Architecture :: Check For Nulls In An Object Aggregation?

I am working on a legacy application. It uses custom MVC framework and Windows Communication Framework service to bridge the Presentation layer with the rest of the application (i'll call this AppServer).

Every Entity in the AppServer inherits from BaseEntity which contains the method:

[Code]....

As you can see:

if the personObject was not null, but the ContactAddress was, [which is exactly what happens in the construction of a PersonObject in the event that no contact details are provided (hence they are not present in the HashTable and dont get created)] then the code will fail with a null reference exception.

SO:

Is there a fundamental flaw in the way that objects are getting created? It would be easy to point the finger in this direction, however, im sure there must have been some reason for the original architect to choose not to instantiate an empty ContactAddress object every time a Person object is referenced - EG if in a particular Presention->AppServer Request/Response cycle we only want a person's login details - we wouldn't care about the ContactDetails.

FINALLY MY QUESTION:

Is there a clean way to check for null objects within an aggregation, without doing something like:

if(Parent!=null)
if(Parent.child!= null)
if(Parent.child.child != null)

It just looks messy and it seems such a common problem, im sure there would be a better way of doing things.