Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Global hunt for relatives after woman died alone
HEIR hunters had to search the globe to find living relatives of a woman from South Gloucestershire who died alone at Southmead Hospital in Bristol.
And when a descendant living in Canada was eventually tracked down she was surprised to discover that not only was she in for an inheritance, but that one of her distant relatives had been a notorious Bristol criminal.
Christine Woodey, 80, died in February 2021. She had no known next of kin and had not made a will.
She was born in Bristol in 1941 and married John Woodey, who was 14 years older than her, when she was 23.
They didn’t have children and John died in 2007.
Christine had been living in a care home in Old Down, Tockington. She was the only child of Henry Churchill Amesbury, an aircraft engineer during the Second World War, and Mildred Collins, who married in 1939.
Danny Curran, of Finders International, the probate genealogy firm and star of the BBC’s Heir Hunters series, was instructed by the local council to search for relatives entitled to inherit.
With no children and no siblings the search for relatives immediately went back a generation and swiftly revealed a family scattered across the UK and Canada.
Researchers found surprised relatives to inherit and, what came as an even greater surprise, long buried family crimes.
Canadian resident, Sandra Vanstone, 63, whose father was a
cousin of Christine, was a beneficiary.
She said: “I had never heard of Christine. I was aware of some fracturing within the previous generation of my family but I never quite got to the bottom of it.
“Now, thanks to Finders International’s work, I understand that my father, Raymond Woodey, and Christine were first cousins. Christine’s father and my grandmother were siblings. Sadly, my father has passed away so I really don’t know if he knew or remembered his cousin Christine either.”
Sandra left Frampton Cotterell, South Gloucestershire, and moved to Canada with her parents when she was ten. While she has kept in touch with some relatives in England over the years, Christine and her parents were not among them.
Finders research also revealed that one Evelyn Amesbury (known as Margaret), who was Christine’s aunt and Sandra’s great aunt, was a notorious Bristolian in her day.
Declared an “incorrigible rogue” by the courts in Downend in 1923, Evelyn had amassed a rap sheet of 57 convictions in only 10 years.
Evelyn was sentenced to prison and hard labour for a litany of offences including malicious damage, larceny, sleeping out and being drunk and disorderly.
Newspaper reports say she was 33 years old at the time and was jailed despite an appeal for leniency, and a note that “her parents were very respectable people”,
Records also show that Aunt Evelyn did not have any children. But she seemingly put her early life of crime behind her and lived to the age of 95, marrying when she was 76.
Sandra said: “It has been an interesting and surprising process that has helped me piece together some of my extended family. I was particularly intrigued by the story of my great aunt, who unfortunately seemed to have had a difficult early life.”
Danny said: “Without a will we will never know what Christine’s last wishes were. However, we are pleased to have found relatives to inherit her estate and possibly renew their extended family connections.”
Christine’s estate was valued at less than £15,000.