It’s pretty easy to find some people if they’re on Facebook, and I’ve reconnected with many old friends.But lots of people from my past don’t have one, and if the women now go by their married names, it’s unlikely I’ll find them. But today I was thinking about a very smart, funny girl that I met in college, who was a sophomore when I was a freshman. She transferred to a different school after her sophomore year, but she was also friends with my older sister, so she came to visit us at our parents home after she graduated. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. Last time I spoke to her, she was teaching an English class to adults in a tough neighborhood in her city. That was 35 years ago.
I’ve looked online for her before, but she has a common name, and if she married and had a new last name, I’d never find her. Today I felt nostalgic, and gave the search another try. This time I found someone with the same name, who was teaching Reading in an inner city (the same city) alternative school as far back as 2013. I saw a picture of her giving a speech, and it really could be her. I saw a detailed lesson plan that this person wrote about engaging adolescents in their cultural history and encouraging them to experience the language that authors use to reflect their struggles. It was so absorbing! I’m thinking about going through the reading list.
There’s no contact information, or I might send her an email, but I do believe this is my college friend, and I’m happy to see that she found a way to share her gift of humor and language to teach all these years. On Rate My Teacher, her students seemed to love her. I don’t need to contact her, but I’m glad to see that she has been leading a passionate life.
Have any of you searched ( I don’t want to say stalked, but it sure can seem that way) for people from your past?
I do it not only for people from my past, but people from my offspring’s past.
I grew up as a military brat. Long distance phone calls were expensive back then. Email didn’t exist. Sometimes we’d write for a year or two, but then give up. I’ve reconnected with some of these people, but more often, I’m just curious as to what became of them.
I’d like to reconnect with some of them, but @jonri, mostly I’m also curious as to where life took them. This time, I feel like I tried a few different phrases that made all the difference.
I have! It’s fun to catch up, and once we connect on Facebook and follow each other’s posts for awhile, it almost seems like we haven’t missed so much time.
If you’re lucky, there might be some resource that helps you determine what a woman’s married name might be. Around here, for example, marriage licenses are publicly available online. So if I wanted to know the married name of an old high school friend, I could look her up in the marriage license database. It’s not foolproof. She’ll only be in the database if she got married in this county, and it’s also possible she might have divorced and remarried in another county or something like that. Yes, I know how stalker-ish that sounds! LOL! But I have to track people down for work a lot and I’ve learned a few tricks along the way! And I’ve tracked down a few old friends that way too.
When I was in college, there were a group of guys that played intramural sports and called their team a unique name. One day on a whim, I searched Facebook for the team name and found that one of the girlfriends had created a group. It’s been fun to reconnect with them. Most of them married their college sweethearts, although my boyfriend and I broke up before graduation. (He is not part of the FB group, though).
If you know the county in which your stalkee (lol) lives, you can search the property tax appraisals for their name, if they own property. (I know where my college boyfriend lives!) You can google [Whatever] County appraisal district and you should find the site. This is available in Texas but I don’t know about other states.
There’s a Facebook group for the pinball parlor where we all used to hang out when we were 15, and I’ve reconnected with more people than I need to from that experience, haha. The intriguing ones seem much harder to find.
I grew up in Russia, and a lot of my former classmates emigrated. It’s been very interesting to find out what country they ended up in (most in the U.S.) I tracked down my favorite high school teacher recently. He is retired and lives in California now and was very happy to hear from me, and I finally had a chance to tell him how much I loved his lessons.
I usually google with the maiden name and college name or some other detail(s) I know for sure. Sometimes, you know the name of a sibling, which might bring up FB (and maybe she’s shown as a friend) or an obituary, which lists her as a survivor (eg, the parent’s name, then her, as a survivor, with her married surname.) All sorts of ways. sometimes fruitful, sometimes not at all. Later, you can confirm on LinkedIn or see if the suspect’s FB includes any mutual friends.
I did find my grad school roommate this way. I knew her husband’s name, but she divorced him and remarried. Long story, but I even found a photo-- and if my life depended on it, I never, ever would have recognized her in real life. Same with a middle school friend, who went from perky, athletic blonde to middle aged. (Ack, life.)
Do I stalk? Not really. The biggest re-connection for me was in a local deli, where a coworker from 20 years earlier recognized me. We lived about a mile apart, 3000 miles from where we knew each other.
Oh, wait, even weirder. A large group of grad school friends got together and at some point, talked about the people we’d want to find and invite to any next gathering. I searched for a male friend (knew his hometown and where he went undergrad.) Lo and behold, found a suspect about 90 minutes away. What came up most on google was about a son. One night, months later it just dawned on me the kid would be my D’s age and in college. What if…? And you guessed it, he was at the same college. And she knew him.
I’m wary about searching. When I’ve tried to find old friends on the Internet, I’ve discovered that the ones who are most likely to show up are those who have died recently or whose family members have died recently. Obituaries are the first things that pop up if you enter someone’s maiden name and the name of the city where they were born.
I reconnected with a couple we met on vacation 32 years ago…spent a fun week with and never saw again. I found them years ago before FB from the white pages, but it seemed odd to reach out. I had no idea if they would remember us…we were all so young. I was worried she would think it was creepy. But then with FB, it doesn’t seem so odd to reconnect and find people. So I friend requested her. They live in NV. Turns out we were heading to Las Vegas, so they met us and we had a fantastic time reconnecting. As fun a couple as I remember. That’s why I love FB.
I recently organized my 50th HS reunion and I searched for everyone from our class (240 people). It took a lot of time, but I found 221 of us. (Some dead, some ill, most alive and kicking.) I feel very proud that I found all but 19 people.
I googled the maiden name. I googled the parents’ names. I googled siblings’ names. I looked on Facebook and LinkedIn. Also, the more people I found, the more information I got from them. For example, I remember bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t find someone with a very common name, nor was I likely to. It turned out one of the class members I had already found knew where he was.
Sometimes I felt like a private investigator. It was very satisfying and a huge amount of fun.
I reconnected with folks as a result of a 45th high school reunion. People found me on Facebook, but only because they contacted my brother. I have a very ethnic maiden name, which I don’t use and also started using my middle name (dropped given name completely) when I went to college. If not for my brother still living in the area where I went to high school (I moved away after college and never returned), I am not sure the organizers would have found me. I have become friends with these hs friends on Facebook–there is a closed group for members of our class.
I really would have loved to have known about my h.s. boyfriend and first love. He was never on FB though and there were no pics of him that I could find. He passed away relatively young a few years ago. He was such a nice person.
I find that almost every year around the holiday season I become nostalgic and wonder “whatever happened to…” and start the internet search. I’ve been “successful” a couple of times and unfortunately 2 people I would actually really like to locate (one woman and one man) I am unable to (so far…I do keep checking). The woman was actually my very best friend back in the late 60s (elementary school) and her mother took my mom and me in when we returned to the US after our 4 year around-the-world travels (her mom & my mom became good friends because of our friendship) - alas, that “her name may have changed” seems to be a reality for her. And the guy was someone I was very good friends with in junior high (he was a year older than me), and his family moved to New Zealand when he was 14…a year after he moved my own family moved to NZ and believe it or not he was in my class in school there (I was just under 14 when we moved and didn’t even know where NZ was!). It was a most joyous reunion for me and he and all his friends simply embraced me immediately into their group. Although he has an unusual last name, I simply have been unable to find him though any search. I don’t want to buy into one of those “find anyone” sites, but I won’t lie, the thought has crossed my mind. I truly would love to find them both and just see how their lives have unfolded.