That Time in 2019 When Boredom Met Curiosity and a Newly Discovered Family Insurance Policy from 1933 Led to an $8.14 Payout

The headline on March 13, 1933, was a bold-face national one: Banks across the country were set to re-open following a week-long forced holiday brought on by Depression-fueled panic. But there was other news around the country this Monday.

In D.C., the Volstead Act was amended to allow for the sale of low-alcohol beer. In New York City, the latest Time magazine was published, featuring Adolf Hitler on the cover. In Queens, future Elvis songwriter Michael Stoller (of Lieber & Stoller) was born, his “Hound Dog” just 20 years away. In Des Moines, 2000 Iowa farmers stormed the state capital to demand tax relief.

And in Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhood of Port Richmond, a financially struggling married couple bought a $57 life-insurance policy that would go dormant for nearly a century until a curious second-generation descendant with too much time on his hands decided to wake it up.

Which is how in 2020 my six siblings and I each became exactly $8.14 richer.

My curiosity began in the fall of 2008, when a few days after our father’s death my brothers and sisters and I descended on his small one-bedroom in Northeast Philadelphia to sort through his things. At the end of the day the results sat in four small cartons on a dining-room table, sharing space with an aging metal filebox, awaiting review. What to keep, what to donate, what to toss. And what to claim. My eyes were on the filebox.

For as long as I could remember, from the growing-up days in our crowded Philadelphia rowhome to his alone years in smaller places nearby after our mother’s 1987 death, my father had the same ritual: During the last week of each month, usually after dinner, he’d seat himself at the kitchen table with paper and pen, calculator, and that metal filebox to tend to the household bills.

A vintage-green Excelsior Stamford upright, the filebox was the kind with a front latch that when released allowed its hinged lid to pop up and then to hang down the back. Each time I saw the ritual play out — whether as a kid passing through the kitchen in the 1970s or later as a west-coast-living adult passing through town — I saw the same sheet of paper, tri-folded and tucked into a makeshift plastic sleeve, sitting in the cavity of the upturned lid. Never unfolded or explained. Just always there. Like it was this sad and strange day.

The decades-in-the-waiting reveal in our absent father’s living-room was anti-climactic. It wasn’t a deed to a secret house nor a map to a family fortune but rather just an old-looking “official document” sheet of paper that for all we knew was dummied up for fun long ago at a street fair. It held no meaning. But its vintage look — Old World typography on paper yellowed with age — did have appeal. So with my executor-sister’s permission, I bequeathed it to myself. I tucked it back inside its plastic sleeve and took it home with me to L.A. the following day, where, despite best intentions to frame it, it remained filed away for yet another decade and through my many moves.

In February of 2019, on a cold morning lousy with rain, now living in Nashville, I sat down at my own kitchen table to prep for a tax appointment. In search of receipts, I unlatched my metal filebox (a vintage-green Excelsior, bought in homage), and as the lid popped open the plastic sleeve dropped out. If only to distract myself from the tax chore in front of me, I told myself that today would be the day I’d frame the thing at last.

I unfolded the paper to size it and for the first time noted an official stamp on its otherwise blank reverse, dated March 1967 (the month our grandfather died), transferring ownership of it to our father. I wondered: What exactly was it that was transferred? I flipped the document over to see it was an insurance policy sold by Sun Life Insurance Company in 1933 to my father’s parents, for their then-16-year-old daughter.

Which begged more questions.

Why would poor parents, at the height of the Depression, buy life insurance for what I knew was a healthy teenager? Why just her and not her two brothers, including my then-six-year-old father? Why was the policy seemingly still in effect 34 years after it was signed (when my father took ownership), when by then his sister was in her 50s and twice married? And most important: Why did my father then hang on to it for another 40 years, especially beyond her 2003 death?

Did this policy just slip everyone’s attention through the decades?

In fits and starts over the next four months, from my home in Nashville, I went on a phone and online search for answers. It led me through a frustrating bureaucratic maze with stops in Philadelphia and New York and Maryland and Los Angeles (twice) and Harrisburg. There were few answers to be found. The complication: Sun Life, founded in Baltimore in 1890 (“Brings Comfort to the Home”), was long out of business. Research suggested it had become part of either SunAmerica Life Insurance Company on the west coast or First SunAmerica on the east. But inquiries at each led to dead ends, as did a call to the Maryland Insurance Commission, which documented the 1991 forfeiture of Sun Life and which pointed me to yet another Los-Angeles-area company that may have acquired it. (It didn’t.)

I then dug further into the online histories of older Philadelphia insurers to see if there were ties to Sun Life and made cold-call inquiries to present-day companies in the city, hoping for a crumb that might lead to a trail. I came away with little but a primer on my hometown’s impressive insurance-business past. (Philadelphia, I discovered, is home to the country’s first insurance company and was in fact it a hotbed of the business in its early days due to its status as the continent’s largest port city. So…there was that.)

Two strokes of investigative luck came in June 2019: first, a distant genealogy-loving cousin who’d been tracking my quest on Facebook sent me a trove of family data, including death certificates, to use as background; and a deeper online dive into Maryland’s insurance past suggested that in 1999 Sun Life had actually ended up part of the American International Group, Inc. I called AIG, but over the course of 95 minutes and eight transfers, with the last actually returning me to where I started an hour-and-a-half earlier, any hope I’d had for progress was dashed. In both English and Spanish.

