OBITUARY: Entrepreneur Terry Howes made a fortune through once-dormant mining stocks – by Tom Hawthorn (Globe and Mail – December 22, 2014)

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Terry Howes was a prospector who made a fortune from mining, though he never stuck an axe in the ground, or swished a pan of gravel in a Klondike river. Instead, he surveyed dusty documents in archives, seeking nuggets of information in which could be found unclaimed treasure.

Mr. Howes had several eureka moments by locating shareholders of once-dormant mining stock that had become valuable. Mr. Howes took a percentage of his findings as a reward.

“I don’t know of anyone else who does what I do,” he told the Toronto Star in 1989. “I got the idea when the price of gold went up eight or nine years ago. I was aware there were a good many gold-mining companies that had lost all their value. … Now suddenly they were valuable again. I thought it might be a good idea to track down shareholders and tell them what they had.”

The laborious and painstaking search along a paper trail might be described as a get-rich-slow scheme. Mr. Howes, who has died at 85, also operated a company called Locator of Missing Heirs Inc. As the name promised, he tracked down those owed money from an estate, negotiating a fee with the heirs for the service.

Once, the lawyer handling a Toronto woman’s estate called on Mr. Howes for help in finding a man who had done small kindnesses for her in the 1960s. She had left $10,000 to Allen Cameron, a handyman who had shovelled her walk in winter, ran errands to the store and joined her for tea and conversation in her Mount Pleasant home once a week. Some sleuthing revealed the man had died in the intervening decades, but his heir, a son, was tracked down and received an unexpected gift.

The oddity of his entrepreneurial endeavours gained Mr. Howes many column inches in newspapers across the country, as editors could not resist tales of oblivious beneficiaries.

Terence David Howes was born on Nov. 27, 1928, in Toronto to Marguerite (née Cook) and Henry Austin Howes, who worked for Bell Telephone (now Bell Canada). One of his first entrepreneurial ventures came as a teenager when he sold fruits and vegetables to holidaymakers on the Toronto Islands. He cajoled a girl he had met at a Catholic Youth League dance into helping him out, the duo spending pleasant summer days on the verdant oasis a short ferry ride from downtown Toronto. In time, Mr. Howes married Marion Mahon, a union lasting 63 years.

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