Edmund Dennis died in at the end of 2015 at Broomfield hospital in Essex, and his unclaimed estate was listed on the Bona Vacantia list, the name given to ownerless property which by law passes to the Crown if the rightful heirs can’t be found.
It took a lot of hard work, but the Finders team eventually found 24 potential heirs, many of whom had already signed up with a competitor firm.

Edmund Arthur Dennis
Edmund Dennis died in at the end of 2015 at Broomfield hospital in Essex, and his unclaimed estate was listed on the Bona Vacantia list, the name given to ownerless property which by law passes to the Crown if the rightful heirs can’t be found.
Edmund was born in Essex and had lived there all his life. Neighbours spoke of him as keeping himself to himself, and never having any family visitors, but they had shared one passion – gardening.
When the Finders International team started its research, we discovered that there had been someone called Maud living at the address up until 1989. This woman could potentially have been Edmund’s wife or partner, so we investigated further. Our research showed that she’d died in 1989, but was actually Edmund’s mother. Edmund had no siblings, so we split our investigation between his maternal and paternal families.
Assistant case manager Camilla Price investigated the material side and discovered Maud had two older brothers, Edward and William. She found ten beneficiaries and signed up eight of them. But it wasn’t quite as straightforward… When Camilla received Maud’s birth certificate, it showed that she was illegitimate. The heirs signed up were actually half-blood siblings, disinheriting them from the estate.
Meanwhile, Ryan Gregory, our senior case manager, was looking into the father’s side of the family. He found a record for Edmund’s grandparents, Ebenezer and Beatrice Dennis who married in 1894. Ebenezer had been both a baker or brewer’s labourer, the reason for the change might be because large industrial bakeries came into being in the late Victorian period, and local bakeries couldn’t compete.
It took a lot of hard work, but the Finders team eventually found 24 potential heirs, many of whom had already signed up with a competitor firm. However, in the end, Finders signed up eight heirs, one of whom was Wayne Johnson, a first cousin once removed.

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