Somewhere in Ireland is a family that doesn’t know it’s about to become $1m richer.
The search for the long-lost relatives of a New Zealander who died without a will is entering its fourth year.
And while a genealogist working for the Public Trust has narrowed the hunt to Ireland, they have just one extremely common name – a “John Smith” equivalent, who must now be connected back to a deceased estate on the other side of the world.
It’s the biggest and oldest case on specialist trustee Jade Winikerei’s files.
“At the moment we’re out to first cousins. It will probably go beyond that,” she says. “And in a few months’ time, we will have potentially cracked it.”
Winikerei is an “heir hunter” – a specialist trustee with the Public Trust, who works in a team managing estates that are deemed “complex” and, commonly, where someone has died without a will.
“Of the estates I am currently managing, around 30% of them have someone I need to find,” says the Auckland-based 36-year-old.
“It’s like a TV show. Calling people out of the blue and saying ‘I think you’re the person I’m looking for’. Obviously, it’s sad because someone has passed away, but if it’s like a great-great uncle ... it can be a nice surprise to hear that you’re getting some money.”
The former beauty therapist and flight attendant never imagined this could be a career.
“I started at the bottom and kind of worked my way up, learning everything there is to know about trusts and estates ... You kind of fall into the role. I think lots of people start in an admin role and find out how interesting the work is and end up sticking to it for a long time.”
Around half of all New Zealanders have a will. The Public Trust is not the country’s only provider of estate administration services, but it is the largest and longest-serving. An autonomous Crown entity that, in the last financial year, wrote 6982 wills and 4424 enduring powers of attorney.
When someone with assets exceeding $15,000 dies “intestate” or without a will, the Public Trust can be asked (or appointed) to become administrator of their estate. Next steps are guided by legislation that prioritises the distribution of those assets. Partners and/or children come first, followed by parents, then siblings, and then nieces and nephews.
“And then it gets quite wide,” says Winikerei. “We have to start looking for aunts and uncles and they’ve usually passed away. So then we look at their children, and then we get into cousins and second cousins.”
At any given time, she estimates specialist trustees are searching for between 50 and 100 potential beneficiaries.
“Maybe 70% of those are where people have passed away without a will, and about 30% have been named but we don’t know who they are.”
Sometimes, the search starts with the physical. A specialist trustee might have to enter a dead person’s home to look for a will or other documents that help establish the extent of someone’s assets.
“Even if they do have a will, we might know nothing about them. We might have to write to all of the banks to ask if this person holds an account with them. It’s kind of detective work, we look through statements – okay, they’re paying insurance, so they might have a life insurance policy? They’re receiving dividends, so they probably have some shares ...”
Finding living relatives usually begins with an online search. Facebook, other social media sites and the New Zealand Companies register are common starting points.
“Where it can get complicated is if we only have a name – we don’t know who the parents are, we don’t know who the siblings are – then we have to engage a genealogist.
“It might get complicated if they’ve been adopted or they were born overseas and they died in New Zealand.”
In the case of the missing Irish relatives, she says a genealogist has done the hard work.
“The challenge we’ve got is that a lot of the records in Ireland were destroyed in the Civil War. According to genealogists, Irish records are really hard because some of them just don’t exist.”
The family members the Public Trust is looking for will inherit “a sizable amount. This is probably one of my biggest estates – around one million dollars.”
Beware of strangers bearing windfalls? Winikerei says the Public Trust would never ask for credit card details, you should always be able to call a representative back on its free number (0800 371 471) and it’s likely that anyone contacting you would have a large amount of not readily available information about your family tree.
“I’m very grateful for the work that banks and people are doing to bring awareness to scams, but it has made my job harder! Sometimes I feel like the ‘Prince in Nigeria’ story.
“I’ve had people wanting to meet me in person to make sure I’m real. I’ve had video calls to prove I’m real ... I’m glad that people take steps to make sure.”
She recalls one case where the international relatives were particularly suspicious – and rightly so.
“In that situation, I needed to build the family background and family tree for them first, because this was a complete surprise ... it’s probably quite nice to be receiving some money that you’re not expecting, but it also probably opened up some sadness – they didn’t even know these people, and they’ve passed away.”
Winikerei believes, in an online world, anyone can be found.
“I think with technology these days, it would be really hard [to disappear].
“I think it’s so interesting. Growing up, it was kind of a joke. Someone would get a new boyfriend and they’d be like, ‘Oh, Jade will be able to find out everything’ ... I think I was just a curious person. My grandad was probably a bit the same. He was on the local rugby club and kind of knew everything that was happening around town. Maybe that’s where I picked it up from?”
Not everything a specialist trustee uncovers is welcome news. While she hasn’t personally encountered this situation, she knows of cases where a person’s death has resulted in the discovery of a secret life.
“Where, more commonly, fathers have had another family that the wife and children weren’t aware of... there might be something like an anomaly on a certificate – ‘Hmm, why does it say there are this many children, but we know there are this many?’
“A genealogist might stumble across someone’s family tree, and then they dig a little deeper and order birth certificates ... or we’ve had situations where people have come forward and said, ‘I’m a relation ... he was actually my father and I haven’t been included’.”
Winikerei says families are challenging.
“We see lots of different family dynamics, and because we’re dealing with people grieving, they’re in a heightened state of emotions. Not everyone has a happy family or home life, and that’s sad. It’s sad when people have lived a life by themselves.
“We deal with so many scenarios. Anything from messy estates with ongoing litigation, to maybe when someone has passed away and they’ve got no one around them and we’ve had to organise a nice send-off for them and make sure they’ve got a nice final resting place. That’s probably one of the things I enjoy most.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior reporter on the lifestyle desk.