The Far Flung Family
Finder
The Far Flung Family
Finder
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Useful family-finding tidbits and other family tree info
I have been playing with genealogy since 1996, and the hunt for family members has been addictive. One of my main family tree fascinations has been finding living distant cousins, a.k.a, far-flung family members.
This web site will go into my methods of discovering those far-flung family members (and ancient family members) and what web sites I use in that search.
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In these pages I will show general finding tips for the family tree and some specific things I ended up having to do for my family tree research. Hopefully, some of these tips will be helpful to you. Comments and suggestions here -> Contact info.
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First you have to make yourself findable.
Sometimes it is easier to find people by letting them find you.
So, you have to create a presence on the web. Do this using family tree oriented message boards and personal family tree web sites, etc.
Most large family tree web sites, such as
www.ancestry.com and
Rootsweb.com, have message boards. (While I believe all message boards are free, most of the data at Ancestry is accessible only with a paid subscription, and all data at Rootsweb is free.) These
message boards are usually specific to a family name or location. Post detailed
questions that ask for someone or something that you are looking for, such as
"great-aunt Mary had three children, Tony, Lisa, and George Smith born in
Smithville, New York. Looking for descendants of this family." Get as specific
as you can with names, dates and locations, that way you have a better chance at
getting a match. I have found many cousins this way, and each new find is just
as exciting as the last one.
And so now that you are findable the e-mails will come screaming into your inbox, right? Well, it's more like a trickle, but it continues for years. Some of my posts are from 1999, and they still show up in the search engines, so they are still working for me. This is why it is better to make yourself findable, because you never know when somebody else will get the family tree bug. Or you can be found for a moment by somebody who just felt like googling themselves and then they send you a quick note.
Another thing to consider for this long term findability factor - use an e-mail that you can have for a long time. Service providers come and go, get bought out by a bigger company and make you change the domain name, or you just get tired of them; but it you create an e-mail address with Yahoo or Hotmail or one of the other long term free e-mail services and then use this e-mail address in your message board postings, you'll be findable for an eternity.
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Obituary and newspaper searching
Searching obituaries has been one of my favorite past times. You can search for obits in your local print newspapers or you can go to the vast number of on-line newspapers. Some web sites to find newspapers are:
Unfortunately, not all newspapers have their obituaries available on-line. If they do, it's great, but sometimes it can be difficult to find them. And then if they do have on-line obituaries, they don't necessarily have all of their obits on-line; family members can opt-out of on-line obits.
The ideal place to find most obits is an obituary link on the home page of the newspaper. Sometimes you have to click around to "local news" or other secondary links to find them. And then other times, obituaries can be found in the classified section, generally under announcements. So just keep looking until you've exhausted all of your options. Don't forget to check the "death notices" as well.
Newspapers are also great sources for birth, engagement, wedding and anniversary announcements, another family tree gold mine. And most newspapers have a search box so you can enter your family name to do a search on recent articles. Some newspapers have archives where you can search back a few years for useful information.
For really old newspapers, you can search the databases at the ancestry web site. I have found a great deal of information thru that site for my family in Clearfield County, PA. You can use the link below to try to find your family name in an old newspaper. (Again, not everything is available on-line. You may have to go to the library to look up old papers on mircofilm.)
Another service that ancestry.com provides is a current collection of obituaries from current newspapers. Kind of like one-stop shopping for newspapers. Enter your family name and see what shows up or use their obituary hunter and let the website contact you when it finds a match. Recently, I located the obituary of my great-aunt this way. Families grow apart and you are not always notified by a family member when these sad events happen.
Other obituary sites:
Find A Grave
Obituaries On The Net
Obituary Links Page
Obituary Central
funeralnet.com
Michigan Funeral Directors Assoc.
Desmond Funeral Home - Metro Detroit
Cieslak & Tatko Funeral Home - Pittsburgh
Friederichs & Sons Funeral Home - St. Clair, MI
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There are many discussion groups available on the internet for a wide variety of family tree topics. Most discussion groups are e-mail oriented. You sign up and get the discussion e-mails as they are generated, or you can choose to get the digest format and only get one e-mail from the group per day. I started a discussion group for “My Muszyna People.” It, like most small discussion groups, is quiet most of the time. A newbie signs up for the group, and there is a little bit of discussion, and then it is quiet again. Some of the larger discussion groups can be quite noisy. Sometimes it is just useless chatter, and in that case, you can sign up for those discussion groups using the no e-mail option and just browse the archive as time allows.
