How to Find People

Whether you are looking for a long-lost love, an old friend, a person who is a potential threat to your well-being or a distant relative, there are new ways to find a person that never existed until the Internet came into our lives. There are old-fashioned methods of finding people as well. Here are some steps you can try to find that very important person.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Use a Web site that specializes in divulging information about people. Ads for these Web sites pop up any time you look for a phone number on the Internet. These companies charge a good price to find someone and give a lot of repetitive and incorrect information, but it still may lead to the people or person you are looking for and may be well worth the price.
2. Contact old friends or go to a class reunion if the person you are trying to find has been out of your life for many years. Chance meetings in unexpected places occur all the time, and relationships are renewed. Someone you know may have seen that person you want to find and have a way to contact them.
3. Look up the county assessor's Web site for the county where you believe the person may own property. Almost every county in the country has information listed on a Web site about all land and property in that county, including the property owner's name and the property address.
4. Hire a private detective if you can't find the person on your own. Private detectives have the tools, expertise and contacts to dig up information that most of us cannot find on our own.
5. Browse through a search engine to look for a person by just entering their name as the keywords you are looking for. It may be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you just may get lucky.
6. Call 411 to reach an information operator to inquire about a person's telephone number. Once you have a telephone number, you can enter it as the address on many search engines, such as Google, and reveal the location of the telephone number. Each telephone company also has an Internet presence with "White Pages" and "Yellow Pages," reverse look-ups and business pages.

Tips & Warnings

• You may want to consult with an attorney before trying to contact anyone to make sure you are not violating anyone's right to privacy.
• The easiest place to start looking for someone is using the Internet telephone company "information" pages.