When there are major life changing events, it might start people thinking about their family, both near and far. It might also start them thinking that it is time to plan a family reunion. For some families, it is as simple as opening the door and saying, picnic time and the cousins, aunts and uncles from three counties will start showing up.

For other families, however, it might be more difficult to locate family members that have moved a thousand times. Some family members may not have stayed in contact with their own direct relations so it will be even harder to find them. Some may not even want to be found. But, once you get an idea in your head, it is often impossible to sway you, so it becomes a quest to locate family and get this family reunion underway.

One of the easiest ways to locate family is with the social media networking sites. Facebook is one of the biggest of these and may bring you closer to your family than you ever intended. If you are not familiar with Facebook or the other socialnet sites, joining is easy and currently free. You sign up for a profile and then post your information. Friends (contacts, actual friends and family members alike) send friend requests and then can post comments, pictures and videos to your profile. They can also send you private messages through Facebook as well.

Once you become a member, you can post on your wall (your profile page) that you are trying to locate family and your friends and others can help you out with whatever information they might have. What is great about these sites is simple- if you have a friend named Sue who lives in Detroit, she might be friends with your cousin Dan who lives in one of the suburbs and instantly you may have found one cousin already. Dan knows where his mother and two of his brothers live, so you have already started to locate family without any effort at all.

Another method that can be used to locate family is with genealogy sites that can help you trace your family tree. You might be surprised to find how many of your family members are concentrated in a certain part of the world.

You might also be surprised to find out how many of these same family members are on this site as well. If you would rather not trace your entire family tree, you can use people search sites to locate family as well, starting with the last name and then narrowing the results down. A very common last name will generate thousands of results while a less common one will have fewer results. The benefit of course will also be that most of the results will actually be related with the less common last name.

A final method to locate family is with an email chain- starting with the person that you suspect might know the most people in your family. Send the same email to everyone and see how many responses that you get. It might be worded simply: “Trying to locate family of J and J Smith, please help.”