Almost 44% of Americans report feeling the presence of or communicating with a deceased relative in the past year, according to recent survey data. A recent study estimates that living Black and white Americans, representing about 217 million people, maintain 755 million ties to deceased close relatives.
Demographers typically study the living, but researchers asked an unusual demographic question to determine what a population of deceased relatives looks like. The study focused specifically on deceased grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and children using a modeling framework called demographic microsimulations. This approach produces results only for Black and white Americans and excludes groups with high percentages of foreign-born individuals who have family abroad. While the study focused on populations as of July 2020, the analysis was updated and weighted to the estimated population as of October 2026.
Size and Characteristics of Deceased Relatives
The modeling decisions involved counting only deceased relatives who died after the birth of at least one person still alive, ensuring someone remains who could remember them. Deceased persons were counted based on how many relatives they have in the living population; for example, a deceased 60-year-old man survived by a spouse, an adult child, a grandchild and a sibling is counted four times to reflect being remembered by four living individuals. This quantified population represents a count of direct relative ties remaining to those who are dead, classified by their age at death.
The results revealed that the deceased relative population is more than three times the size of the living population, with about 21 deceased relatives remembered for every under-15-year-old out trick-or-treating on Halloween. On average, these deceased relatives died 25 years ago.
Generational Ties to the Past
Over half of the deceased relative population was born more than 100 years ago, before the term “trick-or-treating” took hold in the United States. Around 10% of the deceased relatives were born before 1900, including 140,000 born before the Civil War, representing the remembered grandparents of today’s oldest individuals. These findings demonstrate how generations of the past maintain direct ties to the living, remaining present in memory, tradition, and personal identity long after death.
