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Oftentimes you will find a connection between yourself and an unknown person who you just discovered is a distant relative. Sometimes it may be useful to contact such people and ask them what they may know about the history of the family, but it can also take some skill to do so.
For this demonstration, I will be investigating Jon Zmikly. I had some reservations about doing this, but since this is all public information I’d say the worst this could be in regards to ethics is a grey area, and Professor Zmikly should know that my using him as an example is not out of any type of malice, but simply because he is a person my fellow classmates, who are most likely to discover this blog, can relate to. Zmikly probably knows that all of this information can be obtained about him and I shan’t think he’ll be very surprised. I am merely using him as an example of how to find reliable contact information for a living person. This information is very useful for the genealogist. I must stress that this should only be used to find people whom you have a legitimate interest to contact (i.e. you have discovered that you are related or you are using them for the purposes of a demonstration for a blog about genealogy which you are doing for your MC4381 class). I myself have used these methods numerous times to establish contact and reunite with distant estranged family members. The most important thing is, as with anything, to use these techniques for good and not for evil. If you’ve found a connection between yourself and another person, you most likely know something about them which can help you find them, such as the general area of where they live or have lived, so we’ll use the information we know about Professor Zmikly to help track him down. This information is often similar to what you would have.
Note, I’m not going to publish an extreme amount of the information which can be found about Professor Zmikly here, but I will be explaining how to find it, as the demonstration necessitates. Also note that none of this information has been verified by Zmikly, himself. So, let us begin. We all know Professor Zmikly is from the Detroit area, but more specifically, he is from a small, affluent outer suburb of Detroit known as Oxford, Michigan. His legal name is Jonathan Thaddeus Zmikly and he was born on June 15, 1984 to Kenneth and Haline Zmikly. His parents still maintain a residence in Oxford, Michigan. It appears he has an older brother named Joseph Kenneth Zmikly who was born exactly one year to the day before himself. How do I know all this stuff? It’s actually very simple.
The first resource we are going to use is our friend Familysearch.org, where public records, which contain the kind of information you would find in a phonebook, can be easily searched. So let’s go to FamilySearch and click on the Search tab, type in Jon Zmikly and tell the system to limit the search to records pertaining to Michigan. We obtain a list of different people with variations of the name John, Joan, Joann, etc., most of whom we know could not possibly be Professor Zmikly because they are either too old or they are death records. At the bottom of the first results page, however, are two records of a “Jonathan Thaddeus Zmikly,” born on June 15, 1984 and living in Oxford, Michigan. We can find out from a simple Wikipedia search that Oxford is in the Detroit area and that it is located in Oakland County. Knowing the county can actually be very helpful, and that will present itself shortly. So, the number one question is, how do we know that this is the Jon Zmikly we are looking for?
For that, we will go to our next resource, WhitePages.com, and search for Jonathan Thaddeus Zmikly in Oxford, Michigan. We get two results, the first of which also has an address for Jonathan Zmikly in San Marcos, Texas, which pretty much confirms that it is the right Jonathan Zmikly. Unfortunately, the address given in San Marcos, Texas corresponds to one unit within a duplex, so it is likely that this address cannot be confirmed by searching the county’s property tax rolls. This is not true for the address given in Oxford, a search of which on the tax rolls of Oakland County, available at http://apps.oakgov.com/etax0002/index.jsp, shows the owners as Kenneth and Haline Zmikly, Professor Zmikly’s parents. Accompanied with these records are three different phone numbers which present potential methods of contact.
As you can probably see, addresses are often the easiest form of contact information to obtain, so sometimes snail mail may be the best or only way to contact a distant relative whom you have recently discovered.
Lastly but not least, it can be beneficial to make yourself easy to find so that others may contact you. I hope this post has been very informative for you and could help you in your research, and finding someone if you ever need their help.
Thank You.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentini
Giosuè Genealogy 