Berridge/Campbell Heir Hunters

Heir hunters specialise in tracing missing family members

who are entitled to money from a relative who's died.

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

Sometimes, the deceased simply hasn't left a will,

and sometimes, they have become estranged from their family.

Did look like Mum a bit! You did look like Mum. Your eyes.

The race is then on for heir hunters

to find the often-distant relatives in line for a windfall.

I had to read it two or three times because I thought, wow!

-What is this?

-But this is a highly competitive arena...

Getting to a case first is the most important thing.

..with dozens of firms hoping to pip the others to the post

to sign up heirs and claim their commission...

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

..and hand over what could be tens of thousands of pounds.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up...

The heir hunters take on a case full of secrecy and scandal...

The deceased had a potential sister. Um... But we have no name.

And I think people are reluctant to give out that information at present.

..while another job gives them a right run-around.

All the candidates that I'd put together were all useless

and they all went in the bin and I had to start from scratch.

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury.

Could a fortune be heading your way?

Fraser & Fraser is one of the world's largest probate firms.

The husband left a probate some years ago.

There could be some money there.

Every day, they're racing against time to try to trace

the distant relatives of those who've died without leaving a will.

I'll have a look for you, James.

It's challenging.

Case manager Ben Cornish is all geared up for a job that's

-just come in.

-Just been given the case of Audrey A Berridge.

She passed away in March of this year, 2013.

It's quite an unusual name.

We notice she's a Miss, but we can't find the birth record at the moment.

We've tried England and Wales, Scotland. Um... But it's, er...

We can't find anything at the moment.

This case has been privately referred to them

and could be a high-value estate, potentially worth around £150,000.

So for the time being, they're the only company investigating this.

But for how long?

Audrey A Berridge passed away here in her house on 19 March, 2013.

She's believed to have lived all her life in Worcester.

That's all the information the team have to start with

and, unfortunately, there are no surviving photos of her.

However, her neighbour, Rhoda Scarett,

who knew her for over ten years, can paint a picture of her.

I used to see her in the village and see her on the bus, in town.

She was a very nice person, always friendly,

always had a smile on her face, you know, always dressed nice

and, you know, you couldn't, like, say anything wrong about her,

-I don't think.

-But it would seem she led a very lonely life.

You never saw her with anyone. She'd get on the bus on her own.

Audrey never married, as far as I know.

She never even talked about a relationship or anything, you know.

Her life, I think, was more, you know, to herself sort of thing.

Her one love, though, was her garden.

Where a little drive was, coming up from her house,

from the cottage to the road, if you'd go by sometimes,

you'd see her putting some little plants in there

cos I think she liked flowers, you know,

so you'd see her putting these little plants in.

And she'd just say, "Hello. How are you?"

Back at the office, the team know Audrey died

a spinster, as Miss Berridge, but that's about it.

It's a real problem, actually, isn't it?

This means they need to look to her wider family,

but to do that, they need to find her birth.

And immediately, the team have hit trouble.

We haven't found her birth yet. Not going well.

Despite searching all the available databases,

they cannot find any record for a birth of Audrey A Berridge.

I just honestly think that she's... It's a completely made-up name.

Without the birth,

they won't be able to find out who Audrey's parents were

and, in turn, they won't be able to unlock the family tree.

-He's born 1897.

-But Ben has a theory.

It does look like she's probably adopted by the Berridge family.

So that's what we need to check now.

The team must now search adoption records to see

if they can prove the theory.

She's known as Audrey A Berridge. Cheers. Bye.

The team have found records of people

who could be Audrey's parents, but with no way of proving a connection,

it's little more than guesswork.

And it appears to be baffling

even the most experienced of heir hunters.

-William J Berridge?

-He looks a bit old. He's very old.

That could be probably the reason why they don't... They've adopted her.

I think we should work out one of these Berridge families, just to get it up to date.

She might have just given her house to a Mrs Berridge

who's not really Mrs Berridge.

Likely to be a Miss Berridge, won't she?

-Some female Berridge brings up the child in '37.

-Mm.

-Difficult.

-Slowly but surely.

The team just hope the adoption theory is right.

Under Westminster constituency, it's West Worcestershire County?

Oh, right. Bye. This is going to be a bit of a problem. If she's just..

Have got the name, taken on the name. Um...

-No trace for that adoption.

