Hey everybody. I am Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger and it's a quick genealogy tip.
On today's quick genealogy tip I am going to be talking about how to find
living relatives. Now when I first started genealogy one of my first goals
was to find my living relatives, to find my cousins. In the first month of me
doing serious genealogy research I was able to find tons of cousins all over
the world in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Israel, the
Netherlands, and even other places and at this point I've connected with thousands
of relatives all over the world. Now the first place to start with finding your
living relatives is to actually have information about living relatives.
Now if you don't have any information on living relatives there are a couple of
ways you can go about finding information on living relatives. The
first thing you need to do is locate a place on your family tree where you
think there are descendants that you don't know about so maybe your
great-grandparents had a sibling who got married and had children but the
information for you stops at the 1940 census well your best friend in this
case is going to be Google now if you have relatives who are the 1940 census
but you don't have any further information on their descendants it's
going to be hard to find that information by going through a genealogy
search engine like ancestor or your family search so the trick is is to find
the places where you can get the memes and information on further descendants
now depending on their age you may expect an obituary and you may be able
to find that obituary especially if it's been a more recent death you may also be
able to go to find a grave and get information that way you can also search
through different newspaper websites such as newspapers calm or Fulton
history calm and you can search for marriage announcements birth
announcements other obituaries or just news stories that may have happened to
your relatives another place to look is the white pages white pages have a
website which actually has information that dates back to different times
earlier I mentioned that Google is going to be your best friend in this and one
of the reasons I said that is because all of these sites and options that I've
mentioned can all be accessed through Google and in top of these websites
using Google to search for people allows you to locate websites that you may not
know about maybe there's a relative of yours who was famous for something they
have a Wikipedia page about them you may even find that they have their own web
page that they built the items you may be able to find just by searching
someone's name from Google are boundless alright so now you have information on
your living relatives now you want to actually go about finding them now as I
mentioned before Google is going to be your best friend so just doing a Google
search may actually turn up their email their phone number may even bring up
their Facebook because Facebook has pretty good search engine optimization
but one of the best places to really look is social media Facebook is the
best when it comes to this and I honestly think Facebook is the best way
to contact the relatives as well. Facebook has become somewhat of a world
directory, and the same thing with Twitter and Instagram. I'm connected with
people on all of those websites that are from all around the world now the best
way to start when doing a search on Facebook to find your relatives is look
for a cousin who has the most uncommon name so if you have a family of Smith's
that your relatives of maybe one of those cousins is Tristan Smith well
that's gonna be more uncommon and so it'll be easier to find Facebook and
other social media sites are especially useful if you have information on
relatives who are part of the millennial generation which is people born between
1982 and 2000 or anyone who's part of Generation Z, which is 2000 and later. In
my own experience I found the people of this generation are on a lot of social
media sites and are usually the easiest to find and the easiest to correspond
with because they understand the systems and they have an
easier time of being able to verify that you are legitimate and what you're
saying now one of the things that I really like about Facebook is that when
you do find someone who you think is a relative there's a way to try and
confirm it and to do that all you have to do is look at the friends of that
person who you think is your relative and you should find other family members
who are their friends so if you find someone who you think is a cousin you
can then go on their friends list and look for any other relatives from that
same branch maybe that cousin has a couple of
brothers or you know of an aunt or uncle or their parents names sometimes you may
even be able to find the grandparents in there as well this is also why it's
useful to do some of the family trees of spouses of your relatives because then
that gives you more ability to confirm a match Twitter and Instagram can be a
little bit harder to find people on the Facebook but they are useful to look at
as well because there are a lot of people on those websites who don't want
to use Facebook some people prefer different websites
over others so it's always just best to check all of them now as I mentioned
Facebook is my favorite way of contacting relatives and there are a
couple of reasons for this the first is that they can quickly verify that I am a
real person if I send somebody a message on Facebook I have a good amount of
information publics and then they can go to my profile see that my profile has
been around and active for years and they can also see other people
responding to me this is why it's such a good idea to find someone who's part of
the Millennial Generation or Generation Z is because they have an easier time of
doing this another thing with Facebook is that when you contact them there they
have time to respond it's the same thing with emails but if you're gonna do a
phone call which I know a lot of people feel like would be a better route it's
actually a bit more difficult because people don't really have time to digest
the information research it look into it you know actually be able to verify that
you are who you are and the connection does seem legitimate if you do a phone
call, they're put on the spot. They may not
know that much information and with how much people worry about fraud and
identity theft you're going to get a lot of hesitation with phone calls. Thank you
so much for checking out this quick genealogy tip if you enjoyed please be
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