Estate/Inheritance Issue

Location: Kentucky

I had a great uncle that died 19 years ago (2007). Ten years later (2017), my brother received correspondence from an estate attorney who said he was trying to contact surviving relatives to divvy up the estate - there was no will specifying an heir/heirs. He said he'd tried for years and had very little if any luck getting responses out of over a 'dozen' living relatives. He provided the attorney the contact information for me, my brother and himself, and within a few months of back-and-forth calls and emails, we each received a small payout totaling less than $3,000 each.

Five years later (2022), I started wondering if anyone else had claimed their portion of the inheritance, so I contacted the attorney myself. He told me he'd 'turned it over' to another attorney and gave me her contact info. I emailed her, and she told me she was only contracted to find surviving heirs and that her search had been fruitless for a period of years, and that she'd be happy to 'close this out'. At her suggestion, I wrote a formal email letter requesting a.) an explanation for why any unclaimed funds hadn't been promptly turned over to the state treasury within five years b.) to know the sum total of the remaining funds being held and c.) for my brothers and I to be paid out that remainder of our great uncle's estate since it had been 15 years since his death at that point and no one else had come forward to claim it. She forwarded my email back to the original attorney.

Weeks went by, and the response I received was that he didn't have enough information on the heirs he'd attempted to contact to 'properly fill out the forms for submitting to the treasury' and had thus just kept the money himself (which makes me wonder about the decades worth of interest it should have accrued as well). He did not answer my question about the total of remaining funds but did say a 'final' check would be on its way to us. That final check was an anemic few hundred dollars each, which makes no sense. If there were over a dozen relatives he was searching for when he gave us our first portion totaling in the thousands, and no one came forward since, how was the total of the remainder less than one thousand dollars?

I simply don't know what to do at this point. I know he's not going to respond to me again, as he was very annoyed I was even contacting him, and he's practically retired now. I have no way of knowing if there's enough left to be worth hiring a lawyer over either. I thought about contacting the state treasurer's office but am not sure if they'd have any recourse to offer. Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated!