<p>I am trying to figure out how to track down a long lost family member. I have her maiden name, birthday and parents names. I think she lived in the same county as us as a small child but do not know what state she is in now. I would like to find her, but have no clue how to start looking. I have googled her name but to no avail. Any tips?</p>
<p>She may not want to be found.</p>
<p>Try googling the parents? </p>
<p>A way that I found long lost elementary school classmates for a reunion was through road race results! People don’t realize their names & ages get posted to the results even for local 5Ks and these make their way to the internet. Use nicknames (Jim vs James).</p>
<p>Facebook is another place, as most women include their maiden name. Granted common names like Smith or Jones will produce thousands of possibilities.</p>
<p>Good Luck!</p>
<p>I’ve sometimes had success with [Pipl</a> - People Search](<a href=“http://www.pipl.com%5DPipl”>http://www.pipl.com) if the name isn’t too common.</p>
<p>I found my father’s long lost cousin via anybirthday.com. Fortunately he was delighted to be found, but as LasMa suggests above, that’s not always the case.</p>
<p>I would think that other relatives in common would be the way to go- if noone knows where she is- then just putting the word out that you are looking for her- then if she wants to, she can find you.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.Ancestry.com%5B/url%5D”>www.Ancestry.com</a> allows a 2 week trial period for free. I suggest this because it allows you to find other family members and then you can use [The</a> Official WhitePages - Find People for Free](<a href=“http://www.whitepages.com%5DThe”>http://www.whitepages.com).</p>
<p>I found a family member this way. The reason why is that I tracked them through their children. Birth records appear on ancestry. Thus, you can find them that way. All you need to do is input the birth parent, and Census records pop up with different states. View the census because you know the age, and you can track back that way. When you track back, than you can tract forward for the census and BAM, you now have their city/state and married name…use white pages and you have their phone number.</p>
<p>Another way to go is googling the Census for the last time you know they were there. Then, see who was in the home with them, and google those names. This is much harder…so much easier to take the 14 day trial memberships at ancestry and go that way.</p>
<p>I was very polite, and I explained to the family I am doing an ancestry lineage and looking to see if this is SO AND SO’s family. They were gracious like I would have been, and asked for family details. A few hours later they contacted me.</p>
<p>The only thing I will say about ancestry.com is it can become very addictive. I landed up pay 40 bucks, because in the 2 week trial period I was able to do a huge search, and I had to keep going. In the end, I actually quit because my head hurt from how long the line went. I made it to 1042 AD. I learned I had Revolutionary ancestry, Indian Ancestry, Mayflower ancestry,European counts, British knights, etc. I finally said ENOUGH! Ancestry.com actually contacted me because they watch over the site, and saw that using their site I can go back very far. I am still waiting for them to verify if I didn’t screw up…they told me it would be @ 6 mos for their verification. The avg ancestry.com client can only go back 5 generations.</p>
<p>Haha I have just now started to use ancestry.com which us what got me started on this chase! I have found her birth records which is where I got her birthday and parents names. I am totally on a genealogy kick right now and ancestry.com has been a huge help! She was born after the 1930 census which is the last one on ancestry.com and I can’t find her on the 1950 census substitute. I have been able to go back around 10 generations on one side of my family. Wonder if we are related? :)</p>
<p>Yes, I was going to say that census records won’t help for anyone born after 1930, since the 1930 census is the most recent one to be made public, in 2002. (The privacy laws governing census records extend for 72 years, so the 1940 census will be released in 2012. Please don’t be fooled by ancestry.com’s so-called “census substitutes”; it’s a rather absurd marketing gimmick for ancestry to suggest that they’re remotely equivalent to having access to actual census data.)</p>
<p>I’ve been an ancestry.com member for years, and have found it most useful for tracing relatives who were born or lived in the U.S. For researching European Jewish genealogy, there are far better resources (even although jewishgen.org recently gave some of its databases to ancestry with the proviso that they would always remain free.)</p>
<p>I think finding this woman through relatives is clearly the best option, since you know only her birth name. Are you sure she ever married, and that she’s still alive? Just in case, you should check her birth name on the Social Security Death Index on ancestry.com to make sure she didn’t die without marrying. </p>
<p>Think about using databases of newspapers to check for obituaries and possible marriage notices. Think about possibly looking for will/probate records, if you know when and where this woman’s parents died. If there’s any possibility she inherited a residence from her parents and later sold it, and you know the address (or can find it out from, say, old telephone books), consider investigating records of real property transactions. All depending, of course, on how much effort you wish to put into this!</p>
<p>PS: The most remote direct ancestor I’ve been able to identify (not on ancestry.com), in the close to 20 years I’ve been researching my family history (on and off), is an 11th-great-grandfather (that is, 13 generations back), a certain Joseph (b. abt 1540, d. about 1610), who lived in the town of Alschwill near Basel, and was a physician, living in the town with the permission and under the protection of Bishops Melchior de Liechtenfels and Jacques-Christophe Blarer de Wartensee, and exempt from paying Schutzgeld* after May 10, 1590.</p>
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<li>=“Protection money” – the sums that Jews were required to pay on an annual basis in all the German-speaking lands in order to obtain and maintain permission to live in any given town, to buy a house, to get married, etc., etc., until Jewish emancipation in the 19th century. In other words, legalized extortion!</li>
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