In these tough economic times, it may come as a surprise that more than $1 billion sits unclaimed by its owners in Pennsylvania. That’s about 500 times more than the $2 million that was unclaimed 75 years ago (see article below).

The Pennsylvania Treasury Department maintains a database of thousands of abandoned bank accounts, forgotten stock certificates, uncashed checks, unclaimed life-insurance policies and numerous other types of assets. The owners may have died, or moved, or simply forgotten what they owned. (The 1934 article below raises the spectre of “racketeers” and people leading “double” lives.)

The department’s Bureau of Unclaimed Property maintains a searchable database, where you can type in names of individuals and businesses to see if they are on the list.

I’ve been aware of the Bureau of Unclaimed Property for a number of years, because it launches periodic ad campaigns to find property owners. But until I happened upon the article below in the Lancaster Newspapers archive, I had no idea that the state has been collecting unclaimed property, and seeking its owners, for nearly a century.

According to the article, which was published in the New Era on Jan. 13, 1934, the state had, at that time, been collecting “forgotten money” for 15 years.

It appears we’ve gotten a lot more “forgetful” since then. But it also appears the state has gotten better at finding owners of unclaimed property.

According to the bureau’s Web site, the state returned $88.8 million of the $1 billion to its owners in 2007, for a success rate of about 9 percent. That compares to $16,000 out of $2 million, or less than 1 percent, in 1933, according to the article below.