Today I’m on a mission to locate a living relative for a client. The person was born in 1930 after the 1930 U.S. Federal Census was taken. So where do I go next. I tried the county websites for the last known address, which was in 1980. Nothing popped up on the website, but I called the local historical society and they told me about a county website that has government records on line. They had nothing on the family at their society.
When I went on line for the government records, I located a marriage record, but they did not put the complete information on line, such as dates of birth. I called the courthouse and located a person who was willing to look on microfilm at the original record. This gave me dates of birth for the bride, my target person and her new husband. He was born 1919, she was born 1930. They were in western PA when married in 1980, so next I started looking on Switchboard.com for any people with the same last name, living in that same general area.
I located a number of families with that same last name and started calling them. On the second call I found a nephew of the husband of my target person. Through this person I found that the husband died some years ago, but the wife maybe still living or her children. Now it is just a matter of following up further with her to connect my client with her cousin.