-Nothing at all?

-No. No.

It's probably an unofficial amendment.

-It's going to be an unofficial one.

-All right, matey.

-If you just bring that one back with all the details...

-Yeah.

So that's the confirmation that she wasn't actually adopted.

The search appears to be slowly grinding to a halt...

-This is not looking too good.

-..before it even gets going.

Now she hasn't been formally adopted, it's a bit of a problem

because we can't find what she was known as before.

She could have completely changed her name.

I mean, she could have been called Audrey at birth,

but we can't find any records.

It's going to be a needle in a haystack to find any Audreys

been born in that area around that time.

So it's a bit of a pickle, really. Yeah.

With an estate worth around £150,000 at stake,

the team aren't going to give up that easily.

As heir hunters, they make their money from commission, which they

agree with the beneficiaries, so this could be a worthwhile case.

The team decide to turn their attention to Audrey's house.

There's a Violet Fanny Griffiths

born in Upton, which isn't a million miles away, is it?

Looking at records of who's lived there over the years,

they want to see if they can find evidence of a name change

or of other family members living there.

Basically, there's a Griffiths living with the deceased at her property.

She dies 1996, aged 93.

She lived there, it looks like, with the deceased,

so maybe there's a connection there.

Could this be the breakthrough they're looking for

or could Violet Anne Griffiths just be a family friend?

The team continue to plug away.

I think we're going to have to slowly build up a case, really,

rather than...

Well, we can't go straight into it because we just don't know who this

woman is or what she's born under or who her family connections are.

-Apart from that, it's going well(!)

-Yeah.

Ben just hopes the travelling researcher will unearth some

useful information to help get this investigation under way.

OK. Well, if you, you know...

Just see what else you can do cos it would be good to try and...

If there was a sister, try and get her name.

But, yeah, I'd definitely ask at the local shops cos I called...

She did work at a shop. OK. Cheers. Bye.

Enquiries have been made at the local address. Um...

No-one really knows her. They had to chip together to...

For a pauper's funeral. Um...

Some information that we have gleaned is that the deceased

had a potential sister. Um... But we have no name.

And I think people are reluctant to give out that information at present.

So we're making some more enquiries with the people that actually

organised the funeral and hopefully pick up some certificates

and maybe we'll get lucky on the certificates.

But it's going to be difficult to prove anything

cos there's no real connection at the moment,

so need to get a body of evidence together and see where we end up.

But at the moment, it's not looking too good.

Travelling researchers spend their time out on the road, making

enquiries, collecting documents and, ultimately, signing up heirs.

That's our sole aim, you know?

The most difficult side of the job is to tell

a person their mum's died or their dad's died.

That's the most difficult part of the job, really.

In this quiet village where Audrey lived,

there's a close-knit community.

However, Audrey appeared to lead a very private life.

Basically, she told me once about her work,

and that was about it, about her mother and her friend.

And that's all, really, Audrey ever, you know, ever told me, I think.

With no-one able to shed any more light on Audrey's family,

the team in the office have got their work cut out...

..and are now abandoning computers

and resorting to good old-fashioned research.

There's an air of mystery starting to build around this case.

But for Ben, an air of frustration engulfs him at the moment.

This is...this is what I hate. Four, seven cases upstairs just like that.

What is this, where does it all belong?

As the team are not making too much headway

using the computer databases, Ben makes the decision to

take their research into their well-stocked library which contains

parish records and specialist directories going back centuries.

Senior researcher Roger decides to have a look

at the 1937 electoral register in the library.

The team think this would be around the time Audrey was born.

It's one name and one address so it gives us a start, hopefully.

We will see.

Roger has found an Alice Berridge listed on the electoral roll

and wonders whether she might be a relative.

We are looking into possible deaths for her

and we think we've got one in 1966 in Martley.

Is this the vital breakthrough the team have been hoping for?

Or could it be another dead end?

We think this is possibly her mum.

Finding long-lost relatives requires quick thinking

and meticulous research by the heir hunters.

They're often referred to as the detectives of the genealogy world.

The process of finding heirs to unclaimed estates

is rarely straightforward.

But it's one that's relished by probate firms like Celtic Research.

In my work, because we deal with death and money,

you often see the best and the worst sides of people and often

the stories that we have to deal with are quite sad but it's always

a challenge whenever we are working a case that is very difficult.

