Author |
Message |
Hootyhoot
Member
12-18-2001
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 11:11 am
Have you found someone using the internet? Or has someone found you? So many new sources of information ... it has worked both ways for me. I wanted to find a girl I shared an apartment with in California back in the 1950s. I had been looking for years, but I didn't realize I had one letter wrong in her last name until finally she showed up in a listing on classmates.com for high school graduates. So, I had her name spelled right at last. I knew her husband's last name, but we all called him Mac and I couldn't remember his first name, but with her maiden name and his last name, I found her grandmother's obituary on line. Luckily, that gave her husband's first name and the town they lived in ... and there was a genealogy site for her family that gave me the names of her children and their birthdates ... and then to a white pages site and 15 minutes later, we were talking on the phone for the first time in omigosh 49 years! And then, one day this week, the phone rang and a woman's voice asked for me by my birth certificate name! I immediately wondered what the heck this was going to be about! And it turned out to be a friend I went to first grade through the first year of high school with ... and then I moved away. She had been looking for a new dentist and was on some kind of people search program when it occurred to her to put in my name! What fun it was to talk to her! Because she stayed in town, she knew some of my distant relatives better than I did ... and we shared some funny grammar school and high school memories. We made plans for a spring get-together of friends from way back then! I can't wait.
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Jagger
Member
08-07-2002
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 11:28 am
I've never tried to find anyone from my past, those I wanted to keep in touch with I pretty much knew where they or their parents lived so I didn't have to search. I did use white pages for looking up their phone numbers though. It is kind of scary though all the information that is out there on people. It makes identity theft so much easier.
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Landi
Member
07-29-2002
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 11:45 am
i just found my bestest friend from junior high through high school. she had gotten married right after high school. i was her maid of honor. and had lost touch after her second marriage. i found her through reunions.com we just sent emails back and forth. a couple of the people i knew in high school have sent a couple of emails. i'd like to find my dad. the searchs came up with a guy who answered the phone and said he wasn't him. <sigh>
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Marysafan
Member
08-07-2000
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 12:04 pm
For our 30th wedding anniversary, I decided to try and find our best man as a surprise for hubby. Being that his last name is Carter, I had quite a time. But I remembered that he was originally from Rochester Minnesota, so that helped. I finally got it narrowed down to two people...and called the first number. It wasn't the right guy, but he was a very sweet man, and wished me luck. The second one turned out to be the right one! He and hubby had a great talk. They found out that when we had lived in Wisconsin back in the 1980's. He had been servicing the computers at a place where hubby had been servicing their copiers. It sure would have been neat if they have bumped into each other! lol!
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Twiggyish
Member
08-14-2000
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 3:52 pm
I found a friend from school. She was my pen-pal for years after she moved to New York. It's easier if they kept their maiden names!
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Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 9:08 pm
Guy I had dated in college found me through my high school's website.
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Tabbyking
Member
03-11-2002
| Monday, January 02, 2006 - 9:26 pm
guys are easier to find even just going to switchboard.com, but when a gal gets married, it's harder. the classmates type things work, but i hate to have to pay. i keep getting things from classmates telling me 'two people have searched for you', but i just don't want to pay the money! after my first marriage, i hope it's hard to find me! fortunately, the guy would never think of where i went to school, so wouldn't use classmates to find me. i found a guy i dated in new york when he was in medical school. it really bothered me to hear of all the shootings in e.r.'s in southern california several years back and not knowing the names of the doctors who died. (news coverage where i live sucks, especially since the best donut shop for treats and gossip closed down!) i knew only that years back this guy was an e.r. doc in southern california. anyway, i found him a few years back and now i can sleep at night knowing he is okay. he is still an e.r. doc in the los angeles area, married with 4 kids. i was totally happy for him; just relieved to find out he was fine. a gal i went to high school with was one of those socialites who climbed the big mountains...where so many others died on the climb. i never realized it was her because they always referred to her as a 'manhattan socialite' and i knew her in a small california town. turns out she married the guy who started mtv and something to do with time-warner and she used to hobnob with tom brokaw's wife and ms. martha stewart. who woulda thunk it?!
