How quick can my MC find distant relatives?

hunnypot

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MC needs to find her distant relatives, fast! Their lives are in danger but she can't go to the police. She's on her own. The last known relation MC has is great, great grandparents. From that, what is the quickest method of finding her distant relatives?
 

Maggie Maxwell

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I'm guessing this is modern day urban setting, somewhere with computer access? An ancestry website might be the first place to start. Perhaps census records if she knows where they're from. But hopping on Ancestry.com and hoping someone on that side of the family is big on family recordkeeping would be my first step.
 

hunnypot

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She's just found out they're in danger so she wouldn't had had a genetic ancestry test done.
 

JJ Litke

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I don’t know what kind of access you can really get to relatives on a site like ancestry.com, but I think they have some extra levels of privacy for people who are still living. If both people have done the DNA tests (which take weeks to get the results from) then you could get a little more info, assuming those people have also allowed for others to find them. So, you could contrive to make this work as a method, but it could come across as awfully convenient. The character could also search old obituaries online, since those typically list the surviving family.

Hold on, if the last known relatives are great-great-grandparents, how does she know she even has any distant surviving family? And why would she be concerned?
 

pharm

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Does she live in a small town with a long and/or mysterious local family history? Sounds like it’s time for a trip to the library and — you know what that means — a microfiche montage!
 

hunnypot

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Yes, set in modern day. Distant relatives wouldn't have done family record keeping. I'm guessing best bet would be census. But how much information would she have access to? Would she be able to find her 18 year relative? Where they live? Phone number? And how quick could she do this?
 
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pharm

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Yes, set in modern day. Distant relatives wouldn't have done family record keeping. I'm guessing best bet would be census. But how much information would she have access to? Would she be able to find her 18 year relative? Where they live? Phone number?

Unless someone lives off the grid to a truly remarkable degree, it’s pretty easy to find this kind of info through public records. Anyone with access to Lexis through a university or work, for example, can pull up a personal background and address history on most folks in seconds.
 

hunnypot

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I don’t know what kind of access you can really get to relatives on a site like ancestry.com, but I think they have some extra levels of privacy for people who are still living. If both people have done the DNA tests (which take weeks to get the results from) then you could get a little more info, assuming those people have also allowed for others to find them. So, you could contrive to make this work as a method, but it could come across as awfully convenient. The character could also search old obituaries online, since those typically list the surviving family.

Hold on, if the last known relatives are great-great-grandparents, how does she know she even has any distant surviving family? And why would she be concerned?

I agree it would be too convenient and it would be out of character for my characters to have done DNA tests.
She didn't know she had surviving family until she finds out there are people out to kill them and only she can save them. Yes, they are strangers to her but she doesn't want anyone to be murdered.
I like the obituary idea.
 

lonestarlibrarian

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So parents/grandparents/great-grandparents are totally unknown to her, but she knows the identities of (some? all?) of her great-great-grandparents? If so, it might be helpful to explain how that is--- because we usually know about the relatives older generations tell stories about, and we have no clue about the relatives no one mentions. I wanted to build a family tree this summer, so I asked my maternal grandparents for names further back. Grandma had the set of Great-Grandparents down just fine (her parents), but was very wobbly on her grandparents' names (my great-great grandparents). I only got first names for the two wives, and a question mark on the first name of her paternal grandfather. :)

I had way better success on my maternal grandfather's side of the family, because we had some serious genealogical effort going in, and they had made a little book so that no one had to re-do all their work. But they were only focused on the male line, so the wives were dead-ends in and of themselves once you got into the 19th century... but the male line was traced back to c. 1500.

I ran into similar things when I was looking at my father's family. There had been a good deal of work done on his mother's line-- but again, the wives all seemed to come from nowhere, because they didn't overlap with anyone else's trees.

Everybody has sixteen great-great grandparents. So technically, her "distant relatives" would be all of the descendants of those sixteen individuals, as well as everyone else who happened to be siblings or cousins or aunts or uncles or whatever of those sixteen individuals, plus their offspring...

