Locating Next of Kin

Under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, local authorities have a statutory duty to provide a suitable public health funeral for persons who have died intestate within their boundaries where seemingly no one else is willing or able to make funeral arrangements.

Finding next of kin

The ultimate aim of our genealogical research is to locate and contact family members (blood relatives) as soon as possible. This approach allows the relatives to attend or even take on the responsibility of the funeral and to deal with the administration of the estate, should they choose to do so.

We have encountered these situations hundreds of times before and have, in the vast majority of cases, been able to locate at least one living relative. Our commitment is to transparency, and we always endeavour to be as responsive as possible. We are also fully insured.

By successfully locating the next of kin, it provides them with the option to make the funeral arrangements which would therefore no longer be the local authority’s responsibility (unless they chose not to take this on), saving both time and resources.

Research that can be relied upon

We are a well-established probate genealogy organisation, locating next of kin and missing beneficiaries.

Tracing next of kin is the core pillar of our company – it is something we undertake every day, whether on behalf of a public sector body, a legal firm, a financial institution or on cases we choose to pursue from the Unclaimed estate list published by the Government’s Legal Department.

We have long been at the forefront of driving greater transparency and best practice and our research is fast, free and failsafe. You are in safe hands with us.

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Regional Head Eileen Lavelle discusses a public health funeral case where the estate turned out to be much larger than expected

Gerald Howell had died intestate with no known relatives. As with many local authority cases, we had no idea of the size of his estate, all we knew was that he lived in social housing, so it was likely to be small or non-existent.

Typically, if the deceased had no children or siblings, and you track back to their parents’ generation when families were much larger, you are looking at a great deal of research. This is because every stem has to be investigated if the estate is to be distributed correctly.

Eileen Lavelle

In Gerald’s case, his mother’s family tree involved only three stems – three maternal siblings – but there were seven on the paternal tree, which also had to be researched. We managed to establish that most of the ten stems had died out before we tracked down three of Gerald’s paternal cousins.

At this point, there was still one other stem on the paternal family tree that we couldn’t be 100% certain had died out. So, once the council had recouped the funeral expenses, and a personal representative had been appointed, we advised him to take out missing beneficiary indemnity insurance so that he could confidently distribute what turned out to be a £30,000 estate.

(For reasons of confidentiality, names and other identifying features have been altered.)