This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Halloween kicks off a series of religious and cultural festivals to honor the dead, including All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day and the Day of the Dead. But deceased loved ones don't disappear from people's social worlds once the ghost and skeleton decorations come down.
Present in memory and tradition, the dead can shape people's identities and behaviors long after they die. Recent survey data shows that almost 44% of Americans report that they have felt the presence of a deceased relative or that they have communicated with a deceased relative in the past year alone. Researchers lack basic knowledge about this shadow population.
As demographers, we typically study the living. But in our recent work, we asked an unusual demographic question: What does a population of our deceased relatives look like? Our research typically categorizes the living population by age groups and other demographic attributes.
In our recent study, we took our analysis a step further to estimate the size and age distribution of the currently living population's deceased relatives. We focused specifically on deceased grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and children. To do this project, we relied on a modeling framework called demographic microsimulations.
This approach produces results only for Black and white Americans. The method cannot estimate relative populations living outside of the United States, so it excludes groups with high percentages of foreign-born individuals who have family abroad. Our study focused on the populations as of July 2020, but for the purposes of this article, we updated our analysis and weighted results to the estimated population as of October 2026.
Because estimating the deceased relative population is not a common exercise in our field, we had to make some modeling decisions. We counted only deceased relatives who died after the birth of at least one person still alive; if no one remains who could remember them, we did not include them. Also, we counted deceased persons based on how many relatives they have in the living population.
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