Update on contacting a living relative

I posted almost a month ago I need advice - the best way to contact a living relative. The twist to the post was that they are not my relatives, but a friend's relatives. My friend, Ed, asked me to find information about his father in what I've named Project M in order to keep the identities of the players hidden.

I had many responses giving great advice - about half said to phone, about half said to write a letter, and DearMYRTLE said to let Ed do it - it's not my job. I really appreciate and value everybody's advice. So I asked Ed - do you want to make a phone call, or write a letter? I asked him to think about how he would feel if they were calling or writing him. He said that we should write a letter to all three of them and ask them to contact us by phone or email. He asked me to write the letter because I could do it easier and better than he could. So I did.

In the letter, I told the three half-siblings that I was Ed's friend, that he only wanted information about his father's life, and that I had found them from newspaper obituaries for their sister and mother that identified them by name, and then using the online public telephone sources at www.411.com to get their addresses. I listed Ed's and my names, phone numbers and email addresses. We'll see what happens now - they should get the letters late this week.

I fully understand DearMYRTLE's argument that writing and sending the letters wasn't my job, that it was my client's job. However, Ed is also a friend, and not able to do some things that he used to be able to do, so in the interest of "finding information about his father," I wrote the letters with his approval.

On the Project M research front, I received the SS5 application for Ed's father - he signed up in 1936, and it verifies his father's name, but the surname of his mother is given as C****, which is the surname of her second husband (both living at the time of the SS5), not Ed's grandfather. Argggh. Unless, C**** is really her maiden surname and she married another C****! I should check.

I've found quite a bit more information from the census and other online records about Ed's ancestry, and have added it to his family tree. He was genea-smacked to see how much I've found out about his ancestry. But he really wants to know about his father.

Stay tuned!