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What if there's a missing heir? Now we've had cases with missing heirs and if there's
a missing heir it's a huge mess. Missing heirs in our experience strictly come from adult
children that have frankly run off. Nobody's kept track of them, nobody's know who they
are. Typically it's a result of a previous divorce where there were children from the
previous marriage. Or maybe there never was a marriage in the first place, but the deceased
had a child. And the deceased did not keep up the contact with the child, the child didn't
keep up contact with the deceased, but what everybody knows this child exist. The problem
is the child may be dead. The problem is the child may not be able to be found. Maybe the
child's out of the country, who the heck know where the child is. And the problem for everybody
else, the big problem for everybody else is the distributions may not be able to be made.
Property may not be able to be sold without finding that heir. And so you can go on the
internet, and there are plenty of services out there on the internet that will look for
missing heirs. They're going to charge a fee, I don't know what sort of fees you're looking
at. You may want to be able to get by with a fixed fee. More than likely you're going
to pay them a percentage of the estate that the heir might have received or that you'll
receive. Because we need to get this thing down the road so that everybody can start
taking distributions, and mange the property of the deceased without excessive expenses.
So there are ways hopefully to find missing heirs, it may be impossible to find this heir.
The bottom line is this, if the deceased had a will an up to date will or up to date living
trust this wouldn't be an issue. Get a good will get a good trust.