Unclaimed Property, Surprise Gift

In November St. Vitus Parish received an early and very unexpected Christmas gift.  Here's the story.

Back in August, just as he was preparing to move out of our parishes and into the administration of St. Paul Seminary, Father Nick Vaskov was reading the New Castle News.  He noticed a full-page ad, with a listing of "unclaimed property" held by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  One of the listings was for a "Stvitus" along with a strange address.  He brought this to my attention.  We were both puzzled by it and didn't know what it meant.  So I asked our business manager, Nancy Bonk, to complete the on-line forms to submit our claim for the unclaimed property.  Then we forgot about it.

(Several years ago I found my own name in such a listing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  I submitted the necessary paperwork, and received two checks, for $22 and $40, as the result of a court settlement with AT&T, which I had missed.)

On Friday, November 22, my new best friend, Rob McCord, the treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, sent St. Vitus Parish a check in the amount of $55,788.10.  Yes, you read that amount correctly.  This was the fulfillment of a bequest that Miss Carolyn Black had given to the parish in her will when she died back in 1996.  Somehow the bequest was lost and ended up in the state's Unclaimed Property office.  And now 18 years later the gift reached its intended beneficiary.

So, I am grateful to Miss Black for her generosity to St. Vitus Parish.  I will be publishing this notice in our bulletin next weekend, both to thank her and to suggest to parishioners that they can include their parish as a beneficiary in their will.

Also let me suggest that gentle readers of this blog might go online to determine if our state, or any state, has your "unclaimed property."  For Pennsylvania, go to www.patreasury.gov/unclaimedproperty .  For a national listing, visit www.missingmoney.com .  News reports said that Pennsylvania has over $1.9 billion in such unclaimed property, New York over $14 billion.  You never know what you might find!