How To Locate A Relative With Public Records

Name variants, approximate age, last known places, relatives and event dates.

NARA recommends names, dates, places and relationships as core genealogy clues.

From NARA’s Catalog Guide, open the National Archives Catalog. Try the full name and spelling variants, then the relevant event or record topic with a place; narrow the results using filters. Open a description and compare its dates, places and relationships with what you already know. If there is a digital image, inspect the original record. If there is only a description, use the holding unit’s contact details there to ask how to access the record. Many catalog descriptions omit personal names, so a failed name search does not establish that no historical record exists.

A court docket or agency record is evidence of that event, not proof of current residence.

For a living relative, a privacy-respecting next step is to ask a family contact you already know to pass along your message and your own contact details, without asking them to disclose the relative’s address. If the relative has voluntarily offered a current public contact channel, send one brief introduction explaining the family connection and let them choose whether to reply. Do not assume a profile is the right person, publish a dossier, or treat no reply as permission for repeated contact. NARA’s historical records cannot supply a current living-person locator.

Look for multiple independent identifiers before concluding two records describe the same person.