A very successful 2013 has once again meant little time for blogging. However, we do have some news to share: in addition to a very busy summer of probate genealogy, our Liverpool office has recently moved and we have a new contact telephone number there: 0151 203 5827.

If you are a solicitor with an intestate estate to deal with, or missing heirs in a will to find, please call either our Tunbridge Wells or Liverpool office for a no-obligation assessment of your case. Leave the work to us!

If you are a beneficiary who has received correspondence from us, please do call us if you have any questions. You will get through to our experienced staff (we’re an independent friendly company, not a call centre!) and we are pleased to return your call if you wish.

If your case reference number ends in ‘L’, your case is being run from our Liverpool office. If your case reference is a 4 digit number not ending in ‘L’, you should contact our Tunbridge Wells office on 01892 506887.

More news by Christmas, time permitting!!

Happy New Year to you, from all of us at Martlets.

We’re kicking off 2013 with networking news from Liverpool: our Liverpool office opened in 2009 and we are members of the East Liverpool Business Forum, a business networking group serving the south and east of the city. The group meets for breakfast every fortnight, as well as holding various social and networking events throughout the year. The ELBF is a great way to help develop your business and make new contacts and there have been a diverse range of interesting guest speakers recently, such as a local MP, a specialist film-maker and local business leaders.

Our director Mark is now the invitations secretary, so if your business is in Liverpool and you are interested in coming along, please email mark@martletresearch for further details or visit the ELBF webpage: http://www.eastliverpoolbusinessforum.blogspot.com/

There is a special networking event for prospective new members at 7am on Tuesday 19th February 2013, which would be a particularly good time to give it a go. Attendance is free (and includes breakfast!), so to book your place contact Mark today.

A very merry Christmas to you all! 2012 has not been an easy year for a lot of people but we wish everybody a happy, peaceful, healthy and prosperous 2013. We would like to thank all of the beneficiaries who engaged us to prove their claims and also the solicitors and estate practitioners who have instructed us to resolve their estates. We look forward to being of service to you again in the near future.

For many of us, Christmas is a time when we receive cards from family and friends that we do not see as often as we would like. It’s the nature of our society that some families are separated by circumstances, such as work or relationships taking us away from where we grew up. It can also be a poignant time when we reflect and think back to childhood, and remember family who are no longer with us. These are understandably feelings that we encounter from time to time when we speak to beneficiaries, especially if we have had to break the sad news of the death of a relative. Indeed, we are always mindful that although any case we deal with concerns an intestate estate or other legal entitlement, it also involves a person who has passed away leaving family, often quite distantly related but perhaps close personally in the past.

There is never an ideal way to convey news of the death of a relative and every situation is different, but we take pride in our professional and sensitive approach. In particular, we would only in the rarest of circumstances ‘cold call’ a potential beneficiary in person at their home and we know that many people are now quite rightly wary of businesses taking such an approach. We do however also have to take care that we are contacting the correct family, especially when the names we are researching are common, and sometimes we may have to contact a potential heir speculatively by telephone or letter. In these situations, we cannot reveal too many details of the matter we are researching until we are sure that we have traced the correct person.

If we have contacted you by letter or have left a telephone message for you to call in, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will always return your call if you wish, saving your phone bill, and we would be pleased to answer any questions you have concerning the person who has died, the entitled family, the estate concerned and our involvement in the matter. We will also acknowledge all emails sent to our company contact address within twenty-four hours during the working week. We are a small and friendly company and our case managers have lots of experience in dealing with sensitive probate matters.

Please note that both our Tunbridge Wells and Liverpool offices will close this year at 1pm on Christmas Eve. Our Liverpool office will remain closed over Christmas but our Tunbridge Wells office will operate with a ‘skeleton staff’ (closing at 1pm on New Year’s Eve). We re-open fully at 9am on Wednesday 2nd January 2013. Once more, we wish you compliments of the festive season from all at Martlets!

We sometimes receive calls from members of the public asking us to research their family tree or track down their long lost cousin, or an old flame, or their mate from school who they lent money to in 1983.  The best we can do in these situations is to point them in the direction of a relevant website. At Martlets we specialise only in legal matters which are to the potential benefit of the people we trace.

