

As his sister Winifred died in infancy,

the heir hunters now needed to trace Clement and William's descendants,

Derek's cousins, in order to find heirs.

Once we'd identified George's brothers, we then had to go back

to the marriage records, try and find the marriage entry for them

and from there on we could find whether they had any children.

And the search for Derek's cousins was to uncover a terrifying tale.

In late December 1941, the Japanese invaded Burma.

What shook me so much was when we were bombed.

And suddenly, this lovely, idyllic childhood world

was totally shattered.

Heir hunters trace thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year.

But not all cases can be cracked.

There are thousands out there that have eluded the heir hunters

and remain unsolved.

Today we're focussing on two Scottish cases.

Whereas in England and Wales,

unclaimed estates are dealt with by the Treasury Solicitor

and their value is not revealed,

in Scotland, they're advertised by the Queen's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer.

And they do list the value.

Could you be the beneficiary they are looking for?

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

First up is a case worth almost £55,000.

John Greer Martin was born on 10 March 1939 in Glasgow.

When he died on 18 September 2012 in a care home in East Kilbride,

he left no will,

and no relatives have come forward to claim his estate.

Did you know John?

Do you have any information that could be key to cracking this case?

Next is the £7,392 case of Richard Rogers Smith

who was born on 12 September 1960.

He died on 9 September 2008 in Melrose in the Scottish Borders.

It's believed Richard may have been survived by a child,

siblings and parents.

But despite all this information, there's been no success

in tracing beneficiaries to his estate.

Does his name mean anything to you?

Perhaps you know of some clues which could help find his family.

Both these estates, totalling over £60,000, remain unsolved.

And if no-one comes forward, the money will go to the government.

Do you know anything that could help solve

the cases of Richard Rogers Smith or John Greer Martin?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin?

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

Back in central London, the team, led by case manager Gareth Langford,

are busy tracking down heirs to Doris Stout's estate.

Since starting the case,

they've discovered that she was one of 10 children.

Born the John James and Annie Harbour.

What we know about George is that in 1903, he was down as a seaman,

just a general hand on a boat.

But by 1911, on the census he was down as a ship rigger,

so helped to construct...helped to put the mast up on the boat.

So was moving into the shipbuilding industry

as opposed to the sailing industry.

And it seems shipping was in the blood,

as both Doris's grandfathers had worked in the industry before him.

By the time George became a shipbuilder in 1911,

the year of the Titanic's launch, the industry was at its peak.

NEWSREEL: 'England banks on 534 to reaffirm her supremacy on the Atlantic.'

In 1911, British shipbuilding is turning out no less than 60%

of the entire world merchant fleet.

That's four times as much as its nearest competitor, which is Germany.

For men such as George employed in the industry,

it was a physically demanding job.

Working conditions in the shipyards were very tough.

Everything had to be done by hand,

obviously everything was done outside,

the jobs were very physical and often very dangerous as well.

And it provided an unreliable form of income.

It was actually quite well paid by the standards of the day,

but there was no job security

and when there was no work, men were not employed.

So men were quite often thrown effectively into poverty.

For George, the threat of unemployment would have been

very real, as he had a large family of 10 children to support.

And it's the descendants of these children

that Gareth and the team are now trying to track down.

As one child died in infancy, and two had no children,

the team are busy tracing heirs

on six different branches of the tree.

With the threat of rival firms also working the case,

it's all hands on deck to find them before the competition.

And finally, it seems they make headway with one stem.

-There she is, live number...

-Brilliant. Thank you.

Doris's sister Ivy had three children

and the team have just found contact details for one of them.

Hopefully they haven't been contacted already.

It's actually, although the tree is quite large,

at this stage we're not sure how many beneficiaries will be involved.

I'm hoping not many.

Gareth gives the heir a call.

Is that yourself? Oh, brilliant.

Your mother was one of quite a large family, I believe.

I'm specifically looking at Doris James.

And he's in luck.

That would be your aunt...

He's managed to reach them before the competition.

And that's Mr Stout's sister.

Thank you very, very much.

Not only that, but the heir is able to fill him in on the family tree.

