How To Find Long Lost Family

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How to find long lost family. This is something that we are often asked about. Over the last 14 years we’ve located over 10,000 long lost family members.

Article Author

My name is David Oates, I am the Head Researcher at Relative Connections, you can view my LinkedIn by clicking here. I am also the director of the adoption support agency which is regulated by Ofsted. I am a highly regarded and experienced family tracer and intermediary. I have spoken about finding long lost family on BBC Radio 5 and was part of the featured team on BBC1’s Family Finders TV series.

Since 2008 we have used our extensive knowledge to help lots of people. We have been involved in some fascinating work to find peoples long lost family.

Here is an example from our completed searches archive. Hopefully by reading on you will learn how to find long lost family.

We found someone’s father. He was born in Libya but moved to the UK in the 1960s. After our client was born, he returned to Libya. All our client had was this information and a business card with his father’s full name and UK address from 1963.

This is tip number one…

Make sure you to hand, ALL the information you know about your long lost family member. Even if it is not very much.

The whole search was successfully completed because of this business card. It helped us identify the exact person we were looking for because we knew the information on the business card was correct.

This was a difficult search to begin with. It is hard to get any historical genealogy information about people in Libya, so how did we do it?

Firstly, we have a network of overseas researchers covering most countries. We also have specialist researchers in all aspects of people tracing. This includes DNA, Genealogy, Intermediary work etc.

We contacted our North African researcher based in Egypt.

He explained that it would be difficult to work on this but took all the information we had which was the business card. He spoke to his contacts, and they were able to speak to a researcher in Tripoli.

This took over 4 weeks of hard work on our part as we liaised with various researchers across North Africa. Luck did play a part but after this time we were able to establish that the long lost family we were looking for had left Libya for a second time in the 1970s, this time making Canada his destination.

This was a huge breakthrough in the search. It cannot be overstated how difficult it was to get this breakthrough and how many dead ends we reached, but we do not give up lightly.

So that’s tip number two.

The person you are looking for is out there somewhere. So don’t give up easily.

We took all the information we could from the researcher in Tripoli. This wasn’t much more than what we had before, but it did confirm that we had the correct spelling for his name. It also provided us with an age for the person and of course the key information that he moved to Canada in the 1970s.

That’s tip number three.

Keep adding to your information pile as you move your search forward through the years.

We had to keep the search moving forward, so we were back to our network of researchers.

We have a fantastic relationship with a researcher in Canada. This meant it was easy for us to provide him with all the key information we had about our long lost family member. It was over to them really from that point onward.

And that is tip number four.

It is what you know but also who you know.

By having the key information and knowing where to look to add to that information is key to a successful search when you are wondering how to find long-lost family. We have services that find your long-lost family for you. You can sit back and let us worry and work all this out for you.

If we can find people in Libya, then we can find them anywhere and often do. Most are in the UK, but we have found long-lost family members in Canada, USA, Australia, Europe as well as less common such as Paraguay, Iran and even the South China Seas.

If you would like to talk to us about your own search, then please do not hesitate to contact us on 0113 282 5900 or book a call back to chat further here. If you decide to go alone then good luck, and we hope this article will give you some ideas to help you think outside the box. Thank you for reading how to find long lost family.