So, for plot purposes, I'm imagining that the focus of the trouble is only on one line within the family, traceable to descent from one particular individual? Like my father's father's father's father and his descendants? Or my mother's mother's mother's mother? Otherwise, it will easily grow into over a hundred people, depending on where you set your limits. (Are you including family members who aren't genetically related? Adoptees? Stepkids? Spouses?) Which makes it technically way easier to find someone, but it has less impact when you bump into someone you need a chart to understand the relationship.

She can come across a family Bible or an old diary or an old yearbook or a cemetery and use that for names/relationships, especially if there's an unusual surname in play.

She can go to the courthouse in the county she was born, and find out the names of her parents and use that as a starting point.

She can go to her public library, if it has a decent genealogy room, and an open subscription to one of the family tree sites. If, say, her second cousin (shares a common set of great-grandparents) was a big genealogy nut, much of the work might have already been plugged in.

Or she might have a basic idea of names and places, and might start communicating on FB, saying stuff like, "Hi, I don't know if anyone remembers so-and-so who used to own a grocery store in your town in the 1940's. Does he have any living descendants? I'm trying to track down my family tree, so any information would be appreciated." People like being helpful.

Once upon a time, I had a woman who had been given up for adoption by her mother, but the records were sealed. She knew that she had worked for a particular bank in our city in the early 70's, and was trying to find a way to find the employee rolls during that time period. (Wasn't able to help her. :( )

She might throw $x at a DNA test that's connected to a family tree website, like AncestryDNA or FamilyTreeDNA, and discover that she is unusually genetically matched with this family over here.

A lot of it depends on why she's isolated from her family history. If she was a war orphan who was sent to another country for her safety, it plays out differently than if her mom gave her up for adoption to avoid the stigma of being an unwed mother, but everyone's still probably within 100 miles of each other. If it's a fantasy story--- the variables can be even more complicated. :)
 

Maggie Maxwell

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I assume the people out to kill them have the information she needs. Is there no way she can very sneakily and at very high risk to herself obtain this information from them?
 

S. Eli

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*anecdotal experience* i once got an ancestry account (which isn't the testing thing) and within a few minutes of having an account, i was connected with a relative that was already putting together my family tree (for some family reunion or something). Would something similar work for your character? The family tree has all the corresponding records, including location
 

MadAlice

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Man, I miss when I had access to Lexis Nexis (I think that's what it was called) for work*. I had to find people, or next of kin type people for reasons, and with a name and city, I could find current and previous addresses, family up to a few generations away, auto license plates, and much more in a few minutes.
Another notes is that some counties, in some states, have extremely helpful probate court information online (looking at you, Montgomery County Ohio). You can find next of kin, other family, executors of estates, copies of wills, who inherited the house, who argued over the antique dolls, etc. Some counties/states are less helpful.
If your MC works for a utility company, say in customer service (which I didn't, but I know this for other reasons), they would have access to at least preliminary credit report info that would give a recent address at the least, or employer.
Facebook can even help. Too many people post selfies in front of their new house/apartment with the address number clearly visible.
Also the ancestry info above.
Sometimes, I would mail a letter to a last known address, write "Address service requested" on the envelope, and the post office would mail back the person's forwarding address. This of course assumes you have a bit of time and have learned the person's name and previous address.
ETA: Oh, also newspaper archives. In my city, you can access marriage records, divorce records, birth announcements, death announcements, and with a little time and coffee (or vodka, or both) you can connect the lines up, down, and sideways.

I say your MC coughs up the money to pay for access to a skip tracing tool, in combination with ancestry website.



*I solemnly swear I have never used my skills for evil, or writing research... .... ...
 
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waylander

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Who did her parents get Christmas cards from in the family? Maybe she has a list from her parents stuff.
 

WeaselFire

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MC needs to find her distant relatives, fast! Their lives are in danger but she can't go to the police. She's on her own. The last known relation MC has is great, great grandparents.

