In 2008, one of our British partners presented us with a case that initially seemed strange.

A gentleman who, as the “Wolverhampton Ring Road Tramp,” lived for almost 40 years on a traffic island in the British city of Wolverhampton, died there at the age of 87. Our concerns that the deceased probably left no estate were quickly dispelled when our British colleague discovered that the deceased never cashed out his pension payments and the estate thus amounted to almost 100,000 British pounds.

With the help of our Polish correspondence office, we succeeded in a race against various European colleagues to find heirs in Germany and Croatia and to submit their claim in Great Britain.

In the course of the proceedings, it became clear why so many of our colleagues throughout Europe were so vehemently searching for the heirs: The “Wolverhampton Ring Road Tramp” was a kind of local hero who, born as a Pole, fought during the war on the side of the German Wehrmacht in Africa, then emigrated to Great Britain and after a few years of work could no longer stand the confines of his apartment and set up his tent on a traffic island, where he spent the rest of his life. The local city administration initially put an end to the matter, but then bowed to the protests of fellow citizens who saw the deceased as a “higher being” who placed no value on earthly desires. Over the years, a worldwide fan base formed that saw the deceased as a kind of patron of the city.

The heirs in continental Europe only knew the deceased by hearsay and were quite astonished when requests for interviews from various European television stations approached them. They had not expected such a celebrity as a relative.

We know that our profession is relatively unknown. We also know that you have to take away the heirs’ skepticism before telling them exactly what it’s about.

In the present case, which we were offered from the USA via a Hungarian partner office, the deceased, a niece of the deceased in the USA, had already been tracked down by our Hungarian partner after long research in various archives in Poland in Haifa/Israel, but did not respond to the letters from our correspondence office.

We were therefore asked – not least because of our permanent Jewish employee on site – to make contact with the heiress, which we initially did not succeed in doing because the lady did not respond to our employee’s calls in that she simply did not answer.

Eventually, however, our genealogist succeeded in learning the name of a daughter of the heiress who lives in Tel Aviv and he contacted her by telephone. She confirmed that her mother was simply no longer able to operate the telephone, but asked boldly about our request.

After our employee briefly explained our activity profile to the lady and said that her mother might be entitled to a larger estate sum, she reacted extremely skeptically and demanded all information about the inheritance case, which we did not want to tell her on the telephone. She then called our office in Vienna at short notice and demanded unequivocally that the managing director appear personally in Tel Aviv the next day, otherwise she would block any further contact attempts from our side.

2 hours later, the most important things of our managing director and another genealogist were packed and our team traveled from Vienna via Zurich (the direct flight from Vienna to Tel Aviv was already booked out) 5 hours after the telephone call to Israel. Once there, our permanent correspondent received us and brought us to the agreed meeting point in a large downtown hotel, where the daughter and son of the heiress were already waiting for our employees. Also present were 2 lawyers and the respective spouses of the children of the deceased.

After a five-hour meeting, where skepticism prevailed, we agreed that the children of the heiress would sleep on the whole matter again and let us know tomorrow.

However, since the next day was a Saturday (Sabbath) and therefore no work could be done, we had to wait until sunset until further contact was possible.

In contrast to the somewhat more open-minded son of the heiress, the daughter told us that after consultation with her husband coming from the USA, she had no interest in continuing the talks and we then contacted the son, whom we asked for a new conversation.

Unfortunately, however, he lived 150 kilometers outside of Tel Aviv and it was extremely difficult to get a taxi to his hometown on this holiday, which we eventually succeeded in doing and we were able to visit the son again through the Gaza Strip.

At a dinner, which his lawyer also attended, we were able to convince the son of the heiress of the matter and it then took about 5 hours until the fee agreement was accepted by both sides.

The brother then contacted his sister, who after long hesitation finally agreed, so that we personally handed her the contract on our return trip to Tel Aviv with the request to hand it over to the mother.

The next day, our originally planned departure day, we received the agreement back signed and our Viennese employees flew back to Vienna one day later.

The heiress receives almost $700,000 in this case.

A German partner office asked us in this case to search for any descendants of a German who emigrated to Brazil in 1919, who might have property rights to a plot of land in East Berlin.

With the help of the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, we were able to view the immigration list and determine that the deceased emigrated in 1919 from Germany to the then prospering Brazilian port city of Santos. He probably left his homeland due to the precarious economic situation after World War I and sought a new beginning in Brazil.

Through the help of our employee Rosskamp on site, who searched through all resident registration data in the relevant period and dug up historical correspondence from the honorary consulate in Santos, we found a telex from the emigrant from 1932 to his sister who remained in Germany, in which he briefly informed her that “the work on the banana plantations is laborious and poorly paid; I also suffer from constant fever and my daughter Maria is concerned about me.”

We now knew that the deceased had a daughter named Maria, and with the help of the local registry office we managed to view all births in Santos and indeed a daughter of the deceased was born in 1925.

