Track down living relatives
If you’ve lost touch with a family member, follow Nick Peers’ tips to…
Reader Peter Carr got in touch with a question about tracing living relatives from his family tree – in his case a cousin who disappeared off the radar after marrying and moving to Wales.
Search the electoral roll
If you know roughly where your relative was living at any point after 2002, you may be able to track them down using the open version of the electoral roll (also known as the ‘edited electoral register’). This assumes they’ve remained on the edited register. If not, you’ll probably be able to track them down only to the point where – usually for privacy reasons – they opted out.
Find My Past offers access to the edited electoral register to people with a Plus subscription (£12.99 a month) - search at www.snipca.com/37197. Start by entering their name, then add what else you know – for example, another household member’s name, the county, town, or even last-known postcode – to see what comes up. You can then click to view a detailed transcript that reveals this information (see screenshot below left).
If necessary, carry out a fresh search for their name and other household members to see if you can identify their next address, and so on until they either disappear from the register or you reach 2020. If they disappear completely, they may have died or simply removed themselves from the open register. Another possibility is they’ve split from a partner or been widowed, in which case try a search without the partner’s name.
Search directory enquiries
Once you have their last-known address, search directory enquiries for free ( www. thephonebook.bt.com/person) to see if you can confirm their current contact details. Again, not everyone will appear here. It won’t find those who don’t have BT landlines, or who have chosen to go ex-directory.
Another way to search directory enquiries and the edited electoral registers simultaneously is through 192.com’s ‘Search People’ tool ( www.192. com/people). A basic search is free (see screenshot above), as are any results from directory enquiries, but you’ll have to pay for credits to access detailed information from the edited register (one per record). These cost £18 for six credits, £36 for 30, and £60 for 100.
192.com also offers a background check that can provide you with detailed information on a single individual within its records that includes the last five known addresses. This costs around £18 for each search.
Tracing someone’s movements up to 2002 is trickier because Ancestry’s phone books collection ( www.ancestry.co.uk/ search/collections/1025) sadly ends in 1984, leaving an 18-year gap to fill (see Grow Your Family Tree, Issue 589 for instructions on using it).
If you still draw a blank, download the British Library’s free guide to finding living relatives, including links to people-finding services. Typing the following URL into your browser will automatically download it as a PDF: www.snipca.com/37200.