By now, you have probably seen commercials on TV about people who have found long lost family members using a popular website, Ancestry.Com. This site has been around for a while and has helped people find grandparents and even great grandparents that they wondered about. Most of the advertisements include those who found out about their fathers or grandfathers who they never knew and may have been told misleading information concerning the person. While this is a good place to start to look for long lost relatives, it is not the only site that offers you a quick peek into records that are public information. There are others and, if you dig far enough, you can get the information for free.
Information about long lost relatives takes two forms. It can be relatives that you have not seen in a while or never knew existed, or it can be your ancestors. To find your ancestors you have to go back a few generations. Finding out that your grandfather served in WWI is not finding an ancestor that you never thought you had. You knew you had a grandfather, might not have know much about him, but he is not an ancestor - he is a antecedent. Ancestors go many generations back and are people that you could not possible know because they died before you could have been born.
There are many reasons to find family members. Most of us have a desire to find out where we spring from. We may hope that we have famous relatives on our side. When I did my searches to find relatives I never knew I had, I found that one of the original “Untouchables” who worked with Eliot Ness was my second cousin, three times removed.
