Finding long lost family in Australia is very possible. In this article we’ll show you how.
My name is David Oates, I am the Head Researcher at Relative Connections, you can view my LinkedIn by clicking here. I am also the director of the adoption support agency which is regulated by Ofsted. I am a highly regarded and experienced family tracer and intermediary. I have spoken about finding long lost family on BBC Radio 5 and was part of the featured team on BBC1’s Family Finders TV series
If you’re thinking about Finding your long-lost family in Australia there are two main ways you can do that.
The first way is to find them yourself.
The second is you use a tracing agency to do it for you.
But when you are in the UK should you use a UK agency or an Australian one.
And which agencies can you trust.
Before we get there though. Let’s first look at how you can go about finding long lost family in Australia yourself.
Finding long lost family yourself
It’s good to work out who you are looking for when you say long lost family.
Is it a living relative or one that is likely to be deceased?
Are you looking to contact the relative? Or are you building out a family tree?
Basically, is this a genealogy matter or a people search matter?
These things do make a difference. You’ll hopefully know what your end goal is.
In both situations you can really benefit from having a deep dive into the life of the long-lost family member you are looking for. Uncovering various records about them can help you find them. It can also build a clear picture of their life.
The best starting point from here in the UK is almost certainly Ancestry or Find My Past.
They both have a good range of Australian documents that you can access. They also have shipping records. Ancestry possibly has the most (sorry FMP) so, we would recommend paying for an Ancestry account and having a look on there.
We can’t guarantee you will find anything and that can be the frustrating aspect of self-searching.
We’ve had so many clients who have come to us with information they have found themselves. It is often wrong. They have wasted time, money, and emotions on wrong information. It is very easy to find a record and say to yourself, this MUST be my long-lost family member, when to be brutal, it isn’t.
Ancestry is the prefect starting point though whether you are looking for a living relative or a deceased one.
The truth is though that you can only use Ancestry or any of the other family research tools like Find My Past to get information.
The chance of you obtaining an actual up to date address is very slim.
So, if you’re compiling information, it is a great place to start.
But if you want to contact a living relative who lives in Australia, you might find some information about them, that could be names of children or a marriage record. It won’t be an address though.
This might be enough to help you find them though.
Let’s say you’re looking for a cousin that moved to Australia when she was 16.
Chances are she married and had kids. If you find her marriage record, you can find her children’s births.
Once you have all that you can look for her, her husband, and her children on Facebook.
Finding long lost family in Australia via Facebook
Ah! Facebook!
You’ve probably already tried Facebook.
It is the most logical place to start.
With this new information you might get somewhere.
If not, read on as there are more things you can do to help with finding long lost family in Australia.
If Facebook hasn’t given you any hits. What next?
You can try the Australian white pages, basically a look through the phone book. Very old school.
Or you can do a Google search.
If you put their name in Google, you might get lucky and find them that way. The more unusual their name the better the chance if it being them. If they are called John Roberts, you’re going to find a lot of hits on Google.
If that doesn’t work, then you might need to admit defeat and call the experts. The truth is there isn’t a magic website of people in Australia that you can access and say with any certainly that it is your relative.
Finding long lost family in Australia via a tracing agency
It will cost money. But you can relax knowing that they are doing the research for you.
So, if you instructed us, what would we do that you couldn’t?
Well, the simple answer is having access to lots of systems. We can then cross reference them all to ensure we obtain as much information as possible about your long-lost family member.
We’ve better at spotting your actual relative and not a name’s sake. That’s a combination of experience and talent.
Once we’ve done that, we usually have a clear idea of the person we are looking for.
From that point we have plenty of options to get an actual address if you are looking for a living relative. Or if we don’t need an actual address, we can piece the family history together from that point.
Finding long lost family in Australia with an Australian tracing agency
If we do struggle from this side of the world, we have two excellent teams in Australia that can help us. One team specialise in finding actual addresses.
So, let’s go back to our example. We would tell this team that we had a lady called X, she was married in Y to a chap called Z. Her children were born here and, on these dates, and these are their names.
Once the team have that information, they will find her in about 24 hours.
So, our UK team and our address team in Australia work hand in hand to get you your answers.
Once we have the address, we also help you with contact. This is a key part of our service.
If the work is more genealogy based or we can’t find the previously made-up information in our example, don’t despair. We have another team.
This team are focused on historical family research in Australia. Again, our UK team will work closely with them to get you the answers you are looking for.
It is not unusual for us to send the search to the family history team, them to send it back to us in the UK and then for us to send it to the address team. Phew! Its busy work but between the three teams we can almost always get to the bottom of every search we are asked to do.
This makes Finding long lost family in Australia not only possible but almost guaranteed
Back at the start of this article I mentioned if you should use a UK tracing agency to find someone in Australia or an Australian one. Well hopefully you can see that if you instruct us, you’ll get the best of both worlds.
We are asked to find family members in Australia every week so have established systems and processes to help you.
Finally at the start we were talking about trust. Rather than trying to persuade you to trust us please just read our Trustpilot client reviews. They speak louder than we every could about our service and how it can change your life.
Thank you for reading and we wish you success with finding long lost family in Australia.