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Costacat
Member
07-15-2000
| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 - 7:08 am
I havent', but then again, I haven't tried. I have, however, had people contact me looking for other people. For example, a guy in the Netherlands was looking to connect with a tech writer he used to work with here in San Diego. I'm all over the Web as a tech writer slash online help author in San Diego, so he sent me an email asking if I knew her. I didn't, but I checked my membership roster for the San Diego STC chapter (I was VP of membership then) and lo and behold, she was a member! So I sent her an email with his email addy. The coolest thing? He was so glad to reconnect with her, that he's stayed in touch with me!!!!
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Maris
Member
03-28-2002
| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 - 7:33 am
I organized my high school 30 anniversary reunion and used the internet a great deal, found people in Fiji, london, belgium, South Korea and in the end was able to track down 75% of the people in my class. I still keep in touch with many of them.
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Bandit
Member
07-29-2001
| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 - 9:46 am
Tabby...don't feel like you're missing anything on classmates.com when you're told "2 people searched for you." I get those alerts all the time, and I DO pay for classmates. When I look to see who it was, it's people from all over the map who I don't even know. If you have the same name as anyone else, then you'll get the alert that people are looking for you. Even though they're not looking for YOU per se. Did any of that make sense?
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Konamouse
Member
07-16-2001
| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 - 6:29 pm
Found a couple of ex-boyfriends. Funny when they have a website or part of a business and their picture is online. Dated when we were in Junior High School - it was a long distance relationship. Fooled around at the end of high school and ran into him a couple of times while in college. Hard time remembering some of the last names. And if they are "common" then it's harder to figure out where they are now. 'squeek'
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Tabbyking
Member
03-11-2002
| Tuesday, January 03, 2006 - 10:37 pm
you are so right, bandit. i did have an unusual name (although there are many michaelas now) but it could just mean two people read my bio, not that they are necessarily two people i ever knew or want to still know! it's not worth paying to find out! maybe i'll attend my 35th reunion in 2007; my new house is only 40 miles from the high school where i graduated. i'd like to lose 30 pounds first, but probably no one looks really great at 52! even the gal i know from my high school in los gatos who lived through the mt. everest climb in 1996 that they wrote all the books and made all the films about doesn't look great after having a facelift and all the money in the world. i thought it was kind of funny when i read about her exploits. she mentioned that she had wanted to climb the 7 tallest mountains since she was 9. well, we were best friends during junior high and she even went to our cabin at donner lake a couple of times in the winter. she hated the snow! it was a surprise to me about her having a life-long desire to climb because she never mentioned it once in the 2 or 3 years we were together constantly. at one time, you could get classmates for free and i found a guy i used to date and he is now fat and bald and still single. it's funny how i still want to picture people as they were at age 17!! sometimes i walk by a store window or something and see a middle-aged lady and am surprised to see she is dressed just like me...and holy crap! it IS me LOL my mom told me the other day (she is 72) that she saw an old lady one day and thought, "she's fairly nice looking for someone her age" and then realized it was her. 
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Juju2bigdog
Member
10-27-2000
| Wednesday, January 04, 2006 - 9:54 am
I have kinda bad news for Tabbyking. The ones who still look good at 52 are the ones who all attend the reunions. I was amazed how good looking a whole lot of them were. And then there will always be the woman who has never changed her hairstyle since high school, and that is a bit interesting.
