Crewe-Jennings/James Heir Hunters

Every year, thousands of people die with no close family

and without making a will.

He was one of these guys who 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 come in.

They're experts in tracking down long-lost family members who

have no idea they're in line to inherit.

I'm trying to trace a lady who may have been born in 1942.

Their work involves painstaking research...

She could have completely changed her name. It's going to be a needle in a haystack.

..and it's a competitive industry, with thousands of pounds at stake.

We're going to look into this quite urgently cos it's got potential.

The heir hunters also shine a light on fascinating family histories...

Nobody who worked here was allowed to talk about it

to their friends, their family or anybody else.

..as well as reuniting relatives and bringing back memories.

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

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

Could the heir hunters be knocking on your door?

Coming up...

A case that delves into the secret

life of workers at the mysterious Bletchley Park.

It wasn't until the secret came out in 1975 that people turned

to their partners and said, "That thing in the news, guess what?

-"That's what I did during the war."

-And investigations uncover

one woman's remarkable fight for working-class rights.

Would have given Mrs Thatcher a run for her money!

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury.

Could a fortune be heading your way?

It's midday on Monday in central London,

and in the office of heir hunting company Fraser & Fraser,

lunch has been forgotten as a pile of new cases have just been

released by the Treasury's Bona Vacantia division.

Case manager Gareth gets straight onto one case that catches his eye.

We're looking at the estate of a Kathleen Crewe-Jennings.

What we know, at this stage, is her surname, when she passed away.

Crewe-Jennings. Her maiden name was Green. She resided in Birmingham.

It looks like she owned the property and had lived there

and owned it since the '70s.

Because she owned a property,

the team estimate that the case is worth around £300,000.

Kathleen Crewe-Jennings died on 28 March, 2013, in Birmingham, aged 94.

It seems she wasn't well-known by her neighbours

and no photos survive.

But what is known about Kathleen, whose maiden name was Green,

is that she played an important role in a top secret, code-breaking

operation in Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park is a country house built in 1938.

It was bought by the Government to house an organisation

called the Government Code and Cypher School.

'We know, from one of the few surviving official wartime records,

'that a Miss K Green worked in'

the Communications Signals office sometime in 1944.

As far as we know, they were mostly young women who'd just left

school, so with a typical education,

but not necessarily a university education for this particular job.

They would have to be trustworthy, they'd have to be

capable of working accurately and quickly under great pressure.

They were certainly vetted to make sure that there

was nothing about them that means they might be indiscreet.

The first they knew about what they were going to be doing would be

when they got off a train at Bletchley Station,

were brought into here, signed the Official Secrets Act

and taken to their place of work.

And Kathleen would not have been able to tell anyone about her work.

Secrecy was absolutely essential to what went on at Bletchley Park.

Nobody who worked here was allowed to talk about it

to their friends, their family or anybody else

because if the enemy had found out what was going on here,

they may well have sent aircraft to attack Bletchley Park.

After serving her country as a young woman,

Kathleen married late in life, when she was 57 years old.

As her husband, Edmund Crewe-Jennings,

passed away before her, and the couple had no children,

the team are now trying to track down any siblings

she might have, and the pressure's on.

Any estate that's got a property on

is going to have all the competition.

We've really got to, you know, crack on with it as soon as we can.

According to Kathleen's death certificate,

she was born in Birmingham on 28 November, 1919,

so using this information, Gareth runs some searches online.

We've got a potential birth of a Kathleen W Green in Bedford

which, obviously, isn't Birmingham. Um...

The information on the death certificate is Birmingham.

But it's the only one that we've got in the right quarter,

so we're looking at it anyway.

The information doesn't quite match up.

For Gareth and the team to go ahead and research Kathleen's family,

based on the Bedford birth certificate, is a huge gamble.

One of the most obvious risks is, you know,

we could be working the family, the wrong family,

and competition could be working the right family,

so, you know, it's important we get the right record.

Heir hunters work on a commission basis, earning money by taking

a percentage of the estate, which is agreed with any heirs they find.

But unless they can beat the competition and find

the right birth, they won't be able to find any heirs or earn any money.

We're hopefully going to get the deceased's marriage certificate.

That will tell the father's name. Um...

And maybe some decent informants as well.

And what we're also going to try

and do is get the potential birth in Bedford. Er...

