How to Find Lost Relatives and Ancestors: A Guide for Beginners
Some genealogy fans wear shirts with catchy phrases like "Collecting Dead Relatives and Sometimes a Live Cousin" and "My Family Tree is Lost in the Forest." These dedicated researchers want to fill in the blanks in their family trees. Most people have been doing this work for decades.
My wife and I wanted to start looking for family members we had lost touch with, but we didn't know where to start. One of her relatives had put together a binder full of information, but other than that, we were the ones who were lost.
We started by going to Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library's Genealogy library, but you can also do this online.
The first step to finding lost family members is to get all the information that has already been put together. We did this by using the Ancestral File database, which is indexed at The Family History Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is the world's largest genealogy library. We logged into the database from afar and looked for my wife's records first. On her pedigree chart, we could see that some of her relatives had already put together information about her mother's family, but the line for her father was blank. We did some research on my wife's father's line after putting her family tree on a GEDCOM file. The family history expert told us that there may have been work done on my wife's father's line, but it hasn't been linked to her file.
By putting the name of her father's father into the search box, we were able to find out a lot more. The consultant told us that we needed to download his pedigree chart, bring it home to our computer, and combine it with my wife's file. That would put all of his information in the same place as my wife's.
Personal Ancestral File (PAF), which is now in version 5.2, is the best programme for putting together information about family history. Since the software is free, any search engine should be able to help you find it.
Check back to learn more about how to do your own research in the next part.