And from there, the number of heirs keeps on growing.

The tree's kind of exploded because every stem,

whereas we thought a lot of the stems weren't having issue,

I've now spoken to several beneficiaries

and they basically said each stem seems to have four or five children.

So every time I put the phone down, I've got more heirs.

So what I'm trying to do now really is get another copy

of the family tree together, so I can pass it on to the secretaries

to get letters out today to the ones we've located so far.

Gareth does exactly that,

and with the tree still growing at an alarming rate,

the team eventually have to call it a day.

The next day, and although they've found

a lot of potential heirs to Doris's estate,

they still have several more to find.

Really, what's left is the sort of slightly more tricky bits,

really, that we're struggling to sort out, but, you know...

It's never always easy, so it's good to have difficult bits,

because if it's difficult for us, it's difficult for everybody else.

So far, they've completed work on five out of six stems.

I think he may have passed away a minor,

or he's just not actually a part of our family.

And they've made great progress,

tracing 11 nieces and nephews of Doris,

as well as six great-nephews and nieces.

All 17 of whom are potential heirs to her estate.

At the moment, we're fighting quite a big battle, with lots of heirs,

lots of competition, and what we need to do

is get them all on our side.

Where's my cup of tea?

To add to the team's woes,

they still don't know how much this case is worth.

Although Doris and her husband once owned a property worth around £175,000,

it's possible the proceeds from selling it

were all used to pay for her care.

But the impression of Doris's neighbours

is that they were quite well-to-do.

And they remember Doris's late husband John

as a successful businessman.

His early business interest lay in the fact that he produced

mannequins that used to show in shop windows.

And I believe he was one of the first in the country

to produce those things.

And it seems like he might have had some money behind him.

He was quite a neat gardener, if you like, but he used to say,

"Well, this garden here would fit in a flower bed at my other place."

And you thought, "Crikey, it must be a fair old place."

These gardens aren't big, butt to fit one in a flower bed,

you're talking some sort of garden.

Time alone will tell if the team's gamble will pay off.

But for now, their main concern is completing the tree.

And there's one stem causing problems.

Really, we've contacted most,

or certainly people on most parts of the family,

apart from Leslie, who is proving slightly more elusive.

Yes, Leslie's children, we are still trying to track them down.

Doris's brother Leslie was born in 1918 and died in 1994.

But the team can't find records to trace any children he might have.

There's Leslie, over there. Now, they don't think he had four children.

Solving this last stem is absolutely vital to their research,

as without it, they cannot be sure if they've found all the heirs.

The worst-case scenario for us, on an estate,

is if we've got unsolved stems. What we really need to do

is get every stem up-to-date as quickly as possible.

Because if we're not getting it up-to-date,

it's possible our competition are.

Finding heirs, however, is just one part of the job.

The team also want the heirs to sign up with them.

So Gareth calls travelling researcher Dave Hadley

and arranges for him to go and visit

one of the heirs they found yesterday.

No, I think Marie is the best bet actually.

All the other stems I've contacted or left messages with.

Lovely, thank you. Bye-bye.

Dave is one of the team's army of travelling researchers

based all over the UK.

His job out on the road is to make enquiries, collect documents

and crucially, to sign up heirs.

I'm on my way to try and make contact with another heir.

Gareth has been trying to ring her all day,

but it's constantly engaged, so he's asked me to make a call on her.

Dave's meeting with one of the Doris's nieces, Marie,

a daughter of Doris's brother George.

And he's hoping she'll sign with the firm.

-Mrs Marie Gibbs?

-Yes.

I've got you as...

As your father was George... would have been Doris's brother.

So that makes Doris your aunt.

Once they've run through the tree, Dave explains the uncertainty

surrounding the value of Doris's estate.

We can't say how much you're likely to get at this stage

because we don't know how much the estate is worth.

We know that she owned her own property at one time.

But it turns out Marie might have some important information.

They had this underwear factory as well.

-Yeah.

-The last time I saw him,

he might have been retired by then,

so he might have sold the factory by then. I don't know. But...

Oh, well, there might be a reasonable amount of money

in the estate in that case.