If we can get a copy of that, then, obviously, the date of birth

will help us confirm whether it's the correct one.

I'm still concerned that the deceased is supposed to be

born in Birmingham.

To get hold of the certificates,

-Gareth gives travelling researcher Ewart Lindsay a call.

-Hi, Ewart.

Where are you, mate?

If you've finished afterwards, could you head over to Bedford for me?

Cheers, mate. Let me know. Cheers. Thanks. Bye.

Ewart Lindsay is one of the company's army of travelling

researchers based all over the UK.

His job, out on the road,

is to make enquiries with friends or neighbours of the deceased,

collect documents and certificates and, crucially, sign up heirs.

Once you've made contact with a family,

then that's when all the stories come out, you know?

I love that side of it.

Having sent Ewart off to collect the certificates,

all Gareth can do now is go with his gut instinct.

We often have to make an educated guess. Um...

And sometimes, you're just going with instincts.

With the chance of competition hot on their heels,

Gareth makes the risky decision to work up the family tree,

using the Bedford birth anyway.

What we still don't know is if the birth is correct but, um...

..if it is right, the 1919 Bedford birth,

then I think her parents are actually Frank and Winifred.

For now, Gareth and the team work on the principle that Kathleen's

parents were Frank Green and Winifred Powell

and begin searching for any other children they might have.

Surname's Green. Mother's maiden name's Powell.

That's quite a common combination.

It's turning out to be a lot of work,

and the team aren't even sure if it's the right family.

But it's a risk they have to take to try

and get ahead of the competition.

At the moment, we don't know if we've got the deceased's birth.

We don't know if we've got the deceased's parents that go with

the birth that we're not sure is correct.

This is purely just difficult surnames.

Finally, Gareth gets the make-or-break phone call from Ewart.

Thank you very much. Cheers. Thanks a lot. Bye. Um...

So we've got details about the deceased's marriage back. Er...

and it's confirmed, basically, that the father is a Frank William Green.

The birth that we've been working,

we think the father is Frank W Green, so it's got to be the same.

From our point of view, it's brilliant news

because it's confirmed, you know,

everything that we were speculating about is actually correct.

So, I'm sitting here, saying, "I think it was wrong."

Turns out it was right.

It's a huge relief,

and knowing that all their hard work hasn't been in vain allows the team

to really crack on with their search for Kathleen's siblings.

And we've just got a lot of names.

She's probably just an only child.

With so many potential siblings to check,

they can't be 100% sure for now.

But it's looking like Kathleen is an only child.

So the team decide to expand their search and look to Kathleen's

father's family first in the hope of finding aunts, uncles or cousins.

We think, and I'm quite confident, that

the deceased had an Aunt Lilian and an Aunt Elsie. Um...

But we're still missing a few names, which I'm trying to work out now.

And we haven't got anything on the maternal side yet.

As their research continues,

Gareth and the team gradually build up the tree.

So we've got five kids, by the sounds of it, on the paternal side.

Kathleen's paternal grandparents, Thomas and Amy,

had six children, including her father, Frank.

One died as a minor,

and the rest of Kathleen's aunts and uncles have since passed away,

so the team are hoping there may be cousins and cousins once removed,

who are in line to inherit if Kathleen is an only child.

I don't think there's any near kin.

I'm hoping there's no near kin.

But having ruled out siblings

and focused all their attention on researching the wider family,

new information suddenly comes to light that changes everything.

We've got a potential sister of the deceased and she's passed away,

but she had, certainly, two children.

Heir hunts can often uncover fascinating family histories,

many of which shine a light on the strength of

human nature in difficult times.

The search for heirs to the £7,000 estate of Sandra James

was one such case.

Heir hunting company Celtic Research, headed up by father

and son team Peter and Hector Birchwood,

has offices in London, Liverpool and Wales.

Their South Wales branch is run by another father and son team,

Phil and Donovan, a pair who relish a good challenge.

'We particularly concentrate on cases that would be'

deemed to be more difficult to solve,

that are niche against the competition.

When the case of Sandra James appeared on

the Treasury Solicitor's list of

unclaimed estates back in October 2012,

it immediately caught their eye.

We cover all of South Wales and also Bristol and Glamorgan.

And Sandra died in Swansea, so it fell into our area.

Sandra James died on 17 February, 2012,

aged 67 in a residential home in Swansea, South Wales.

