PEOPLE SEARCH
public information search engines
Pam Johnstone Hitt and Jerry Nelson,
McLean High School (VA) alumni of 1959 & 1960
2006
FORWARD
Learn to help yourself (and maybe offer to help us) find lost classmates and nail down more email addresses for one another.

INTRODUCTION
A search in Google for "white pages" or "reverse phone directory lookup"  yields familiar phone book sites like whitepages.com,   anywho.com,   infospace,   or Yahoo's People Search.  AOL's own whitepages service is not their own -- they resell Infospace.   Google itself can be used for a white pages search.  Put "Jerry Nelson" in quotes to force exactly that phrase (name) to be searched.  If Google doesn't come up with what you want in the first two hits, click on the Phonebook Results link for all the hits.  Still not there?  Try name variations.  You won't find me in a traditional white pages service unless you look for "Jeremiah Nelson" in VA.  In a people finder like usa-people-search, you could guess incorrectly at my age (say, 62), you could call me JER Nelson, because you don't know if I am Jerome, Jerry, whatever, and behold!  you'll get a Jerry Nelson in McLean.  Now you know at least one valid form of the first name.  usa-people-search is more forgiving than a phone-book-style  search.    

The  "people finder" sites are a little different.  There is a lot of public information out there besides phone books.   Public information search engines compile information published when you register your corporation or partnership, buy a house with a title search and mortgage, guarantee the loan for a kid, apply for a wedding license or die and generate both a newspaper obituary and paperwork at the Social Security Administration.  Birth, census, military and marriage/divorce records may be tapped.  Not all people finder sites aggregate the same information.  

These are great tools, but the trick is to how to use them without paying subscription fees -- at least until you have some practice, some results, and some idea which "engine"  you like best.                    

SAMPLE SEARCH: A COLD START WITH ANCESTRY.COM

Go to ancestry.com, try all your best guesses until you get their "star rating" higher.

If ancestry.com tells you that the person has died, get the date go to the ObitsArchive site.  Get the newspaper and date if a paid death notice was published anywhere in the country.  

Instead of buying the obit text from ObitsArchive (90 days access $40), find the on line edition of the newspaper, and try to look up the obituary there.

You don't have time to wait until your classmate dies, you say?  No problem.  Finding the obituary of a parent will give you a list of all the children (your classmates).  This is one of the few routes from the maiden to the married name of a female classmate.

Ancestry.com's free service uses the government's Social Security Death Index (for deceased targets), but gaining access to a given Social Security Death Index RECORD (SSDI record) requires a paid membership of $180/year (or other time periods).  You can also access the SSDI record  via the rootsweb.com link listed above.  


SCREEN SHOTS  SHOWING  OUR SAMPLE SEARCH SCENARIO above

ancestry.com input

We are in ancestry.com on a sample search for someone who has died; in this case, the student himself, although more often you might search for  the classmate's parents.  The year deceased can be only a guess.  You play with the name and locations to try to improve the ensuing results.  In some people finders, the free output is limited to the first 100 hits -- what you want may be hidden in the unshown hits.  The game is to refine the search with guesses so that fewer than 100 hits come up.  Then  you know you've "seen it all" and your guess was either lucky or definitively wrong, so you can move on.

Ancestry.com has other aggregations of data besides "generic" public records.  Military data is a great separate search area.    

Ancestry.com output 1 of 2
ancestry.com output 2 of 2
Output from ancestry.com.  You play with your guesses about name, dates, locations until the star ratings increase.

The lower John E. Isaacs is alive.  The upper hit has died, and now we know the year of death.  He was married by civil ceremony in Virginia, same state as the high school.  Looks good if we are search for McLean VA high school classmates.  Getting a look at the relevant record of the "Social Security Death Index" or the dates in blue (the "dd's" and "mm's" etc) costs money.  Before we get that desperate, let's look for that obituary in obit.com.  We know the year (2002).

obituary.com hit

obituary.com was searched for the date of death given by ancestry.com and the name  John Isaacs (John E. Isaacs did not work -- go figure).  The output tells us that a death notice was indeed published.  The paper is the Washington Post, in September of 2002.   Before we sign up for 90 days access to 90 obituaries for $40, it's time to check in at the Wash Post on line.  

Wash Post obituaries (paid death notices) are a little hard to find.  They are in the Metro section.

Washington Post input for death notice search

The "teaser" output of the first 25 words is enough to confirm that all these names and dates are correct -- we have the right person.  

Washington Post hit
Our high school class (McLean VA 1960) has no funds to finance missing persons searches, so just try it yourself on your old friends.  If it works, try one of the missing classmates.   For a list of who's still missing in McLean '60, write to faybrumback at removethis aol.com

REVIEW 

White page search services were listed.  

Two Google searches were set up (just click).  One finds  more white page services, the other finds  reverse-lookup services.

A bunch of more powerful people finder search services were listed.

We did an example that illustrated using
Another person's useful "Guide to Finding Classmates" is here.  


A RUN-DOWN ON THE REST OF THE SITES  

http://www.usa-people-search.com/Results.aspx
usa-people-search is as good a place for a cold start as ancestry.com.

