I need to locate records on my sibs, including current address, dates of name change due to marriage(s), birthplace. I haven’t been in contact with either my brother or sister in 20 years.
I’ve found several sites that have their addresses, phone numbers and history and promise to sell them to me. I have no problem with paying for this information, but they all seem to clickback to Intelius and I do have a problem with them. They have a history of charging people far more than they contracted for on a “trial membership” that you can’t seem to opt out of. Not only have I had been experienceds with them, but a simple websearch show that many other people have as well.
So, is there a non-scam outfit that I can pay - once - to get this information? I don’t mean by hiring a PI for hundreds of dollars and weeks of time.
Ancestry requires a hefty subscription price, and I think it’s more useful for doing historical research than current locations.
Pipl.com is a site I use, and while some of the links it turn up point you to for-pay sites, it’s the best place to start. And not for nothing, but Facebook is one of the best places to start searching, as well.
I’m not a PI, but I am a reporter, and I spend significant amounts of time using public databases to track people down. If you know where they live, or at least where they used to live, start with a public records search in that state or county.
There are other public data sets that aren’t instantaneously available online that will help as well. I’ve rarely been stumped trying to find someone, even people who were trying not to be found.
There are only a handful of large data aggregators, the two largest being Acxiom and Choicepoint, Epsilon is a strong player as well.
Intellius was at one time powered by a subset of the Acxiom database–don’t know the current state.
A PI is going to use one of these two services, however it may be re-branded as something else. If you have permissible purpose under the FCRA laws you can use their credit history to find them. More on FCRA permissible purpose can be found here: http://www.consumerfinance.gov/guidance/supervision/manual/fcra-narrative/
If they are in your debt, that is a permissible purpose and you can hire a skip-tracing agency to find them. You will get better data than a PI, because a PI does not have permissible purpose under the FCRA.
Re: marriage and name changes…disclosure of marriage info is governed by state laws and it is not uniform. Some states make the info publicly available, but most do not. Likewise divorce disclosure laws are not uniform.