Understanding the world of People Search
While performing family tree or genealogy searches, you may find yourself searching for a living relative. You may be searching for a deceased individual – like a grandparent or the like – meaning you will be searching deceased records – or you might just be trying to locate a friend or lost love – in which case your search will be on living people. The process of obtaining data regarding living people is certainly different – and will take you to totally different sites – than searching for a deceased relative.
Thanks to the internet, searching for living people is much easier than it used to be even 10 or 15 years ago. Each year, thousands of people are successful at locating living folk. Many times, however, you will be accessing both living and deceased records – if, for instance, you are trying to find someone and must begin with deceased relatives. Regardless of whether you are searching living records or accessing deceased records on unknown ancestors, doing such a search – especially for genealogy – can be highly engaging.
As you will quickly learn, the access to records in support of data on living persons is much more widespread than that on dead people. Many times – for a genealogy search – you will find that you have a key or missing link in the tree and cannot progress until you find the spouse of your great grandfather. Older vital records, such as birth certificates and marriage bonds, are more difficult to locate and verify. If they are available they will often be quite costly, but even that may be a small percentage of what it would cost you to travel to that county courthouse.
Living people have the benefit of being connected online having records published on the internet. You can start your search for free on Google or Yahoo and determine if the information is available before you actually pay for it. This kind of search will normally get you started and at least help you locate the state where the person is and it will often include a chronology of events – like address changes.
You should also strongly consider the use of free online directories of phone numbers and email addresses. Again, these sites will often help you – by providing corroborating evidence – of where this person is at the present time.
If the person you are looking for is presumed to be either unaware or at least not hiding you should also consider using social bookmarking services and sites like Facebook. You might access Facebook and locate the person immediately and totally free.
Oftentimes you will need to get creative – by using such characteristic data as college associations and clubs and even military ‘buddy’ websites. You might start looking for possible associations through an association directory such as http://www.asaecenter.org/Directories/AssociationSearch.cfm. These are often sites that can be accessed by keyword type rather than the person’s name.
Again, for deceased records there are many genealogy sites that connect to living public records as well as death records and these can be extremely helpful. With the technology available in the 21st century, you can easily search and find living people from the comfort of your own couch. When all else fails if you are trying to conduct a people search, consider the use of a reputable people finder.
