Be a family tree sleuth

Sometimes the information you’d like to know about your family and its history isn’t in plain sight. With a computer and internet access, though, it can be possible to trace long-lost relatives, and we’ll show you how.

What you can do, for example, if the trail has grown cold, or if you want to know what it might have been like for a relative living through an historic event, such as the General Strike of 1926? Rather than packing the whole project in, it’s now that you need to turn detective and start thinking around the problem you’re trying to solve. But how can you do that?

Well, if you can’t find the person you’re looking for, maybe you can find their best friend, or someone they served with overseas. Maybe you can - virtually, of course - go back to the village where they grew up and see if there are any references to them there.

Maybe you remember an old boyfriend or girlfriend they used to speak about, or if it’s further in the past, perhaps there are letters they wrote, or postcards from a favourite holiday destination (remember that many families used to go back to the same place year after year), or even a club or society they used to belong to. No matter how elusive the person you’re searching for appears to be, they’ve undoubtedly left their mark somewhere along the line - the trick is to find it.

Online databases
A good starting point is one of the websites designed to help old friends and colleagues keep in touch. The largest of these is Friends Reunited. You might use it to catch up with someone you knew 25 years ago at school, but its records go back much further. So, it may be possible to find someone who went to a particular primary school back in 1911 or who used to be a member of a fishing club in the late 1950s, or who did amateur dramatics, played cricket or ran a local young farmer’s association.

Similarly, it may be possible to track down someone via their place of work or their unit in the armed forces, or by looking up the street where they used to live. However, Friends Reunited’s records only go back as far as its members’ lives, so its information is largely about the 20th century.

Military connections
Many people enter basic information about themselves on services such as Friends Reunited on a whim, but never complete the full forms. Others, however, go the whole hog and tell you what they’re doing now, post photographs and positively encourage contact. Like most services of this type, Friends Reunited allows you to search its database to find people free of charge. However, if you want to contact anyone, you’ll have to pay a small fee - in this case, £7.50. But with more than six million people registered in the primary schools section alone, it’s pretty good value.

If you want to find someone who was in the Army, Navy or Air Force, however, you’re better off using either Service Pals or Forces Reunited. Of the two, Forces has the larger membership at 378,000, compared with Service Pals’ 110,000, but both can help to track down those who served in the armed forces, and they work in a similar way. Service Pals has a top-level search where you can type in the name of a person to see if they’ve signed up to the website; and there are multiple forums, which include a missing persons section. If you want to email anyone or post to the forums, it costs £7.50 a year.

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