In many cases, e.g., when performing systematic literature reviews, one need to find documents related to a certain document or to a certain set of documents. Historically, traditional databas esearches based on keywords has been the main way of doing this. For a number of years these traditional search methods have been complemented with so called snowballing. Backward snowballing starting from a document A means that we look at the (older) documents that are cited by A, and forward snowballing means that we look at (newer) documents that cite A. Snowballing and traditional database searches can also be combined in hybridsearch strategies (Wohlin et al 2022). Here we define a way to generalize snowballing, to something we refer to as family searching.Compared to traditional backward and forward snowballing there are two clear advantages with family searching: (i) family searches find a larger number of related documents compared to backward and forward snowballing, and (ii) family searches rank the related documents based on how closely related to the starting document (or set of documents) they are.