Sir Eustase Gurney

Sir Eustase Gurney

Sir Eustase Gurney was a resident of England, in the Thunder Bay District of Ontario.

The estate was probated in the Thunder Bay District surrogate court in 1929 and inventoried at $2,417,676.90. He died testate, leaving a will, and was survived by seven children.

Relevance to Thunder Bay

He's Sir Eustace Gurney (1876–1927) of the Gurney family of Norwich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurney_family_(Norwich)) — the Quaker banking dynasty behind Gurney's Bank (later absorbed into Barclays). He was a Norfolk JP and naturalist living at Walsingham Abbey/Sprowston Hall, and never lived in Thunder Bay.

His estate is in the Thunder Bay Surrogate Court file through ancillary probate (resealing): when someone dies owning assets in a jurisdiction where they didn't reside, the local court must reseal the foreign grant of probate before those assets can be transferred. His inventory is dominated by ~$1.48 M in stocks and ~$602 K in real estate — he held substantial Canadian property and securities, and the Thunder Bay District (a magnet for British investment in land, grain elevators, silver mining and railways) was where some of it sat. Two takeaways:

- The recorded $2.42 M is his entire worldwide estate as resealed, not his Thunder Bay holdings — so it isn't comparable to local decedents. That's the real reason James Murphy (an actual Fort William resident) is the right "richest man from Thunder Bay." - Note the year: he died in 1927 but the record says 1929 — that's the resealing/probate year, not death.

He's not alone: roughly 262 of the 2,338 records are non-residents (Winnipeg, England, Duluth, Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Florence…) whose estates merely touched the district's court.