Tracing A Family Member You’ve Never Met

How to find a family member you have never met can be a challenge. Working out who they married and where they live now can be fun.

Sometimes it’s not fun though, if you’re too invested in the outcome it can stressful to be fun. It means too much to you.

If this sounds like you, you might be better speaking to us about using our research team to find them for you.

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. This article is written by me.

To trace a family member click here. We can tell you more about what we do and how we do it. We can give you a exact price too.

Our amazing research team to find your family member for you. They can even act as an intermediary if you want.

If you’re looking for a family member and don’t feel too invested in the outcome, then spending some time looking for them yourself can be fun. Be warned though! Even with our amazing research team some searches take months to complete. It’s true to say that in 2017 you now have a large selection of websites that can help you trace a family member. The dawn of the internet has led to many records becoming available online. That help you with and this has made the process of tracing a family member possible.

Before the internet you would have had to visit libraries and record centres to discover data, whereas now you can find large parts of it online.

Some of the systems that are currently used for tracing family members are:

Electoral Roll

The electoral roll is useful if you’re wondering how to find a relative you have never met. Its downside is that it takes a long time for the information to filter down to the online searches. In that time people can move.

Since 2003 the Electoral roll has been edited and now in 2017 over 50% of people ‘opt off’ the electoral roll. These people will not appear at all when you search for them. At Relative Connections we have systems that overcome this issue but these are not available online.

Birth records

A date of birth is a great way to confirm you have the correct person. Ordering a birth record gets you this crucial piece of information. It’s key to how our research team at Relative Connections work.

Marriage records

A marriage record is useful when tracing both men and women. For women it gives you their new name. For men you know who they married and can now look for two people. The Relative Connections research team would search all marriage records if they were tracing your family member.

Death records

It’s worth checking to see if your family member has passed away. It will save you lots of time.

Our research team would always order the death certificate if the family member was deceased.

One of the reasons for this is to make sure we could pass it on to our customer to give them as much information as possible.

There is also another reason though.

They do have the informant of the death on them and this is usually another family member. They can then be traced. Again this is something that we would cover. This can be really useful when you’re wondering how to find a family member you have never met.

These are all great starting points to help you with tracing a family member.

How to find a family member you have never met.

This is never going to be easy.

There are so many things you can do but where do you start. You can also find yourself going down so many dead ends.

One door opens and it looks like you’re making progress then next you reach another hurdle.

If you want to use Relative Connections click here to trace a Family Member. There you will find details of our service, an enquiry form and a host of testimonials from happy customers.

These are some of the main techniques you to follow. They give you some key pieces of information.

Please remember you will never have the range of data available to you that we have. That’s not to say it’s not possible to find your missing family member but it is much harder.

how to find a long lost relative

So what else can you do to trace a family member? You can try more things online. Facebook is a good place to start, with over 1 billion members it is a huge website and many people of all ages are on there.

The problem is, many people have an account and don’t use it. If your person has a common name there will be thousands of matches on Facebook.

If you know what your family member looks like it can be worth trawling through the records. A word of warning. We had a customer who swore she had found a match on Facebook because the person had the correct name and a ‘her mother’s eyes’ but it was NOT her half-sister.

You have to be very careful when wondering how to find a relative you have never met. It’s so easy to make presumptions. When using our service we make sure that all the information you have moves from anecdotal to fact.

You can also try Twitter, to use and you can look for your family members and make contact with them.

If the person you are looking for is of working age then you could try LinkedIn, this is like a Facebook but for working people. Lots of directors, solicitors and corporate workers are LinkedIn. If you are not you can still create an account and search for the people you are looking for.

If you have tried these things and they haven’t worked you could try a basic Google search. It’s a surprisingly easy way to find someone when it works.

Google will search through all online data for a name in that location. This can bring up matches from newspaper websites, company websites and other websites.

As an example your family member may have appeared in the local paper for running a marathon for charity.

This story will have their name and their photo. Google will bring the search results up and you can see your relative is a prominent person in the local community and you now have a photo too!

From this you can concentrate your efforts around that community and in no time will be back in touch. On occasions within these stories they put the line such as “Mr. Smith of St Christopher’s Crescent, Leeds”.

So now you also know what street the person lives on, this is a great technique for tracing a family members.

How to find a long lost relative using BT

A final tip. You can use BT.com to do some telephone number searches and this can be a great way to make contact with a local area. For example you can add the surname smith and the area as Doncaster and it will bring up all the people that have listed telephone numbers.

Best thing to do then is to phone them and ask if they are your family member or if they know them. Again this is a technique that is used.

Remember to be courteous and polite on each phone call. Don’t reveal too much information until you are sure you are speaking to the exact person.

Do not reveal to a person’s family member that you are their child from 30 years ago. It might not go down too well so you have to give the person time to inform people in their lives of who you are.

Good luck with tracing a family member.

For an informal chat about using our research team to trace your family member for you simply call us now on 0113 2825900. We hope we’ve given you some suggestions with tracing a family member.