The fourth week of September is now Unclaimed Property Week in Kentucky.

To celebrate the inaugural year, officials with the Kentucky State Treasury welcomed legislators and other guests to learn more about the program and how it is positively impacting Kentuckians.

For an individual claim, you can generally find that unclaimed property in about 30s if you go to our website, put in your name.

Many people tell us, well, I looked ten years ago, I had no, I don't have any unclaimed property, but we get money in twice a year.

So our recommendation is on your birthday every year.

Look at the unclaimed property database and see if there's anything in there.

You want to search your name forward and backwards.

You want to search your legal name and your short name.

So for example, I would search for James Florence, but also Jim Florence.

Most of the claims that come in are for monetary values their stocks, their gift cards, their deposits.

Uncashed checks, things of that nature that were forgotten that we also receive safe deposit box here, but we have roughly 8000 safe deposit box contents in each one of those boxes.

Has 10 to 12 items in it.

They range from gold, silver coins.

There's jewelry, all types of interesting things.

And when we see those come in, it's almost like, what are we going to experience today?

And we do have a baseball bat signed.

We we see interesting things that are of value monetarily value.

But there's also things that carry emotional value.

We know they're important to the family.

We know they are items that, the loved ones want to get back and they mean something to them personally.

So that's why we take great care in protecting them and safe care and keep and trying to get them back to the family.

We do have a lot of weird things.

We have many socks.

We have many, dentures and teeth, hairbrushes, things of that that are not really, like gold coins and diamonds and things of that nature.

But people felt like they needed to keep them in their lockbox.

And at some point they got turned over to us.

One of our individuals found a claimant who didn't realize that they were left in a will.

They had taken care of their neighbor, feeding them dinner, helping them get groceries and mowing their yard, etc.

unfortunately, the individual passed and this gentleman, we reached out to him saying, did you realize you had unclaimed property here?

He's from eastern Kentucky.

What makes this story special is, he lost his home in the hurricane.

It came through in 24.

Lost his job.

Had been reemployed.

Baby on the way.

Been married ten years, going to celebrate his anniversary in about two weeks.

And when we called him, he thought, this is a scam.

There's this.

Not possible.

He had no idea he had been left $300,000.

And so now we've been able to change his life, getting that money back in his hands and allowing him to change his family trajectory and invest in his home and his wife, his children.

When we make changes like that and you know, someone has a super need and they are kind of at rock bottom at that point when you can give him something like that, that's initially theirs and get it back to them, it just feels your heart and you go home at the end of the day, just thinking like today was a day that made it and it.

Sometimes we have tough days and they're stressful, but those are the kind of things that offset those tough days and tell you it's all worth it.

Yeah, especially the $300,000 story.

Officials with the state treasury, though, say Kentucky and should be mindful of scammers.

They'll usually ask you to pay a fee to receive your property, but a state claims processor will never do that.