Demographic models estimate that living Black and white Americans maintain 755 million ties to deceased close relatives, a population more than three times the size of the living public. Updated demographic analysis reveals that the average remembered ancestor died a quarter of a century ago.
While Halloween kicks off a series of religious and cultural festivals honoring the dead, deceased loved ones do not disappear from people’s social worlds once seasonal decorations come down. Present in memory and tradition, the dead continue to shape identities and behaviors long after their passing, with recent survey data showing that nearly 44% of Americans report feeling the presence of a deceased relative or communicating with one in the past year alone.
Demographic Microsimulations Quantify the Shadow Population of Deceased Relatives
Researchers studying this shadow population faced a fundamental gap, as demographers typically study the living. To address this, analysts utilized a modeling framework known as demographic microsimulations to estimate the size and age distribution of the currently living population’s deceased relatives.
The study focused specifically on deceased grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Because the methodology relies on specific demographic patterns, the framework produces results solely for Black and white Americans and cannot estimate relative populations living outside of the United States, thereby excluding groups with high percentages of foreign-born individuals who maintain family abroad.
The underlying research centered on populations as of July 2020, but analysts updated the work and weighted results to estimate the population as of October 2026. Because quantifying a deceased relative population is uncommon in demography, the researchers established modeling parameters. They counted only deceased relatives who died after the birth of at least one person still alive, ensuring that someone remains who could remember them. Furthermore, deceased persons were counted based on how many living relatives they possess. For example, a deceased 60-year-old man survived by a spouse, an adult child, a grandchild, and a sibling is counted four times in the deceased relative population, reflecting his direct ties to four living individuals.
Living Population Maintains Millions of Ties to Deceased Relatives
The model yielded several conclusions about the scale of these generational connections. The living Black and white population, representing about 217 million people, accounts for 755 million ties to deceased close relatives—a figure more than three times the size of the living population itself. To illustrate the density of these connections, researchers noted that for every under-15-year-old out trick-or-treating on Halloween, roughly 21 deceased relatives are remembered.
Data indicates that the average deceased relative died 25 years ago. This quarter-century interval demonstrates that loved ones remain suspended in memory for decades following their deaths. More than half of all departed relatives entered the world over a century ago, prior to the establishment of trick-or-treating
as a common American practice. Approximately 10% of these deceased relatives were born before 1900, including 140,000 individuals born before the Civil War who serve as the remembered grandparents of today’s oldest living Americans.
Documented Childhood Memories Across North America
While demographic modeling captures the statistical footprint of ancestors in public consciousness, individual reports of past-life memories provide another lens through which families experience generational continuity. A survey of documented cases across the United States, Canada, and Cuba catalogs 39 specific instances of children recalling previous lives.
American cases of this nature resemble European patterns, featuring longer intermissions and generally slighter development than Asian and Middle Eastern counterparts. For 16 solved American cases possessing reliable data, the median intermission between lives is 9.5 years. These documented accounts, alongside the millions of familial ties identified in demographic models, demonstrate how generations from the past maintain a direct presence in the social worlds of living Americans.