If you have lost relatives while migrating to Europe, you can use the tracing tool Trace the Face, an online photo gallery to help you find family members.
Trace the Face
Search for your family yourself
If you or your relatives have migrated to Europe and lost contact, you can directly look for each other on Trace The Face, wherever you are in the world: be it Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Syria but also France, Great Britain, Sweden or Germany. The only information available online are people’s photos and their family relationship with the missing person. If you recognise someone in one of the pictures, you can send a message online to contact a Tracing Service support centre.
Start your search now
Give your family the opportunity to find you
If you have not found the picture of the family member you are looking for here, please contact the nearest support centre of the GRC Tracing Service. A team dedicated to tracing missing persons will process your request with the utmost diligence. The GRC Tracing Service is linked to other Red Cross and Red Crescent teams around the world who can also help. The Tracing Service staff will collect all the information and data useful in the search for your missing relative. Your photo can also be published on Trace the Face if you wish.
Reuniting families on a weekly basis
Thanks to Trace the Face, more and more families who have lost contact with their relatives are being reunited. On average, one family per week worldwide, and the number is growing. Read some of the success stories here.
One website - 7 languages
Tracetheface.org is currently available in seven languages: Arabic, Dari, English, French, Pashto, Somali and Spanish. More languages are to come.
Trace the Face is also a poster.
It is not compulsory to publish one’s photo online to use Trace the Face. You can also decide that your picture should only appear on the Trace the Face poster. This poster features 16 photos of people looking for their relatives. Each month, a new poster is printed with different pictures. Copies are sent to all participating tracing services of the Red Cross/Red Crescent and to the ICRC. The posters are displayed in locations where they are likely to be seen by migrants.
Trace the Face -Kids-
You can search for your family with a photo, even if you are under the age of 15. You can search for your child or a minor family member in our photo gallery, even if that child is under 15 years old.
To ensure the safe tracing of unaccompanied minor refugees, Trace the Face-Kids- is a password-protected, non-public area within the www.tracetheface.org website. Only Red Cross tracing services post photos of children and young people searching for their relatives and of relatives searching for their children here. The pictures can only be viewed together with a Tracing Service employee. The photos are not published in the online photo gallery Trace the Face.
Start your search now and contact the GRC Tracing Service.
The GRC Tracing Service has more than 75 years of experience in searching with photos: After the end of the Second World War, for example, photos of children whose parents were looking for them were published. For reasons of data protection, we now only use photos of persons who have given their consent.
E-learning course for persons offering support services
The module teaches you how Trace the Face works and how to explain it to persons who are looking for their loved ones. Each E-learning module has several lessons. At the end of each lesson, you will find a compulsory quiz that needs to be solved to be able to proceed to the next section. Each module takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes. At the end of the training, a diploma can be printed out and a short evaluation is offered.
