Finding the Living Among the Dead:
Using the Internet to Find Your Living Cousins
Living people are making changes and additions to online family trees.
In FamilySearch.org we can identify living people who may be related to us by looking at the individual pages of our deceased ancestors and their deceased descendants. Who are the living people making changes, attaching sources, attaching memories, creating discussions and adding notes?
In Ancestry.com trees not only can we identify deceased relatives, we can also contact the living tree owner for help in identifying living family members. Most of the people listed as "private" in public trees are living people who are related to the deceased individuals in the public tree.
Living people can be found in the obituaries of our deceased relatives.
Obituaries can be found in many places: Record Collections, Newspapers, Mortuaries, Cemeteries, and through Search Engines.
Contact information for living people can be found online.
The U.S. Public Records Index contains contact information for living people; MyHeritage.com has this index in their collections. People finder/directories and Social Media sites contain contact information for living people.
Here are lists of sites that I have found useful in obtaining the above information. They are in alphabetical order.
Family History / Genealogy
Newspapers / Obituaries
Mortuaries
Cemeteries
Search Engines
People Finders / Directories
Checkpeople.com ($)
Findanyone.com ($)
Intelius.com ($)
Peoplelookup.com ($)
Peoplesmart.com ($)
US Public Records Index
(MyHeritage.com)
Ussearch.com ($)
Social Networks
I am giving a version of your class on Saturday. When they first assigned me the class I missed the key word living. I love doing cousins research, love using puzzila, etc. then the word living was noticed. I went into a panic attack. Among my past IT jobs I worked for 10 years for an Army security team. I have taught classes on Identity Theft. Privacy Issues are big with me. I have had to work Cyber stalking cases. I had not watched your class yet, so I took a deep breath and sat down and watched it. I liked your first slide and that is a point I want to place emphasis on you must approach Living cousins within the framework of those questions. Who? Why? What? I am going forward. Do you mind if I point my class members to your site? Thanks in advance
ReplyDeleteYes you can send your class to this site. I also sent you a message via Facebook.
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DeleteHere is Chris' comment - I removed his personal email address:
DeleteThank you and I saw your notes on facebook. Since I am a native Montanan. This is a good site http://mtmemory.org/ Newspapers are here. http://montanamemory.org/newspapers
Hi Amy,
ReplyDeleteI have been working on descendancy research on each of my eight great-grandparents down to my own and my children's generations. I have been making great use of the US Public Records Index and Facebook to identify family relationships as well as finding whatever obituaries and grave information on living descendants. One of my biggest challenges is finding the maiden name of spouses of descendants. For example, often the US Public Records Index will list relatives without identifying the relationships and will list only the married name of spouses. I cross reference to Facebook, but often this source will not reveal maiden names. My question is this: I know there are a great variety of paid background check websites like Spokeo, USA Public Search, Intelius, etc. and I wonder if any of them are better than the others for the specific purpose of identifying maiden names, marriages and divorces, and family relationships. I would be willing to pay for the use of these sites. But I had one bad experience of signing up on one of these, only to find that once you made payment there were hidden added costs for each lookup, which made the cost prohibitively expensive. I would appreciate any guidance you could offer. Thanks,
Dale G. Bailey