Claire Langford, Case Consultant, Title Research
Over the last 10 years since I joined Title Research, the technology and resources available to trace missing beneficiaries has improved significantly. The skills needed to maximise the benefit of these resources remains unchanged. A forensic approach to analysing records is needed, as well as an in-depth understanding of genealogy in the context of the laws of intestacy and estate administration. The complex and often disparate nature of the family trees we research, present continuing challenges for the probate genealogist.
One of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of the job involves constructing large family trees from scratch, where nothing is known about the family previously and research reveals a huge extended family. Interviews with family members happy to reminisce about the past, can often provide crucial leads for further genealogical research. Some people are happy to provide as much information as possible, although increasingly people are becoming more cautious about providing details which could help the investigation. Often the first thing beneficiaries ask when phoning in response to our letter is, “Is this a scam?” and it can take some time to persuade them otherwise.
1911 census
Whilst beneficiaries can be more guarded than they used to be, in many ways progress can be made more quickly due to the resources now available. Census returns have always been an important resource for identifying family members where the Deceased’s parents and uncles and aunts were born in the nineteenth century.
This year, the 1911 census for England & Wales became the latest census to go online and, as this records more information about members of the household than previous census returns, we are now able to get a better idea of the family tree at an earlier stage of the research process. As well as asking for the number of years married, the 1911 census also requested the total number of children born to the marriage, the number of those children still living and the number now dead. This information is of great value in determining family size and composition as at 1911.
The 1911 census is also the first for which we are able to view schedules as they were filled in by a member of the household. Then as now, people sometimes struggled to fill in the form correctly – there are a number of examples of parents including their deceased children as members of the household and I found a family recently in which the two-year-old son was recorded as being a “sardine salesman”!
Occasionally, family members found on the 1911 census turn out to be living beneficiaries. On one case earlier this year, I located a beneficiary (a first cousin of our Deceased) who was recorded aged four on the 1911 census and had just celebrated his 102nd birthday.
Locating living people
When it comes to locating living beneficiaries, we have a number of in-house databases comprising publicly available information (e.g. electoral rolls) and others containing information which is not publicly available, but to which we have Data Protection Act licensed access (e.g. address details held by credit reference agencies). Often the individuals we are looking for are not registered on electoral rolls and we have even made contact with potentially relevant people – in the UK and overseas - through messaging on Facebook.
Four corners of the earth
On a recently completed case, we were asked to establish the paternal family of a Deceased who had died intestate and without surviving immediate family. Our client was already in contact with the maternal family, which comprised three first cousins and three first cousins once removed. Using census returns, we were quickly able to establish that the Deceased’s father was one of 10 children born in the 1870s and 1880s. Of the nine paternal uncles and aunts, three died without issue and one died leaving one daughter who predeceased without issue. The remaining uncles and aunts all had fairly large families and all of the first cousins had predeceased, most of them leaving issue. Many of the first cousins once removed had also predeceased and we had to locate their issue. In total, we located 54 beneficiaries in the UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates. Our research revealed more than the usual number of illegitimate children in the family and census returns were useful in identifying those children, although we had to rely on family members telling us about illegitimate children born after 1911.
Back in the USSR
Each Case Consultant at Title Research will typically have 5-10 cases involving research in non-English speaking countries. I oversee the company’s work in the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. Generally, the Deceased on these cases will have emigrated to the UK after the Second World War, will have recently died here intestate, and we will be seeking their next of kin in their country of origin. However, recently I have had a number of cases where Ukrainians living (and dying) in this country have died testate and remembered family and friends “back home”, and we have managed to resolve these cases successfully and fairly quickly, with the help of our agent based in Kiev. In one instance, the Deceased had died in 1990 and one of the residuary beneficiaries had still not been traced at the beginning of this year. We were instructed to locate this person. We established that she died in Ukraine in 1994, documented the death, and identified and located her successors, also in Ukraine.
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