One recent case that caused case manager Saul Marks

a bit of a headache was the £10,000 estate of Frederick Campbell.

Even though it wasn't a high-value case,

Saul decided to investigate as Fred lived and died in Birkenhead,

which is just over the water from his Liverpool office.

Obviously Frederick Campbell is a very common name

and there was no middle name to narrow it down for us, so...

I looked initially at other people named Frederick Campbell

who had been born and who lived in the Birkenhead and Wirral area

in the hope that one of these might be our deceased.

When Saul got Frederick's death certificate, he discovered

he wasn't as local as he initially thought.

The deceased was actually born in 1912, he was 99 when he died,

and he was born in Middlesbrough.

So all the candidates that I'd put together were all useless

and they all went in the bin and I had to start from scratch.

Frederick Campbell died on 28 May 2012.

He was living in a nursing home on the Wirral when he passed away.

His friend and brother-in-law Derek Leaming was with him.

Well, I was quite fond of Fred because, you know, man to man,

you could talk the sport, jobs, anything, you know?

He always got on well with myself and I felt so lonely for him

because he'd gone 99.5 years and he was at the end on his own, you know?

But he hadn't always been alone.

Fred married Florence Davis, Derek's sister-in-law, in 1973.

We used to go to the Labour club at Wallasey. Fred used to sing.

Not that I saw him sing, but he used to play the ukelele.

Sadly, Florence passed away in 1998 and they had no children.

Fred then lived on his own with the social services coming in

because his sight was receding.

They were coming in in the morning to do his breakfast.

Derek also paid regular visits

to his brother-in-law and kept in touch until the day he died.

But he is not an heir to Fred's estate.

In Liverpool, Saul's search for beneficiaries

was well and truly under way.

I went through the electoral rolls, going back and back in time.

In the early '70s his wife's name disappeared off the roll

and a couple of years before that there was a different lady

living there, named Edith Campbell, and I was thinking,

"Well, I don't think that's his mother's name

"and it wasn't his wife's name, perhaps it was a sister?"

And then it dawned on me, perhaps he'd been married before.

Sure enough, Saul soon found a marriage in 1951 of Frederick

to Edith Hoggett on the Wirral.

At this point in the research, I'd established that the deceased

had been married twice

and he'd had no children by his second marriage to Florence Davis.

Um, he didn't appear to have any children by his first marriage

to Edith Hoggett either.

So it was to the wider family the heir hunters had to turn

and Saul was quick to establish that Frederick's parents

were James and Clara Campbell.

Fred was their sixth child, born in 1912.

At this time, the area was booming as a steel town and Fred's

father and grandfather worked in the local steelworks as engine drivers.

Looking at the history of this region, erm, Middlesbrough as we

understand it now as a town didn't exist prior to round about the 1850s.

It was the railways which brought other industries to the area

and it was the Pease family that actually had the controlling interest

in the Stockton and Darlington Railway who made the first extension

of the railway lines out to what we call

the ironmasters district of Middlesbrough.

But to make it valuable they wanted other industries to come to

the same area and use their railways so they attracted the iron makers

and it was Bolckow and Vaughan, one of the first companies that came

to Middlesbrough, and suddenly everything started to blossom.

Frederick followed in their footsteps,

working at the Haverton Hill steelworks as a stoker.

Life in iron and steel furnaces was pretty mucky, pretty grimy,

pretty dangerous.

When you look at old photographs of workers they're basically

wearing what we would call ordinary clothes.

You know, they're wearing a pair of trousers,

a shirt with their sleeves rolled up, a waistcoat, a scarf around their

neck and a flat cap and that was about all they had to protect them.

Certainly, in an iron works,

it wouldn't be odd to be working a 10 to 12 hour shift.

A tough job and skills that would be needed when Britain went to war.

During the Second World War, Fred was stationed on board

the Sir Evelyn Wood, a ship used for the transportation of men,

ammunition and other supplies.

The Sir Evelyn Wood was an 850-tonne iron steam coaster that saw service

with the war department fleet

and Royal Army Service Corps fleet from 1896 until 1957 -

a remarkable period of service, lasting 61 years.

His role was chief stoker.

The vessel was powered by a twin compound steam engine.

And it wasn't just the seas that were gruelling.

A stoker was responsible for shovelling coal

into the boiler of the ship's engine.

