The
focus of much genealogical work is tracing one’s family tree back through the
generations. And I have done a good amount of that. But I also decided that I
wanted to find all my Russell cousins who were still living. While finding
ancestors has many challenges, finding living relatives has its own set of
challenges. Some of these are (1) census records are not released until 72
years after they are taken, so many of your relatives may not be found in
places like ancestry.com; (2) it’s a moving target – both geographically as
more recent generations are much more likely to change locations, but because
new family members are always being acquired through marriages, birth of
children, etc.; and (3) if one of your relatives has built a family tree in
ancestry.com living individuals are screened from view of others.
I
have two fairly large documents of descendant Russell family that I have been
building. One is all the descendants of my great-great-grandfather, Walter J.
Russell (1852-1895). These would be all my first, second, and third cousins.
The other goes back one more generation to Silas Russell (1803-1886) and
contains all my fourth cousins. This latter document still has a lot of “holes”
and unfinished research, so I’ll focus on the first document in this blog.
Walter
was married twice. He had six children with his first wife and four with his
second. However, three of these children never married, one married but had no
children, and one I have not been able to find any further information on.
Still that leaves five family lines to try to trace and find all the living
individuals at the end of each branch. Here are some of the methods I used to
fill out this extensive family tree.
Personal Knowledge
A
good place to start any investigation is by recording what facts you actually
know yourself. In this case, I knew all my first cousins, all my aunts and
uncles, and many of my great-aunts and great-uncles. Even if I hadn’t seen some
of them in over 50 years, I recorded what/who I knew and approximate ages,
relationships, etc.
Phone Calls
I
used whitepages.com to try and find phone numbers for any of the near relatives
who appeared to be living in the towns where I knew them. If I could get a
phone number, then I called them, introduced myself to them (for some it had
been 50 years since we had communicated), then asked them about other family
members.
Obituaries
A
good source of information are obituaries which can be found in the archives of
the newspapers or funeral homes where the individual had their funeral. Many of
these are searchable via google and give details like dates, names of parents,
maiden names, names of children and their spouses and where they were living at
the time, etc.
Google Searches
Sometimes
just open-ended Google searches may locate information for you. I’ve gotten
pretty good at structuring searches to locate individuals.
Ancestry.com
While
there are not as many resources that contain information on living individuals,
there is some – if you know where to look for it. One that I’ve used on a
couple of occasions is a database of all marriages in CT between 1959 and 2001.
Since I, and many of my relatives, are from CT, this has been quite useful.
DNA Matching
Although
I had documented what I thought were all of my cousins, as I mentioned in an
earlier posting, I was surprised to find a new cousin through DNA matching.
Facebook
Once
I have found one relative through the above methods, I often see if they have
an account in Facebook. If they do, then I look through their friend list
(assuming that it’s public) and see what other people with the same last name
they have as friends. I note all the ones I find and use this as a starting
point for trying to find other of my relatives.
Conclusion
It
takes a lot of work to do this sort of “forward searching” instead of the more
typical ancestor searching. But the results for me have meant making connections
to many cousins whom I did not know existed before and some new friendships.