You can create your own discussion group also. Yahoo! Groups is one of the locations available to do this.
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People finders can range from the good ol’ telephone book to public records databases. There is your standard paper-form phone book and a large collection of on-line phone books, Switchboard.com and Infosearch.com, among others. And then there are the public records databases. Most of these are put in a name and pay for the information. But these databases also provide teaser information that is sometimes very valuable to the genealogist. Ussearch.com and Intelius.com are two of the available databases. Intelius has the added bonus of providing family groups, i.e., those who live or have lived in the same household with the same last name. New databases are always being created on the internet. You can find these being discussed in message groups or you can just run into them in your searching.
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Also try this site as an alternate for searching Google. It is probably only useful if you have a common name, cause I tried it with my Polish names and nothing came up.... Try a Genealogy Search on Google
And there are probably more...
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The SSDI is a list of people who have died and were part of the Social Security system and some one reported the death to the SSA. Not all deceased people will show up here, but most will, and once in awhile there might be incomplete information, i.e., just the month and year of death. If all you have on a deceased person is their SSDI entry, then you can use that information to research them more. For example, the index has the date of death and the location where they last lived. You can research the newspapers in that area for their obituary and find out any family information that might be published there. As always, one tidbit of information can lead to another.
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There are many family tree sites available on the internet. An overwhelming amount of sites. Start with cyndislist.com and you'll be busy for months!!
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Census information is amazing. A large number of the censuses have been indexed which is good, and bad. Good for when the indexer interpreted the name correctly, and bad for when they didn't. But still, you can find tons of information in the censuses. I have found it useful to maintain a spreadsheet of the families that I find while searching the census, this helps me avoid searching for the same people over and over again. Try to do your census research in an organized fashion, because there is just way too much information there to waste your time going over it again and again. You can find just about all of the census images at the link below.
Additional census info. I just started helping my sister-in-law with her family tree. We needed to find John McCormick in Detroit. Well I couldn’t find him. It was getting real frustrating. In fact, I couldn’t find her McCormick’s in any census I tried. Why? Was I spelling the name wrong? After awhile, I remembered that the University of Michigan has a 1929 Polk’s Detroit city directory in their digital library. I put McCormick in the search box and I found John’s father, Thomas, and his street address. Yeah! So then I used Steve Morse’s Page to find the census enumeration district number for that address. (On Steve Morse’s home page click on Census and Soundex: 1910/1930 Census ED Finder) Now I had two ED’s I had to search thru, page by page, and wa-la, I found their 1930 census entry. Happy dance!! The name was spelled McCormick... so why didn’t they show up in the Ancestry index?? I found a fairly uniquely named neighbor and entered his name into the Ancestry search box. Ancestry has a new, cool census feature where you can see the indexed names of the family and neighbors of a certain person. The indexed spelling of McCormick was Mc Cormick, no wonder I couldn’t find them! Mystery solved and persistence pays off.
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How to create your family tree.... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Coming soon And until I get my act together on my Bogoria page, I will list here my Bogoria, Poland, family names for possible connections: Brodcki, Brudek, Chrzastowski, Demczynski, Gorski, Gurski, Klocek, Kogut, Kosowicz, Krolikowski, Pietrzyk, Snopek, Trybuszkiewicz, Wiktorowski. These are both direct line ancestral names and allied lines. If you are related to these Bogoria names, please
contact me. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - A WORD OF CAUTION - (caution might be too strong of
a word, but...) not every far-flung family member wants to be found. When making
direct contact with a potential family member, fully identify yourself and ask
them if they are interested in discussing the family relationship potential. You
have to honor their wish to be left alone if that is the case. Additional information for This site and all
content is owned by FarFlungFamilyFinder.com. All rights reserved. 2004-2006. Writing to Your Relatives.
