Ancestry Magazine

Forget those winning European lottery announcements that keep filling up your inbox and the dreams of a jumbo prize check coming to your door. You could be next in line to score a real prize—and you might not even know it.

So who would know? An heir tracer—a genealogist assigned to a find out just who is entitled to an unclaimed estate.

“When an estate goes into probate with no designated administrator it will eventually go to the state,” says ProGenealogists Inc.’s Kory Meyerink. Oftentimes, a genealogist is hired, usually by an independent heir-tracing firm, to determine who the estate’s beneficiary would be.

Heir research, closely related to forensic genealogy, usually involves two parts: locating unknown or missing heirs and analyzing information for court, says Kathleen Hinckley, a certified genealogist and private investigator.

Researching heirs is a competitive field, one that Hinckley says isn’t easy to just step into. And it’s hard work. A researcher needs to develop worldwide contacts and a library of resources. Even the silver lining of telling someone he or she is about to inherit a bundle has a cloud: indirectly telling someone a relative has died.

So what do you do when someone tells you that you may be the heir to a fortune? Hinckley recommends starting by verifying that the claim is legitimate. Ask for references. Then do a little of your own research: check with professional organizations like the Association of Professional

Genealogists or the Board for Certification of Professional Genealogists to see if you can find information about the people who found you. And remember, a simple Google search—for more information about the estate, the researcher, or the organization contacting you about the claim—can always be enlightening.