How technology traces people back through time

Meet Neil Fraser, a partner of Fraser & Fraser Genealogists and International Probate Researchers, the stars of the BBC series Heir Hunters.

Fraser & Fraser has dealt with over 7,000 inheritance cases and has enabled its clients to inherit over £100 million in the last 20 years alone. They have been able to reach such success by always staying one step ahead and using both old and new technologies.

Genealogy is one of the most popular searches online today, fuelled by people trying to find out about their family history. The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool in such quests for ancestry information, so I met with Neil Fraser to try and find out what technology he uses to aid in his “heir hunting”.

Could you just give me a brief description of what it is you do here at Fraser & Fraser?

“Fraser’s was set up as a company itself in 1969 a partnership formed by my father and my uncle, although my great aunt started this work in 1923.

“We specialise in locating missing and unknown beneficiaries. Generally from when people die without leaving valid wills, but not solely that. When they die without wills it’s called intestate so we do intestate work as well as testate, which is when they leave a will.

“We also find people for whatever positive reason, we don’t do debt collection. For example we are working on a case at the moment where the National Heritage were loaned some furniture, fifty to  hundred years ago, and they now want to hand it back to the people that gave it to them in the first place.

“These people have passed away, so we are in the middle of finding their beneficiaries, which is one sort of a sideline of our work, but the majority of our work is to do with primary beneficiaries.”

What sort of technology do you use through your work?

“By 1970 the company had switched from using a typewriter to an electronic typewriter, which had word processing functionality on it and we were one of the first people in our building, and really in London, to start using digital word processing.

“That developed to our first PCs in around 1975 and again we were right at the forefront of adopting personal computers. We were the first people within the EC1 postcode to have a fax machine and we also had mobile phone before everyone else.

“We have always been at the forefront of technology, but traditionally a lot of our research has been done through microfilm. Microfilm is what lot of people describe as very ancient technology which they don’t like but microfilm has the ability to be able to cope with a lack of technology.

“Although we are a big fan of microfilm, a lot of our records are on that, we have subsequently moved away from them and started using computer resources. We started creating our own database of births, deaths and marriage indexes in 1997.

“At one time we had 265 million records with 12 fields for each record so, for a database to cope with that was pretty much pushing what technology would do at that time, especially when we were trying to back it up. Now that we’ve moved past DVD, CDs and tape backups, we can now transfer 16Gb on a memory stick, it’s considerably easier. But we’ve also got the problem of storage capacity as most of our work is data.

“Online databases and the mobility of that data as remote storage and also the linking together of multiple servers to get remote access has overtaken some of our internal developments. That is what’s really changed and to be able to use someone else’s processing power to search data.”

What hardware do you use?

“Generally we get from Dell however I’ve also got an Acer. The last one was Dell, and most have been Dell. We use PCs, using Windows XP.”

Obviously to do your research you must travel a lot, do you take laptops with you?

“In the office we have our standard network with about 40 computers running through four different servers, some controlling SAP some controlling our other networks.

“On the road we have recently switched from normal remote computers onto netbooks and we are using Samsung NC10s and NC20s on the road. They run SAP which is our client management software and the family tree making software.

“The team are able to take a family tree that is being worked on in the office and hall that up on their netbook and that’s just with a Vodaphone 3G dongle.

“Our network drive for our family trees is an office based drive but it has remote properties on it so we can access it remotely over the Internet, which has enabled our guys on the road to have full support for family trees through the database. They also run HP printers so they can print family trees which can now save us hours of dictation.

What kind of software do you use?

“Our biggest software and our biggest cost is our database which is a client case management database, run by SAP whom is pretty much the world leaders in database software.

“Our other software is basic accounting software which we don’t run through SAP and we also run our family tree data. We use a program called Family Tree Maker which cost me $20 per licence to buy. It is a very basic family tree program but it’s exactly what we want. “

Social media sites are becoming more like large databases containing people’s information. Do you think you will ever use them when searching for beneficiaries?

“We have contacted beneficiaries through Facebook before. Facebook can help find people. It can help push you in the right direction when you are looking for someone.

“However the majority of our beneficiaries are the oldest surviving generation, so you are talking of people who are 50-80 yrs old on average. The percentage of 50-80 year olds who are on Facebook is light less than the 20, 30 or 40 year olds, so from that side it doesn’t help a huge amount.

“We also find that when people are contacted through electronic media, email as well as social networking, they are very sceptical because the majority of fraud comes out that way. We do have a big warning on our web page that says we don’t make initial contact by email.

That is because of Nigerian frauds; due to the TV series we’ve had a lot of people interfering with our work fraudulently. We’ve seen letters with “BBC heir hunters” and all sorts of variations on our name passed around, which have tried to add a bit of credibility back onto Nigerian fraud which is worrying; that is why we have this warning saying we don’t make initial contact that way.

What kind of antivirus software do you use to protect your systems against a cyber attack?

Kaspersky, but we are just looking into switching to hardware like Cisco.

Image by Charlotte Murphy