The stoker would work in temperatures potentially up to 150 degrees

with the atmosphere full of coal dust and with

the ship pitching and rolling in both calm and rough seas.

For Saul, the hunt was on for living relatives to inherit

Fred's £10,000 estate. He'd now found out Fred had six siblings.

Several of the deceased siblings died in infancy but there were

two brothers and a sister who actually had children so there were

actually 14 nieces and nephews of the deceased who were still alive.

It looked like Saul had cracked the case,

and in one fell swoop found all the heirs to this estate.

Ready to put this case to bed, Saul was all set to sign them up,

only to be dropped a bombshell.

The deceased had actually been married three times.

Every year, the heir hunters manage to crack the majority of their cases

and track down heirs to unclaimed estates.

However, there are always a few that elude them

and stay on the Treasury Solicitors bona vacantia list.

Bona vacantia is Latin for ownerless property

and there's two main types.

The first is the property of now-dissolved companies.

And the second is a property of those who die without a valid will

and without anyone entitled to inherit.

But the cases won't remain on this list indefinitely.

A case will stay on the list for 12 years, so either

until it's claimed or until the limitation period is passed.

Today we are focusing on two cases that remain unsolved.

The first is Dorothy Avery, who died on 3 April 1988

in Friern Barnet, North London.

She was born though in West London, in Hammersmith, on 2 June 1898.

Dorothy is believed to have been one of six children,

having four brothers and one sister.

Do you know anything which could shed some light on Dorothy's family?

The next case is Joanna Margaret Andrews.

She died on 10 July 2011 in Tyne and Wear.

However, she was born in India on 18 December 1935.

Joanna had been married to a Joseph Andrews,

but he died in 1968, leaving her a widow.

When it comes to who inherits an estate,

the heir hunters have to follow the rules of intestacy.

Generally the first people who are entitled are the spouse

or a civil partner of the deceased.

After that it's blood relatives who are directly descended

from the grandparents of the deceased,

as set out in the Administration Of Estates Act.

Do you have any clues that could help solve these cases?

Or maybe you believe you're related so could potentially have

thousands of pounds coming your way?

Heir hunter Ben Cornish and the team from Fraser and Fraser

are hard at work on the mysterious case of Audrey Berridge

who passed away at home in Worcester in 2013.

She died without a will, leaving an estate worth upwards of £150,000.

We haven't found her birth yet. Not going well.

After a day on the case, the team has

so far been unable to find a birth certificate for the deceased.

I just honestly think that she's, it's a completely made-up name.

And the only leads the team have to help identify Audrey

are two names, Alice Berridge and a Violet Griffiths.

Both had lived with Audrey up until they died.

It's a new day and the team are again hard at work

seeing if they can make headway on this tricky case to solve.

Yesterday we thought that the deceased was adopted,

suggested that she may have been adopted by the Berridge family.

It may be that she's just been given to this Alice Berridge

and Alice Berridge has brought her up and named her, so there's many

different possibilities of what could have happened. So now,

we can work back this individual and see how she is connected in.

We still would be concerned about the fact

that they cannot find the deceased's birth record.

But it's a lot more positive than it was looking yesterday.

Alice was born in 1873 and was married to a John Berridge,

they had no children.

But what emerges through the team's research

is that Alice had been married before,

to a William Griffiths in 1901.

And they had one child, Violet Griffiths.

So that made Alice and Violet mother and daughter,

but what relation were they to Audrey? Was Alice Audrey's mum?

Were Audrey and Violet half-sisters?

The team desperately have to find answers.

We just had to look for any "Audrey A"s in a 10-year period

from 1938 forward and back to see

if we can find any births of an Audrey A to tie it in.

The team order in birth certificates for the Audrey As they have found

and when they arrive in the office, it's good news for Ben.

We noticed straight away it was our deceased.

It was Audrey Anne Griffiths,

she was born 28 September 1930.

So the Violet Griffiths that we found, we initially thought she was

a half-blood sister, but since she appeared on the birth certificate

of the deceased we now know that she was actually her mother.

This is a massive breakthrough for the team.

It means they now know that Alice Berridge

was in fact Audrey's grandmother.

The pieces of the puzzle are now slowly coming together,

and it looks like neither Audrey or Violet had any siblings.

It means there's going to be no family at all

on the maternal mother's side of the family.

But why was Audrey a Berridge and not a Griffiths?

