Tracing living descendents

I would love to do that for my mother's family. Her father died in WW1 and there seems to have been no contact with her father's family after his death. My grandmother was the only one of her generation to have children and all the previous generation except my great grandmother migrated to the USA.

I did vaguely trace one of my grandfather's family and sent a message through Ancestry or some other site, but I have had no reply, but since I very rarely check my inbox on that site regularly, it is possible it was never received.

These are the ones I did not know about, but they contacted me from genes reunited and friends reunited, before I knew about findmypast and ancestry.
I haven't been in touch with them much since my husband died, however, as putting that on line makes it much more final, if you understand what I mean. In fact I haven't put anything online since then although I do check to see if there are any more strange cousins.
My mother's grandmother was one of eight. Her father was one of eight, so there are a lot of extra cousins I knew nothing about.
One of them has sent me all her family tree. Her great grandad was the City Treasurer in Hull. He had 9 children. My great grandmother was his eldest sister and was sensible, only having four children.
I have a family tree which is like a roll of wallpaper. It would take me years to contact all of the living, so I get messages from only a few of them, but once you have contact with one, you will find you keep getting messages from others you do not know, providing you give permission for your email address to be passed on.

mrsmop. Get all the information you have from the 1911 census and start looking for marriages and deaths. Also look at WW1 deaths if the family were of that age.
I have a branch of my fathers line originally from Chester who went to Liverpool C1840s Probably with the railways. He was born C1810
This ancestor from Chester married a woman with a a distinctive surname which became a family middle name and now goes through several generations of the family of a younger brother of my direct line ancestor. I have found addresses for this person who has migrated from Liverpool to Lancashire. I am tempted to write but younger men are not in the group likely to be interested. I have only ever had two first cousins. Maybe one day.

I do actually know about my 1st cousins, i.e. Children of my aunts and uncles, on my mothers side, but going back a generation to my paternal grandfather's eleven siblings, these are the 2nd cousins I would like to trace. I have researched all eleven of them, but ground to a halt at the 1911 census, as their descendants would have bern born after 1911.
As a child i remember meeting lots of great aunts and uncles at my grandfathers house, but took little interest at the time. Now i hope to find their children. There must be quite a few of them. I'd love to meet them.

I had a lot of cousins contact me through friends reunited.
My mother was an only child, and my father the eldest of ten. They lived in the area where my mother grew up, so I knew her cousins as my aunts and uncles, even though they were not.
My dad's family I am still in touch with anyway. My mother's father was the eldest of 8, but I never knew until one of my cousins got in touch. They live in places like Wales and Scarborough, so quite spread out.
The good thing about finding cousins is that they will put you right if you have made any mistakes on your tree.

We have found cousins simply through adding our tree to as many of the free genealogy websites as possible. Mostly they have contacted us via email.
We have found a "cousin" with the same name as DH because the family name went down two lines - no clue as to why!!
My mother has been able to visit a cousin - all she knew was that her aunt had married a Welshman named Jones. We thought that one was an impossibility, but it turned out that their granddaughter was on a family search too!!
Good luck mrsmopp

Good luck Mrsmopp I had 2nd cousins actually find me through a Local history society. Long story.With one, by e-mail contact ,we did quite a lot of family history together. We "talked" for 18months but she was never interested in meeting and sadly she died ,but she had put me in touch with two others with whom I still correspond and one has visited with his wife and I hope also to meet the other one. It has been fascinating to hear about their lives since their Grandfather moved his family away to look for work and strangely my mother had never spoken of them. I don't even know if she knew they existed.

There is a website called Lost Cousins (www.lostcousins.com) that is very helpful. You enter your known relatives and then search to see if anyone else has them in their tree. It tells you how to do this, and then you can send messages to them. The good thing about this site is that it matches exact entries from the census, so you can be sure you are talking about the same relative.