At the end of the Second World War there were thousands of friendly societies, offered attractive savings and protection policies to their members. Since then the vast majority of societies have ceased to exist, leaving only 40-odd societies still active in the provision of financial services.

If you, a member of your family, or a client, were a member of a friendly society that you want to trace, there are a number of actions you can take to discover whether the policy has any value:

• First, check through our list of members, and if appropriate follow the link to the Society’s own website for more information on how to claim.
• If your Society is not listed there, have a look at our register of closed societies. If we have details of the new name of the Society, or the organisation it has transferred to, this will be listed here Register of closed societies.
• If that doesn't provide an answer, your next port of call is the Mutual Societies Registration, located in the offices of the Financial Services Authority, the City regulator. They should have record of all societies that have been registered, though note that it was not a requirement to be registered until the 1960s:

25 The North Colonnade, Canary Wharf, London E14 5HS (telephone 020 7066 4916; email Mutual.societies@fsa.gov.uk).

• If you know the name of the Society, try ‘googling’ them on the internet. If you are unsure of the name of the friendly society you are looking for, have a good look round the house to see if you can find the policy document. Alternatively, if you used an adviser to help purchase the policy they might be able to help. And if you were paying premiums by direct debit, your bank might have details.

• There are also a number of organisations who hold records of policies for a range of financial services organisations. These sometime charge a fee to search, and not all friendly societies or insurance companies provide data:

Assets Reunited

Unclaimed Assets Register

Unclaimed Assets

• One further possibility is the Public Record Office at Kew, which has sometimes turned up records of societies which could not be traced elsewhere.
• The Friendly Societies Research Group, whose work we feature on our website, may have some ideas, if you are researching regalia or other historical facts.

Friendly societies are committed to helping their members find lost policies. Because of the nature of many friendly societies, who work in local communities, or trades, they generally have quite low proportions of lost policyholders, and the value of those policies may well be quite small.

You can read an article produced for our magazine, Friendly Face, in 2008 about “Dormant Accounts and Friendly Societies”.

If you have any further information that would be useful, or have any comments on this article, please contact martin@afs.org.uk