A recent case study from Title Research highlights how an intestate estate came close to a misdistribution and was only avoided by genealogical research being undertaken.
On this occasion, Title Research was asked to verify the Deceased’s paternal family. The estate was known to be passing to the class of whole blood uncles and aunts, and their issue where predeceased. The Personal Representative was said to be the only maternal heir. We resolved the paternal family research and located 14 potential heirs. Prior to distribution, the Personal Representative sadly died and our client attempted to obtain missing beneficiary insurance. In order to do so, we were asked to verify the maternal side of the family as well.
This was expected to be a fairly short and straightforward piece of work but we very quickly realised that this was not the case. The one maternal heir was one of 62 heirs on this side of the family, making 76 in total.
This is certainly not the first time we’ve discovered additional unknown heirs and prevented a client from misdistribution. As this case study highlights, family relationships are becoming increasingly complex which now makes family tree verification more important than ever.
Learn more about the importance of family tree verification in Title Research’s latest blog post: https://hubs.ly/H0d6H3M0