Researching your family tree has never been as popular as it is now.  Whereas in the past it may have required a coach trip to the Family Records Centre (the arrival of which was generally a cue for us professionals to head off for a cuppa), you can now avail yourself of a fantastic array of records on the internet.  This means that you can journey into your family’s past from the comfort of your armchair and for the price of a subscription to a website.  The development of search engines has made the process a lot quicker and the availability of records online has transformed genealogy.  OK, there isn’t the same sense of self congratulation in finding a census return after five minutes on a computer as there used to be trawling for five hours through several enumeration districts on a microfilm reader in the Public Record Office. But then again your chances of finding the entry are now much higher, particularly if the family has moved to a different area.  Unless the entry has been mis-transcribed of course…

One thing that has not changed with the proliferation of the internet is the importance of probate genealogists obtaining birth, marriage and death certificates and copies of probate documents. Unlike an amateur hobbyist, who may gather information by using online indexes or by interviewing their relatives, professionals cannot rely on the memories of beneficiaries or the basic information found in genealogical databases. Certificates are essential documents which prove the entitlement of beneficiaries, confirming that they are indeed related to the deceased and not simply sharers of the same surname.  Certificates also provide vital evidence that a line of the family has terminated without any living heirs. An informant on a death certificate or the witnesses to a marriage can be vital in resolving a line of the family and a will can often be invaluable in confirming the extent of kin on a stem.

The cost of a birth, marriage or death certificate is currently £9.25.  For the amateur this can make for quite an expensive hobby and for the professional quite a substantial expense.  At Martlets, we are experienced in judging which certificates are essential for research and which certificates family members can provide for themselves. This enables us to complete a case without accruing unnecessary costs.  The family tree we produce is complemented by a comprehensive genealogical report, enabling a solicitor or administrator to obtain missing beneficiary indemnity insurance and to distribute the estate with confidence. Our reports always refer to information contained in the wills and certificates that we have obtained during the course of our research.  We feel that without these documents, a family tree and report would lack supporting evidence and would not be suitable for presentation to an insurance provider.

Genealogy is a great hobby, but resolving intestate estates is a serious business.  Martlets employ only experienced probate genealogists, with the expertise to thoroughly research and evidence the family tree of the deceased intestate.

When we began our careers in the early 1990s there was plenty of exercise involved. Being a professional probate genealogist back then generally meant working in central London where the records were. These were the days before digitized records, Who Do You Think You Are and Heir Hunters, when hardly anybody had heard of probate research and genealogy was generally pronounced ‘gene-o-logy’. Our formative years involved daily sprints between St Catherine’s House, Somerset House and the Public Record Office (then situated on Chancery Lane), in order to get to that vital record before a competitor.

St Catherine’s House was our main place of work. Situated on the corner of Kingsway and the Aldwych, not far from Covent Garden, it held large tomes of quarterly indexed births, marriages and deaths. Most of our time was spent ‘pulling books’ and making lists in our filofaxes (colonised by genealogists long before the yuppies made them famous).  If you want to see exactly how it used to look, Mike Leigh’s 1996 film ‘Secrets and Lies’ contains a scene where Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character searches for and orders a copy of her birth certificate. They were appealing for extras on the day of filming and had we known what a great film they were making, we might have stayed behind!

Alas, the days of ‘pulling books’ are no more. The Family Records Centre closed several years ago and genealogists must research births, marriages and deaths on microfiche or online. We have substituted the strain on our forearms and the soles of our feet for eye strain!  Another significant change is the development of the search engine. A birth, marriage or death record can now be found in seconds and a family’s entry on a census, which might once have taken days to find, may now be tracked down in a matter of minutes.

Of course, to the professional, computerisation is a mixed blessing.  Whilst we too can now base ourselves outside of central London, there is an increasing perception that cases can be solved with the touch of a button, or that people can be found by simply typing a name into Google. Hey presto! A beneficiary.  Sometimes though a search engine is no substitute for a search in the original indexes. Indeed, a professional genealogist’s skills are honed by manually searching the indexes. The ability to see the significance of any marriages occurring in a different area of the country, or the slight misspelling of a name, or a double-barreled name appearing at the foot of the page: these details can be spotted when the page is in front of you but cannot easily be factored into the parameters employed by a search engine.

Despite the advantages of digitisation, there are still many challenges ahead and, in certain cases, new technology can limit the amount of information available to us. An example of this is the introduction of the edited electoral roll in 2003. The edited roll is generally a good thing.  Your address is not so readily available online to members of the public, to marketing companies or to probate genealogists! The desire for privacy in these days of cold-call telemarketing and instant access everything is understandable.  However, a consequence of this is that the more privacy a person has in terms of their public profile, the more difficult they are to find!  The good news is that, as career probate genealogists, we are able to use our experience to overcome such challenges.  We make use of a number of current and historical databases (and yes, the internet) to track people down and where necessary, we make use of local agents to undertake enquiries.

Mining the wealth of information online certainly requires an amount of skill and tenacity and at Martlets we take full advantage of the latest databases. However, sometimes the old-fashioned methods still pay dividends and the genealogical skills we have acquired down the years continue to serve us in good stead today. Having said that, we’re not too sad to see the back of shelves of telephone directories.  And don’t get us started on room 319…