I was pondering how ubiquitous social media is today and how easy it is to find someone with a quick search of Facebook or Instagram. This got me thinking about how people used to do what social media allows us to do so easily. And I began wondering… how?
So let’s say it’s… 2004. MySpace technically exists but isn’t much of a going concern and Facebook is just a student directory for ivy-leaguers that nobody really knows about. It’s been ten years since I graduated high school and I want to look up an old buddy of mine from senior year. Unfortunately we never stayed in touch after that last summer, and I’d like to reach out. Unfortunately I have no clue where lives or even how to start looking. There is no family that I know of that I can get in touch with, no former friends that I still communicate with. I probably know where he went to college and what year he graduated, but that’s about it. I’m basically starting with a blank slate.
How would I have looked up and made contact with an old friend in 2004?
You’d pick one or two of the most likely area codes and call Information.
“Operator, well could you help me place this call?
See, the number on the matchbook is old and faded
She’s living in L.A. with my best old ex-friend Ray
A guy she said she knew well and sometimes hated
Isn’t that the way they say it goes? Well, let’s forget all that
And give me the number if you can find it…”
This is why class reunions were invented. You’d have to wait several years, and then go to the next reunion, hoping that he would go too.
(and that’s why class reunions are no longer such a big thing. )
Or you could write a letter to the high school and maybe somebody would answer and give you the name of somebody from the alumni association. Usually the most popular kid from that year who might be the kind of person who would have taken it on herself to organize the class reunions. After all, somebody had to do it once every ten years.
The school alumni association usually had active addresses for a small fraction of the graduates.
After 10 and 20 years, they sent letters to everybody on the list, asking if they had any info about the rest of the missing people. Then they’d look in phone books and try to find names where it was reasonable to call blindly and ask whoever answered if they were the same family who had a son who graduated in 1979.
What I would do (and still sometimes do) is ask other people from the same class that I’m still in touch with whether they’ve heard news of the guy. Sometimes they would have, sometimes they wouldn’t, and sometimes they would still be in touch with others who know the guy. Kind of a game of six degrees of separation, but in many cases it works.
If it’s someone from the same home town, then the guy’s parents might still be living there, and my parents might even know them.
2004? Seriously? When I saw the title of the thread, I presumed that “before social media” meant “before pcs were so ubiquitous,” like 1990 and millenia before that.
But by 2004, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines were up and running fine. I’ll admit that their reach and depth was not as far as today’s Facebook, but they were operational, and I did use them successfully for this stuff.
There were social networks before the internet like the Masons, the Elks, Mensa, political parties, families, school systems, police fraternities and the Klan. People from far away would write letters to people or call people on the telephone and ask about someone. Also the government kept many records and you could either do a records search yourself or hire a private detective.
I may have raised some eyeballs by mentioning the Klan, but back in the day they knew a lot about everyone in regions where the Klan was strong. My dad is white and my mom’s family was from Mexico and that constituted a mixed marriage in the eyes of the Klan so they had him blackballed from work in his small west Texas hometown. So he ended up moving to Houston and would get jobs for a couple of months until his employers found out he was on the Klan’s no work list. So my family moved to a town in rural Ohio and they got jobs with an auto supplier, somewhere the Klan had little influence.
I received a letter from the university I attended. It said someone I went to college with wanted to reconnect and it provided the name and address. I was free to pursue or ignore without my privacy being compromised. High schools might perform a similar service. In both cases, they may have contact with alums who need transcripts.
Before mobile phones were ubiquitous the majority of people would be in the phone book. That doesn’t help if they change cities or take a married name but since a lot of people will remain in the same city, the simple phone book would be pretty effective
There were sites like classmates.com, but they weren’t as useful as Facebook is. I believe membership was free at the very beginning, but at some point, a free membership only allowed you to browse class lists and possibly participate in group conversations but you couldn’t receive/send individual messages without paying. And you couldn’t easily give someone your email address in a message. ( email addresses showed up as a string of 'x"'s). And there are far more people on Facebook than there were on classmates
The reunion I helped organize using classmates also involved a whole lot of looking up people’s parents and siblings in phone listings and sending letters. Fortunately, a lot of those parents/siblings still lived where we grew up ( there would me lots fewer now). And of course, once the organizer gets in touch with me, I may keep in touch with another 5 people and so on. Even with Facebook, these methods need to be used to some extent - people on Facebook often don’t use the name you know them under. Not just the maiden/married name thing, but also using a first/middle name or an oddly spelled name like “Mi Key” for a Michael or “Donna M. Lano” for Donna Milano. It’s easy enough to find my cousin or a current friend whose using a first/middle combo - but the chances that I know the middle name of someone I haven’t seen since high school are non-existent.
If you have access to the yearbook for the senior year, you might find it there. Many wanted to be all formal about how their names were written (at my school, at least). They’d choose to be listed not as just “Lee Oswald” but “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
How does that work if you don’t know the city or state where they live?
The OP is specifically about a friend from High School. People were more likely to belong to alumni associations in the past and updated the association from time to time. You could ask for a roster. My old High School was able to track me down for the 1992 ten year reunion by calling my parents. They hadn’t moved and the school still had their number on file.
You get further out in time and it becomes more difficult. You would have to call easier to find likely associates and see if they knew or if they knew someone who knew. You might find out a rumor that they moved to Baltimore or something and call information there. It’s really tricky if they had a common name. You might have to call nine Mark Johnsons to find the right one.
I tracked down a really good friend from my military days whom I had lost contact with about 20 years earlier. I assumed that he had also retired, so I wrote a letter to the retirement arm of the Navy and asked them to forward my contact information to the guy, which they did.
For nearly all of human history, losing track of people was just something that happened. Yes, in 1990 or 1970 or 1950, if you went to great lengths to try to find somebody you’d lost touch with, it might be possible; and people have suggested various things to try. But a lot of the time, if you hadn’t kept up by mail or phone, people you used to know just faded out of your life (and you out of theirs.)
If it was really important to you to keep in touch with somebody, you’d write them or call them; and if you moved you’d let them know. If it was important to them to keep in touch with you, they’d write back, at least to let you know if they moved. If it didn’t matter to one or both of you enough to keep your address updated with the other, then you’d lose each other. If one or both of you changed your minds years later, you might be out of luck.
When was that? Growing up in Houston in the 1970s and 1980s, white/hispanic marriages were very common in West Houston- enough to not generate commentary for the most part, and mixed kids were accepted among white kids without issues. For that matter, Hispanics were accepted as well without issue.
For my high school, there were newsletters. Usually one or two from the class and then one or two from band. College had the alumni association.
Of course, it was different. With social media, I might send one brief message to someone and that’s that.
Using a letter or a long distance phone call is a lot more of a commitment. Not worth the effort for something as trivial as, Remember that piece from jazz band where you had the sax solo? Just heard some guy playing it at a bar last night.’
Late 50’s early 60’s. My mom actually got stopped on a street in Houston for spanking my brother by some rednecks in a truck and was informed that the help was not allowed to strike a white baby.
She also was not allowed to go to the whites school, white theater or whites only restaurants. Being Mexican before the Civil Rights Movement was the same as be colored and it still is in some respects. I am half white with a white last name and I still hear all sorts of rascist comments from people until I inform that my grandfather was named Pedro.
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