On the death certificate of Violet Annie Griffiths,

no relationship is ever given between her and the deceased.

The deceased is the informant, but I am not sure

whether they didn't want to... She did not know that was actually

her mother or they chose for some reason

not to list their relationship.

As all three women had passed away there were going to be no answers

to that question, and as there were no heirs on the maternal side,

what the team now had to do

was focus their attention on the paternal side.

We haven't got a name on the birth certificate,

no father is shown on the birth certificate,

so really we've got no paternal side.

The mystery behind the family deepens.

The lack of a father's name on Audrey's birth certificate indicate

she was born illegitimately and with no heirs through her mother's side

of the family, this brings the team's two days of hard work

to a sudden standstill.

With no maternal heirs and no paternal family to trace,

it looks as though there will be no beneficiaries

and no commission for the heir hunters.

But with an estate worth around £150,000,

company boss Neil is refusing to give up.

If he can find out and prove who Audrey's father was,

they may still be able to find heirs.

He's decided to travel to the area where Audrey died

to see if he can find anything in the local records.

So the information we have and what Ben's been able to put together

is that the deceased we think is an only child,

the birth certificate seems to indicate that she's illegitimate.

So...we're going local, really, we are going back to the local records

and we are going to see if we can find some trace

of why it's illegitimate or...

You know, why we... if we can find a father's name.

Neil first heads to the local archive office

to search the records.

The names I am searching for are Berridge and Griffiths.

We're searching under the name she's died under.

The name we found the birth registered under

as well as her forenames.

It's not too bad, going through a book like this.

You can pick it out and because we've been doing it for a while

and I've been doing it for a while,

it's several years since I looked at them,

my tactic is I always go through the surnames first and then go

backwards so turn the pages the opposite way to go for the forenames.

It just means you can focus your eyeline a bit on one column

and in the end it works out quicker.

Neil has no luck tracing Audrey, but does find her mother Violet.

And then, flipping on a few pages, and it really is only a few pages,

but it's the best part of 30 years' worth of baptisms...

we get to 30 August 1903.

And here we have an entry for Violet Annie Griffiths.

Violet Annie Griffiths is the mother of the deceased.

It says her father is William Arthur, her mother Alice, everything ties up

with the information from the birth certificate

so we are definitely in the right area,

the right parish and unfortunately, I can't find the deceased,

which means I can't find a father's name.

However deep the team dig, they cannot find an ounce of information

to help them identify Audrey's father.

Neil has now decided to make his way over to the house

where Audrey lived and died.

This property will contribute a large amount

to the total value of the estate.

As decorations and standards of repair go, this is pretty bad.

Building-wise, it's a beautiful building.

It's solid brickwork, beautiful headstone over the door.

But, just a very, very poor state of repair at the moment.

However, even though the house is in such a bad state,

it is a valuable asset.

I know that an end terrace of this quality is going to be worth

a few thousand pounds, a few tens of thousand pounds,

maybe even up to £150,000.

It is a valuable estate.

It is certainly worth us doing something on it.

It is worth us following up as hard as we can.

It is an estate which we don't think anyone else knows about.

But with no-one so far to inherit it, it is worthless to the company

as they won't earn any commission.

Neil pushes on, and there's one last avenue to explore.

The company's research has revealed

that at the time of Audrey's birth, her mother Violet

was living at a nearby stately home called Croome Court,

the home of the Earl of Coventry.

The family first came in about 1570.

They moved here because the then Thomas Coventry

married a young lady from this area, a very rich young lady,

and with her dowry came some of the land in this area.

Sadly, she died after having about four children. So he remarried

another young lady from the local area who came with more land.

That was the start of the Croome Estate.

When the sixth Earl inherited Croome in 1751 he had dreams

of modernising the estate, and called on the esteemed

landscape architect Capability Brown to take on the job.

It so happened that in 1751 as well, Capability Brown had set up his own

business in Hammersmith, and so Lord Coventry became his first client.

So he brought him here, not initially to do the park, but to do the court.

Now, it's unusual for Brown.

There are other buildings that he was architect for, but Croome

was his first one and Croome was also his first landscape park creation.

So Capability Brown set about bringing the Earl's vision to life.

It was to make a complete work of art with the house sitting in the middle,

the parkland surrounding it, and they worked together.