We now set about finding the marriage, which we succeeded in relatively quickly, although the joy was only short-lived, as the daughter adopted probably the most common Brazilian name of all after her wedding: Maria Santos.

Since it seemed impossible to find this lady, of whom we didn’t even know whether she was still alive, we came up with the idea of asking the Protestant cemetery located outside the city for any death certificate for the deceased, as we assumed that he did not convert to Catholicism even after his emigration to Brazil.

We actually found the deceased’s death entry with the note that he died penniless in 1947 and the city paid for the burial due to lack of relatives.

Maria Santos had thus disappeared and we saw our last opportunity to start a local appeal in the local media (radio stations, newspapers), which, however, also brought no success.

Eventually we found the director of the local poorhouse, who – at 94 years old – still remembered the deceased, as he lived there until his death.

He described the difficult situation of the family to us and knew that the deceased had a daughter named Maria who worked as a cleaning lady. Fortunately, he could still give us the address of the former employer, so we visited his children, who still knew Maria Santos. They told us that the daughter of the deceased died about 5 years ago, but had 9 children, one of whom works for the city administration.

The search for this grandchild of the deceased went quickly and the grandson told us about an aunt who had also already died, who lived about 300 kilometers away on a banana plantation, barely making ends meet.

Eventually it turned out that the two daughters of the deceased had a total of 17 children. After further research, we came across over 55 heirs, most of whom could not read and write.

One daughter of the deceased had married a genuine Indian, with whom she had 13 children; with these we had to have the signatures certified by fingerprint by a local notary.

Although this case dragged on for three quarters of a year, we eventually succeeded in providing financial help to the many heirs in Brazil; with the money due to them, each of them can buy their own house and a piece of land, as they were previously financially dependent on the large landowner as “modern slaves.”

An Australian partner office asked us to find any heirs of a Greek who emigrated to Australia, of whom we knew the place of origin and the date of his birth. He came from a small village on the south coast of Greece and worked as a shepherd until his emigration.

Through calls to the local authority, a brother could quickly be found, who according to the mayor had also emigrated; however, nobody knew where. About 1 week after our telephone call with the mayor, a Greek who had emigrated to Germany contacted us, referring to the conversation with the mayor and told us that the brother of the deceased moved to the vicinity of Budapest and changed his name there.

Through the active support of the Greek embassy in Hungary, the new name could be determined and so we finally found the deceased’s brother relatively easily in a village near Budapest. The heir had not heard from his brother for 50 years and despite the death of the brother was glad to now learn the last whereabouts of his relative.

Not every case unfortunately ends with a happy ending; that an heir is unwilling to accept the inheritance occurred occasionally, but never before in a case with a volume of over 1 million euros.

A German genealogical office had been following the trail of someone who emigrated from Poland to Germany, later to Great Britain and finally to New Zealand for years and notified the heir of the entitlement by mail, whereupon he wrote back that he was not interested.

Our partners assumed that this might possibly be related to any Jewish ancestry of the heir and possibly letters from Germany due to the events in World War II would be understood with great mistrust, which is why they asked us to contact the gentleman, as we have a Jewish employee who might be able to convince the heir in a personal conversation that there is indeed an inheritance case here, to which the New Zealander is entitled.

Another thought was that the heir’s wife had an Italian-sounding maiden name, whereby our selected employee also speaks excellent Italian in addition to Hebrew.

After a 26-hour flight from Vienna via Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, our genealogist finally reached Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and visited the heir, to whom he presented the case. It quickly became clear that the heir was neither of Jewish ancestry, nor did his wife speak Italian; rather, the heir made it unmistakably clear that although he believed in the inheritance case, he had absolutely no interest in so much money, as he feared that his wife would be kidnapped and he would then not know who would cook his food.

Endless attempts at persuasion through engaged local notaries and lawyers failed, so that our employee had to leave again after 5 days.

It should finally be noted that the heir lives in extremely poor economic conditions and his son showed extremely great interest in the assets, especially since he had also been unemployed for some time. A conversation between the son and the father, however, was just as fruitless as the intervention of our sent employee.

Sometimes our profession simply requires historical knowledge and luck…

We were asked by a German partner office to find inheritance-entitled descendants of a German-speaking woman from Galicia.

Since the archive conditions in the formerly easternmost crown land of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy are catastrophic and the processing times sometimes exceed 1 year, the chances were relatively poor of finding inheritance-entitled persons within a reasonable time. However, we knew that 99% of the formerly German-speaking population of Galicia emigrated after World War II primarily to Baden-Württemberg, Hesse as well as to the Austrian federal states of Upper Austria and Salzburg.

In a name bearer search in the telephone book, in which we limited the search to the mentioned regions, brought 2 entries and we found within a very short time the son of the nephew of the deceased in Salzburg, who was himself still born in Galicia and had to leave the country in 1945 after the invasion of the Red Army.

One of the most demanding and elaborate cases we have ever handled, we received from an Austrian notary who sought the heirs of a surviving Jewish concentration camp prisoner with our help.

