No task is too big for us at FWL. However sometimes, the challenges are fairly large. “Please can you find David Jones“…. oh heavens! Even tying down the right birth reference will take some time!
In my own family, I have two Evans lines, one Jones and one Williams (and that’s not to mention Smith, Day and more). Thankfully, there are some rarer names as well, otherwise I may have given up on family history several decades ago. Alongside the daily BV list, private client work etc., we work for many dozens of solicitors across the globe and, for these cases more than any other, failure is not an option. We have a 100% crack rate (still!) but those ‘cracks’ don’t come easy. Some take months…. and today, Jones was being hit with a sledge hammer. A solicitor part-administrated the estate in 1997, leaving two ‘not-insignificant’ lines totally unresearched and hence, just north of £10,000 in the Client Account. Now, that solicitor is no more (probably for good reason!) and another solicitor has been left to ‘pick up the pieces‘, with our help.
The two beneficiary lines in question have totally the wrong names heading them up. The two sets of documentation received from beneficiaries paid out in 1997 (initially from the aforementioned solicitors) contradict each other…. the distribution account doesn’t match up to the family tree! Great starting point….
Thank heaven, having battered our heads against a large brick wall for hours, significant progress has been made. Not quite there yet but soon, we will be. And now, to research two Williams lines in Wales. We must need our heads tested.
