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Your Yearbook is now good for something! Begin by finding your senior yearbook, and try to find someone who still has a yearbook from your freshman year. Go through both and make a complete list. (Neither yearbook alone is complete, because some started late, and others ended early).
Age is your friend. If the person is a classmate, then you know their approximate age: the same as yours. So if you use some site such as Intelius, you might find many listings for people with a particular name. You’ll see names and aliases, locations they have lived, where they have worked and studied, relatives, and ages. Use age — which you know — to rule out all but a few, then use the other clues provided to decide which person is the one you are searching for. While there are many errors in the Intelius database, there is also useful information that will be able to guide your subsequent efforts to track them down. Using age is critical. Do not use information from a record where the classmate’s age is more than a year or so different than yours. If you ignore it, you may be tracking down someone’s father or son.
Merge your information sources. Your search might turn up two listings for some odd name, both of whom are your age, and both of whom once lived in Sayville. It doesn’t take much courage to decide that these are two records for the same person. If so, you may merge the information provided for each. The relatives for one might be “Bob”, “Andy”, and “Leslie”. For the other, they might be “Andrew”, “Leslie”, and “Hank”. You can merge these two lists of relatives. And you can merge listings of locations lived and AKA information. Using your good judgment will improve the amount of information you have, even though we must recognize that errors can come from anywhere. When you finally find him, Jim will want to tell you that he was never “Jimmie”, or that he never lived in “Poughkeepsie”. That’s fine, because your strategy paid off, and you found him with imperfect information.
We laughed then. Someone else might have turned up in that search with the same name, locations lived that don’t include Sayville, but relatives that include the relatives of your first person. If this is the case, you have likely found a second record for the person you are searching for, and so can combine the information from both records. Use your judgment when doing this. Finding a “Bob Smith” living in New York, NY is not quite as useful as finding “Robert Axolotl” living there. In high school, we might have found “Axolotl” amusing. Today, we are grateful. He’ll be getting a reunion invitation. Bob Smith in New York might not.
They didn’t get far. Another general principle: most of our classmates who did not go to college stayed near Sayville until they retired. Many of our classmates then moved to Florida (or perhaps Arizona or Texas) upon retirement. Those who went to college sometimes stayed near that college town. So while you can set out to scan the solar system, most of your old friends are likely near Sayville or near their college town. If you are near retirement age, some will have moved to a sunshine state.
From city to street address and phone. If you know any of the locations where this classmate once lived, then http://www.peoplefinder.com will help. Using it, you should be able to find the classmate in one or more of those cities (You’ll likely find two or more addresses for the same person). The contact info from this site includes cell phone numbers (sometimes out of date) and street addresses. If the phone number doesn’t work, ask the Information Operator for the classmate’s number, then call to confirm it is them, check the accuracy of the contact info that you have, and fill in the blanks. Of special interest is their email address.
Under 30 somethings. Another general principle: those who’ve recently graduated have not left as many breadcrumbs as older graduates.
Exploit relatives. If your classmate has a last name that was common in Sayville, but is rare elsewhere (such as Vanessendelft), you might contact others with this last name who now live in Sayville. They are likely to know where a cousin or aunt lives.
Garbage in. But many things will go wrong along the way. The databases you are searching are the tidy results of sloppy work. For instance, if you find the names of relatives of someone, these are likely only approximations of the correct spelling.
Social Media and Google. For classmates lacking email addresses, you might search for them in social media, or let Google do the work.
Married women. The most difficult classmates to track down are women who married and dropped use of their maiden name. For most of them, the trail simply grows cold. But most of them are known by some classmate, so as your list builds, ask those you can contact if they know anything about those you cannot contact.
Finding Married Names. If you do find “Susan Brown” who was in your class (and so is your age), and who once lived in Sayville, look at the AKA information. She was Susan Brown in high school, so “Brown” is her maiden name. But suppose you find AKA listings of “Susan A. Brown”, and “Susan B. Smith”. It is a leap of faith, but quite possibly “A.” is her middle initial, the “B” is an abbreviation of “Brown”, and “Smith” is her married name.
Making Amends. Our Amend page gives you a chance to add a classmate to our database, and a chance to add or change information on anyone. Results are posted to a table of provisional information, where it is reviewed by a mortal. If it is accepted, it goes live, and we all will benefit. So use that page to record what you learn as you search and learn.
AccuVita.com. This website is an outgrowth of my desire to automate the finding of classmates. Unfortunately, the database of 240 million Americans was corrupted when the server developed a bad controller. We are still picking up the pieces. More to follow.
Your search will be more efficient if you know what you are looking at. There are only 3 major databases you can search, and all of the people finders draw on one of those three. So there is no new information to be gained by tapping two different front ends for the same database. Find one InfoPay Affiliate, one Inflection/PeopleSmart front end, and one Intelius front end and you will tap all that there is to find from such services.
Affiliates are those who get a payment screen showing Infopay.com