When all I have to go on is a name and a surname of a relative, I will first run that through the Social Security Death Index and get a list of names from which I will eliminate the possibilities until I get a place of death.

I will then contact the public library, county historical/genealogy society, the newspaper, and/or funeral home and determine where the obituary and details about the funeral might be found. You can usually go on line to a site like www.internment.net and find where your relative was buried too.

If you have a relative with a very unusual first name, you can sometimes run the SSDI search with just the first name alone.

Just something that may help other family researchers.

Thanks to Joe Ocho for today's Quick Tip! If you have a tip you would like to share with researchers, you can send it to ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

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