Getting Contact Information

Often the hardest part of a search is getting current contact information. Often the online directories lag a couple of years behind. In addition, many people now have cell phones and at this time, we do not have a cell phone directory. I always Google the full name using quotation marks, then first, middle initial and last name and finally  just first and last name. You often find someone's name on a club roster or membership list that has been posted online.

I have a paid subscription to peoplefinders.com. That can give me the phone number, pipl.com and spokeo.com as well as whitepages.com, and 411.com and many similar directories may have it. If you have the address, try a reverse look up on whitepages.com as well as search on the address in Google.

I have had two finds this past week. The first is a birth daughter and I am still trying to find a good phone number for her. She does have a Facebook account with pictures, but it has not been touched for a few months. So I have the family, she has a birth sibling, trying to send messages to all her facebook friends saying that family is trying to contact her and can they help them. This has worked before.

The next find, has been many years in coming, with about a year's involvement on my part. This is from the St Louis MO area. Missouri gives detailed non-IDs (non-identifying documents that give general information about the family). They are extremely good at not giving you the details that would make a difference. In this case the adoptee, A, received a non_ID several years ago and we had been working from that. I had discovered with another Missouri case, that a request for a non-ID from the court would provide additional information to that from the adoption agency. A requested another non-ID and it had several pieces of information that pointed us in the right direction. It had ancestry information which we pursued as well as information on which school 3 of the birth mother's siblings went to (they went to a special school for a handicap).

A found a Facebook site for the school and contacted someone she believed to be in the same graduating class as her uncle. Bingo! A name of a classmate with two similarly handicapped siblings came forth and then A and I spent hours using Skype and looking up all the people with that last name and figuring how they fit in with the non-ID.

We knew that we had the right person and family, but A was very emotional and petrified to call. She finally has and her mother was very, very receptive and the first thing she told A was that she had always loved her.

Now I will put together a small family tree for A. She has a large extended family now by birth and adoption.

I hope that these thoughts give you some ideas for your search.

As I tell my husband each time, one down and 5 million to go.

Good luck on your search.