Through various file inspections, we quickly knew that the deceased had a brother whose fate was completely unclear. It was to be assumed that he had not survived the Holocaust due to his Mosaic religious affiliation. Research in victim lists brought no result, which is why we assumed that the deceased’s brother managed to survive the war.

We knew that he was 16 years old when Hitler came to power and assumed that he might have emigrated to the USA or Israel, but could not confirm any immigration in the relevant databases.

Help came from a list of the so-called Kindertransports; these were Jewish children who were enabled to flee to England without their parents on the eve of World War II. Equipped with a suitcase, a bag and 10 Reichsmarks, about 10,000 Jewish children were able to escape the Nazi regime.

Upon arrival in England, the children were placed in foster homes and in the records of such a home we finally found the name of the sought brother. Since the sought brother fortunately had a “sponsor” assigned to him by the British government, whose children we could ask about the whereabouts of the deceased’s brother, it turned out that he emigrated to Canada via Shanghai at the age of 18.

Soon after, we were able to determine the descendants of this brother in Ottawa and tell them about the fate of their uncle.

Showmen travel through countries like few other people.

In our case, a lady from Austria died, of whom it was known that as a 17-year-old girl she gave birth to a daughter in Hamburg, whose whereabouts were unknown. We quickly found out that the daughter was born illegitimately in Hamburg during a tour in Germany, but came to adoptive parents in Scotland at a young age and maintained no contact with the mother, who finally settled with her husband in Styria.

With the help of our British partner office, the daughter, who had meanwhile been married 3 times, could be quickly tracked down and although she knew that her biological mother lived in Austria, she did not know her name.

The daughter finally inherited a neat single-family house in Austria, which would have fallen to the state without our help.

In 2005, we were made aware of an apartment in the best Viennese villa location, which would fall to the state after the death of its owner, should no legitimate heirs be found within a certain period.

We soon found out that the last owner was a lady named Ludmilla N., who allegedly came from Mannheim.

Only when we received negative information from the German registry offices about the deceased, we could determine after further research that her place of birth was not in Germany, but in Ukraine – it was Mannheim near Odessa, a former German “colony” in Bessarabia.

One of our employees then pursued the trail of the lady together with an engaged partner office and since we knew that most “ethnic Germans” had to leave their homeland after World War II, the suspicion was that the family emigrated to Germany or Austria.

With the help of the Association of Expelled Bessarabian Germans, the lady’s birth register was found relatively quickly and we learned that she had 2 brothers and a sister, whose whereabouts were unknown.

However, we also found other relatives of the deceased with the help of the association, namely cousins of the same, who were “bought free” by the Federal Republic of Germany from the Soviet Union in the 60s of the last century.

This one reported of a sister who was also supposed to have lived in Germany. We were able to determine her after laborious research work, but she had already died about 20 years ago, so we had to search for descendants of the same, whom we finally found in Belgium.

We thus had one heiress, but what had happened to the brothers of the deceased? Through the support of the partner office, we were able to find out that only the deceased succeeded in fleeing west from the Red Army with the withdrawal of the German Wehrmacht. Her brothers were, because of German origin, suspected of collaboration with the Nazis and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in Siberia.

These 25 years were later reduced to 15 and after they were over, they settled in eastern Kazakhstan, on the border with China, where they also died a few years ago. The deceased had tried throughout her life and also with the help of the Red Cross to make contact with her brothers, which unfortunately she could no longer succeed in doing.

After about 3 months of intensive research in Kazakhstan, we received the message from our partner office that the descendants of the brothers of the deceased who died in Kazakhstan now live in Russia under the poorest conditions; we found these and so they can now rejoice together with their cousin in Belgium over an apartment in Vienna including cash.

At the beginning of December 2004, we received an email inquiry from Russia. Mr. D. wrote to us that his grandfather was wounded in a defensive battle of the k.u.k. Army in World War I near Lemberg (former Austro-Hungarian crown land Galicia & Lodomeria) and as a result was deported by the Russian Army to labor service in Siberia.

There he married a Russian before his death – stateless – who bore him a son. This one had to suffer greatly under the consequences of World War II, as he was considered a so-called ethnic German.

After the end of the war, the Austrian family tried several times in vain to bring the son of the deportee to Austria; until his death he did not see his father’s country.

His son, who lives in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, commissioned us to search for his relatives living in Austria.

First of all, we researched the birth entries in the Lower Austrian place of birth of the grandfather of the client and we were able to determine that he had siblings, whose descendants we could not determine even after extremely intensive research in the region.

The Vienna City and State Archive then gave us insight and we found out there that parts of the family moved to Vienna after World War I and also died there. A check of the grave list at the Vienna Central Cemetery confirmed that some of his relatives had died in Vienna.

We then checked who paid for the grave of the brother of the deportee and were thus able to determine his daughter, whom we then contacted and who confirmed to us that a relative of the family from Russia never came back.

A family reunion after almost 90 years had succeeded.