Does she even have distant relatives? You're going to need to make this believable and your situation just isn't. She calls her known relatives and asks. The same way all ancestries are found out.

Or hire private detective.

Jeff
 

JJ Litke

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She didn't know she had surviving family until she finds out there are people out to kill them and only she can save them. Yes, they are strangers to her but she doesn't want anyone to be murdered.
I like the obituary idea.

Then she can use whatever info she found out about this long-lost family to find them.

It makes no sense that the last known relatives were great-great-grandparents. No one would be be in danger and think, hey, did great-great-grandpa Fred's brother have any descendants? She has to have some far more recent info than that to make this plausible.
 

jclarkdawe

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So the great, great grandparents lived in some town in some year. You look up the census records for that town and look for the other children of the great, great grandparents, and siblings of the great, great grandparents. With any sort of luck, that gives you a bunch of first and last names to work with. Now go to the white pages and look up those first and last names. Often you'll find some matches. If the results aren't large enough, you then just go with the last name.

Now write to each of them, and see if you're lucky. I used to do this for real estate when we had missing heirs. Nearly always someone in the family stayed in the area. And once you make a connection, they can provide you with other connections. Using this method prior to the Internet being widely available, it rarely took me longer than a month to put together the list of missing heirs.

If I did this today, I'd run the names through the Internet and see which one got lucky. Simple matter of if you've got a big enough field, you'll probably get lucky.

And this is avoiding the wonderful aspect of Internet genealogy websites. Look at how fast the police can find a hit on a cold case when you run DNA. If I didn't have to worry about a budget and I'd take some of her DNA and compare it through those websites.

Jim Clark-Dawe
 

benbenberi

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One possible shortcut to finding at least some distant relatives is if your character has a very unusual surname. Mine, for instance, is so rare that every person who has it is at most a 3rd cousin.

(But it's not infallible. There are some branches of my family that adopted other variations of the name that are less identifiable. Plus one set that settled in Pittsfield MA in the early 20 c: when they started school there, teachers couldn't handle their real name so they all became "Robinson" instead...)
 

Roxxsmom

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I echo the others who say a modern-day genetics website, like ancestry dot com would be helpful. I've been messing around with one lately, and I've discovered some lineages within my family.

Now, these sites keep the profiles of anyone still alive private (just show a generic picture), but there is a way of taking a DNA test and putting your name in a registry of people searching for relatives. Also, you could use the information you get to guess, at least, where current relatives may live and who they are descended from and take out an ad in a given city. I don't know if ancestry sites make this possible without the DNA tests.

Any descendants of John Beasley and Mary Hanson Beasley of Seattle Washington, please call this number.

That would sort of be hit or miss, though.

One possible shortcut to finding at least some distant relatives is if your character has a very unusual surname. Mine, for instance, is so rare that every person who has it is at most a 3rd cousin.

(But it's not infallible. There are some branches of my family that adopted other variations of the name that are less identifiable. Plus one set that settled in Pittsfield MA in the early 20 c: when they started school there, teachers couldn't handle their real name so they all became "Robinson" instead...)


This is sooo true, and the further one goers back, the more varieties of spelling there are, even for the same person sometimes. Before the mid-to-late 1800s, it was really common for various clerks and registrars filling out records based on someone's oral information to simply spell a name the way it sounded to them. Sp, for instance, there could be Redmonds, Redmans, Redmonts etc. who are actually the same family, or even the same person (one example from one branch of my family tree I traced back to the 1600s)..

It's also possible to find errors when you have a family name that is fairly common, as I do. I was interested to find that one branch of our family has my paternal grandfather listed as a child of their own great grandparents with the same surname, but he was an only child, and I know the name of his parents. There was another man with the same first name as my own paternal great grandfathe living in Ohio at the time, but with a different middle name and parents. That guy had a lot of kids, so some other people constructing family trees assumed my paternal grandpa was one of their many great uncles or something.

This sort of thing is something one could include in a story where the plot requires the perusal of family trees, I suppose, if it adds to the tension or creates obstacles to overcome.
 
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