Searching for a Person
on the Internet
by Bob Harris
There are many times when we are doing our genealogy that we find the name or name and address of another researcher that may have some good information on one of our relatives. This could be on an old query at a USGenWeb county page, a Family Tree Maker "World Family Tree" CD-ROM, a Genealogy Newsgroup archive, a card in a State Archive Building, or a dozen other places.
One of the most recent additions to Web genealogy is the LDS FamilySearch site. At the bottom of an Individual Record in an Ancestral File search is a line that says "Submitter(s):". When you click on "Details" button at right side of this line you get a list of names and addresses of the people who have submitted the information for that person.
These addresses could be current or years out of date. You could easily get a "Returned - No forwarding Address" notice from the Post office when you try to contact one. Yet, they may be researching away at another location and have new information that could save you hours of research.
Lets see how we can use the Internet to help find a person. The number of search sites is awesome! I will separate them into two categories: free and pay.
First the free
Let's start with the "people search" Web pages. The largest sites have millions of names. Most are bought and updated regularly from the telephone companies. It is their list of listed telephone numbers and addresses. In addition, the different sites collect names, addresses and e-mail addresses from many other sources. One is the warranty cards you fill out and return when you purchase an item.
Some sites are: SuperPages.com, Lycos, Go.com, Infospace, iaf, switchboard, anywho, 411locate, InfoUSA, USWestdex, and YellowBook.com . There are many more but this will get you started.
Why look at more than one? Although they all may have millions of names in common, each has some names that the others do not. So, if you want to cover all bases, you have to use as many as possible until you find the name of your subject. While you are looking, check for an e-mail address as well as a phone number and street address. If you get too many hits for your name, look for the Advanced Search instructions that most sites have.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x users with Outlook Express can click on "Edit" then "Find People" and choose from some of the above sites already included in Outlook Express. (In Internet Explorer 5 it is "Edit" then "Find" then "People".)
If you can't find your person in the phone lists (they may have an unlisted number) but you know the city where they may be living, try the Tax Assessor records. These are public records that you can look up on the World Wide Web. They list all people who own business and residential property in a county or city. You can get an address if you know the name or a name if you know an address. In addition, you will get the tax appraisal value of the property and sometimes, the size, number and kind of rooms and a diagram of the house.
There are 3 kinds of folks you can look for: those who want to be found and put their names on the net, those who don't care, and those who don't want to be found. The latter are the ones who have unlisted numbers and addresses. If the person you are looking for wants to be found, try looking at a reunion or alumni site. Some people have started web pages that list high school classes and invite graduates to put their name and address there so others in the same class can find them. Check out: Reunion Hall, Reunions.com and there are many more. If you have the time, do a search in Fast Search or one of the other search engines on the words "reunion" or "classmates" or "graduates" etc. Some high school web sites have class reunion pages. If the person you are looking for was a college classmate try the alumni section of your college site.
There is always a chance the person you are searching for may have had an article published on the web. They could have just been mentioned in an article or they could have their own web site. There are computer programs called "search engines" or "spiders" that spend all day searching the web and indexing every word on every page they find. They index 2 million pages every day. Some of these sites have over 200 million pages in their index with every word on every page indexed! Fast Search, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, AltaVista, are some examples. Go to one and type in the name you are searching. Be sure to put quotation marks around the name, for example: "Sam McClatchey". If you don't you will get a list of every page that has the name Sam along with every page that has the name McClatchey --- hundreds of thousands! (Don't use Yahoo for this. It is a great subject index like the table of contents in the front of a book but only has a few million indexed sites. The other search engines mentioned above are word indexes like an index at the back of a book)
Unless you are sure the person you are searching for is living, there is always a chance they have died. To rule out that case look at the list of Social Security Death Records. This is a list of everyone who: 1. had a social security number, 2. is dead, and 3. had a death benefit paid by the U.S. Government. For recent deaths it is almost a complete listing. For deaths before the 1980s it does not have a lot of folks and there are very few listed who died before 1970. This is because, when social security started in the 1930s, it was mainly for the factory workers. Large groups of people were not included such as government employees, business owners, professionals (physicians and dentists), farmers, etc. Although some of these folks got a social security number before they died, they were not paid benefits and would not be listed. A number of sites publish the list on the Web. You might try the one at: Rootsweb. It is put up by a genealogy site and is free.
While we are on the subject of genealogy sites, that is another place you can look. Even if your subject does not want to be found, a relative may have put up his own genealogy and included your subject. The odds are long here though. There are hundreds of millions of names listed at the genealogy sites and less than one percent are living folks. But, there is always a chance you might get lucky. Your index search may have turned up a few genealogy sites. Try the site at: Family Tree Maker to start. I have a short list of some other sites.
For U.S. government and military employees, start at the Yahoo page. Click on "U.S. Government", then "Military" and follow the links to the military service and base that you are interested in. Some military base sites have locator search engines that will give you the work address and phone for the employees on the base, military and civilian. If you cannot find a locator, but can do a search, search for the person's name. You may find them listed on a document they have published or on a list of orders approving officials. Similar sites exist for county, state and local governments. Here is a sort cut to the Air Force. Use it and click on "Other Military Services" to get to the others.
If you can't find your subject's name on the web but know he or she is in a military service, go to the service's locater site, for example the Air Force and follow the instructions. They will even forward a letter to a retired member for you and the member can decide if he wants to answer. For retired members from the other services the procedure is similar; see Army FAQ, Navy or Marines.