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Wargod
Moderator
07-16-2001
| Thursday, January 05, 2006 - 12:16 am
When bils mother was dying last year the family was frantically searching for her little brother that she'd lost contact with about 10 years before. They gave me all the information they had, his name and last known address, and I used a couple sites looking for him. Problem wasn't finding him, it was finding the right him. No one wanted to pay money to get the more detailed information on someone to find out it was the wrong him (it was a surprisingly long list!) In the end they decided to take the info to a private investigator who used the same method, internet search. Withing 48 hours he had found the right guy, had not only his address and phone number, but a list of neighbors numbers (at the time he was driving trucks and rarely home.) I was a little surprised. Considering the information he gave the family I'd thought maybe he had guys in Chicago searching for the lost brother but he did it all through internet searches. The third morning after hiring this guy, they were able to find the brother through a neighbor who got the message to him that he needed to call his nephew immediately and withing five days he was here. It is a little frightening the information you can find. Not only someones phone number and address but their neighbors and where they work? Though in this case we were all glad that he was located so quickly and it truly was a good thing.
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Graceunderfyre
Member
01-21-2004
| Friday, January 06, 2006 - 6:57 am
War, It is VERY scary how much information is available through the internet! Google used to give our address and phone when you typed in a name. They took out that feature now - but boy was that scary the first time I typed in my name. When this was all sorta new and I was in college, I got tracked down a few times by people I met on irc. They basically saw that I was logging in from my small private college and then went to the college and asked for me - I always use my first name online because my RL Indian name is too hard to deal with on the internet. So when these guys showed up on campus, they were calling me by my First name (Grace) and the students were like, oh you are Indian you must be looking for [insert Indian name] and they literally led them to my dorm room door. I was an RA that year and had to have a dorm meeting after the second time to remind people we have codes on our outside doors and on each floor for a reason. I helped a little in tracking down missing people for my high school reunion - it was a lot of fun. Though I don't remember being all that successful. When we were sending out birth annoucements and then moving announcements, I used the interenet again because people had moved and I'm terrible at keeping in touch. There is this website The Ultimates.com that lets you search several websites at the same time that I use often to find phone numbers. . . But the newest thing I've found is myspace.com - I got an account on there at the beginning of the school year just to tease a couple of the counselors I work with. Almost every time I log on there, I get new friend requests from people I have seen or heard from in forever. It's been incredible finding all these people I went to elementary school with, summer camp - even kids that were my campers and are now almost done with college. But again, I think there is too much info given out on that site too...
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Rslover
Member
11-19-2002
| Saturday, January 07, 2006 - 5:18 pm
This is a good site too. You can check birthdates as well. http://www.zabasearch.com
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Merrysea
Member
08-13-2004
| Saturday, January 07, 2006 - 6:55 pm
I searched for me on the zabasearch website, and my birthdate was way off! It was a different month and day, and I am supposedly eight years younger! It did have my address as of 1998, but nothing since then (and I've moved twice).
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Brenda1966
Member
07-03-2002
| Monday, January 09, 2006 - 12:38 pm
ANy of you that have had luck, did you have to pay to get the information? I've looked on some of those web sites and I don't see any full birthdays unless you pay. Seems they are all linked back to find.intelius.com and then you have to pay. I have the first/last name, probable father's name, birth month/day (but not exact year), and state to go on.
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Rslover
Member
11-19-2002
| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - 1:55 pm
Try this - http://www.birthdatabase.com/query.php
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Cndeariso
Member
06-28-2004
| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - 1:59 pm
i tried it using my info, rslover, and got zippo. i don't exist! LOL
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Tabbyking
Member
03-11-2002
| Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - 2:07 pm
wow, it had my correct birthdate, but it had my zipcode as the one i had in massachusetts 20 years ago!! as a matter of fact, brookline doesn't even have that zip code anymore; they changed it about 8 or 10 years back.
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Brenda1966
Member
07-03-2002
| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - 11:33 am
Thanks RSlover. I think I found him. Of course he's married. 
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Rslover
Member
11-19-2002
| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - 9:10 pm
These databases are not perfect. This info is compiled from public records so it depends if they have been updated recently. Here is another one http://www.daplus.us/
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