Bernard Lester died in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 88. A retired film company executive, Bernard had never married and left behind him and a considerable estate, but neither any close relatives nor a will, and it soon became apparent that tracking down his heirs would be no easy task.
Friends confirmed that Bernard’s older brother, also a bachelor, had died 10 years earlier and that they believed the family had emigrated from England in the 1930s but was thought also to have had links with both Russia and Poland.
Realising this was going to be a complicated case, potentially involving several countries and a lengthy family tree, the US attorneys turned to Fraser and Fraser for help.
We quickly traced Bernard’s mother’s family and found they had come to the UK from what was then Russia and is now Lithuania. This is not an uncommon scenario with US-originating cases, where a 19th-century relative may have been registered as being born in a place that was at the time Russia, but which might now be in a number of countries such as Ukraine or Belarus, each with its own legal and administrative system and procedures.
As often happened, the family had also anglicised its name once it arrived in England, adding a further level of complexity, but we were still able to locate down Bernard’s mother’s relatives in England, Scotland and the US.
Our researchers found the situation was rather different in the case of Bernard’s father, Maurice. Census records in the UK proved he had been born Moszek Lenczner in Radom, Poland, in 1888, and we were also able to confirm he had been one of six siblings born to a Jewish family in the 1880s and 1890s.
All of Bernard’s brothers and sisters had gone on to marry, so we were hopeful of finding additional heirs. Working with our offices in Poland and our partners in Israel, we conducted painstaking research, with researchers sifting through the archives in both countries and also visiting local parishes in Poland in an attempt to find the crucial clue.
Everything drew a blank, however, leading us to the inescapable conclusion that every member of Bernard’s paternal family had been killed during the Holocaust. It was a grim realisation, but on that sadly was not surprising. More than 95 percent of Poland’s Jewish population did not survive the Second World War.
Fraser and Fraser ultimately provided the Californian court with a detailed affidavit of records identified and research undertaken in Poland and in Jewish archives in Israel to detail the extent of the family and the fate of its members, thus ensuring the funds were distributed to the living maternal heirs and not held back by the court. In addition, we supplied all the relevant certificates and supporting documentation as proof of the claims of Bernard’s maternal relatives.
Working with its highly experienced partners across the world, Fraser and Fraser was able to bring this challenging case to a satisfactory conclusion within three years of it first being filed. In total, 11 people ultimately shared an estate that was valued at just over $6.3m.
Names and places have been changed to preserve client confidentiality.
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