Here at Relative Connections we are passionate about reuniting people with their long lost relatives. It’s what we do and what we have done for the last ten years. We work for people just like you. It’s our job to put you in touch with a long lost relative. We do this by researching them and tracing them to a current address. All the information we supplied is guaranteed to be correct and we support you every step of the way.
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.
Since 2008 we’ve reunited over 15,000 long lost relatives. So if you’re wondering how to find a relative, congratulations you’ve found the right place.
If you’re looking for a service that finds your relative for you then again you’re in the right place.
We search and find your relatives for you.
Your relative is out there somewhere. It’s the job of our research team to find them for you. They do this by doing some very special things. Once you’ve confirmed your order and made your first payment.
Firstly you’ll have a consultation with a senior researcher. They’ll go through all the information you have about your relative. Sometimes the smallest facts can really progress a search so this step is key to a successful outcome. Don’t worry if you don’t know much. Our research team love a challenge and specialise in finding lost relatives with only snippets of information.
Once that’s done your search will start. Our research team will order and analyse any documents that we might need. Check old registers, census information and birth, death and marriage records too. It’s a full search so we can’t list everything we do. What we can tell you is we leave no stone unturned and we understand that each search is the most important search we’ll ever do.
Our in-house research team will keep you up to date with regular updates on how your search is progressing. They’ll support you too, every step of the way.
How To Find A Long Lost Relative Yourself…
There are things that you can do if you want to know how to find a lost relative yourself. We have a specific page that can help you to find a long lost relative yourself but we’ll also help you here.
Our service to find long lost relatives is more for people who are too busy to find a relative on their own, they’re usually too busy and just want to get the answers they’re looking for.
If you do want to make a start on how to find a long lost relative then you can try the following…
When our researchers start a search. The first thing they do is analyse the information we have.
Usually we have a name, an approximate age and maybe a rough area.
So how do we go about taking that information and finding the current address of your exact relative?
Well it’s often tricky and we do try lots of things that only sometimes work. Saying that those we do have a system so this is where we’d start. Firstly compile all the information we can and then we work out what information is missing which has the most value for us.
This is usually working out their full name if we don’t know it, their current name if we do. You can do this by obtaining the persons birth certificate. The only problem is to do this you need to know how old they are and where they were born.
Now things get a little more complicated. This is where we have a distinct advantage. We can carry out searches speculatively. So you might need to order multiple documents to uncover who is the correct person.
It can be harder to trace a woman because they are the one to change their name when they get married. Then, if they remarry they sometimes do so via their first married name but on other occasions they’ll revert back to their maiden name so there are even more checks to do.
How to find lost relatives
This is what we do though, we find lost relatives. We build up the picture of the life of the relative we’re looking for. Once we’ve established some facts that we can use. We might look deeper into their birth and find their actual date of birth.
This piece of information might not be useful for you but to us it will help us identify that we have found the correct person.
As well as going back to a long lost relative’s birth we can also start at the end with a list of names and addresses and work backwards from there, so we have so many options.
There are cases where we trace lost relatives without having their name but we have some other facts that mean we can still find out their name. An example of this would be an old address and a time they were at the address, we can then use something like Ancestry to look at old census information. We also use the 1939 register if we need to.
It’s all of this put together and then coupled with our years of tracing expertise that really separates us from other tracing agencies. We go the extra mile but we also know HOW to go the extra mile.
Our amazing research team, described recently as the best in the UK take as long as 60 days to complete a search, in that time over 3 members of the team can be involved in your search. We might have enlisted the help of other external researchers, made over 50 phone calls, ordered over 5 documents. We do this because we’re the best in the country at finding long lost relatives and we’ll do everything we can to help you.
We hope this short article has helped you answer how to find lost relatives.