In my own case, my parents were long deceased and I wasn’t sure where to start. I had to locate my father’s birth certificate (amongst many other documents), but I didn’t know where he was born.

Through an old photo album and hours of Googling, and plain luck, I came into contact with a long-lost cousin in Germany on the web and through him, obtained many of the documents I needed.

Sometimes it’s a matter of digging through old family papers. When my cousin could not locate my parents’ marriage certificate after writing to government offices in Berlin, Poland, and even the Czech Republic, I thought I’d never be able to prove that my parents were married. I decided to go through some of my mother’s old papers, and bingo, I found my parents’ Stammbuch that recorded my parents’ marriage and my birth. (The reason I didn’t dig deeper into old family records to begin with was because I thought I’d found them all and I was living in another country at the time I started to collect the necessary documents.)

With persistence and luck, I not only learned about my past family history but also about the more recent history that I thought had been lost to me upon the death of my father and mother. And in the process, I reconnected with a cousin I last saw when I was 3 years old.