Worth £266,000,000

Ni Family Claims Estate

11THEN Robert Edwards lived in America ▼ ▼ last century, he gave to his son leasehold titles over Manhattan (New York) land now estimated to be worth £266,000,000. A family in Norfolk Island claims the fortune.

Robert Edwards migrated from Wales to New York in 1830, and married a Dutch woman. He had one son, John Henry, who went to sea and became a world wanderer. Robert gave this son certain documents showing him to be owner of 50 acres of leasehold land on Manhattan.

John Henry came to Norfolk Island with his little ship, the “St. Kilda,” and event ually settled there. It was he who carried back to Pitcairn, the section of original Pitcairners who did not like Norfolk and so returned “home.”

John Henry had those documents with him when he died in 1906. His son, Charles Robert, who has lived most of his life on Norfolk, and is now 75, says the deeds were there once, but now have dis appeared. He and his son, Victor Edwards, 48, curator of the island’s famous convict grave-yard, are now press ing their claim to the fortune. The American authorities, about 1912, began to seek the owner of the 50 acres on Manhattan—now fabulously valuable—but the Edwards family of NI did not know of the quest until quite recent times. —Condensed from Sydney “Sunday Sun.”