Born with Down's syndrome, as a young child

she then contracted polio,

a disease which caused her to become severely disabled,

and spend many years of her life in care.

Polio is a waterborne virus

that affects the spine, and it depends

on what level of the spine it affects to the extent of your paralysis.

Some people can get polio and they're not paralysed at all.

Other people can get polio

and are paralysed from the waist or even the neck down.

In the '40s and '50s, polio was the dreaded disease

and was every parent's nightmare.

In fact, it was called in those days "infantile paralysis".

Since the introduction of a vaccine in the 1960s,

the disease has been completely eradicated in Britain.

But during Sandra's childhood, the virus was rife.

Sandra would've been one of the just under 20,000 cases of polio

between 1940 and 1949. And at that time, there was a 10% mortality rate.

And for those children that did survive, one in ten children

suffered from irreversible paralysis and faced a difficult life ahead.

It would be very different for Sandra now if she had contracted polio

as compared to when she did in the '40s and '50s.

Many children were encased in iron lungs.

There's different treatment nowadays for respiratory diseases.

Many children had to go through numerous, very painful bone surgery

with pioneering techniques, some of which worked, some of which didn't.

Many children in the '40s and '50s

missed an awful lot of their education.

Nowadays, education is taken to the hospital.

So it is a very different world indeed nowadays to having polio

as it was in the '40s and the '50s.

As Sandra died in a nursing home with no known family, case manager

Donovan took on the challenge of finding heirs to her £7,000 estate.

The first thing I needed to do was order the death certificate,

or actually pick up the death certificate from Swansea,

because it was in our area and it wasn't too far away.

A death certificate usually reveals the date and exact place of birth

of the deceased, but in this case, things weren't quite so simple.

It didn't really tell us exactly where she was born.

It just said "London", which could be anywhere.

It's just a minefield, especially when she...

If she doesn't have a middle name,

or the person doesn't have a middle name, it becomes more difficult.

With a population of nearly ten million people in Greater London,

searching for a record with no idea of borough

or area was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But finding out where Sandra was born and tracing her parents and

any other children they might have was crucial to the investigation.

I knew from the death certificate she was born somewhere in the UK,

and I knew I was going to find it somehow.

Sometimes it takes years to find them, something it takes a day.

But you don't give up.

After a trawl through the online records, eventually,

Donovan seemed to be in luck.

There was only one particular Sandra James who had been born

in the same quarter in London.

But, sadly, it was too good to be true,

and when further research revealed it wasn't the right Sandra James,

it seemed the investigation had stalled at the very first hurdle.

Don't have her birth certificate, we don't know who the parents are.

Erm, we don't know where she was born. We're stuck, basically.

We didn't know what else to look for.

But Donovan was determined not to be beaten.

And together, he and his father Phil work through all the possibilities.

You've got the date of birth

and it just doesn't add up that the person doesn't exist.

Then, your options are very few.

Either they died very young

and were never registered or they were adopted.

The next step I took was to e-mail the office in London to check for

adoptions for a Sandra being adopted by a James family.

That's all we can go with,

and the exact date of birth we've got on the death certificate.

They checked and they found that there was two possible adoptions.

So we would have to order both of them with a check saying

the date of birth has got to be that particular date of birth.

When the checks came back, it turned out that Sandra had indeed

been adopted, and suddenly the investigation was back on track.

The birth certificate for Sandra...

Adoption records revealed that Sandra was adopted

on 17th September, 1945, when she was just six months old.

Her adoptive parents were David James and Edna Veal.

Since 1926, child adoption has had legal status in England and Wales,

which means the estate of anyone adopted after this date

will go to their adoptive family, rather than their birth family.

Knowing this, Donovan quickly looked into Sandra's adopted parents.

First thing we do is we would check if they had any other children

themselves, because maybe Sandra had a brother or a stepbrother.

Maybe the parents were married twice.

We would check for that as well.

Erm, but what we found is she was an only child.

Sandra had no siblings that could inherit, so it was time to

look to the wider family to trace any aunts and uncles of hers.

If they found any,

they or their children would now be heirs to the £7,000 estate.

Donovan discovered that Sandra's mother Edna was one of nine children

born to Martha and John Veal in 1908 in Aberdare,

in the county of Glamorgan

in South Wales.

