Elizabeth works for the Environmental Health Department at East Cambridgeshire Council. Her role is to take care of matters for ‘lone’ deceased people who are sadly found in residential properties not owned or run by the council in the district.
Elizabeth’s first duty is to try and locate next of kin to help with the preparation of the funeral. No obvious next of kin existed in this case but Elizabeth did trace distant relatives with no emotional connection to the deceased.
Her usual cases involve the deaths of homeless people and people with drug abuse problems, who typically have no assets.
However in this case, following an investigation of the deceased’s residential property, it was evident that the deceased had assets, therefore it was imperative that she ascertained whether or not a Will existed.
She started to call local solicitors to understand if a Will existed, indeed she spent many wasted hours in her investigations and called what she considered was every solicitor in the area but all to no avail.
During these calls one local solicitor recommended that she carry out a Certainty Will Search. Within minutes of carrying out the Will search a local solicitor made contact with Elizabeth to validate her enquiry and then disclosed that they held a Will (dated 2013) for the deceased, which had been registered with Certainty the National Will Register.
Elizabeth said: “We are pleased that we have done the right thing for the person who passed away on their own. Finding the Will has allowed us to honour their last wishes. We are also extremely relieved to have introduced and found the Certainty Will Search service as it quickly and easily provided us with the answers we needed. The distant relatives under the rules of intestacy would have been next in line to inherit but the deceased’s Will stated very different instructions! We now incorporate Certainty Will Search services in to our deceased estates procedure.”
….Real life Will search stories from the legal profession…
The search used for this case was a Will Register Search at £33.33 + VAT..
