Have you lost contact with a member of your Lodge or maybe their widow? Have you received a report about a member passing away, but don’t have the date? Below is a list of free websites that we regularly use in the Grand Lodge office to locate current addresses, date of death records, et cetera.
Our first avenue for information search: www.google.com – type in first and last name, city, and state. The more detail you enter, the better the results. Your search results will offer websites showing information for the person you are looking for. Most of the time, we find what is needed at this step or from one of the results.
Searching death notices: these are the common public websites where we seem to have the best results when searching for members or family who have passed away.
www.tributes.com
www.familytreenow.com
www.findagrave.com
www.legacy.com
Address/person search: these are common public websites we use for genealogy research. We receive requests from members and families trying to fill in the blanks, and these have been very helpful. Sometimes our membership archives are just enough to find the next piece of information.
www.whitepages.com
www.anywho.com/whitepages
www.familytreenow.com
www.mylife.com
www.besthistorysites.net
www.nuwber.com
The Grand Secretary’s office subscribes to www.beenverified.com. This site offers addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and more. There is a fee for this site, but it has proved to be very beneficial for our office research.
If you need assistance with your genealogy research, call the office at
(614) 885-5318, ext 1, or email GLOffice@Freemason.com to connect with
Darlene Shirk. She is our resident genealogy expert. We have access to over
two-million member records for the Grand Lodge of Ohio. She can often find the needle in the haystack for those challenging names or locations.
We hope this information is helpful to locate members that you haven’t heard from or who may
have passed away and the Lodge was not notified. Please feel free to share your special tools or websites that have proven helpful for you when doing this type of research. We’ll add them to
this list. Good luck with your research!
