Thompson v. Thompson Et Al‪.‬

RONAN, Justice. This is a petition by the administrator of the estate of Charlotte W. Thompson, the wife of Fred H. Thompson, against Mary E. Thompson and the Chicopee Co-operative Bank to establish the petitioner's ownership in a certificate of ten shares of the said bank which stands in the name of Fred H. Thompson or Mary E. Thompson. The petitioner appealed from decree dismissing the petition. It appears from a report of the material facts made by the Judge of the Probate Court under G.L.(Ter.Ed.) c. 215, § 11, that 'an account was opened' at the bank on August 6, 1912, in the name of Mrs. Fred H. Thompson; that monthly payments were made regularly up to the death of Mrs. Thompson on September 14, 1922, and thereafter until the shares matured in October, 1924, when a certificate was issued to Fred H. Thompson, who, on May 7, 1940, assigned the certificate by an endorsement thereon to Fred H. Thompson or Mary E. Thompson. The latter was his unmarried daughter, who lived with him and did all the housework for many years, much of which was done without pay up to the time the certificate was assigned to her. All of the money that 'went into this account' was earned by Thompson, and there was no evidence that any person other than he ever made any of these monthly payments. At the time of the death of Mrs. Thompson there were several bank accounts in the joint names of Thompson and his wife. In all of them the latter was described as Charlotte or Lottie Thompson. Thompson died on May 17, 1940. The Judge stated that he was not convinced upon all the evidence that Thompson intended to open the account in his wife's name and that there was no evidence that he made a gift of the account to her. He found that the petitioner had failed to establish that his intestate was the owner of the account.