An area which, at the time,

was at the heart of Britain's coal-mining industry.

Sandra's grandfather, John Veal, a hewer cutting coal in the mines,

was one of hundreds of thousands of men toiling to keep up

with the high demand for Welsh coal.

'Here, deep in the earth,

'men dig the black fuel for Britain's furnaces.'

A hewer was somebody who actually cut the coal.

It wasn't just hacking wildly at the coal.

You actually cut a channel down through the coal

and then went on your side and then cut a channel under the coal.

Prop it up, make sure it doesn't all come down, and then stood back,

withdrew the props, and you hew large lumps of coal about that size.

With few other employment opportunities

available in the area of the time, as soon he was old enough,

John's only son, Ronald, joined his father

working in dangerous conditions in the pit.

Of course, most of them would have accepted that by the time

they came 12, at that period, 14 years old, they would go underground.

The boy had to lift the coal up by hand, put it in the box,

and then drag or carry the coal box back to the dram,

which is a wheeled vehicle.

Load it up very carefully, and then come back for the next box

and keep doing that all day.

It sounds easy, but if you're working in a seam about 2ft 6, 3ft high,

it means he's banging his back, banging his elbows.

Young boys at that age are awkward anyway.

And working in cramped conditions underground

caused serious health issues.

Lung disease is more prevalent in South Wales Coalfield

than any other part of Britain, any other coalfield in Britain.

Erm, basically, because the coal is small.

So when they're cutting the coal, that dust is coming out,

they're breathing it. It's going in the lungs.

Years of labour down the mines eventually

took its toll on John Veal, and, sadly, he died aged just 40,

leaving his wife and nine children behind.

But, at the time, it wasn't just those who worked down the mines

that had a short life expectancy.

TB is known as the disease of poverty.

So it was caused, basically, by bad air in the house, bad diet,

bad living conditions.

It is a disease associated with poverty and poor living.

With TB killing more people in the mining towns of South Wales

than anywhere else in Britain at the time, how many of Sandra's

relatives would survive?

You'll find children dying very young

and even dying in their teens and mid-20s.

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 focusing 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, who 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 just over £10,000.

80-year-old Julian Nowak died in hospital in Edinburgh

on 1st August, 2006.

While he died in Scotland,

it appears he was actually born in Poland on 18th February, 1927.

Did you know Julian?

Do you have any idea when and why he moved from Poland to the UK?

Perhaps you have some clue that could help trace family at home

or abroad and find the rightful beneficiaries to his estate.

Next is the case of Isabella Pirie Cruickshank,

who was born on 25th August, 1926, in Auchterless, Aberdeenshire.

When she passed away in Dundee on 23rd April, 2007,

she left an estate worth £2,852,

which, so far, no family have come forward to claim.

It is believed she lived in Montrose,

a seaside town on the Angus coast.

Does her name mean anything to you?

Perhaps you were a neighbour of hers.

Both these estates remain unsolved, and if no family can be found,

the money will go to the Government.

Do you know anything that could help solve the cases of Julian Nowak

and Isabella Pirie Cruickshank?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin the heir hunters are looking for.

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

In London, the team are hard at work tracking down heirs to

the £300,000 estate of Kathleen Crewe-Jennings.

Kathleen died in Birmingham in 2013.

After marrying Edmund Crewe-Jennings later on in life at the age of 57,

she had no children or any close family who could inherit.

As a civil servant, she had dedicated the earlier

part of her life to a career which began at Bletchley Park.

The purpose of the Government Code and Cypher School was quite simply

to decipher any messages that were in code

and then exploit the information in them to brief senior officers,

senior personnel, like Churchill, and support the war effort.

It's believed that the work carried out at Bletchley Park

shortened the war by as much as two years.

But it has been a fiercely guarded secret ever since.

It wasn't until the secret came out in 1975 that in many cases

a lot of people, wives, husbands, turned to their partners and said,

"That thing on the news, guess what? That's what I did during the war."

It is seen as a great honour. People are now able to talk about it

and realise that their work was appreciated.

But, for many years, they had to keep very, very quiet about it.

It is not quite the code-breaking that went on at Bletchley,

but in the office, the team have been making good progress

unlocking the secrets of Kathleen's family tree.

Led by case manager Gareth Langford, they have discovered that Kathleen's

father Frank was one of six children born to Thomas William Green.

