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Clarify the name of the person for whom you're searching. Someone's full name may not always be the name you know him by. A person you know as "Chuck" may actually be a "Charles," while "Skip" can be a nickname that has no relation to the person's actual first name. Some people use their middle name in lieu of their legal first name.
Check information such as correspondence, workplace directories or school yearbooks, and talk to other acquaintances to clarify the person's full name.
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Online phone books are useful people-find tools. mobile phone image by Vladimirs Koskins from Fotolia.com
Search the national phone book at Superpages.com by entering the first and last name in the appropriate fields and selecting "All States" under the "State" pull-down list.
Although there are many online white pages directories, most require you to search for listings in an individual state, which is a barrier to finding someone if you do not know the state in which they live. Superpages allows a phone directory search of the entire United States at once.
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Search at Pipl.com by entering the person's name and, if known, his location. Pipl is a specialty search engine that scours the Internet for information on individuals and presents it in a concise format. It is often surprising to see how much personal information is available from a search at this site.
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Search at Intelius if your Superpages and Pipl searches don't reveal the information you're seeking. Although searching at Intelius is similar to a white pages search, the results are more detailed. This commercial people-find service shows information on a person's age, relations and previous addresses, along with current address and phone number listings.
Preliminary information is available at no charge, but Intelius charges a fee for full listing information.
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Check the Social Security Death Index if the white pages and Intelius produce no results. Enter all or part of the person's name. You can enter additional information, if known, such as birth date or state of residence, in order to narrow the search results.
There is always a possibility that the person you're seeking has passed on. SSDI contains information on almost all deaths that have occurred in the past few decades in the United States.
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Check workplace listings at Jigsaw.com if you still haven't located your missing person. Jigsaw is a business contacts database with millions of names of employees at large and small companies in the U.S. and other countries. Search on the person's name to review preliminary results at no cost. Jigsaw charges a fee to retrieve a full listing.
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Search news items at Google News Archive. People often are named in newspaper articles and other news reports for some accomplishment or scandal, or in a routine announcement of an engagement, marriage, birth or job promotion. Newspaper searches are especially useful in finding women who changed their last name after marriage.
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Search genealogical records at FamilySearch.org by entering the person's name and any information on place or dates of birth or death. FamilySearch is a useful resource if you need to go further back in history than other people-search tools generally provide.
5/9/11
How to Find People on a Resource Site
There are dozens of major resource sites on the Internet that you can use to find people. Some are broad national white pages directories with hundreds of millions of name, address and phone listings, while others delve deeper and provide additional information, such as arrest records or relatives. Still other people-finding sites focus on specialty searches, such as identifying places of employment. And, alas, there are spammy sites that promise information -- like Social Security numbers -- that they typically can't deliver. By using the major, reputable sites, you can search for information on people without wasting your time or money.
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