How to Find Out What Shares and Dividends Your Family Actually Owns

The most common starting point of all: a parent or grandparent mentions old shares, or a dividend warrant or company letter surfaces, but nobody knows the company, the folio number or what anything is worth. Before any claim can start, the holdings have to be found.

Step 1 — Collect every clue

Old certificates, dividend warrants, demat statements, company letters, bank passbooks showing dividend credits, and even the old addresses the family lived at. Each address matters because folios were registered to the address of the time.

Step 2 — Search the public databases

The MCA IEPF portal, each suspected company's unclaimed-dividend list, and the IEPF Authority's search. Search every name variation — initials, maiden names, reversed name order — and every old address.

Step 3 — Query the RTAs directly

The two large registrars, KFin Technologies and MUFG Intime (formerly Link Intime), together handle most listed companies. A PAN-based query to their investor cells can surface folios that public searches miss — including holdings not yet transferred to IEPF.

Step 4 — Reconstruct each holding

For every folio found, establish: current share count after bonuses and splits, current market value, unclaimed dividend total, whether the holding is with the company or IEPF, and what the name and address on record are. This reconstruction decides the claim route for each folio.

Step 5 — Prioritise by value and difficulty

A clean high-value folio goes first. A low-value folio with a name mismatch may not be worth the paperwork cost. A proper trace report lets the family make that call with real numbers instead of guesses.

What a trace typically uncovers

In our experience, families who find one holding usually find two or three — shares were often bought across several companies in the same period. Bonus issues and stock splits mean the share count is frequently far higher than the family remembers.

Send us the shareholder's name, PAN if available, and the old addresses below. We run the trace across IEPF, company and RTA records and send you a free preliminary report of everything we find — before you commit to anything.