Are you trying to retrace your family tree? Are you looking for someone whether it be a long lost love, a high school friend or simply someone you haven’t seen in yours? Have you been looking for someone but aren’t sure if they’re deceased or alive? There is a possibility that the person you may be looking for is no longer alive… so how can you find them? It is easy if you know a couple of secrets…
Eventually, we all want to find someone. Many times it is as simple as finding an old friend who you simply wondered what happened to them. Recently, many people have been tracing back their family trees to understand their background. Unfortunately, the possibility that the person that you end up looking for is deceased is a strong one, particularly if that person is somewhat removed from your daily circle of friends and family or if you haven’t contacted them in a long time. It is a fact of life, but that doesn’t make the search for them any easier, as they no longer own property, don’t have a phone number, and don’t have any bank accounts.
You can, however, find them in many government records. There are plenty of records that will have a reference to them, like death records and previous probate decisions. However, unfortunately, there isn’t one single government program that hold all of this information in one single place. It is probably there, and most of it you can access for free, but you simply need to find it, and gaining access to it isn’t always easy.
If you have an idea of where they last lived, you can first visit or write to their local government office in that state or county and look up their death record. If you’re extremely lucky, you will be able to track down the date they died and check out the local obituaries for that day or a few days after and learn something about them. In all of the instances in which you are trying to find information on someone who has passed away, or even just want to know if they’re alive, very few are successful by using this method.
There are, however, public records databases that exist. There are literally millions of records that are brought together and indexed by organizations whose sole purpose is to bring information together and index it. Not only do they have death records, but they have many other records such as marriage records, some census data, and property records. They bring all of this information together and put it into an easy to view format that will leave you with all the information you’ll ever want to know on the person you’re looking for.