Welcome to Fleetwood
Welcome to Fleetwood Heir Hunting Services Limited. We have a wide range of services designed to trace heirs and beneficiaries to unclaimed intestate cases and unclaimed financial assets. We focus on tracing living people who are entitled to claim or receive money under the terms of a will or as a result of intestacy, often where they are unaware of their entitlement. The Fleetwood Heir Hunting Services has a combined 40 years experience in Bona Vacantia, Genealogy Research, Heir Hunting, Unclaimed Estates and Family Tree Research. We are based in Croydon in Surrey but our services cover the whole of the UK.
Heir Hunting
Heir Hunting, simply put is the process of tracing heirs to an estate. Typically, this could be an estate that is unclaimed otherwise perhaps it could be tracing heirs to an estate which is to be distributed in a Will. We have a full range of Heir Hunting Services.
Family Tree Research
We are able to offer a complete family tree research service. We can create your family tree for you. You can choose whether we research both sides of your family, i.e both maternal and paternal, right back to the 1800’s. Our research will give you a superb insight into your family history.
Unclaimed Estates
In the UK an Unclaimed Estate is dealt with by a department of the government known as the Treasury Solicitors Office. An estate typically goes unclaimed when a person dies alone with no direct or immediate family contact and they die with no valid will.
Empty Houses
Are you aware of an empty house or an abandoned home? Generally, an empty house will be privately owned but the owner is long since deceased. Empty houses can lead to an abundance of problems including vermin such as rats or possibly even squatters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Fleetwood Heir Hunting Services
For further help please call 020 8970 7486
I have received a letter, what do i do?
The first thing to do is read the letter and ensure you are the right person and the information contained in the letter is correct. Then please call our Genealogy Enquiry line. This line may go to a VoiceMail, if so please leave your name and telephone number and quote the reference number on the letter. One of our genealogists will then return your call and go through the letter with you.
Our genealogist will confirm whether you are the correct person and if our trace was correct. He or she will also be able to answer any queries you have with regards the process and how long you can expect the process to be.
Is this a scam?
Unfortunately, due to the nature of our work, at first glance if you have received a letter from us it is an automatic thought to think that this must be a scam. Rest assured it is not a scam. You can always tell a scam from the genuine article because scammers will always ask you for money or promise huge sums of money. Rest assured we will do neither.
All we ask is that we are compensated for the work that we will do by way of a percentage of the amount that you will receive. This will ensure that we will always receive from you far less than you will actually receive.
Why do I need to supply ID?
There are two reasons you need to supply id:
1. The Treasury who hold the money of the deceased person need to make sure that we have found the rightful heirs. They cannot pay us unless we 100% prove that you are the right person. For more information with regards acceptable forms of ID please see our research page
2. The law states that any person who is bankrupt cannot directly receive an inheritance from another person. Therefore we must prove that you are not bankrupt. If you are bankrupt please advise us as soon as possible.
Am I going to be rich now?
As much as we would love to tell you to order that new car and give up your job the chances are that is not going to be the case. The Treasury list estates of people who have died leaving more than £500.00. Statistically speaking people with large sums of money do make wills therefore if there was a large sum of money that person would have made a will and thus the Treasury would not be involved. It is generally those that only have a few thousand who think they do not need a will so regrettably they never get around to writing one. Hence why the Treasury get involved in the first place.
Have you received a letter from us?
If you have received a letter asking for you to contact us the first thing to do is read the letter carefully. Are you the correct person? Do you know the people we have referred to in the letter. If you are sure you are the correct person then please call us. At this early stage please do not get too excited. We work on estates of all sizes, some are small.
In 95% of the estates regrettably in the early stages we do not know the value of the estate. Please do not tell your boss you are leaving just yet! Due to the nature of our research even if we were aware we regret we could not divulge that information. This is because our research road is a long one. Sometimes estate administration may need to be carried out. In these circumstances fees related to the estate can further reduce any inheritance as can debts left by the deceased person.
What we need from you…
Rest assured, although there are considerable costs involved when researching family trees, we will not ask you for any money. We do however need to recover our costs and of course as a company we have to make a profit from our work. Therefore we only ask a percentage of any money you receive. This percentage will be explained to you in our introductory letter and the contract we ask you to sign. This contract we ask you to sign makes provision for us to be paid our fee in the form of a percentage of your entitlement. This ensures that we will only be paid if your claim is successful and that our fees will always be in proportion to your share of the inheritance – ensuring our fees are never larger than your part of the inheritance.
What information can we divulge?
In the early stages we cannot tell you the name of the person whose estate we are working on. Some people seem very offended about this. This is nothing sinister, it is quite usual. This is because during the early stages of our work we have not completed all of the research. In addition, as you should hopefully appreciate, even to get to this stage it has cost us a considerable amount of time and money to even trace you. We must be in a position to be able to recover our costs before we release information relating to the estate we are dealing with.
Speeding up the process…
You can help us speed up the process by letting us have any information relating to your family that you may have. Remember no one person’s memory is the same. Even if we have already spoken to a member of your family it could be that you remember just the tiniest piece of additional information that may help us to resolve a case and thus pay out even quicker. This can help us all.
How long does it take..
Generally the whole process can vary considerably however you can expect that, from the first letter you receive, the timescale will be approximately 6-9 months. This is simply because, for the majority of the cases, we work with the Treasury Solicitor. The Treasury Solicitors is a government department, as with a lot of government departments their wheels do not move swiftly. Nothing we can do can speed up the process. They deal with thousands of cases and regrettably the time taken is simply beyond our control.