We’ve all received them. Those spam emails telling us an African prince has left us millions in his will and all we have to do is send over our bank account details to receive our inheritance. Hopefully none of us are naïve enough to comply, but what do you do if something similar is sent through the U.S. mail? That’s what happened to me more than a year ago.
The letter, which came from a British legal firm, explained that one of my relatives had died without leaving a will and they were trying to find his descendants so any money left could go to us instead of the government. They included a phone number at which I was to call them.
When further investigation told me that heir hunting is actually a legitimate business, I started thinking it might not be a scam. That, and the fact that the deceased had the same name as one of my late mother’s cousins.
I remembered Cousin Roy — technically my second cousin once removed — but hadn’t seen him in nearly 40 years. Even before that, though, we were never close and the likelihood that he would have remembered me in his will, had he actually written one, seemed pretty remote.
Still, I was intrigued. I imagined a will reading at which I and other family members would be gathered around a mahogany table in a paneled study being told of the millions we’d be receiving thanks to Cousin Roy.
I have no idea how Roy’s life panned out after I last saw him. At that time, he owned a bed-and-breakfast in the English countryside. Did he become the owner of a chain of international hotels or end up virtually penniless? I was never going to find out unless I staked my claim.
I made the international call, and 15 minutes later I was having a very pleasant conversation with someone who explained that his company made their money by taking a finder’s fee on finding heirs to unclaimed estates. Fair enough. I’d never have known Cousin Roy died let alone did so without a will had they not contacted me.
“To be honest, I wouldn’t get too excited,” he warned me, momentarily forgetting I was British and so rarely get excited about anything. “You’ll be lucky if you come out of this with the price of a plate of fish and chips.”
“If it means I’ll have the money to fly over and eat them in England, I wouldn’t complain,” I replied.
Once I’d registered my interest, my new heir-hunting friend and I climbed up and down my family tree so he could confirm I was who I said I was. We talked about everyone from aunts and uncles to grandparents I knew only by name.
Months went by. Heir-hunting is a slow business apparently, and I do have a large, extended family so tracking them all down would take time. After a while, I wondered if I’d ever hear anything again.
But last year I was called by another company in England. They’d taken over the work, they said, and were about to send all their information to whoever it was who would release Cousin Roy’s millions.
After several more months, I received another letter in the mail.
This time there was a figure on the first page, just over £15,000. Maybe not enough for me to retire to a tropical island but certainly more than a plate of fish and chips.
I was excited when I worked out that the sum would be close to $20,000. (Turns out some things do excite us Brits, although I can never be sure when my adopted American side will kick in). That was until I started flipping through the letter’s accompanying pages and got to the one that indicated I was one of 14 descendants who would be sharing in the windfall.
My portion was actually £109.74, a few cents shy of $140.
Since then, I’ve been wracking my brain for how to best spend my unexpected gain since using it on something as mundane as groceries seems a waste. I could put it all on black during my next trip to Vegas or invest it in the stock market. Buying a tree for my yard or Union Jack flag for my porch would be nice if they weren’t both banned by our homeowners association.
Perhaps I’ll put it toward a subscription to Ancestry.com so I can find out more about my family given how I’d never heard of some of those on Cousin Roy’s descendant’s list. This whole experience has made me realize that family can sometime give us something more important than money.
Hilary Decent is a freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007. She can be reached at hilarydecent@gmail.com.
