In a previous article, I wrote about my interest in planning a family reunion. Unfortunately, I am not in close touch with most of my first cousins, so I have a great deal of work ahead of me. To begin planning the family reunion, I need to contact many of my relatives via e-mail, postal mail, and the telephone. No doubt I can obtain some of this information from the relatives I'm already in touch with, but can I use the Web to help me locate their addresses as well?

One of the first places to go is Ancestry.com's U.S. Telephone and Address Listings. This national database of phone numbers and street addresses is updated quarterly. Unlike many such search tools, this database allows a researcher to enter whatever combination of search terms he or she would like. When searching for living relatives, a researcher might enter just the surname and the city/state. If the surname is unusual enough, the city may even be omitted. If a researcher has a relative's phone number, but not his or her city or state, he or she can enter the phone number as a search term. This feature, usually called "reverse lookup," helps resolve the confusion that occurs when a phone number is written on a slip of paper without the name of the person it belongs to.

If a researcher fails to find who he or she is looking for, it never hurts to try a few other online databases. The next visit might be to Yahoo! People Search. While this site doesn't provide reverse telephone lookup, it does include a search facility for locating e-mail addresses. When a researcher enters a nickname, Yahoo! People Search translates the nickname into the original first name so that it can search no matter how the first name might appear. Yahoo! People Search provides both a "Basic Search," in which only the first and last names can be entered, and an "Advanced Search," in which additional information such as city and state can be entered. Using Yahoo! People Search to locate my own e-mail address gave strange results. The Basic Search failed to find any of my e-mail addresses, while the Advanced Search, even without additional information, did locate one of my current addresses and two of my previous ones. Based on these results, I recommend trying both types of searches before you give up.

Keep in mind that there is an enormous difference between looking for phone numbers and looking for e-mail addresses. Everyone who has a phone appears in a phone directory, unless they have intentionally opted not to be listed. With e-mail addresses, it's just the opposite: Unless you ask to be listed in an e-mail directory, you're not likely to appear in it. As a result, you're far less likely to find someone's e-mail address than you are the phone number.

Another telephone/address database I've used with success is AnyWho, which was created by the Internet Directory Group of AT&T Labs. AnyWho's Advanced Search has some unique features of particular interest to genealogists. For instance, researchers can indicate that the last name "sounds like" the correct one. This will enable a researcher to find living persons even if he or she is somewhat unsure of the correct spelling of the last name. Another unique AnyWho feature is the ability to search within one mile, five miles, or ten miles of the center of a town for someone.

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached atdrewsmith@aol.com.