From the park you look back at the house

and see it almost as a garden building.

But when you get inside the house

and look out, you look at all the garden buildings.

And all those views are designed.

Wherever you stand, in the house or the park, and look out,

you are looking at a designed view.

We often say there is nothing at Croome has happened by accident.

Both Violet and her mother Alice lived at Croome Court,

because Alice's father William worked there as a stud groom.

He would have had a terribly responsible job.

He would only have been accountable to the ninth Earl himself.

He would have started off at the age of 13 or 14

straight from school as a lowly stable lad.

He would have mucked horses out.

He would have groomed them, he would have swept the yards,

he would have learnt to ride on very, very quiet horses.

Over the years, he would have worked his way up to responsibility.

William's daughter Alice we know lived up here

and her daughter Violet was baptised around here.

Would the Earl's children have mingled with the staff's family?

As very young children, yes.

Later on in life, possibly there would have been a barrier.

Violet, the mother of our deceased, she has this illegitimate child.

All we know is that she was brought up

probably around here in the 1930s.

Is there any indication,

is there anything to say who the father could have been?

It could possibly have been anyone from a page boy to the hierarchy.

It's very difficult to know.

So many questions remain unanswered from this case,

but one thing is certain -

the heir hunters have done all they can

to trace any beneficiaries to the estate of Audrey Berridge

and, this time, have to walk away empty-handed.

This is the end of the line, really, with the estate.

We have taken the enquiries and the work as far as we possibly can.

Out here at Croome Court, it's a remarkable place, you know,

the deceased was probably conceived around here,

but by who, who is the father, it could be anyone, we'll never know.

We can't do anything else.

English and Welsh law is quite clear, we can only go to first cousins.

We haven't got any paternal side, the mother is an only child,

she's got no cousins.

This is one of those estates which the government is going to pocket.

When Fred Campbell passed away aged 99, he left behind a £10,000 estate.

With no children from his two marriages,

Celtic's Saul Marks had traced nieces and nephews.

But as he was just about to sign them up,

a new revelation came to light.

We've been working on the assumption that the deceased had no children

from either of his two marriages that we knew up to that point.

So we were on the point of sending contracts out to them

when we established that the deceased actually had been married before

and he had been married three times and had children by his first wife.

That meant the research Saul had done was redundant

and he would have to start all over again

as the heirs he thought he had found would not be heirs

if Fred and his first wife had had children.

Fred was born in Middlesbrough,

but spent the last 20 years of his life on the Wirral.

He found work there at a Cadbury's factory in Moreton.

Cadbury's, one of Britain's best-known companies,

was established in 1824 by John Cadbury.

It all began when he opened a grocer's shop in Birmingham

selling cocoa and drinking chocolate.

But it was his sons, George and Richard,

who really broke the mould when they took over the company in 1861.

Their plans for the future were ambitious.

They wanted to build a place full of green spaces

where industrial workers could thrive away from city pollution.

So in 1893, the pair bought up more land

to build a village for their workers.

They named it Bournville after a nearby stream called Bourne Brook.

Under the scheme,

workers could purchase the homes they lived in,

and, often for the first time,

they had gardens to relax in and grow their own vegetables.

Fred continued to work for Cadbury's in Moreton until he retired in 1975.

For case manager Saul, the hunt was on for Fred's first wife.

During the research, there was a marriage listing

that had caught my eye of a Frederick Campbell

marrying a Violet Banks in Middlesbrough in 1934.

I thought this was worth investigating.

I established that that marriage actually produced several children.

Could these children be the rightful heirs to Fred's estate?

The first thing Saul had to do was to prove it was the right family.

What I didn't know was whether he had married before.

On that marriage to Edith Hoggett,

he would have been down as a widower or a divorcee.

Sure enough, not only was he the right man,

but he was actually listed

as previously the husband of Violet Ada Banks.

That was wonderful because that proved that the marriage

that I found in Middlesbrough was the correct person.

Frederick and Violet had three children.

The thing is with this case,

we nearly sent contracts to the wrong people.

This was quite a relief because,

instead of contacting 14 nieces and nephews,

we knew we were down to three or four children of the deceased

so, hopefully, there would be less work

and the case would be solved more quickly.

Saul discovered the eldest daughter Mavis had died in her twenties

and she had no children.

However he couldn't find a death for Florence or Violet,

or indeed any trace of them.

