Find a person by name is possible, but how?
This article will give help so you can discover how to find a person by name.
My name is David Oates, I am the Head Researcher at Relative Connections, you can view my LinkedIn by clicking here. I am also the director of the adoption support agency which is regulated by Ofsted. I am a highly regarded and experienced family tracer and intermediary. I have spoken about finding long lost family on BBC Radio 5 and was part of the featured team on BBC1’s Family Finders TV series
So, what’s the short answer?
Well in truth it depends. It depends on who you are looking for and why. For example, finding a debtor when you only have a name will be different from finding your brother. In both cases contact might be welcome and in both cases it might not.
Let’s presume you know who you are looking for and why. In most cases you might know more than you think you do. So have a think. That’s the first piece of advice.
Think about everything you might know about the person you are looking for.
Do you know their date of birth?
Do you know a rough age?
Do you know an old address?
Or an area of the country they used to live?
Do you know other people that knew them?
Or maybe a hobby or interest they had?
When it comes to find a person by name it is not as simple as accessing a database and finding them. Some out of the box thinking will always be required.
That’s not to say it’s not possible though.
Once you’ve had a good think about then. And hopefully wrote it all down, you can start your search.
But wait!
Just one more quick thought that might help you…
Do you know their current name?
Could they have changed it by getting married for example?
There are examples of men changing their surname to match their wives too, although this is unusual.
So now I think, we are ready to start.
If you have your list of information about your person. Let’s get started.
Head to a computer and start searching. You could try Facebook. You could try Google. There are great websites that can help you such as 192.com and Trace Genie.
These will certainly help narrow your search down.
You could try newspaper archives too. You can even piece things together on birth, death, and marriage records. The two services that are well known for that are Ancestry and Find my Past. If you are looking for a blood relative, you could try DNA searching on Ancestry. So as you can see there is lots you can do to find a person by name.
But what if you try all this and find no trace of them.
That can happen.
In these cases, you need to think even further from the box.
At this point you could try a professional company to find them (us?)
You could think about if they could be living in another country. You can search other countries by typing in the name of the country into Google followed by White Pages. This will let you search if there are any online telephone directories for that given country.
Searching other countries can become harder without local knowledge. We have good researchers in many countries and that can really help us find a person by name when they are in another country.
We’ve had successes in both Paraguay and China. We did that by finding local people to help look for information in the country. We did that by searching online.
If you are going to find a person by name yourself then it will be done online. There isn’t really much advantage to looking anywhere else. The caveat to that would old electoral roll data. You can use old electoral roll data to see who lives at an address a long time ago.
Other than that we’d be happy to help.
That’s it for this week’s article. I hope you have enjoyed reading it. I hope it has answered your questions and given you some genuine help and advice.
Good luck with you own search to find a person by name.