Your subject might belong to a professional association for his occupation. For example, go to the American Medical Association's "Doctor Finder" page then "Search by name or medical specialty". Accept the Disclaimer then, finely, you get to the search screen where you can search by name or specialty. Over 650,000 physicians are listed, including many who are not members of the AMA. There are similar sites for other specialties from librarians to teachers.
Then there is the category of people who are looking for a parent or an adopted or missing child. Sometimes these are folks who don't want to be found or someone doesn't want them to be found. Here is an index of some sites that will help with this kind of search.
Another free thing you can do on the Internet, but not on the Web, is to post a message to a newsgroup; try alt.missing-adults, alt.missing-kids, alt.binaries.missing-adults or alt.adoption (for adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents). There are address lists that exchange messages about missing people.
There are many, many more places to look. See Cyndi's List for Finding People for links to additional sites.
Pay sites.
The best, and least expensive pay site to search public records is PublicData.Com. They have put up lists of Texas, Idaho, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Minnesota driver's licenses and voter's registrations. They also have certain criminal records, auto tag lists, etc. The cost is $25 for a year's access that includes 250 searches, making your cost 10¢ a search. This is a great resource for a reunion committee that is trying to locate graduates. Although it is limited a few states now, they have plans to add other states.
At PublicData.Com you can search by name and see the driver's license that gives the address of your subject. To make certain that is the person you are looking for you can also check the voter's registrations to see where they were living when they registered.
When you sign up to use PublicData with a credit card online, they e-mail you your password in about 2 minutes and you are ready to start your search.
Much more pricey are commercial sites CompuTrace, Sherlock and U.S. Search. I suspect that some or most of their sources are free if you had the time and knowledge to find them. Another site that seems to have good rates is SkipSource.com.
Many private investigators have sites on the web and will be happy to do a search for you. Their prices range from $50 - $80 per hour. They can usually locate someone for under $500. See James W. Kenney Interests for an example in San Antonio, Texas or go to the Texas Association of Licensed Investigators site and click on the city listings for the Texas city of your choice. See Yahoo's list of private investigators for one an another area.
Finally, you can try some pay genealogy sites with the same caveats that I mentioned in the free genealogy section above. It is really like finding a needle in a haystack. My favorite is GenServ. The owner Cliff Manis is a San Antonioan. He has over 13 million names. The cost is only $12 a year for searches (limited to 12 searches an hour). But since this is a site for genealogists, Cliff also requires that you send him a file of your genealogy (called a GEnealogical Data COMmunications (GEDCOM) file - made automatically by most genealogy programs) before you can search for names on his site.
Coming someday in the near future county courthouses will be on the Internet with all their public records. These include voter registration, deed records, tax records, civil and criminal records, probate records and assumed names. Already you can use computers at some courthouses to find and view a record.
A Word About Privacy
Much of the information thought to be "private" or "personal" is, and for many years has been, readily available in public records. The examples given are for the state of Texas although similar examples are available for all U. S. states.
What is private information? Your birth date? Your birth place? Your address? The value of your house? Your name? How about your drivers license number, your social security number, your mother’s maiden name?
Lets start with your birth date. There are five public records that contain that information: Your birth record, your driver’s license, your voter registration, your marriage record and your criminal record if you have one. (Ever run a red light? — You have one.) The first three are readily accessible on the Internet. The last two can be found in the county courthouse. Your voter registration record at the courthouse also shows your birth place. Each of these records has a good reason to be part of the public domain. If we don’t make voter registration records available to the public for example, politicians like to vote the gravestones in the local cemetery. The links to the driver's license and voter registration are at PublicData.Com mentioned above. The State birth records are at: Birth (1950-1995): http://userdb.rootsweb.com/tx/birth/summary/search.cgi and Birth (1926-1949): http://userdb.rootsweb.com/tx/birth/general/search.cgi
There is a new site that just went up recently called AnyBirthday.com. The authors have collected over 135 million birth dates and made them freely available on the Internet. The information comes from everything from driver's records to the warranty and registration cards you send back in when you buy something. 135 million is one for almost every living adult in the U.S. See it at: http://www.anybirthday.com
State marriage and divorce information can be found at: Marriage (1966-1997): http://userdb.rootsweb.com/tx/marriage/search.cgi and Divorce (1968-1997): http://userdb.rootsweb.com/tx/divorce/search.cgi
Where can someone find out your address? Of course the easiest place, if you have a listed telephone number, is in the local phone book. There are many locators on the Internet that contain phone numbers and give addresses. What if your phone number is unlisted? They can just look up your home in the tax appraisal records on the Internet. Not only will they find your address but the value of your house and maybe even a map of the house as well!
Unlike Peter O’Toole in Laurence of Arabia who said "My name is for my friends", most folks would not consider their name as private information. If I see you on the street, however, I can follow you home and look up your name in the tax appraisal record of your address on the Internet. If you are in a car, I’ll just use the automobile license plate lists that are searchable on the Internet.
As I mentioned above, your drivers license can give me your birth date, and it can also give me your driver’s license number.
Only your social security number is not readily available. It can still be found in places like divorce records and older membership lists, etc. A good private investigator can find it for a price.
The bottom line is that most of what we consider personal and private is already available in lots of places that are a lot easier to find than genealogy records. With hundreds of millions of genealogy names on the internet and in books in the library, there is no way someone is going to spend the time to search them when it is a lot faster and easier to get that information from other sources.