And one thing in particular has caught Gareth's eye.

One of the interesting things we noted about Frank's father

was that he was a parchment maker.

We're a company that deal with records - birth,

death and marriage records - and his father dealt with, you know,

the parchment that all those records have been historically taken on.

Parchment is specifically the split skin of a sheep.

Parchment making goes back before Christ, we are

into sort of three, 4,000 years BC.

Early examples

would include the Dead Sea Scrolls which is 450 BC.

But there is art that goes back

and there's the written word that goes back.

Once you write on sort of a skin, it's going to be called parchment.

Today, there are only three or four companies

in the world practising traditional parchment making,

but in Thomas Green's time,

before the advent of paper, things were very different.

This guy would have been a busy man.

In the 1850s, parchment was in demand.

Lots of people going to school, lots of people graduating

from university, the demand for parchment was never stronger.

Status wise, parchment makers were up there.

You're talking the same as cabinet-maker,

you know, wheelwright, these sort of things.

These are highly-skilled people,

producing something that's highly valued.

The parchment that he made back in 1880 will still be around today.

There's a document or documents somewhere written

and produced on his work.

It's almost bizarre that

when you look at man's history it's all documented on parchment.

It's commonly thought that if early man had not

written on parchment we would know a fraction of what we know today.

In the heir hunters' office, official records are what's

helped them piece together Kathleen's family.

They've revealed that amongst her grandfather

Thomas Green's descendants, there are seven cousins.

All of whom are potential heirs to her estate.

And as the team turn their attention to Kathleen's

mother's family, Gareth gets wind of a huge spanner in the works.

Basically, we've got

a potential sister of the deceased who's born just before the marriage

and...it looks like she marries and has children so, erm, if it is,

if it is the deceased's sister then they'd be the entitled parties.

Rather than being an only child,

it looks like Kathleen might in fact have had one sister, Elsie Green.

It's a last-minute discovery

that threatens all the work they've done so far, as any nieces

and nephews of Kathleen's would now inherit ahead of cousins.

The surname's Green, it's, you know,

it's also equally possible is just a coincidence of names.

Until we can confirm it, we've got to work both avenues.

Until they can get hold of a copy of Elsie's birth certificate,

they won't know for sure if she's Kathleen's sister

but they can't afford to ignore the possibility,

so they hedge their bets and set about chasing maternal cousins

and any potential nieces and nephews.

Soon, they uncover some possible contact details for a niece.

We are not 100% sure whether it's right or not.

There's only one way to find out. So Gareth gives her a call.

You are not part of the family? OK. OK. I see. Oh, right, OK.

OK, very sorry to have troubled you. Lovely, thank you, bye-bye.

Yeah, there's absolutely no connection to her family whatsoever.

Erm...that's annoying.

With one possible niece ruled out, and having not yet found any contact

details for any others,

the team aren't getting anywhere with near kin.

But they have managed to make some headway with the maternal cousins,

which leaves Gareth in a tricky position.

The decision now needs to be made, do I write to the potential

cousins, now, erm, or wait to see if the near kin's right or wrong?

My instincts are telling me that the near kin is right,

so I'm going to wait.

It's a risky decision as rival firms are likely to be working this case

at the same time and they can't afford to give them any advantage.

But Gareth has chosen to go with his gut instinct and, after

a stressful day at the office, all he can do now is wait and see.

The following day and the all-important certificate

has arrived but will it bring the news that Gareth wants?

Right, have you got the Jennings? Brilliant.

All right so, our Elsie May that I thought may be the near kin...

is definitely not part of our family.

And, strangely, her mother's maiden name is Boswell, not Powell.

So it's a mis-entry on the records.

It's not the result Gareth anticipated but, luckily,

because they continued the hunt for cousins,

the team are still on track with the investigation.

And they've made good progress with Kathleen's mother's

-side of the family.

-She was born in Wrexham, that completely threw us.

So far we've got one stem up-staked on that side.

So, it's full team ahead to work out the other lines of the family tree.

Now we've got the information, that little bit of extra information, now they're falling out quite easily.

Shall I do a copy of that bit?

And pretty soon they're able to confirm that there are

a total of 11 first cousins and cousins once removed of Kathleen's,

and that they are indeed entitled to a share of her £300,000 estate.

One of those cousins once removed is Douglas Powell Jones.

