Recent relatives

One of the great genealogical research problems, for me, is my recent relatives.

The folks I am refering to are either still alive or recently deceased.  In either case, they are near enough that their data is most difficult to ferret out.  Most marriages, births, etc that have occurred in the last 50 years and are hard or REALLY expensive to get. I guess that’s because of identify theft, etc.  In any event, there are times when you (or at least I) need some of this information in order to get accurate genealogical data for select branches of the family.  So are there any tricks?  Well I have come up with a few.  If you have others, by all means share them in our comments area! Here are mine:

• Use sites like BeenVerified. These sites provide access to people who are alive, but ,also to those who have died in the last decade or so.  Don’t tell anyone, but their clean-up processes are not frequent or even thorough.
• Newspaper Archive provides access to selected Newspaper Articles.  The big problem being their database is anything but complete.
• Google News Archive also provides a reasonable set of recent information. It just doesn’t ever seem to have the stuff I really need!

If you have other tricks please share them in the comments area with our readers.

May all your information be readily available!