Possible Beneficiary of Jell-O Fortune Goes Home Empty-Handed
Elizabeth McNabb’s biological great-grandfather started the Jell-O company. However, Elizabeth was unaware of this fact until well into her adult years as she was adopted as child after having been born out of wedlock.
She learned that she could potentially take under two trusts. The first, dated 1926 dividing Francis Woodward fortune among her mother’s “descendants” and the second, providing for the property to pass to her mother’s “living children.”
According to Mark Fass, N.Y. High Court Finds Adopted-Out Child Has No Claim to Jell-O Fortune, NY L.J., March 14, 2008:
In December 2005, Monroe County Surrogate Judge Edmund A. Cavalruso decreed that McNabb did not constitute a “descendant” or “child” of her birth mother and therefore was not an intended beneficiary.
Last March, the 4th Department reversed, effectively granting McNabb an approximately $3.5 million share of the two trusts.
Thursday, the Court of Appeals again reversed, holding that McNabb is in fact not entitled to any part of the trusts intended to benefit her birth mother’s children.
In Matter of the Accounting by Fleet Bank, the court reversed
finding that the law in effect at the time of the execution of the trusts, in 1926 and 1963, does not imply the right for an adopted-out child to share in a class gift.
The unanimous court also found that public policy precludes * * * McNabb from receiving shares of two trusts created to benefit her birth mother’s “descendants” and “living children.”
In the words of Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye:
[T]he finality of judicial decrees would be compromised if adopted-out children were included in such class gifts ‘because there would always lurk the possibility, no matter how remote, that a secret out-of-wedlock child had been adopted out of the family by a biological parent or ancestor of a class of beneficiaries.’
Special thanks to Jeffrey A. Cooper (Associate Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law) for bringing this case to my attention.