How Do You Trace Long Lost Relatives Overseas?

Tracing long lost relatives overseas is an extremely difficult thing to do on your won. It’s hard to give specific information as each country has different rules and regulations that’s relate to data and information about peoples whereabouts and personal details.

 

Saying that there are still things that you can do to trace long lost relatives overseas and the good news is most of these can be done online.

 

Firstly you can post on message boards. I guess we would say that but the truth is Missing You gets visitors from all over the world so it’s a great place to start.

 

You could also try social media. Social media is a great way to locate people and you can use the search boxes on most social media websites to bring up a list of people with that name. This isn’t always helpful due to the popularity of say Facebook. There are a lot of John Smiths on there! So even if you’re relative was on there, it can be extremely hard to confirm that it’s them you’ve found and not a namesake. Obviously if their name is unusual then it’s a great way to trace relatives overseas so it shouldn’t be dismissed.

 

If these don’t help you might have to do some further digging to get to the bottom of your search.

 

Most English speaking countries have some data on Ancestry and other genealogy sites so these can be a great way of progressing your search. Find My Past is another good option to do this. If you’re searching a country that is not represented on these genealogy websites it might be worth looking for other options by searching Genealogy websites and then the country you are wanting to search in.

 

Why would I search genealogy websites to find a living relative anyway?

 

That’s a great question. Genealogy sites provide us with the ability to look at birth, death and marriage records. These are great to help you work out how and who you are related to but also allow you to find out details that make finding them possible. Looking for Wendy Graham would be good but if she re-married and is now Wendy Jones it would make the Wendy Graham search redundant.

 

You could also try the online white pages. Most countries have some type of white pages (the phone book) online. Some are better than others but again it’s another great tactic to tracing long lost relatives. The best part about this one is that if you do get lucky and they are on there then you’re going to get their phone number too!

 

If these little tricks and tips don’t work, don’t worry too much, if you followed the first step and placed a message on our message board that could get a response at any time in the future so that’s great news.

 

If you’re wanting to do more though there is still more that you can do. At this stage though you will incur costs in these searches but the more you pay the more chance you have of getting to the bottom of the search.

 

Using overseas researchers to trace long lost relatives

You can normally find a private investigator or genealogists by searching LinkedIn for the country you are looking for your relative in. You can approach these guys and get them to be your eyes and ears on the ground. Basically they can search records and achieves for you and report back to you. No the difficult thing with this approach is it’s hard to work out the good researchers from the bad ones. The one who actually get moving with your search and uncover lots of things compared with the ones that don’t do very much at all.

 

To combat this there is only one thing that you can do. Well maybe two if you are very determined and money is no object. If that’s the case you could always fly to the country in question and personally trace long lost relatives that way.thought not! Ok so back in the real world the final option would be to instruct a people tracing company with a global reach. Our suggestion? Well that would be to contact a few and ask them what countries they search in but also how they search in that particular country.

 

Thank you for visiting the site today and I hope that’s helped you gain some tips on how you trace long lost relatives overseas. We would strongly recommend that you place an ad with us and trust in the power of the Missing You website.

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