Perhaps the case might be valuable after all.

Which means it's all the more important that Dave can

persuade Marie to sign with the company.

I'll show you the agreement and then you can have a read of it

and give you an opportunity to ask any questions.

And then you can tell me what you want to do.

Marie wants some time to look over the documents.

But things are looking positive.

So I'll leave that with you.

All you need to do is put that white copy in that envelope,

it doesn't need a stamp, and post it back to us.

OK, thanks ever so much.

-Lovely meeting you, thanks very much, bye-bye.

-Thank you. Bye.

For heir Marie, news of her aunt's death

has taken her totally by surprise.

It was just out of the blue. I didn't know she'd passed away.

The last time I saw her was about 25 years ago.

I used to work in a shoe shop and she used to come in to buy shoes.

She was in her 60s then.

But Dave's visit has brought back fond memories.

When I was young, I used to go around her house

and see her up the high road.

Very nice person.

She had no children, but, er, she was, you know, a lovely lady.

Dave leaves Marie to think things over.

The question of whether she will sign

might still be hanging in the balance,

but there's no more he can do.

I think that's me finished for the day now, so...

going to make my way home.

And back in the office, Gareth has made his own breakthrough

with Doris's brother Leslie, who he's been struggling to trace.

I've just had a phone call from one of the potential heirs.

And they've very kindly filled in quite a lot of blanks.

It appears that Leslie probably only had two children,

and his wife had two children from a previous marriage,

so that might be why we're really struggling to identify, er,

firstly his marriage and secondly the issue of it.

Because if the mother's been previously married

then it's not going to be as obvious.

This means Gareth and the team now have the vital information

they need to completely the tree.

A few days later, Doris's niece Marie

has looked through the paperwork Dave left with her

and decided to sign up to allow the company

to help her claim her share of the inheritance

in return for an agreed percentage.

And Marie is just one of the many heirs on this case.

We were able to establish that there are 21 heirs involved in this.

18 nephews and nieces, and some great-nephews and nieces as well.

But from the moment they began working this case,

one question has hung over them. How much is the estate actually worth?

Well, Gareth has finally been able to establish the value,

and it's very good news.

We slowly discovered that this estate potentially had a much greater value.

In fact, er, the value is so large,

it changed the job completely.

Doris's estate is worth a whopping £500,000

which means the team's gamble has paid off

and the 21 heirs should each receive a sizable inheritance.

Heir-hunting film Finders were on the trail of the £270,000 estate

of Derek Lynsdale, who had been born in Burma

and who had died in the UK in October 2010.

Case manager Ryan had quickly established that

any heirs to this estate would come through Derek's father's family.

With the fact that there wasn't any active stems

on the maternal side of the family,

that led us to put all our resources into the paternal side,

trying to find a lead and trying to find a beneficiary,

hopefully, on that side of the family.

Having established that Derek's father George had two brothers,

the team are on the hunt for any children THEY might have.

As the family were Anglo-Indians based in Burma,

to trace them, the team are relying on Burmese records up to 1937

held by the British Library.

On the active lines on the paternal side of the family

we were actually able to find three cousins,

all born prior to 1937,

after which the records in Burma stop.

Baptism records reveal that Derek's uncle Clement

had one daughter, Susan,

and his uncle William had two children.

It was a great start,

but tracing any records beyond that of their birth

was going to be a tricky task.

Because the records end in 1937,

we knew that we had to go to alternative resources

in order to find out what happened to them and where they may be.

And narrowing down where to look was not going to be easy,

as the dramatic events in Burma the following decade

would mean that the heirs could now be anywhere in the world.

In late December 1941,

the Japanese invaded Burma from the east,

from Thailand, which was then called Siam.

This was a part of a general Japanese advance into south-east Asia.

With no capacity to defend Burma,

the British retreated almost immediately.

After abandoning Rangoon first and working their way up through Burma,

they destroyed everything in their wake.

They destroy the electricity generating station in Rangoon.

They destroy railway lines, they destroy railway bridges,

they destroy the oil wells of central and northern Burma.

Everything they possibly can, they want to deny to the Japanese.

