The best way to find people..

OK, my dilema is this. I’m trying to find a good friend of mine that I haven’t seen since 1994 or 1995; we were good friends in fifth, sixth, and a little bit of seventh grade. I know she, like me, would be part of the graduating class of 2001. How would I find her? I know her name, her mom’s name, even her little brother’s name, and what state she’s (probably) in. But I don’t want to shell out $40 at some of those People Searches sites, when I don’t even know if it works well. Has anyone on this board tried to find someone from way back when, and if so, what method did you use if you had limited information?

PS: I would put her name and see if anyone on this board knew her, but I don’t want this to be some type of Spam.

I would start by trying to do a white pages and an email search on the internet. Yahoo has a good one, but there are many more (and probably better). http://people.yahoo.com/

I would start by looking for the mother since she is one most likely to have a phone in her name.

Good Luck.

http://www.pac-info.com/

Have you considered a service like Classmates.com.

One of the sites like Classmates.com, gradfinder.com, or highschoolalumni.com would be an obvious place to start, but you’d have to have some idea of what school she graduated from, and she’d have to have registered.

Since you said she’s just graduated from high school, she may not have a phone in her own name yet, which would make the phone listings useless.

I’ve had reasonable luck tracking down people I’ve lost touch with using a simple Google.com search. It helps if her name is distinctive, or if you can include some additional keywords you’d associate with her (even if it’s only the state you think she’s in) as additional search terms. If you suspect she’s in Delaware, and might have played volleyball, for example just entering

might turn up a page from her high school web site where she’s mentioned, or a newspaper article, or some other useful information. (Putting the first name and last name together in quotation marks causes the search engine to treat them as a single string, so that only pages with the names together in that order are returned – otherwise, you’ll get pages that simply have the first name and last name anywhere on the page, not necessarily together. One downside to this is if she occasionally uses a middle name or middle initial, and that’s how her name appears on a page, the search will miss that page.)

If that doesn’t turn up anything, try her mother’s name, or her brother’s name.

If something comes up that suggests it might be her, but there’s not enough info to be sure, use keywords associated with the page you find to try the search again.

I’ve been able to find about half the people I’ve looked for this way, but I’ve typically been looking for people who’ve been out of college for fifteen years or so, and who’ve had a lot more time to get their names on lots of web sites.

I’ve used----

http://zroots.com/locating.htm

from there, I’ve used----

http://www.switchboard.com/

I’ve found an old boyfriend and an old classmate from grade school.

You get addresses and phone numbers and e-mails if they have one.

As someone else has already said, in your case, look for parents names.

Have you called your grade school to find out what HS she signed up for, yet?

CLASSMATES used to be fun as you could leave messages on the message boards for free. Now, you have to “join” in order to do that.

Good luck. It can be REALLY fun doing stuff like that.

Thanks for all of your suggestions. My search has already begun, so to say.

Yeah, I’ve tried all the high school sites. I do think it’s a bummer that Classmates, etc. charge you for their services. I have my own listing there, and in the info I put my e-mail so that if people want to search for me, they won’t have to pay.

whitepages searches are useful if you know the name that the telephone would be under (her mom’s, maybe).

Other than that, google is great. Just put in different combinations of her name, her state, even nicknames.

I once found on google someone’s brother who hadn’t been heard from in 12 years.

http://www.freeality.com/findet.htm

I’ve had good luck with this one just searching for names and states.

How about Baptism records? Do they keep those? I remember once going to her baptism (not when she was a baby, of course; she was about 13 or so), and I even know where (but not the church).