Britain, Missing Beneficiaries and Unclaimed Estates 1910

The records found in this collection are part of a publication titled Dougal’s Index Register to Next of Kin, Heirs at Law and Cases of Unclaimed Money Advertisements. The publication looks specifically at properties or estates registered in chancery court, which have gone unclaimed because a deceased person did not create a will or did not have any known descendants.

The book comprises lists of titles of causes in courts, index of names found in newspapers related to unclaimed estates, and stories of those individuals who were lucky enough to discover that they had inherited a handsome fortune from a person unknown to them.

The lists only provide an individual’s first and last name. It was the reader’s responsibility to apply to the publisher for the full advertisement at the cost of £1. The publisher claimed that this list has the means of giving a person the information necessary to recover money or property they otherwise would have never heard of.

If you discover your ancestor’s name in the index, search Findmypast’s newspaper collection, available through the Useful links and resources section. The listing may have been published in one of the hundreds of newspapers available here.

• The records are presented as PDFs. A PDF search functions differently from searches on transcribed records. The name search will only search for the exact name you enter in the name field.

• A name search will return results which have the search terms on the same page within the document. This means that searching for John Smith will return pages where the names 'John' and 'Smith' occurred on the same page, but possibly not next to each other.