It's now just over a month since he learned he was an heir

and the news is still sinking in.

When, when Gareth Langford rang me

I said... I think my words to him

were, "Have you got the right person?"

To be honest with you I just felt numb for a few seconds.

Considering I haven't spoken to her for...since I was 15 years of age.

-You wouldn't think that I'm entitled to anything.

-As a child,

the time Douglas spent with Kathleen was brief.

Mother would take me round to Auntie Winnie's and Uncle Frank's

but I never used to stay long. I was too impatient to get out at that age.

I didn't see a great deal of Kathleen.

But when I did see her she was always very pleasant with me,

I do remember that, very, very vividly.

As time went on, Douglas saw less

and less of his civil servant cousin.

I didn't know she got married.

Because she was... She'd lived away for so long.

I always had it in my mind that she'd been a career woman

and she'd got no time for any ties.

But being contacted by the heir hunters has reminded

Douglas of the importance of family ties

and a copy of the tree sent to him by the company has arrived today.

He's signed an agreement that will help him claim his share

of the inheritance in return for an agreed percentage of the estate.

But for Douglas, it's about far more than the money.

It means a lot, it means that I can, I can look back and think

because I've got... I haven't got any photographs of my grandmother

or my grandfather, I don't know whatever happened to them.

This is quite... It's quite exciting.

To think I would... I never thought I'd ever have anything like this.

Oh, it's really, really interesting this.

In South Wales, father and son team Phil and Donovan

were making good progress in the hunt for heirs

to Sandra James's £7,000 estate.

In a crucial breakthrough,

they've discovered that Sandra had been adopted in 1945

and that her adoptive mother, Edna,

was one of nine children born into a mining family in the Welsh Valleys.

I then found the siblings of Edna.

I then checked if any of them had died young

because in those days

a lot of children died young from all types of diseases.

But I did find one, Elsie, who died young at the age of 12 from TB,

which could be related to her father being in the mining industry.

While, sadly, Elsie died as a child,

the rest of Edna's brothers and sisters

all went on to marry and have children of their own.

It was these cousins of Sandra's

that the heir hunters now needed to trace.

Once I found Edna's brothers and sisters,

the family tree started to come together.

It was quite easy to find marriages for her sisters,

cos they were all roughly married in the same area,

which I checked and it seemed to be correct.

So they were all born and married in the same place.

And some of them married husbands with unusual surnames,

one of them being Venn.

His research revealed that one of Edna's sisters,

Sandra's aunt, Eunice,

married Leslie Venn in 1944 and went on to have two children.

And with a bit of extra research,

it wasn't long before Donovan managed

to track their daughter, Julie, down.

And then I found a telephone number, an address for her,

on the electoral rolls and gave her a call.

Once Julie confirmed who she was,

I knew I was speaking to one of Sandra's heirs to her estate.

The rest is history.

Sandra's cousin, Julie, hadn't seen her since they were both young,

but becoming an heir has brought back

fond memories of family visits.

Sandra loved company.

And I remember her as always laughing and any little joke

and she'd crack up with laughter.

Again, because I think she could feel the happiness from her mother

and from the family welcoming them.

It turns out that the story behind Sandra's adoption

was a remarkable one.

She wasn't the first baby my auntie adopted.

My Aunt Edna adopted a little boy first of all,

and a wealthy family who wanted a little boy of their own

came into the picture somehow.

I don't know how Social Services operated in those days,

but it seemed they could just come along, back to the family, and say,

"This child is not in the right situation here with you

"and we'd like him back.

"And we know you wanted a little girl initially, so here is Sandra.

"Would you like her?"

As Sandra was born with Down's syndrome,

her adoption was a huge commitment

and when she contracted the polio that would affect her

for the rest of her life, it was Edna who took on her full-time care.

It made my auntie's situation even sadder

because she had adopted this baby,

erm, not knowing that she had polio

but certainly gave her the best life she could possibly have given her.

Edna worked hard to make ends meet and provide for Sandra.

My auntie cleaned and she was very proud of this.

She cleaned for Harry Secombe's mum

and that was her attachment with the glitterati of Swansea.

And I'm sure if she would have been here today, she'd be

cleaning for Catherine Zeta-Jones' mum or, at least, Bonnie Tyler.

She loved it!

She really was a lovely woman.

