Served & Found
Handling a Sun City estate and cannot find all the heirs?
Sun City was built as a retirement community, and a lot of the people who retired here grew up somewhere else. That shapes what happens when they die. The house is in Sun City, the bank accounts may be in Arizona, but the family may be scattered across half a dozen states, and some branches of it have not spoken in decades.
If you have been appointed personal representative of a Sun City estate, often a son, daughter or other relative doing this for the first time, you may already have hit the problem: a name in the will, or a half sibling everybody remembers but nobody can reach, and no current address for them.
This article explains why that matters and how private investigators find people who have drifted out of touch. It is general information, and your probate lawyer should guide the legal steps.
Why you cannot just skip them
Under A.R.S. 14-3705, a personal representative must give information about their appointment to the heirs and devisees within 30 days of being appointed. It has to be delivered or sent by first class mail to each heir and devisee whose address is "reasonably available."
That phrase does a lot of work. It does not mean you must find everyone on earth. It does mean you should make a real effort, and if someone later says they were never told, the question will be what you did to find them. A file that shows a structured search is a much better answer than "we didn't have an address."
Probate cases in Maricopa County are handled by the Superior Court's probate department in downtown Phoenix. If a missing heir cannot be found at all, the court has ways to deal with that, but it will expect to see the effort first.
Who the heirs are is its own question
Before anyone can be found, you need to know who you are looking for. If there is a will, it names devisees, though sometimes only by relationship ("my nieces and nephews"). If there is no will, Arizona's intestacy rules decide who inherits, and the answer can reach further into the family tree than people expect.
A private investigator does not decide who is an heir. Your lawyer does. But investigators often help build the family tree the lawyer needs: confirming marriages, divorces, births and deaths, and working out whether the "cousin in Ohio" is a first cousin or a second cousin once removed.
How a search usually goes
Start with the decedent's papers
The house in Sun City is often the best source there is. Address books, Christmas card lists, old letters, funeral programmes, photos with names written on the back, a Bible with a family record. Phone bills showing long distance numbers. Facebook friends. Before anything is thrown out or the house is sold, someone should go through it with this in mind.
Then the records
A licensed private investigator has access to commercial databases restricted to licensed professionals, which pull together address histories, phone numbers and relatives' names. Those are the starting point. Public records do the rest: obituaries that list survivors, marriage and divorce filings, probate files for other relatives, property records. Court records in Arizona can be searched on the courts' Public Access Case Lookup, and most states have something similar.
Obituaries are particularly useful in this kind of work. An obituary for the decedent's late brother, published in 2009 in his hometown paper, may list every one of his children and where they lived.
Then contact
Finding a probable address is not the same as finding the person. A private investigator confirms identity before reporting, often by phone or a letter, and is careful about what they say. "I'm trying to reach the relatives of someone who passed away in Arizona" is enough to start. The details of the estate belong to the personal representative and the lawyer to share.
Some complications that come up
- An heir who has died. Then their own heirs may be next in line, and the search continues down that branch.
- An heir who changed their name through marriage, adoption or choice.
- An heir who is in prison, in a care home or overseas. Each needs a different approach to delivering notice.
- An heir who does not want to be found, or wants nothing to do with the family. They may still be entitled to notice. What they do with it is up to them.
Beware of heir hunters who come to you
Occasionally, after a death becomes public, someone contacts a relative offering to tell them about an inheritance in exchange for a percentage. That is a different business from the search you hire for. If you are an heir and get such an offer, talk to the personal representative or a lawyer before signing anything.
Hiring a private investigator for an heir search
Arizona private investigators are licensed by the Department of Public Safety. Every private investigator listed on Served & Found in Arizona is a member of the Arizona Association of Licensed Private Investigators. Ask how they document a search, because your lawyer may need to show it to the court. You can find people who work the area on the Sun City private investigators page, and our guide to what a private investigator does explains the general limits. If the estate needs papers served on a reluctant relative later, serving a Sun City snowbird covers some of the same out of state issues. The Sun City town page has our other guides.
Before the house is cleared, take every address book and card list out of it and put them in one box. That box is often where the search ends.
See the board: everyone in Sun City · private investigators only.