If you are looking for living friends and relatives, colleagues, lost cousins, or old schoolmates, you might be able to find them by using reference sources and computers. Some useful sources for locating living individuals include telephone directories, city directories, newspapers, genealogies, school yearbooks, and the Internet. If you don’t have access to the Internet in your home, you can use this resource in public and university libraries.
In addition to names of people, home and business addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses, several of the Internet Web sites listed in this article also show directions on how to get to a person’s house, addresses of nearby businesses, and other local details for the community. You may even be able to locate information on schoolmates. In fact, one of the best sites for doing this is ClassMates.com, where you can search in the United States, Canada, and overseas for Americans and Canadians who attended your high school.
Search Engines
One of the first steps in accessing information on the Internet is to use a search engine. When searching for living people, as well as for ancestors’ names, type the keywords in quotation marks (“ ”). This will help narrow the search by locating terms adjacent to each other. Search engines also have help pages that show other tips for locating terms, such as using plus (+) or minus (-) signs for including or excluding search terms.
There are about a dozen popular search engines that scan the Internet for keywords. A useful list and description of search engines is available at Internet Search. Listed below are a few of the major Search Engines:
- AltaVista is one of the most popular search engines. It ranks the results in order by the terms requested. This is one of my favorites.
- Go.com often gets high ratings for its Internet searching capabilities and should be used by genealogists.
- HotBot has the ability to search for people associated with Web pages and is a popular search engine that some genealogists find useful.
- Yahoo!, while considered an Internet directory, is a comprehensive way to search for Web sites and have them listed in a browseable subject index order.
People Finders
People finders are ways to search the Internet to look for peoples’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other information. Cyndi’s List includes a category called “Finding People,” which is a useful list of Web sites for locating this information, as well as much more.
Also of particular note, those people seeking help with adoptions should see the Adoption Registry. This is an international free adoption and missing persons registry.
Some of the major Internet sites for locating information on living people are listed below:
Ancestry.com has a very valuable Internet database for locating information on living people known as the U.S. Telephone & Address Listings. It is a searchable database of people’s names.
Ahoy! searches for personal home pages and e-mail addresses. In addition to the person’s name, it also shows address, telephone number, fax number, e-mail address, and if the person has a home page on the Internet.
Bigfoot searches for people, Web pages, and white and yellow pages in directories.
InfoSpace searches both white pages and yellow pages for telephone numbers and addresses. If someone’s name is found, a list of businesses near the person is also displayed.
Internet @ddress.finder searches more than 6 million listings for peoples’ names. You can also search in several foreign languages.
Lycos searches white pages, yellow pages, and e-mail addresses. If someone’s address is found, you will also receive driving directions and a map to the person’s address.
Nedsite Search Center is a comprehensive search center for locating living people.
SuperPages.com, also known as BigBook, includes a useful section for finding living people under “People Pages.”
Switchboard is one of the most popular people finders and will also search for e-mail addresses. In my opinion, this is one of the most useful sites for locating information on living people.
Telephone Directories on the Web will search through several different Internet address finders. This site is also useful for locating foreign phone books on the Internet.
WhoWhere? People Finder searches a large number of Internet sites for names of people and their e-mail address.
Yahoo! People Search is another valuable way to locate a person’s name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
Tips for Finding People
- Check Internet search engines, Internet directories, and people finders for the names of living people for whom you are looking. Be sure to limit your search by placing quotation marks around the terms used.
- Always check for spelling variations, especially any surname variations.
- A useful reference source for finding living people is a book by Norma Mott Tillman called How to Find Almost Anyone, Anywhere, revised edition (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998). Many sources, addresses, and Internet sites are given.
Kip Sperry is an associate professor of family history at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
Kip's Tips
