free family tree check

Fraser and Fraser provides a free professional family tree check. Advising personal representatives of essential work required to ensure all family who would be entitled to a share of an estate have been identified and located.

This helps guard against unknown beneficiaries appearing when least expected and creating additional work and costs. It also provides comfort to personal representatives that all avenues have been covered.

What does the family tree check provide?

A thorough examination of information obtained about the deceased’s family. We will highlight areas which we believe require a more detailed research and also mention areas of research that might identify and locate additional unknown entitled beneficiaries.

Dormant And Orphan Balances

Legal professionals are obliged to take all necessary steps to return money to their clients.

If for any reason solicitors are unable to find a client, then the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) requires them to provide evidence to show they have made realistic attempts to trace them.

How Fraser and Fraser can help

The Law Society suggests using a tracing agent to find missing clients. Our services include:

Locating a current UK address

Identifying forwarding addresses

Discovering if a client has died

If we are unable to establish whether a client is deceased or discover a forwarding address, we will explain this in a report that you can incorporate into your own documentation.

We charge a fixed price per missing client search, regardless of the value of the account.

Case Study

All you need to do is supply us with the information you have and our experienced researchers will provide guidance about whether it is correct, what might be missing and if there is the possibility or additional family members who need to be traced.

What we will supply

A free, no obligation quote of costs to carry out the research and to ascertain exactly who is entitled and document their entitlement.

This is our assessment. It does not involve research and is intended only as a guide. It cannot be relied upon for the purposes of distributing an estate.

risk-free administrator search services

Sometimes solicitors encounter cases where the deceased has not made a will and has no obvious relatives.

Before you refer such an estate to the Government Legal Department, it pays to be absolutely sure there are no next-of-kin who have a prior claim to the Crown.

In these instances, our administrator search service offers a solution. We also provide it on the basis that if we can’t find a suitable personal representative, then no fees will apply.

Our aim is to locate a relative who is willing and able to act as a personal representative. In addition, more than 90% of the administrators we locate go on to instruct our clients.

However, if the personal representative we find does not instruct you, we will not charge you a fee.

We recently helped an English solicitor client identify the sole heir to a £325,000 estate. The case involved a reclusive bachelor and our client had been unable to find any next-of-kin.

Once instructed, Fraser and Fraser’s experts quickly drew up a family tree and identified a niece who was living hundreds of miles away. In due course she instructed our client to carry out the estate administration. On this occasion our fee was limited to time spent on administration after a Grant of Letters of Administration was issued.