Old friends you can't find online

Old friends you can’t find online

or

Childhood friends you expected to be Internet-savvy, but apparently aren’t.

Exhibit A: My friend Roger. I last saw Roger in the summer of 1983. Roger is four years younger than I am, but, by the time I moved away, he was the only other boy on my childhood street that I could hang out with. Roger was a nerd before “nerd” was a word (somebody once called him a “space cadet”, and he replied, “Yes, I subscribe to OMNI magazine”), and he was my neighbor and friend from 1972 to 1983. Eleven years. And holy cow, what a nerd he was. He was ahead of his time. His dad bought him all the new gadgets that my own dad wouldn’t buy me.

Roger is a guy I would have expected to latch onto the Internet and not let go.

I have spent almost 20 years (1996 - present) trying to find him and reconnect. Unsuccessfully. It’s like he doesn’t have any Internet presence at all. And, yes, my searches have included his middle name. And I’ve searched for his younger sister. Complete zeroes, search-wise. Roger, where the fuck are you?! Are you dead?

Exhibit B: My high school girlfriend. The violinist. I can find no trace of her. Facebook? HA! My old girlfriend shared a first and last name with another girl in our class, the only difference being their middle names. And their middle initials were “M” and “N”. So they were “MMM” and “MNM”. The latter was my girlfriend. I’ve found MMM on Facebook, but I can find no hint of MNM, on Facebook, or anywhere.

OTOH, I’ve reconnected with the girl I should have married 30 years ago. She’s happily married, and she lives in my old hometown. God, I wish I had never been young and stupid.

Roger’s so dang tech savvy, he’s on the Internet, but yet completely hidden himself from random Google and social media searches, operating his life in absolute stealth mode. Or he’s croaked.

He was “tech savvy” for 1983. I will acknowledge that he may be dead, but that wouldn’t explain why I can’t even find his sister or parents (and his parents are younger than my own, tech-savvy, parents). Unless a meteor dropped on their house and took them all out.

How common is Roger’s last name? I’ve been able to locate most of my high school friends via the Internet, but there’s one friend – whose name is extremely common – that I can’t find hide nor hair of.

His last name is … like a certain kind of screwdriver (which is somewhat ironic, given that his dad was a machinist). I don’t know how common the name is.

Flathead? :smiley:

Might he have a job with the government that requires a high degree of secrecy so therefore, he has hid himself from most searches?

Roger Torx? Roger Security Tri-Y?

Could it be he’s living overseas, possibly in the military?

http://www.familysearch.org or the Social Security Death Index can tell you if someone’s died. Google will even reveal that in many cases, if it was within the past few years.

I had a friend when I was in college in the early 1980s who does exist online, but I can’t figure out how to contact her. My guess is that there’s a reason for this, and I’m not going to pursue it further. (Hope I’m not the reason why! :p) If a woman married long enough ago, her maiden name may not show up on the free people-search services.

A few years later, I was in a club and met a very interesting man who was in medical school. I even asked him for a date; he declined. Out of curiosity, I looked him up and couldn’t find him online. At all. That was very :confused: for a physician to have NO online presence whatsoever. I had all kinds of goofy scenarios as to what may have happened, and then I looked him up again a year or so ago and found out that he died in 1992, a few weeks before his 31st birthday. :frowning: A little more sleuthing revealed that he incorporated his medical practice about a week before he died, so whatever happened to him, it had to have been very unexpected. He was also still single, because there’s a picture of his headstone on findagrave.com and it says

Dr. His Name
1961 - 1992
Beloved Son

Maybe it was a good thing he turned me down. I could have been a 28-year-old widow.

Torque? :stuck_out_tongue:

Phillips?

I just thought of two other people from my past that I’m very surprised are not on any social media that I’ve checked, and in one case, the trail seems to stop around the year 2000 but I do know she is still alive. The other is a former boyfriend about whom my curiosity was piqued last fall when Bernie Sanders spoke here (at a small auditorium; he hadn’t announced his candidacy yet) and I saw a man there that I thought might be him. Chances are, it wasn’t, especially because veromi.com didn’t list him as living in any cities within about 200 miles of here.

Anyone looking for me on-line might discover that I’m already dead.

It appears that there are or were two people with the same name as me (moderately uncommon last name), living in a small town some 5000 miles away. Apparently, father and son. It seems that the younger one is deceased.

About 10 years ago, a fellow employee in the next cubicle pointed out to me that he had found a web site with my name in the URL, [noparse]my-first-name-last-name.com[/noparse] which, upon visiting, was a gay pr0n site. I’m pretty sure it was the work of the above-mentioned younger deceased one.

I had the job of tracking people down for my 25 yrs High School reunion. The men were generally easy but the women are pretty much all married and don’t use their maiden names so it was just impossible. And I’m of an age where all the women were married long before the internet became a thing, so they don’t have a maiden name presence either.

Luckily women are more social than men so they were better at finding one another through in-person networking.

Well, I had a short relationship with this girl several years ago; it ended up on a sour note and not long after I moved to a different hemisphere.
Fast forward to a couple years ago, checking my Facebook account and I see there is an “Others” in the messages page, I don’t use FB often and never noticed that before.
I checked there and I see a message from my ex GF, that she was sorry about the way things went, if I could forgive her and so on and so forth… the message had been sent more than six months before.
I tried to reply but the FB profile had been deleted, I tried to find her online but came empty handed, now I feel bad because maybe she thinks I ignored or I am still angry with her.

Every now and then I try again, but no luck so far, last thing I knew from her was that she was also moving to another country so that makes things more difficult.

I solve this by not looking for anyone I grew up with online :wink:

I’d consider myself fairly tech savvy (I was on the internet before most people had even heard of it), but I’m almost impossible to find online. I don’t have a facebook account or anything that can tie me back to my real name; I like my IRL and online personas to be separate entities.
If you search for my name, you’ll find maybe a few hits relating to an address I lived in a few years ago, a couple of other random entries that are about a decade old, and that’s pretty much it. On image search, the only one that actually relates to me is from a class photo that someone posted online, dating to about 1983.

It’s the way I like it - I really don’t have much interest in catching up with people I used to know. I’ve moved on. I did try to ‘find’ myself a couple of years back, and only found one fairly tortuous route to my actual email address that you’d need to be fairly savvy (and dedicated) to follow. Even that has now been closed.

I’ve had little luck finding people from my past too:

No sign of any exes except for one, and I know that one has a Facebook account because I’m still friends with his sister. But the guy I almost was engaged to? Not a trace. It doesn’t surprise me because he was a very private person back when we were together.

A good friend from high school went into “stealth” mode. I found him through trial and error by looking up his brother. He “changed” his name and other identifiers but I knew it was him because of other things he’d put on his profile. He too was a very private person back in the day.

Members of my extended family use different versions of their surname and don’t post photos so it’s nearly impossible to point and say, "Oh so that’s X"during a search.

Before most married women started using the First Name - Maiden Name - Married Name format on their Facebook pages, I ran into some confusion a couple times when I received friend requests from women who:

  1. I hadn’t seen in nearly 30 years, and didn’t look like I remembered them
  2. Had unisex first names (like “Tracy”)
  3. The only photos on their profile were of them standing next to their husband/SO

I was left scratching me head because I recognized neither person in the photos, and wondered which one was “Tracy”.

I fly very much below the radar as well, I certainly can’t find anything about me online and that’s the way I like it. He may well be the same and might not thank you for trying to contact him.
There have ben a couple of occasions when old school friends have reached out to me through my family for reunions etc. I politely ignored them. If I had wanted to keep in touch I would have.