So the amount of destruction is very, very substantial.

Their last act is to open the gates of the prison and the lunatic asylum.

Well, first of all you can't leave prisoners and lunatics locked up,

but also it causes trouble for the incoming Japanese.

For British and Anglo-Indian families such as Derek's,

they needed to get out, and fast.

When the Japanese attack them - there is a bombing of Rangoon

actually on Christmas Day of 1941 -

there is an evacuation of the European population.

I mean, clearly women and children sort of first,

but then increasingly the whole population.

Some got out by ship,

a few, the most senior people, would eventually fly out.

Um, but some people actually had to walk out.

At least, they got trains up into northern Burma and walked from there.

But what impact did this event have on Derek's family?

The team knew Derek had made his way over to England

at some stage in his life, but what of his cousins?

It seemed very unlikely

that they would have stayed in Burma beyond 1941,

so case manager Ryan knew he would have to widen his search.

We assumed that the family could have gone anywhere in the world

to get away from what was happening.

And as a specialist, he knew exactly where to start.

That overseas research, you're largely referring

to passenger lists which are very, very useful in finding out

which ports certain people passed through

and where people may be emigrating to.

The team were in luck.

They unearthed a passenger record for Derek's uncle William

showing that when he left Burma, he headed for Australia.

If his descendents were still there,

this could be just the breakthrough they needed.

Due to data restrictions in Australia

it's hard to search through vital indexes

that may have been relatively recent.

It's also harder to search through recent electoral registers.

Luckily in this case we were able to find an obituary record

for the uncle, which led us to his children in Australia.

This was great news. By tracing William's two children,

the team had found their first heirs.

But the search did not end there,

as they still needed to track down Derek's other cousin, Susan.

The paternal uncle Clement actually ended up in the UK,

we were able to find incoming passenger list

that suggested that he boarded over here.

Once we knew that Clement Lynsdale had entered the UK,

we knew that we could look for a death entry for him.

Lynsdale is a very uncommon surname.

The easiest thing for us to do was to find his death entry,

to apply for his death certificate, and hopefully,

somebody in his family would be listed as the informant.

Luckily we found out that his daughter was listed as the informant

on his death certificate, which enabled us to track her down

and let her know that she's going to be due some money

from her cousin's estate.

For Derek's cousin Susan, the news came completely out of the blue.

I was quite...

gobsmacked. Because it never occurred to me that

I would inherit anything.

I mean, I had no idea about Derek, whether he was alive

or what, so it was a surprise.

I would say that from my memories of him as a child,

he had no malice in him at all.

Derek was always known in the family as being very quiet

and very much under his mother's influence,

and as far as we knew, had never married.

He and his parents bought a house in Welling,

where he still lived after they both died.

Being contacted by the Heir Hunters has caused Susan to reflect on

her early childhood spent in Burma with her cousin Derek.

From what I can remember of Burma, it was lovely.

Er...you know,

the Burmese are laid-back people, really,

very relaxed. I never had any angst. First time I really...

Which I suppose is what shook me so much, was when we were bombed.

And suddenly this lovely idyllic childhood world

was totally shattered. When it happened,

obviously it was a huge, complete traumatic experience,

and I still remember it vividly.

I remember my parents had sent me to stay with my grandparents

because they lived out in the suburbs

and so they thought, "Quite safe, nothing will happen there."

Unfortunately, this was not the case,

and when the house next door to her grandparents'

was completely destroyed by a Japanese bomb,

six-year-old Susan had a narrow escape.

Grandfather looked around for me and found me

underneath the dining-room table

with a wodge of envelopes in my mouth,

because you were told,

have something, so that you don't bite your tongue.

After such a terrifying experience,

Susan and her parents fled Burma, first to India,

and then later to England, where they settled.

And that's why Ryan and his team tracked her down.

What was really nice about this case was it had a really interesting

and quite full family history.

It was a very intriguing case

and we were actually able to put the cousins in touch with each other

from the other side of the world.

I had always assumed that we were a small family,

I'd never met any of the others, had no idea about them.

You know, I feel, this is wonderful.

I've found a family I never knew I had.