How To Search For People On The Internet

   



While performing family tree or genealogy searches, you may find yourself searching for a living relative. Or you may just want to find a long lost classmate, military friend, or perhaps even a childhood crush. Searching for living people has its own challenges and obstacles, but the process is also different from searching for dead ancestors.
Finding Living People

Thanks to the internet, searching for living people is much easier than it used to be even 10 or 15 years ago. Each year, thousands of people are successful at locating living folk. Most of the time, a search for a living person occurs in order to find a relative. Whether it is to find a close missing relative, such as siblings separated at a young age, or trying to find a cousin twice-removed, knowing your relatives and building a family tree can be quite satisfying.
Resources for Searching for Living People
When you search for living people, you have many more resources available to you. If you are building a family tree, a search for a dead relative can be difficult and time-consuming while you try to determine last place of residence and piece together other far removed relatives. Older vital records, such as birth certificates and marriage bonds, are more difficult to locate and verify. However, with many online resources, even searching for ancestors can be less difficult than if you had to travel from state to state and agency to agency looking for copies of vital records.
Living people have the benefit of being connected online having records published on the internet. You can perform a simple search engine query such as Google or Yahoo! for your individual, using keywords that you know, such as the name, city, employer, etc. A Google search may turn up plenty of results to get you started on pinning down a living person.
Also, if you do know the location of the person, you can use online directories, such as Peoplesearch or whitepages.com or dexknows.whitepages.com . These directories may be able to narrow down your search and even provide a phone number or address.
Another great resource for finding lost schoolmates is through alumni associations, such as classmates.com , or even on facebook.com . Facebook provides a number of high school groups, as well as other group associations, that may be useful for you to find an old friend.
In searching for your living person, you may have other clues that can help your search, such as hobbies or associations the person was involved with. You might start looking for possible associations through an association directory such as asaecenter.org/Directories/AssociationSearch.cfm. Here you can enter keywords such as “accounting” or “musician” and find potential associations for your person search.
And don’t forget to look at the host of genealogy websites available that may be useful in finding living people. With the technology available in the 21st century, you can easily search and find living people from the comfort of your own couch. Happy hunting!