When no heirs are apparent

The local company is one of only a dozen in the country that search for missing heirs.
THE VINDICATOR, YOUNGSTOWN
By DON SHILLING
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
YOUNGSTOWN -- Josh Butler and his staff hunt for people who stand to inherit large sums of money.
The problem is, they often don't know for whom they are looking. They don't have a name, a place of residence or any clues.
All the four-person staff knows is that a lawyer is handling an estate worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and doesn't know who should receive it. There is no will or any surviving parents, siblings or children.
Or is there?
Josh Butler & amp; Co., located in the Commerce Building downtown, will spend weeks or even months trying to find out. If it finds a legal heir, the company gets a share of the estate, either a percentage or a flat fee worth thousands of dollars. If it doesn't, however, the company isn't paid.
The trail pursued by the staff doesn't stop at children, however. States have different laws about who is a legal heir. In Ohio, for example, second cousins can share in an estate; in Pennsylvania, the trail stops at first cousins.
Butler, who started his company in 1983, said it is one of only about a dozen in the United States that searches for missing heirs. Fewer than 10 percent of its cases are local, so its work involves searching for people all across the country, and sometimes abroad.
Much of the work is done on the Internet or through requesting records by mail, but nearby cases allow the staff to go out and search for records by hand.
Legwork
In one current case, Christine Roddy, a company researcher, has made seven trips to Cleveland and Ravenna to find living relatives of a woman who died without a will. Roddy has scoured birth and death records and census data, talked to acquaintances of the woman and looked through cemetery tombstones.
She has found two cousins so far, but she recently learned about a deceased half-brother, so she is continuing the search.
"It's like putting together a puzzle. You become obsessed with it," she said.
Butler traveled to Czechoslovakia to solve one case. A St. Louis woman died with no known relatives, but Butler discovered her father had come to America and changed his name. He found five cousins in a rural countryside in Czechoslovakia, and they shared the inheritance.
Butler said the Internet has made the search for records easier, but some records have been taken out of view because of privacy laws. California driving records, for example, used to be accessible but aren't any longer.
In print
To help the search, the company collects an odd assortment of books in its office. It has hundreds of city directories, including those for urban areas and smaller towns such as Slidell, La.
Hundreds of recently issued phone books are on the shelves, including one from Fargo, N.D. Some phone books are decades old, like the 1965-66 edition from Nassau County, New York; others are much older, such as several hard-cover directories for small Ohio towns from the early 1900s.
Other resources include a wide variety of Who's Who books and professional books, such as the Episcopal Clerical Directory.
Butler said he receives about one new case a week on average. He used to accept a variety of cases, including those involving mineral rights and stockholders, but he now focuses on finding missing heirs for attorneys and banks.
Sometimes the company is called in when there are known descendants, but there is no will and there is reason to think there may be more descendants.
Family secrets
Sometimes, the company finds relatives from an earlier marriage the family didn't talk about. It's up to the company's researchers to talk to family members and figure out what is true and what isn't.
"We're digging up family secrets," said Roddy, who works along with Tomi Beach and Star Blasche.
About 20 percent of the cases the company takes are unsolved.
Although that means no payment, two unsolved cases have meant publicity for Butler on "Unsolved Mysteries."
The television show featured a case of his in which a woman from England was looking for her father, who was a U.S. soldier in World War II. The man was found after the show.
Another episode featured his search for Curly Green, an eccentric man who died in Nebraska with $150,000. Butler said he thinks the stories Green told of his life were exaggerations or lies and that he was raised in an orphanage in Wisconsin along with seven siblings. A lack of records from the orphanage prevented the case from being solved, and no relatives were turned up by the television show.
In such cases, the inheritance goes to the state.
Butler learned about the business after a researcher in Texas determined he was a missing heir to mineral rights in that state. Butler is a great-grandson of Joseph Butler, steel magnate and founder of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, who bought the Texas land in the early 1900s.
A review of Joseph Butler's will determined that the $10,000 payment for the mineral rights had to go to the art museum, but the case opened new doors for Josh Butler. The Texas researcher began using Butler, a former policeman, to help him solve his cases and eventually became Butler's mentor before Butler set up his own company.
shilling@vindy.com