This is just a small post to share a wonderful experience I had a few months ago in finding some estranged relatives. I was researching my father’s family, the Starr’s. In particular, I was looking to find out a bit more about the more recent members of the family. To give a bit of background, my father grew up having very little contact with his father’s family. To this day, I have been given a wide variety of reasons as to why this was the case. My father wasn’t even aware that his father had younger half siblings. My father also never knew his Starr grandfather, as he died before my father was born. By all accounts, my grandfather didn’t have a great upbringing with a military father. Anyway, I set out to trace the lives and loves of my grandfather’s siblings to the best of my ability. I managed to locate marriage records for both my grandfather’s older brothers through NSW BDM and electoral rolls had provided me with some insight into the children of one of the brothers but of course I could get no birth years from an electoral roll and as it was more recent than 100 years ago, NSW BDM was no use either.

After racking my brain as to how I could find more information, I remembered the Starr family Facebook group that I was a part of. I had been a very passive member up to this point, not asking for anything from the group and to be honest i didn’t have much hope as it seems that my line of the family isn’t widely researched. Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt so I posted the names on the site asking for any information that people could give me. Well, considering I didn’t have much hope I was completely bowled over by the positive response and the amount of information people were willing to share with me. Turned out that the site administrator, who has been researching the larger Starr family for decades, had a complete dossier on my line of the family that she was willing to share with me!! So, I was now armed with names and dates of birth of my father’s first cousins, who he didn’t even know existed. So, my tree was expanded once again. Ever the investigator, I wanted to see if I could find out more about these people as they are currently living so I started doing google searches to see what turned up.

Most of these people had common names or were females who had changed their names upon marrying or simply had very little of an online presence. Then I hit pay dirt, someone had an unusual name and I got a hit for his Linked In page which led me to find him on Facebook. It was such a shock, in a good way, to see the accompanying photo: it was the spitting image of my dad!! I plucked up the courage to send him a message via Linked In and not only did I get a reply, but he was interested in learning more about the family!! So, he ended up sending me a friend request on Facebook and we started an email relationship sharing information about our family.