Man's relatives set for inheritance payout - 92 years after his death

Most advisers are lucky if they can get clients to even consider making a will, but Wellington Burt was one man who didn’t need any encouraging.

The Michigan lumber tycoon, pictured, died in 1919, but thanks to his bizarrely complicated will, his descendents will not get their inheritance until the end of this month; that's a 92 years after his death.

Burt left a multi-million fortune when he died, but specified, either out of spite, eccentricity or a combination of the two, that the cash could not be released until 21 years after the death of his last surviving grandchild.

The nest egg is now worth a whopping £67.5m. Marion Lansill, the last of his grandchildren, died in November 1989, triggering a countdown that ended last November, the Saginaw News reports.

Since then a judge in Burt's hometown of Saginaw has spent months figuring who the rightful heirs should be, swamped with applications from eager descendants.

At the end of May, the judge has now decided, 12 people related to Burt will get the spoils of the nest egg. Only one of them was alive at the same time as Burt, being aged two when he died.

Family lawyers agreed a formula to work out the inheritances, whereby those closest in generation with the fewest siblings get a bigger piece of the pie.

Burt had six children, seven grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren who have already missed out on the fortune, having died already or being ineligible for a share.

... And what about the world's weirdest pension?

It's got to be the money received by Gertrude Janeway, who died in 2003.

She was still getting a widow's pension from her husband's service in the American Civil War, which ended in 1865.

Her husband John married her in 1927, when he was 81 and she was 18, making her entitled to $70 a month from the Veteran's Association for the next 76 years in a pension which straddled three centuries.