Robert Edwards (Welsh buccaneer)

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Robert Edwards was a Welsh buccaneer given 77 acres of largely unsettled Manhattan by Queen Anne of England for his service disrupting Spanish sea lanes. Edwards, who died in 1762, gave the property over in 1877, via a 99-year lease to brothers John and George Cruger, with the understanding it would revert back to his heirs after that. Apparently, this never happened. It is alleged that the Crugers were wardens of Trinity Church, an Episcopal Church -- today, one of New York City's biggest land owners. Maybe everything was tangled in a muddle of colonial Manhattan land giveaways. But, according to family lore, the whole tract wound up in Trinity's hands.

Trinity indeed got a large slice of the land that seems to be described in the Edwards family account. But the church got the last of the ground in 1705, all of it directly from Queen Anne, according to a church pamphlet published in 1955, another time Trinity was bedeviled by Edwards claims.

The legend has since spawned persistent and indeed some high profile claims of righful ownership to the fortune, now estimated to be worth around 650 Billion dollars. The most recent of these was a claim from a Cleoma Foore, whose research led to the foundation of the 'Pennsylvania Association of Edwards Heirs', a body funded by donations in a bid to finally prove that they were entitled to the vast fortune through direct ancestry. This fund attracted around $1.5m at its peak, but no firm evidence was forthcoming. Indeed, the end result was an embezzlement case tried at the federal court in Pittsburgh before Chief Judge Donald E. Ziegler in 1983.

More recently, this ancient claim has been the subject of many multimedia productions including books, tv shows and radio reports and a 1998 primetime UK tv show called 'Find a Fortune' and hosted by Carol Vorderman amongst others, attempted to shed new light on the topic.

A document held at the Glamorgan Record Office (see link below), in Cardiff (Caerdydd), Wales (Cymru) titled 'Edwards Millions' outlines the case as it stands today, with claims and counter claims further muddying the issue. Tales of unscrupulous lawyers and fraudulent claims have also hampered attempts by amateur researchers to get to the truth behind the lore. Finally, the introduction of the 'Statute of Limitations' in NY State, which limits all claims to be commenced within 15 years of the expiration of any lease, appears to have all but buried the claim with the death of Robert Edwards himself. The only document that could prove otherwise, would be the original 99 year lease signed over to the brothers Cruger of course.