Connect With Extended Family This Thanksgiving

Connecting with family over Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time to be with friends and family. If you already know (and get along with) everyone in your extended family, you can end up with quite the group around the table. But if you don’t have that family around, it can be difficult having to celebrate Thanksgiving without them.

Have you lost contact with your extended family, or never kept in contact in the first place? You might want to reach out and reconnect for these important reasons:

-Have a happier (and bigger) Thanksgiving

-Reunite before the holidays

-Be able to give your children a bigger family

Create a More Robust Thanksgiving Table

Having an in-person Thanksgiving celebration can be an important part of Thanksgiving for many people. Do you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal, or just want to spend some time with the people you love? Either way, the Thanksgiving table can be the perfect place to connect with the people who are most important.

When you reconnect with your extended family, you’re able to bring more people around that Thanksgiving table. Plus, it’s a great time to get to know each other a little bit. With the love and kindness you can experience around the Thanksgiving table, you will hopefully be able to repair existing relationships and forge new ones.

Expand in Time for the Holidays

As winter approaches, you’re probably going to start gearing up for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and other winter celebrations. These are also times you tend to spend with your family. So, having new family members around for the holidays can just add to the sense of belonging you want to feel.

Plus, winter holidays are centered around the same sense of togetherness as Thanksgiving. So they can also be a time to mend wrongdoings. If you’re disconnected from extended family members because of previous problems you had with them, those grudges can follow you around for years. Instead, consider reaching out before Thanksgiving to talk about resolving those conflicts.

Introduce Your Kids to a Fuller Family

If you have kids, you might want them to connect with a larger family than just the immediate one they have at home. There are lots of important adult relatives that could figure into a child’s life. Sure, it’s definitely possible for someone to live a fulfilling life without grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. But those extended family members can help them develop a sense of community you just won’t get anywhere else.

Even if you don’t currently have kids, you might want to consider connecting for the sake of kids you might have in the future. You might also consider the extended family around you, who would probably love to meet your kids and form that relationship. A family is made up of lots of people, not just yourself and your kids. Having that family around can benefit everyone in the picture, in the future as well as the present.

How Do I Connect With Extended Family?

One or more of these reasons might be enough to convince you to start looking into your extended family. Whether you’re estranged, disconnected or just never met your relatives, it can be difficult to determine how to start. You might start with social media, asking your existing family, or using an ancestry site.

These are all possible options. Or you might want to try using a site like PeopleFinders. PeopleFinders has access to billions of records for millions of American adults, including things like physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and more.

This makes it easier than ever to try and reconnect with your relatives. If you perform a people search on yourself, you may be able to see the names of relatives you didn’t even know about, making it easier to expand your search. And with tools like the reverse phone search, you can utilize other pieces of information you already have about your relatives to try and find one’s that missing.

Conclusion

Holidays like Thanksgiving are supposed to bring families together. Even if you don’t have a preexisting extended family, it might be worth it to try and create that familial connection. Whether it’s to bring family around the table by the end of November, or just to reach out and connect when you’re ready, PeopleFinders can help you build the connection you’re looking for.

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