Chronos: I don’t know how pilots fly planes, or how surgeons repair brains, but I would like to think that professionals have obtained expertise in their chosen fields that mere simpletons like myself can’t even begin to fathom.
We do inevitably leave traces of our life. It’s just that, owing to privacy regulations, those traces aren’t always available to the general pubilc. Some — many people — consider this a blessing, and think that we have too little privacy in this modern world as it is.
The number of documents available on a person increases greatly if the person is deceased. When I was doing genealogy professionally, some of them documents I would get on a person:
- Death certificate.
- Newspaper obituary.
- Probate file.
- Marriage certificate.
- Birth certificate.
- Summary of military service record.
- Employment history, from the Social Security Administration, showing the name and address of each employer, the year-quarters he worked for that employer, and his quarterly income from each employer that was taxable for Social Security purposes.
- City directory listings.
- Telephone directory listings.
- Land records (purchase, sale, mortgage, etc.).
- High school and college yearbooks.
- High school and college transcripts.
- Applications for U.S. passports (which include a photograph).
- Passenger list records at U.S. ports.
- Mentions in local newspapers (if the newspaper has an all-text index, or if my client is willing to pay me to do a lot of research through microfilms).
- Military draft registration.
- Census listings.
- Application for a Social Security number (has a lot of info).
- Birth certificates of the person’s children.
- Named as a party in court cases.
- Professional licenses (doctor, lawyer, dentist, nurse, architect, civil engineer, etc.)
#1-3 don’t apply to this person (hopefully).
#4 requires payment for a marriage certificate search, ~$40 (we were trying to do this without much expense).
#5 we found indexed.
#6 we already have.
#7 we can’t do without the person’s permission while he’s alive, and only with the permission of his immediate family afterwards.
#8 isn’t available today for large metro areas like Los Angeles-Long Beach.
#9, he apparently has had an unlisted telephone number since at least 1992.
#10, he owns no land in any state, I checked.
#11-12, I don’t know where he went to school.
#13 is expensive (~$80), takes months, and can’t be done without the person’s permission while he is living.
#14, the most recent passenger records indexed are from 1957.
#15 was done for the Los Angeles Times, but that’s a big city, you’re more likely to be mentioned in a small-town newspaper.
#16 can’t be done without the person’s permission while alive.
#17, he’s too young, the most recent census released is 1930.
#18 can’t be done without the person’s permission while he’s alive, and costs $29.
#19 can be done once we know the names of the children from #2, #3, or #8.
#20 can be done, but there is a fee (~$80) to get it from online services.
#21 he doesn’t have any.
FYI, one other member has a friend in the CA police, who has agreed to help us search. I’ll let the Doper say hi if he chooses to, not sure if it’d get him in trouble so keeping quiet on the name for now. So other approaches are being taken…
Answers my question!
So before we go about hiring the gumshoe, could we perhaps help pay for the Marriage certificate search?
Hmmm… maybe that’s what we were doing, AuntiePam, leaving little traces of ourselves as we moved from place to place, like Proof of Life for some future discoverer.
Rifle through people’s bins without rubber gloves, pick apart their poo and sieve it?
Here is a collection of public records databases for California, including prison records. Some are free, some are not.
If the owner is resourceful enough to go poo poo in his own bin, I fear he may have already eaten any letter we have sent him, with a nice milk.
One of my favorite forms of Paleolithic cave art:
- Fill hollow tube with paint.
- Place palm of hand on wall.
- Blow into tube, spraying paint all over hand and wall.
- Remove hand, leaving blank hand-shaped area surrounded by paint.
Just a note to say, “There were people here.”
Filmyak, the results from the searches showed no California drivers license activity since the late 80’s (there’s a bit more to it, but not that I can make public). So, he’s:
A) moved out of California; or
B) has stopped driving (legally); or
C) he’s expired (a subset of A, I suppose).
His last address was on Sunrise in Bellflower, CA.
Thanks, filmyak. Let’s hope the California police officer will help us get to the bottom of this, and many thanks to our own Doper shamuses.
Also, if you have a fairly strong suspicion he might be in a specific other state, let me know and we can try that.
Heh. If you remember which one, I could go get them for you.
C is a subset of B, too. 
Thanks! Look for a 2 or 3 story wooden building that looks like an army barracks, about a mile away from an airport.
Thanks for trying, Raza.
You know, my parents are friends with a retired FBI agent… I think it’s time to see if he can ask a simple favor from some of his former colleagues. =) Not sure why I didn’t think of that earlier…
bump
Welp, FBI contact politely declined. Contacted the LA Times today, haven’t heard back from them yet. Going to try some other newspapers.
I don’t think this is true. As a journalist, I use the PACER Service Center regularly, and although there is a per-page fee ($0.08 each) to download actual documents, you can look up cases and see the dockets at no charge. I don’t believe I paid anything to set up an account. But if there’s any obstacle preventing Walloon or filmyak from using PACER, send me the person’s name by PM, and I’ll look it up.