Do you need to find the beneficiaries to an estate?

You may be someone with no legal background who has nevertheless become responsible for the administration of an estate, or perhaps you are a legal professional specialising in wills and probate.

Whatever your background or expertise you will be presented with the same problem ... do you know who should inherit from the estate and do you know how to find them?  You may confidently leave that thorny task to us.

If the deceased left a will …

Perhaps you have written to one of the named beneficiaries and they’ve not responded.  It would not be surprising if they had moved on as several years often elapse between the drafting of a will and the death of the testator.  Do you even have an old address for the missing heir?

We can provide current contact details for all the named beneficiaries.  Perhaps only one heir is missing.  We are confident we can locate them.  If we don’t then rest assured we will not charge you … anything!

If the deceased did not leave a will …

We will identify and locate all those individuals who are entitled to a share in the estate, according to the law of intestacy.

You are likely to have some knowledge of the family but your information may be incomplete.  Perhaps you have produced or acquired a handwritten family tree that has one or two question marks on it.  Allow us to use our probate research skills to assess the information you provide and build a professional family tree in which you may have confidence.

You may rely on us to provide a complete solution, including arranging missing beneficiary insurance if that is required.  When our heir search is complete you will be presented with a family tree (or trees), together with contact details for each heir and an editable spreadsheet defining every beneficiary’s fractional entitlement.  This will also indicate the precise pounds and pence figure that each heir should receive from the estate.  If you are more comfortable with paper reports then that will not be a problem for us.

Our charges

The nature of our work is open-ended but our charges are not.

Some firms may quote an hourly rate for their work, but what use is that if the number of hours they may take to complete your task is un-bounded?

We are quite prepared to cap our fees following an initial assessment of the task in hand.  This occasionally means we take a hit when a task turns out to take longer than we predicted, but we believe it is important that from the outset you (or your client) will have a figure that can be relied upon at an early stage in the calculation of a limit on the liabilities of the estate.

Every task is different, so it is not possible to indicate here how much you will be charged for our services. Suffice to say that from what we know of other companies’ charges, we believe we are priced competitively.

One further commitment on price that we can make is our No-Find, No-Fee guarantee.  If you ask us to locate a single missing individual and we fail to do so then you will not be charged.

Why choose Kindred UK Probate Research Ltd?

We were established in 1998 in Newcastle upon Tyne, incorporated in 2014, and have a wealth of experience and expertise that cannot be matched by new ventures that have sprung up in the wake of the success of the "Heir Hunters" TV programme.

We are a small company staffed by well-motivated and capable people.  The person that works on your task is likely to be a more accomplished probate genealogist than whichever member of staff would be assigned your job in one of the larger companies.  And when you ring, your call will not be answered by a frosty receptionist demanding a reference number.  You will be straight through to the person who is working on your behalf.

Kindred UK has a growing client base of solicitors who return to us for their probate genealogy needs on a regular basis, either to locate a particular missing heir, next of kin, or to provide a complete solution to an intestacy.

Kindred UK Probate Research Ltd holds professional indemnity insurance.