OHIO: It Isn't Easy

When he first read the letter from England last January, James N. Gape, 46, a valve company salesman and father of two children, let out a whoop of joy. His cousin's widow, Mrs. Sibyl Marion Geraldine Gape, had named him heir to an English estate that had been in the family for 500 years; it was worth, even at current rates, a tidy $270,000. There were two fine ancestral houses—Caxton Manor, with 16 rooms, 1,000 acres and three farms in Cambridgeshire; St. Michael's Manor, a 14-room, spacious-lawned house in Hertfordshire that was built...