Obituaries are your BFF

So, you've made a mirror tree to find your family, but of course privacy is the utmost concern nowadays and you cannot see any living people in the families tree or trees you have been mirroring through websites like Ancestry.

Be prepared to work for it, get out your magnifying glass and your Sherlock Holmes hat, and investigate. If the last living relative is John Smith , from Miami, FL who died in 2015, there is a good chance his obituary contains the names and towns of his living relatives as well as those who passed before. These are tremendous clues!

So start searching obituaries online, use what you know to find the correct person, and add the information to your mirror tree. Adding previously deceased people will help you too, and for those who are living, you now have names, and places to start looking up Publicly Accessable Info, such as address to write letters.

Happy Investigating.