When you have no location information, enter the approximate age here instead, and use just guesses at the partial name.  You can use the middle initial for men, but not women.  Only 100 hits are given for free, so the game is to throw enough guesses into the search to narrow the retrievals to under 100 possibilities.  Fees must be paid to get the "location history" of individual hits.  This would enable you to see that two hits were actually the same person, and to perhaps to track that person back to the Northern Virginia area where we went to school together.

http://veromi.info/    

Requires exact date of birth, takes explicit location information -- thus veromi is better for follow-up than as a cold starter.   Notably, veromi gives probable relatives, so if you know that the person has kids (and a vague hunch about girl, boy, name, age), then you can zero in here.  Some older relatives show up too; for example, a parent who once guaranteed a loan.   TIP: if relatives are **not** listed, or if phone number is said to be not available (for an additional fee, of course), go to ancestry.com -- the person may be deceased.  TIP: If you have other specifics, then drop date of birth (dob) entirely, or drop middle initial entirely.  Some of the databases aggregated into this people search engine may hold your hit, but never store that information, so the dob or middle initial will block  retrieval.  TIP: name of divorced spouse may appear, even years after remarriage.  

http://zabasearch.com/

Use Advanced Search.  Enter approximate year of  birth, multiple variants on possible first name (e.g., Daniel,Dan,Danny can be entered and searched all at once), and close in with location information if you have any.  

http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi

Definitive for the deceased -- the Social Security Death Index.  
Use Advanced Search so that you have more ways of zeroing in on your target.  

Classmates.com and reunion.com  are useful but mostly at the "paid" level.  Because they are organized by people of similar age attending the same school, they are useful for finding brothers and sisters of the person you can't locate.  

REAL ESTATE OWNERSHIP  

Once you have a current location from people finders, you can do a real estate search.  Property ownership often gives you names for both husband and wife.  Although by law real estate transactions are public, searching is difficult because it varies by county.  County?  Yes, the first problem is finding the county.  

FINDING THE COUNTY if you know the town is easy with this Google search string:

"Known City, State"  county department tax assessments property

The name of the county will pop up, whereupon you recycle the search with this string to find the government office that handles real estate ownership:
 "County, State" department tax assessments property

For Fairfax County, where many classmates or their parents live, you can search for assessed property by address (or tax map reference number) here.

Search for most (but not all) counties in the State of Maryland from this single site  (thank you, Maryland!).

And now we come to our big surprise, the easiest way to find civic organizations within any State of the Union.
Karen Pranger
SUMMARY:  go to any State and get Websites of each county as well as state-wide government sites.  In most states, real estate ownership records are maintained at the county level.  

Here's a drill-down for the entire site.

Karen Pranger is a librarian with the Santa Clara County Public Library and I am going to take you through her Website.  With just lists of links she has created a portal that rivals Yahoo, AOL, MSN and all the rest.  "Karen's corner" has no ads and it leads to many non-commercial and government organizations.  We imagine that Ms. Pranger has personally visited each link and scolded them if they did anything wrong.

Karen's home page is    http://www.garlic.com/~kpranger/      
"www.garlic"?  The garlic comes in because Ms Pranger is hosted -- perhaps for free, we do not know -- by a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) called South Valley Internet in San Martin, CA 95046 (Silicon Valley).  They call their Internet service garlic.com and garlic.net.  Examples of non-local ISPs are Verizon and AT&T / SBC.

Everything on the home page is worthwhile.  It lists:
 We go to the Web Sites Reference Notebook, which is the heart of the site, the list of links, about 60 of them.   You have my permission to go look and get nothing else done today, but use your browser's BACK button when you want to return to this drill-down for real estate property ownership.  Recall that we know the probable town of residence of a missing classmate and used Google to get the county for that town.  

In Karen's reference notebook, choose "United States (State Information)".  
Of the mere dozen or so US info links, we pick "United States (Individual States)" and we are all done.  

On the list of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, you can pick VIRGINIA or any other state and get links to each country that has a Website, as well as to important state-wide state government agencies.  From "Virginia" and about a half-dozen Websites for Fairfax County alone, we pick  Karen's  "Fairfax Country Real Estate Assessment".   On that homepage for The Department of Taxation Administration, we read that "Our website provides assessed values and physical characteristics extracted from the official assessment records for all property in Fairfax County" and go to the website, which finally offers property searches for Fairfax County.  

FOREIGN SERVICE SITE  

The Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide  is a non-profit organization that has been representing Foreign Service spouses, employees and retirees since 1960.  If Dad gets posted to an unfamiliar place, the AAFSW Website can show Mom what kind of life to expect and how to fit in.  By going to the page for Virginia, you can gain entrance to many county and city Websites.  Post 9/11, this site no long shows pictures of  the housing project I grew up in in Germany.  It is no longer useful for finding Foreign Service "alumni".
 

PARTING SUGGESTIONS

Adjacent-year yearbooks and classmates.com get you brothers, sisters,  cousins attending the same neighborhood schools who may be easier to  find.

Enter the missing person's last address into any whitepages site, get  the phone number, swallow hard and call. 

A parent's obituary in the local paper will tell you where their kids  live, and it links the maiden and married names of daughters.

Tackle uncommon names first -- same effort, more missing classmates.   As more of us are found, we hopefully generate more sources of help  for finding the remainder.

Any lead you get in one search engine gives you a better shot if you go back and try again in another.  

POSTSCRIPT

Jerry says:  Pam Johnstone Hitt  is the most talented searcher I know.  If you attended McLean High School in Northern Virginia, perhaps you can persuade her to help you.    pamela hitt all one word at comcast  dot net.  
--end

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Rev 4/06