Theory to Practice: Tracing a Living Relative Via the 1940 Census

Like most genealogists, I often write about the dead here. But one of my primary goals in my personal family history is to trace other lines down to living relatives. I’ve done so quite improbably sometimes, mostly through finding another researcher who’s researching the same line, such as another woman who descends from my sixth-great-grandparents. She turned out to be visiting my area shortly after I contacted her, and we met for coffee and research chat, and it was quite lovely. But I don’t know as I ever would have found her if she hadn’t also been researching the family.

But then there are the people who aren’t researching at all. My great-grandfather’s little brother had two families. After his first wife died in childbirth, he left the area where he’d been living, and his children stayed behind. My great-grandfather never mentioned this brother to his family, and his grandchildren had no idea that the brother had still been alive when they reached adulthood until I began doing genealogy research. Since discovering this, I have hoped to trace a descendant of the first family, particularly of the little boy who was not adopted by an outside family as the baby had been, but rather raised by relatives who lived in the area. (I was lucky; I found an obituary for the baby that included both the biological parents and the adoptive parents, so I knew what had happened to the baby over the course of its life.)

Slowly I have pieced together his life over the course of my genealogy research. The 1940 US federal census, released earlier this year, provided a new piece of the puzzle. He and the wife I’d previously found had divorced between 1930 and 1940, and he had a new wife and a new young child that appeared to be born to that wife. Using vital record indexes, I found that the then-child has already died, but I also found the index to the child’s birth record, which included the mother’s maiden name. With that information, I was able to find another child born to the same couple.

And that child is still alive.

I didn’t know for sure that she was; I did searches online and confirmed that she had fairly recently been alive, and got an address from an online directory. I wrote a snailmail letter to her, with no idea if it would reach its final destination – no idea whether she is still alive, and no idea whether the address was current even if she is still alive. Fairly often these letters don’t reach the person I’m trying to contact, but I figure it is worth the stamp and short amount of time it takes me to write them on the off chance that they will. As with letters to repositories, I always include my email address and phone number so that the person can contact me whatever way they prefer.

I had no idea whether the letter had ever arrived when one day I got a phone call from her. She left voicemail that she had received my letter and was very interested to talk to me about the information in it. After some phone tag eventually we were able to talk on the phone. It turned out that her grandfather (my great-grandfather’s brother) had never mentioned having any brothers to her. The only genealogy research she’d ever reviewed was her late aunt’s research, which she said consisted mostly of charts. She asked me to send her photos and some of my family history research, and I obliged.

I’m so happy to have found a “new” cousin.