She didn't have much in the world but whatever she had,

she would give you her last.

As one of nine children, growing up in the heart of South Wales'

industrial mining community,

Sandra's mother, Edna, was no stranger to hardship.

And it transpires that in Sandra's grandmother,

she had an extremely strong female role model.

Martha Dennis was born in 1887

and married miner John Veal in Aberdare, in 1903.

After being widowed at a young age and witnessing the working class

struggle first-hand, she became an ardent political campaigner.

She was a very active member of the Labour Party...for years,

she was on every committee.

Erm, held meetings in the house,

debated with anyone who'd care to listen, talk and give an opinion.

We actually had a letter from the House of Commons when Martha died,

saying what a sad loss it was to her family and to the Labour Party

and thanked my mother, who the letter was addressed to,

for the time and effort she'd put in.

At the end of the letter, my favourite bit is,

"I hope that your grief will be somewhat lessened by the fact

"that your dear mother did a great deal,

"in her memorable life, to

"ameliorate the conditions of the class to which she and I belong."

And that's my very favourite bit and, I think,

sums up what my grandmother was all about.

A working-class woman in the early-20th century,

Martha was inspired to fight for the rights of miners and their families.

So, Martha would have seen the sort of poverty that was going on.

The dirt, the dust, you know, the deaths.

Erm, there was constant childbirth going on, she wanted something

different and saw the Labour Party as being a way out of it all.

As issues such as health, wages, houses

and working conditions became more and more important, the mining

communities of South Wales were a hotbed of political activism.

So, in about 1910, 1911 there were big strikes across South Wales.

There was a huge one in the Rhondda, which is know colloquially as the

Tonypandy Riots but also there was another strike,

known as the "Block Strike" in Aberdare at the same time.

So, she would have seen this going on.

In 1912, the Minimum Wage Strike went on right through Britain.

So she would have been, probably, involved with that as well.

Perhaps she would have been on the streets demonstrating, marching...

And with the closing of hundreds of mines in the 1920s

and '30s, hundreds of people took to the streets to protest

against unemployment benefit cuts.

As a politically active woman

at the time, Martha would have been in the minority.

But in the matriarchal society of the Welsh Valleys,

she was more than able to stand up for her beliefs.

The "Welsh Mam" is a favourite character, like the "Jewish Mam".

People listened to them, they ruled the roost.

Whether the men liked it or not, she probably told them

exactly what she thought anyway.

I think women felt important because

they were so important in keeping

the large families, that was often the case, keeping them ticking over.

Without the mam, the Welsh mam,

the whole system would fall apart.

I think, perhaps, if she'd had a chance of an education, her life

would have been very different because she was an intelligent woman.

She was driven by politics, would've given Mrs Thatcher

a run for her money!

And it seems within her own family, Martha's political legacy lives on.

I daren't not vote for the Labour Party.

SHE LAUGHS

As my mother, Eunice, would say, "Mam would turn in her grave!"

Sandra's grandmother, Martha Veal, was the matriarchal

figure at the head of a large family.

And whilst heir hunter Donovan might well have tracked down

one cousin of Sandra's, he still had a lot more to find.

I was hoping that she would be able to help me

with the rest of the tree because she was a cousin and she was not

a second cousin or she wasn't further down the family tree.

She was quite high up and she could, potentially,

tell me a lot about the family.

Julie could indeed fill in a lot of the gaps

and, thanks to her help, Donovan was able to

track down 11 heirs on the maternal side of the tree.

Along with the two heirs he found on Sandra's father's side,

it means Sandra's estate will now be divided amongst all 13 heirs.

For heir hunter Donovan,

it's a job that was only made possible by one thing.

From finding the adoption certificate really put us

on the path to solving the case, basically.

If we wouldn't have found that,

I would still be sitting here trying to figure out where she was born.

Donovan was determined to solve the case, he looked at it

as a challenge because he couldn't find anything on it.

He was absolutely stumped and once he got the adoption,

he started finding people, he was over the moon.

He's enjoyed his time finding the heirs and speaking to them

and listening to their stories.

And it seems a shared inheritance from Sandra has united

her family and brought a new appreciation of their history.

We've still been in contact more often now

because we've been running stories by each other and seeing what

we can remember, and only happy memories

come from chatting about it.

Just having a lot of fun going over the old times.