Helping Heirs
Get What's Theirs

When the forensic genealogists of Legacy Probate International begin work on a case, we never know where it may lead us. Genealogy does not discriminate and so we find heirs from all walks of life. Over the years we’ve located famous heirs and regular Joes (& Joans!), rich and poor, foreign and domestic. Sometimes the heirs we locate are interesting, but other times it’s what we uncover in the past that gets the crew excited. And so it was when we dug into the genealogy of Cynthia M. It turns out her father was married a couple times and while we searched through the records we uncovered a marriage to a woman named Grace. She just happened to be the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. Apparently his son Teddy Jr. met our decedent’s father while hunting in Indochina so he introduced him to his daughter and the rest is history, except for the part about her cousin being President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We can only imagine the pressure on him when he went to dinner for the first time with the Roosevelts!

Ann Stevenson Gillem was born in Illinois in 1905. In researching her estate, we found that Ann was a descendant of one of the most famous political families in Illinois history. Ann’s great uncle was none other than Adlai Stevenson, the 23rd Vice President of the United States, serving during President Grover Cleveland’s second term. Early on, we discovered Ann had moved to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. Our research soon revealed acting ran in the family. She had another famous relative, her first cousin, Edgar McLean Stevenson, Jr., better known as McLean Stevenson, an actor most recognized for his role as Lt. Colonel Henry Blake on the TV series M*A*S*H. We had the pleasure of contacting McLean Stevenson to inform him that he was one of several of Ann’s surviving first cousins and an heir to her estate.

While doing research on the estate of Joyce M., we ran into a sports historian’s dream scenario. The research for this case reached back to the mid 1800’s. The Legacy Probate research team found Joyce’s grandfather, August, born in 1863 in Wuppertal, Germany and then we located a ship’s passenger list showing him sailing to the U.S. in the 1890’s with his wife and two kids. Once they reached the fertile shore of America they had four more kids, including Joyce’s father, Frank. Grandpa August must have had some athletic genes because his middle son, Bernhard Borgmann, surprisingly turned out to be one heck of a basketball player. He played professionally from 1919-1936 with the Kingston Colonials and the Original Celtics. He was considered the best offensive player of his era and his knowledge of the game was so widely respected that he became the head coach of the Syracuse Nationals who eventually became the Philadelphia 76ers. Bernhard capped off his basketball career by getting inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1961!

We at Legacy Probate International get our fair share of good stories and while many of them begin overseas, sometimes it’s the good old fashioned American tales that really stay with you. When we worked on the estate of Stacy B, the trail brought us to Motown aka Detroit, MI. Our research eventually brought us to the realization that her uncle was a member of the famous pioneering music quartet, the Four Tops! You may not remember their songs, so here’s a list and I bet some of these titles will get you humming! Baby I Need Your Lovin’, It’s the Same Old Song, Reach Out I’ll Be There, Sugar Pie Honey Bunch, Walk Away Renee, If I Were a Carpenter, Ain’t No Woman(Like the One I’ve Got), & When She Was My Girl just to name a few.

All that was known initially about Mr. Lott was that he had no close relatives and had spent much of his life suffering from injuries he received in World War II. While we were collecting the necessary documents to prepare a family tree, one family member sent us something quite extraordinary: a cover of Life Magazine dated January 29, 1945, featuring a photograph of George Lott and the caption, “George Lott, Casualty, Odyssey of a Wounded Soldier.” The photo of Mr. Lott shows him sitting in a wheelchair in what appears to be a full-body cast. We were able to locate Mr. Lott’s cousins and they can now proudly claim their relation to this war hero.

Sometimes when you embark upon a genealogical journey things get difficult and you want to “exit stage left”. Other times, you “eats your spinach” and persist through the tough times until the genealogical puzzle finally shows itself. The best cases are when you figure out the historical aspects of the family and, along the way, you find something that simply makes you smile. This is what happened when we worked on the Marie T. estate. The research began in the late-1800’s in Italy when Marie’s uncle, Vincent, travelled through Ellis Island into the United States. He set up shop as a barber in Brooklyn. Back then many immigrant kids carried on the family business, but one of Vincent’s kids had other ideas on how to make it in America. He was none other than Joseph Barbera, the creator of some of the most iconic cartoons of our times including Popeye, the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and Scooby Doo! One can’t help but think of young Joe in the back of his father’s barber shop with a pencil and paper working on the outline for Popeye’s new girlfriend (of course that would be Olive Oyl!).