Working on genealogy, genetic or otherwise, is much like being lost on a deserted island. The first thing you do once you’ve got your basics covered is to move the rocks to spell HELP so that anyone flying by can see it. I’ve attracted the attention of a few people by doing this, so I’d like to share a few ways in which this can be done.

Many people have privacy concerns about having public family trees and the like, but if your goal is to find cousins, then making a family tree private is like having a giant HELP made out rocks and promptly covering it up with a tarp. Maybe someone will ask what you have under the tarp, maybe not. Given the successes I have had in connecting with family, I feel confident about my decision to leave digital breadcrumbs everywhere, but this is a decision everyone has to make for themselves.

Obviously the easiest way to find cousins is by the fact that you share DNA. However, there are several DNA companies so unless you’ve tested with all of them, you’re bound to miss some. Uploading your DNA for free to GEDmatch is one way to cover the gap between companies, plus it offers tools that some of the testing companies don’t (*glares at Ancestry*). I believe MyHeritage also allows free autosomal transfers, as does Geni.

Making a family tree online is another way to leave your mark. You should definitely make a family tree to go with your DNA, wherever it is (although be careful to check that living people are automatically marked private -this is not done at GEDmatch). Geni allows you to build a family tree for free as part of their world family tree. MyHeritage is another free family tree builder. Of course I can’t forget the free family tree builder at Family Search! In addition, Family Search is the only place that I know of where records are free to search and to attach records to your tree (Bless the Mormons! We would not be able to do the genealogy research that we do without everything they’ve done). Keeping all these trees updated can be a bit of a pain, but it’s worthwhile when family finds you as a result of your work.

Family has found me this way by doing online searches for family members. A descendent of my husband’s 3rd great-grandfather found my Geni tree when she was doing a search for this great-grandfather, and it was nice to connect. Cousins who have searched for our relatives have subsequently connected with me to ask about my research, and I am able to share knowledge with them that their parents never knew. “I was stolen away,” my great-grandfather told his children. Thanks to my research I was able to tell them who raised him. Hopefully I’ll also be able to get DNA from these cousins to help me sort out DNA matches on this side of the family.

I connected with another distant cousin via the website Lost Cousins. I like this novel way to connect by finding your ancestors on the census. The program matches you with other members who have found the same ancestor on the same census. While this is only useful to people who can find their ancestors on certain English, Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and American censuses, given that these cover pretty much all my ancestors, this is perfect for me. The proof is in the pudding -a cousin contacted me and proceeded to share with me all of her genealogical research, taking my family tree back another 200 years on that branch.

Finally, posting in online forums and mailing lists is a great way to connect. The specific forum or mailing list will depend on the specifics of your family tree. My husband’s 3rd great grandfather was a rabbi, and an email to a rabbinical genealogy mailing list resulted in a link to a forum that had posted a 4 page article about him. The article referenced a book written by a relation: a few google searches and emails later and I was connected to previously unknown distant cousins in Israel who shared pictures and their branches of this family tree.

As you can see, if you have an interest in connecting with family, there are many ways to go about it. I look forward to many more successes using these resources.