Leave it to the Experts

Objective: After a private investigator fails to find an heir, IGS is called to help

Year: 2007

Overview: IGS is contacted by an administrator to help locate a woman called Melissa-Anne Mason. Her father had died and left her $75,000 in his will. A private investigator had previously been hired to find the heir but had been unable to trace her whereabouts. Could we succeed where the investigator had failed? The answer was ‘YES!’

Challenges: Information we had to work on was limited. Melissa-Anne Mason would be hard to track down because:

• We only had her name and date of birth
• Melissa was the child from her father’s previous marriage and they had not seen each other since Melissa-Anne was two years old
• Melissa’s name had now changed

Starting at the very beginning it was clear to see why the private investigator had failed in his search for Melissa-Anne. Firstly, he had misspelled her name and that in itself was catastrophic. It also became apparent that he had only conducted a limited number of searches which consisted of looking solely in databases.

We were amazed to read the private investigator’s notes:
‘It is almost impossible to locate an individual with only the name and date of birth.’
FALSE! It didn’t take long for our experienced researcher to crack the case.

Results: Melissa-Anne, our missing heir, is found!
$75,000 inheritance money is successfully awarded. When we talked to Melissa Anne we discovered her name had changed after her parents divorced when she was only two. In another twist, her mother had told her that her father had been killed in a car accident. Melissa-Anne was happy to learn the truth and that he had lived a longer and happier life than she had first feared.

One other important point to note here is that: Not Everyone is Qualified to do Genealogical Research