The second daughter Florence caused us quite a few problems,

but ultimately, after quite a bit of work,

we established that she died under her maiden name of Campbell.

We assumed that she was a spinster

and that, again, there would be no heirs from that line either.

But just to make sure,

I obtained a copy of her death certificate

from Middlesbrough Registry office, and that actually revealed

that she had been married and that the informant was one of her sons.

This was the breakthrough Saul needed.

He quickly found Anthony, Florence's eldest son.

Anthony knew of his grandfather Fred,

but his name wasn't mentioned often in the family home.

I was quite intrigued, actually,

because I wasn't sure that anybody in my family had any money to pass on.

I was also intrigued that it was from my grandfather because,

to tell you the truth, I didn't have many details about his life

and I was hoping that maybe I could find out more.

Anthony then put Saul in touch with his three siblings

who were also heirs to Fred's estate.

Saul still had to find Fred's youngest daughter,

and he soon came across some interesting information.

By sheer coincidence,

the deceased's surviving daughter actually lived only a few miles away

from where he was living, and yet they hadn't been in contact.

It's amazing how families can move from one side of the country,

back again and back again over the course of generations.

She hadn't been in touch with her father for some years,

so she had no idea that he had passed away.

It was actually her daughter who broke the news to her.

The fact that she also lives in Liverpool,

not far from our office, was very convenient for me

because I popped down that same evening

and had a nice meeting with her and signed her up.

For Fred's grandson Anthony, he now wants to know more

about the grandfather his mother rarely spoke about.

My memories of Fred are very scarce.

I remember Mum showing me one picture of him.

Apart than that, I had no other details.

From the few details Anthony does know,

he shares one thing in common with his grandfather.

I know that he served some time at sea.

I had cousins and uncles who served time at sea

and being a current serving coastguard officer,

I suppose there are those links.

Today, Anthony is travelling from his home in Norfolk to Liverpool

to meet two of Fred's brothers-in-law,

Derek and Alex, both of whom knew his grandfather well.

Today I'm feeling intrigued and excited. My first time in Liverpool.

I've made a five-hour car journey

to find out some background on my mother's father.

For me, it's especially important today

because today would have been my mum's 75th birthday.

I'm doing it partly for her too.

Anthony is meeting Derek and Alex at the famous Albert Dock.

-Hello. I'm Derek.

-Hello, Derek, nice to meet you.

-How do you do?

-Are you OK?

-Take a seat.

-He's like Fred's build.

-Yes.

Anthony sees for the first time in decades

what his grandfather looked like.

That's your grandfather.

That's taken approximately about 20 years ago.

Yes, I can see where you're coming from.

-I can see my mother's face on him.

-I did meet your mother.

I didn't know about you. We both have a few times.

Derek and Alex then give Anthony an insight into Fred's character.

-He loved music.

-Yes, he did like music.

-My mum did.

He did a lot of singing when he was younger.

Because when he first came into our family,

-he used to sing when he was walking along.

-Always singing.

-Any time he was sitting there, he'd start.

-Chirping away.

I wonder that's where my mum got it, because she was always singing.

I was brought up on Elvis Presley.

Did you know about your grandfather then?

I only had really sketchy details.

I didn't know he played the ukelele or that he was a stoker.

All I knew was that he spent time at sea, I didn't know what he did.

-He sounds like a bit of a character.

-He was a character.

He got on well at the nursing home

because the majority were women there.

He was in his element there. He was quite happy there.

'Florence's son was very helpful.

'He remembered his grandfather and he was kind enough to put us'

in touch with his siblings and the family of his surviving aunt.

Thanks to him, we were able to conclude the case quite quickly,

once we had spoken to him.

All his life, Anthony's grandfather has just been a faint and hazy image

in the background.

But now the memory of his grandfather can only grow stronger

as he learns more about him from the people who knew him so well.

It feels great.

They told me things that I didn't know,

things I probably couldn't have got off my mum.

Bits about his life, like he used to play the ukelele.

I can see the jovial side of him now.

It's taken the intrigue out of him.

It's opened him up to me and made him,

kind of filled him out, made him a full person.

Fred, my wife, myself.

I honestly believe he is the kind of man

I would have liked to have got to know better.

Somebody I honestly think I could have spent time with.

Just getting to know him.

The way he comes across,

I could have seen us spending many long hours together.