Our specialism
When the trail leaves the jurisdiction.
Cross-border estates are where research most often fails and where the consequences of failure are hardest to remedy. It is the work we have built the practice around.
The difficulty
Why overseas research goes wrong
A domestic search that reaches a dead end at an emigration record is not a completed search. But continuing it requires knowing which authority in which country holds the relevant register, what that authority will release and to whom, whether the record survived the twentieth century, and what the name would have become on arrival.
Practitioners rarely have that knowledge for one unfamiliar jurisdiction, let alone for several at once. The risk is not usually that the wrong answer is reached. It is that an incomplete answer is treated as a complete one.
Capability
An established international network
We maintain a specialist proprietary database of overseas records and have developed an extensive international research network. This enables effective overseas research and tracing in both commonly encountered and less familiar jurisdictions.
- Estates with beneficiaries living overseas
- Cross-border and multi-jurisdictional intestacy
- Jurisdictions with limited digitisation, archival loss or language barriers
- Time-sensitive or higher-risk overseas enquiries
- Records requiring an authorised local agent to obtain
- Translation and certification of overseas documents
How overseas research is handled
Overseas work is coordinated from Bristol rather than subcontracted and forgotten. We instruct, quality-check and interpret the material our network returns, and we report it in a single consistent format suitable for probate and for professional reliance, not as a bundle of foreign correspondence for you to make sense of.
Where a jurisdiction cannot produce what is needed, we say so and set out what secondary evidence exists instead. A clear negative is more useful to a practitioner than an open question.
A clear negative finding, properly evidenced, is worth more to a personal representative than an unresolved possibility.
Have a matter that has left the jurisdiction?
We are happy to give an informal view on whether it is likely to be researchable before you commit to anything.
Or call 0333 772 4565