On the trail of a family fortune

A CORK family’s efforts to prove their right to a multi-million dollar inheritance will be featured in a TV series next week.

Film-makers will detail businessman Dermot O’Regan’s efforts, which included the exhumation of a body from a plot in a Cork cemetery last May.

Mr O’Regan, 63, who owns O’Regan Precast in Ovens, Co Cork, has spent a small fortune since 1987 trying to prove his link to Mary Ellen O’Regan Sheehan, the last in a line of a wealthy American family who died in her home in Savannah, Georgia, more than 20 years ago.

Mr O’Regan believes she was his grandfather’s sister.

She was the daughter of an Ellen O’Regan who emigrated to the States in 1898 and who later married William Sheehan, a retired policemen who had amassed a fortune in property in Georgia. They had four daughters - none produced an heir.

Mr O’Regan agreed to the exhumation of his grandfather, Jeremiah O’Regan, who died in 1966, from a plot in St Finbarr’s Cemetery last May, in a bid to prove a DNA link with Ms O’Regan.

A tiny sliver of bone was taken from the body by US-based forensic anthropologist Dr Karen Burns, a leading DNA expert in the State of Georgia.

Tests are still being conducted to compare these results with that of the body of Ms O’Regan, which was exhumed from a cemetery in Savannah on January 16.

If a match is made, it will prove beyond all doubt that Mr O’Regan is the closest living relative and heir to the family fortune. Mr O’Regan employed genealogist Jim Herlihy to search for relevant documentation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mr Herlihy made a number of trips to the US, where he uncovered what he believes to be indisputable proof.

However, even if a link is found, it is likely that Mr O’Regan’s solicitor will have to take an action against a firm of lawyers in Atlanta who distributed the estate to other people in 1989 whom they believed were more entitled to the family’s immense wealth.

The Family Silver begins on RTÉ 1 on Thursday at 10.15pm.