Then I discovered that AIG had a big corporate presence in Nashville. So, armed with a copy of the policy and related documentation, I showed up to present my inquiry in person — making it no further than the lobby of the tower. I was instructed to fill out a Claims form and leave my paperwork for review — despite my insistence that I wasn’t making a claim. The reply: “A representative will be calling you in twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

When no call came even after 24 to 36 days, I called back to hear the same corporate mantra. And when I vented about it on Facebook, a long-ago L.A. colleague posted a helpful reply: “Jim — three words of advice: Write. The. CEO.” So I did.

In fact, I contacted three of the highest-ranking AIG corporate officers whose emails I could find, presenting a Cliffs Notes summary of my quest to determine the status of the policy, if any, and asking a simple question: Can you help? The answer came three hours later: Yes, we can. A return email supplied a name and number and told me my call was awaited. (Thank you, long-ago L.A. colleague Dan.) On the phone the next day, an AIG agent heard a longer version of my story and then asked that I forward copies of all my paperwork. It took exactly one day to get the good, bad, and better news.

AIG had determined that, yes, the policy is still active (really?) and that, yes, it did once fall under the AIG umbrella (psych!). But (bummer) it no longer did. However, through some digging on its own, AIG did find the current owner (no way!) — TransAmerica Insurance.

“I’m looking at it as we speak,” said the TransAmerica rep the next day. I was now six months into my investigation. “It’s a real and active policy, here on my screen. ‘Mary McKairnes, born August 28 1916.’ Policy taken out 1933.” I rejoiced. “But this policy has already been paid out, in 2012.”

It has?

I asked how that was even possible, given that every name connected to it was long dead in 2012. He explained that the policy simply “matured out” that year — that either its cash value had come to equal its death benefit or the policy holder had reached an age set when the policy was purchased. (I found the latter explanation hard to fathom, since it would mean that in 1933 Sun Life and my grandfather agreed that if the insured, my aunt, were still alive in 2012 — at 96 — then the policy would pay out to my grandfather, at 117.) Either way, he said, a payout was triggered and a $57 check was cut and mailed.

It was?

“But to whom?” I asked. “And where?”

“To the purchaser of the policy, at the address provided when the policy was purchased.” And once again I was confused. I asked, “Wouldn’t the fact that in 2012 the purchaser had been dead for forty-five years and that his address was by then eighty years old have raised an internal flag?”

“It would have gone to the name and the address on record,” he repeated. Period.

Which is how at some point in 2012 someone on the 2500 block of E. Birch Street in Philadelphia received a $57 check made out to my 117-year-old dead grandfather.

(Not wanting to antagonize the representative, I chose not to point out that even accepting the logic of a check being automatically mailed without first verifying the who and where, the correct incorrect address in 2012 would have been my father’s, since that’s where he was living when the policy was legally transferred to him in 1967 — though no longer was in 2012.)

So six months into my search, that was that, I guessed. My father’s father’s insurance policy on his daughter did indeed still have value after all these years. But it was a stranger who benefitted.

“Actually, no,” the TransAmerica voice said. “It says here that it was mailed to the Birch Street address, but it was never cashed. So since the policy had matured out on this end and the money could not come back to us, it went to Pennsylvania’s department of Unclaimed Property, in Harrisburg.”

It did?

The voice continued: “But if you’re telling me the insured died nine years prior to the policy maturing out” — she had, in 2003 — “then the cash value of the policy reverts to her survivors.”

It does?

Enter: the late insured’s late brother’s seven adult survivors, one of whom was speaking on the phone.

A day later — this was now towards the end of August 2019 — I filed an official claim on the 86-year-old $57 insurance policy. “I understand the path you’ve been on,” said the TransAmerica Claims rep. “But to be honest, at this point the only way for you or your siblings to get this money is to file a claim with the Unclaimed Property department of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, as the living survivors of the deceased beneficiary, with all the necessary paperwork.”

I had all that and more, of course. (Thank you genealogy-loving cousin David.) I mailed off my packet to Harrisburg. And I let the claim simmer for a few weeks — until early October — before following up. A friendly voice there told me that the Unclaimed Property office is forever backlogged, so it’d be a while before my claim could be processed. But he said he did receive the packet I’d sent and that a quick review indicated the claim would be easily processed. He suggested I call back in a month.

I waited until early December, when for some reason the friendly tide had turned. “Let me ask you,” said Unclaimed Property. “Did your aunt leave any survivors besides your late father?” Easy answer: No. “Then this money is not yours,” he said, as though personally affronted by the request. “Maybe a case could be made for your father petitioning for it were he still alive, since it had been signed over to him in the Sixties. But there’s nothing that says his survivors are entitled to it. You’re not. There’s just no way for you to make a claim on this policy.”

Just no way. And there it was: After ten months, I was done. And disappointed. I was also a bit indignant on behalf of my hard-working tax-paying co-raiser-of-seven-kids disabled-at-50 deaf father: Eleven years in the ground and he’s still paying the state of Pennsylvania. I moved on.

Five weeks later, in mid-January 2020, without notice or explanation or even accompanying paperwork, a check arrived at my Tennessee home from the Commonweath of Pennsylvania. The amount: $57.

An insurance payout, after eighty-seven years.

My siblings and I agreed to forward it to local Philadelphia non-profit Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre (https://dhcc.org), supplemented by a separate larger check, in our father’s name.

And today the 1933 Sun Life Insurance Company policy hangs framed on my home-office wall.