How to Find Lost Classmates for a Reunion

No matter how close you were with friends in high school or college, it's likely that you have lost touch with many of them over time. A reunion is a fun way to reconnect with old friends, find out what everyone has been doing and reminisce about the past. Learn how to find your old classmates so you can have the best reunion possible.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Locating Lost Classmates

1. Pull out your old yearbook or contact your school to get a list of classmates from your year. Enter all of the names into a spreadsheet and add columns for married name, email address, mailing address and phone number. You may also want to add columns to track classmates who no longer wish to be contacted or who are deceased. Lastly, make columns for whether or not they are interested in the reunion, planning to attend and interested in helping out.

2. Enter as much information as you into the spreadsheet. Contact your friends and ask them to fill in the blanks with people they are still in touch with. Have them pass the message along as well. Many of your contacts will be found from simple word of mouth.

3. Search for classmates on popular social networking groups such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Remember that many of the women in your class may have changed their last names through marriage. You will need to create a free account on each of these sites to search and contact classmates. Split the task with friends.

4. Use your favorite search engine to look for additional missing classmates. Try using both their full name and their nickname to search. Place the name in quotations to help filter the pages. This type of search is hit or miss, since there many be many people online with the same name. Use clues such as the place that they work or live to help you find the right individuals.

5. Consider joining premium services such as Classmates.com or Reunion.com. You can usually search for people on these sites, so look for missing classmates before signing on.

6. You may want to create an online group using a social networking tool like Facebook or a communications tool like Yahoo! Groups. Members can join for free and get updates, share ideas and reconnect online. It's a nice way to start a buzz about the reunion. It's also a great way to ask others outside of your social circles to help find people who are still missing.

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on 3/27/2009 Another way to find lost classmates is to look them up in old phone books or Grand Lists from your hometown (they should be available at your library, town hall or historical society). This works if you have an idea of which street they might have lived on, and what their parents' names were. Then you can plug the parents' names, or even the classmate's name into veromi.net, and list the classmate's hometown as a possible town they lived in. Veromi.net will return all the people recorded in the U.S. with that name. If you look up the parents' names, often Veromi.net lists "relatives" which could include the classmate and his/her siblings. Then take the name that you think is your classmate's, and plug the name and town into www.411.com. 411.com will bring back published landline numbers of people with that name in that town, plus sometimes the age of the resident. That age info ca