The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-10-21
B|G ESTATE HAS
 GONE ID CROWN !. Cordoya Man Unable to
 Establish Claim STORY OF FORTUNE : Birmingham Firm Employed to De- termine Whether Alabama Man
 Was Not Heir to Property
 in England

Many persons can recall the stir in this country over the Jennings estate in England; a will O the wisp it all turned : ont to be. Hundreds of Americans, most ly women, clipped in small amounts to zl create a fund out of which to pay attor . neys for Investigating the matter. There : vas a regular Jennings claimant asso- citation. One hears nothing of the Jen- nings estate these days. The estate, . amounting to millions, long since es- : cheated to the crown
 'Apropos of the Jennings estate, I was : interested this week in a narrative about . m Alabama claimant to an estate in = Eneland-General Robert Dudley Blakes - vie The claimant was Randolph Blake,
 94 years old now residing at Cordova in
 Walker county.' said a citizen. This
 gentleman was born in Edgefield district
 in South Carolina on July 26, 1916, and .. is 8 son of Archibald Blake.
 !; MT. Blake of Cordova employed Allen s& Bell to investigate and ascertain if he
 wSsn't the heir to the Blake possessions,
 valued originally at about S70O,0O0, now
 at S2,500,0o0. B. M. Allen of Allen & Bell E- was telling me the whole story and it was
 something of a romance, but unfortunate
 ly for the client he was not the heir. The
 entire estate having been bequeathd by
 General Blake to his wife, and she being
 dead without heirs or kin, the property
 was converted into cash and was trans L. felred to the crown.
 = Randolph Blakes affiant sets forth
 ihat his father came to America in 1S06
 rom Dublin, Ireland and settled in S(uth Carolina. that the affiaOt'g a 1pr -z. lnoved to Autauga county, Alabama, in @- 1S36 and died in said county in 1864 The
 affiants father had three brothers, Sam utl Blake, Abran Blake and General Rob
 ert Dudley Blake. All three of the broth v CTS came to America together in 1866 eX- q cept General Blake Abram and Samuel went from South Carolina to Texas and
 the affiant did not hear from them il.
 40 years and does not know whether or &. not they left any descendants. One strk-
 ing feature of Allen & Bells case when ~'.1he Jennings claim is recalled. was that
 + vas conducted in a aghtforward, si3 businesske manner. The fees were req sonable and their client soon learned that ss thore was nothing coming to him.
 Allen & Bells correspondents in London rs were Ashurst, Morris Crisp & Co. They ?" made an investigation promptly and their l" fee and the courthouse fees, so to speak, were very moderate the total being some
 thing like $50. The London lawyers wrote = several letters to their Birmingham cor ' respondents and the last concluded as fol-
 lows: Mrs. Blake's estate has, we are
 informed been transferred to the crown,
 no next of kin having been found. We regret that the result should be so un-
 satisfactory to your client but the mat
 te, is too clear to admit of any doubt ~ Thus the incident closed insofar as TAir. Blake of Cordova is concerned. +fcemember that while the Jennings as essoeation was in existence hundreds of
 people who belonged to the organization were putting up money from time to sme.
 Jennings attorneys kept the business alive for at least 10 years, think. What a s.arted MT Blake to have an investi-
 gation made was an article he read in
 taper under London date line, as fol-
 lows:
 'fThe mystery of the disappearance of ;. Daniel Sheridan the American claimant
 cf the "Blake Millions has been solved
 at last 1t is some months since the Star
 rrinted a story about the pathetic strug-
 gles of this Irish-American farmer to ob- tain the fortune left by Mrs. Helen Blake
 who died ntestate in London in 1876. Her s property. then $700,G0O has been in the s nds of the crown ever since, and,
 counting the accumulated interest, is now
 estimated to be nearly $2,500,GO0. IA letter just received by that news paper from Daniel Sheridan's son. Joseph, no lives Tn quincy, H., reveals the fact s, that an old, homeless nameless man. sHho died in Lambeth infirmary on De- -q cember 18th, 1896, was the lost claimant fcr the millions.
 :. Mrs. Blake was Helen Sheridan, ? beautiful Irish girl, when she was mar Tied to Capt. Robert Dudley Blake, a s oung officer of dragoons stationed in < Dublin He later became, general. s Daniel Sheridan asserted he was Mrs. :. Blake's cousin, the son of her fathers .cleer brother, and he came to London t3 prosecute his claim from Kankakee coun- s ty, H., in 1885, being then a man of 70. He, could not, however, obtain the neces-
 safy evidence to satisfy the treasury that g he was the next of kin. His money dwIn- -,dled away, he was heavily in debt for
 board and lodging, and all the while his family were writing to him from America ? uron the idea that he had obtained the fortune and representing him for desert
 ing them. -
 For a time he was an inmate of a sworkhouse. On his discharge from there she wrote to his son that he was going to
 Ireland to find some one who knew him
 ai a boy. That was the last his family
 ever heard from him. He seems to have -randered about helpless, hopeless, a
 broken man, until on December 9th, 1S96, he was once more admitted to the Lam- -iieith infirmary. He gave no address and
 taiee days later he died