How to Find a Long Lost Friend
The internet has made reuniting with old friends, neighbors, or coworkers possible in the blink of an eye. This article looks at some of the best ways to find a long-lost friend.
Facebook’s tracking capacity is generally unrivaled. The first and most obvious option is to search for people using their names. If you dig deeper, you might find a group or a page connected to an old neighborhood or school or a former employer.
If their profile is private, you need to send a friend request or send them a message. Use a real profile picture to make them more likely to accept you.
Classmates.com
If you knew your friend from school, classmates.com is worth a look. The website targets users in the US. It used to support a number of other countries.
To check if your old friend has an account there, it’s not necessary to sign up. Select the state your school was in from the homepage, then the city and the name of the school. Classmates will retrieve a list of all the linked members. To send other people messages, you will need to sign up.
Alumni.net
This website is a great source of information with a vast member database, albeit lacking in design and visual appeal. It has been live for almost thirty years and has been accumulating more and more members in this time.
Alumni.net divides networks into school networks and professional networks, with portals and subnetworks representing the majority of countries.
This website is one of the best ones to reconnect with old friends from college and catch up on the latest news from Michigan State, Florida State, the University of California at Berkeley, and other universities. It offers access to job boards, meetups, discount deals, and other events.
Almost all colleges and universities have in-house alumni networks, as do a number of leading global enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Nestle, P&G, Accenture, HSBC, and Citigroup.
FreePeopleSearch.com
FreePeopleSearch.com will make it effective, easy, and quick to conduct an advanced people search if you need to find people online but are unsure where to start. This free search tool will make it possible for you to contact someone or even run a background check on them.
The people search service uses lawsuits, bankruptcies, civil records, marriage records, criminal records, and other public information. This vast volume of data powers the search service so users can find people quickly and easily.
Information.com
Users of information.com will access data in almost every facet of life from publicly available records. It is a specialized, intuitive search engine with the latest information about people, including addresses, locations, etc. It’s easy to fill the people search form out. Information.com will generate a report for you, but you have to enter your name and email address to get it.
If you know your old friend from work and you want a free and effective way to reunite with them, look no further than LinkedIn. The professional network has almost a billion members globally. You can check company profiles for a list of people who work there and aren’t on your connections list. All major schools and colleges have an alumni group, and LinkedIn has a group feature just like Facebook.
Don’t underestimate the potential of your network because it’s more career-oriented. It can be a very powerful tool. LinkedIn can help you use it to reconnect with people you aren’t in touch with anymore.
BeenVerified
You can use BeenVerified to perform background checks. Like similar services on this list, you don’t need more than a name to look someone up. This website also uses publicly available information, such as property records, vehicle records, social network profiles, and email addresses. It leverages this information to create a complete profile of your search target.
While it’s not possible to contact the person directly, many of the results include contact details, as the service scans plenty of records. You can use those details to get in touch.
Just entering their name in the mother of all search engines might be enough to track someone down, in case you haven’t thought of that. You might even learn about a prominent achievement of theirs, making them easier to track down.
If the person you’re looking for has enabled the respective feature, Google can find results from different social media, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
You could use a Boolean search operator to narrow down the results list. If you have an old picture of them, try Google Images to see if anyone has uploaded any pictures.
If your old friend was in the army, try a military organization to find them.
Final Say
Few people have managed to evade all online presence. The suggestions in this article might not yield fast results, but if you’re willing to try, you’ll track them down eventually. As a last resort, you could hire a professional to find them for you.