T I P S F ROM THE TOP
THE HEIR HUNTER, 42, ON THE REWARDS AND THE PERILS OF TRACKING DOWN LONG-LOST RELATIVES AND GIVING THEM UNEXPECTED NEWS
So what is an heir hunter?
That’s the title the people who work on the BBC TV programme, Heir Hunters, gave themselves. Probate genealogy is what we call ourselves at Anglia Research. It’s really about using genealogy to trace the nearest next of kin to someone who has died without any known relatives.
Are you a fan of that show?
We were asked to take part in it when it started but the concern for us was the privacy aspect. Not everyone wants someone knocking on their door with a camera crew and details of their family or an inheritance that they might be coming into being broadcast to all.
I felt the show sensationalised the work and didn’t paint a realistic picture.
Record breaker:. A vinyl haul.
Anglia Research was founded by your father, Peter. What inspired his interest? When he founded the company in 1979 it was born out of his curiosity into his own family background, having been adopted at a young age. He grew up in Lancashire, and then moved to the
Ipswich area. By huge coincidence he found that his biological family was also centred on Ipswich. He just happened to move to where the family’s roots were. The business started off by tracing people’s family trees and the biological family of adopted people and, as it grew, it progressed into the probate genealogy side of things.
What attracted you to it?
The investigative side. Trying to crack the case by finding information that would help you trace someone or identify a particular family. That’s the reward.
What skills do you need to be a good genealogist?
An inquisitive mind and an eye for accuracy. We have to do our work quickly but also accurately and they are not often two skills that go hand in hand.
You must be good with people?
There are a lot of sensitivities. We do have to be careful. Sometimes people have drifted apart for a reason. There can be skeletons in closets and we have to be careful not to disturb them.
Mistakes, you’ve made a few?
When I was starting out I did make a bit of a rookie mistake. I perhaps wasn’t quite as tactful as I should have been. I was discussing with a potential client how he would be the sole heir to the estate of an uncle he had never known. His parents had passed away and I happened to comment on his adoption into the family. He didn’t know that he had been adopted. Fortunately, he took it well and it actually sparked a bit of curiosity for him about his own biological family. I was then able to help him in tracing his biological family and it turned out that he had a number of brothers and sisters. They were happy to make contact and welcomed him into the family.
What treasures have been left?
We had a case where a man died and when we visited his property we could barely get in the door. He had over 100,000 vinyl records from floor to ceiling in every room in the house, even up the stairs. It was like a maze getting through it. You had to turn sideways to negotiate these little passageways that had been created by these huge stacks of records. It took the removal men over a week to clear the property. The record collection was valued at £425,000 in total. It was purchased in the end by a specialist auction house and the money paid for the vinyl collection was then paid to the estate and distributed to his relatives.
What’s the largest windfall you’ve got for somebody?
There was a case of a lady who was the sole beneficiary to her aunt’s estate. She received a life-changing sum of money. She contacted me again after she’d received her inheritance and it was great to hear what she had done with it. Often you don’t hear what people do with it. She wanted to thank us for how much it had improved her family’s life. Her husband had been very ill. Using the money, she had been able to take him abroad for specialist treatments.
What reactions do you get when you track people down and give them good news?
It can be disbelief or scepticism. If you have someone turning up or phoning you or sending you a letter saying that you’ve come into an inheritance, then people are naturally suspicious and rightly so. You can’t be too careful. What we do is we go out of our way to demonstrate to those people that we are a legitimate accredited company.
What effect have TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are? had on your business? Would you advise people to get on with doing a will?
If people want to dictate what happens to their estate, then obviously they should write a will. Sometimes people don’t realise that the house that they bought for a few thousand pounds 50 years ago can now be worth a substantial amount of money.