How To Find A Lost Friend In England. If you’re looking for an old friend in England there are searches you can perform to find them.
Searching in England is different from other countries and the information you can get is different too.
The systems and information you can access varies from country to country even within the United Kingdom.
Before we look at how to find a lost friend in England, there are a few safeguarding issues that you must consider when looking for an old friend. These are things that we do as a matter of course for our clients to keep them safe.
Firstly, who are you looking for and why. This is a legitimate question, and your answer will help us to ensure you protect yourself and your friend. Let’s look at a few examples.
- An old girl or boy friend.
We do a lot of work for older people who are looking for a first love.
The intention is to catch up on old times and see where the hand of fate has taken them.
These searches usually go really well, everyone is happy to hear from each other and catch up on old times.
They are great searches, and we do many each week.
The people we find always talk about how we make that first contact.
It’s done discreetly and with respect for everyone. And so much better than knocking on a door and having to explain who you are and what you want, many people would find this overbearing.
So, if you do find yourself in a situation where you manage to locate your old friends address, don’t just go and knock on the door.
Better would be to write a letter, better still would be to use an intermediary. That protects you, them, and anyone else in the household.
- An acquaintance
It’s one thing to find the best man from your wedding 40 years ago. You drifted apart when you both got married and he moved to another part of the country. There was no falling out. These types of searches are easy, we know when we do them that 90% of the time, the old friend will want contact and will be happy to hear from you.
Sometimes when it’s not an old friend but an old acquaintance then the passage of time can affect different people in different ways. That’s leads on to the next section of how to find a lost friend in England.
Preparing for different outcomes when you find a friend in the UK
We tell our clients; we can’t control the outcome we can only do all we can to ensure a positive one. We don’t know how contact will be received. As we have said it is usually positive. But people do change and that is something to consider.
How would you feel if your friend had passed away or didn’t want contact? We’re not trying to put you off, far from it but we do want you to think about how you would feel if something like this happened.
Again, this is why it is good to use a professional organisation to do the finding and contacting. It keeps you protected.
In the event that the outcome is not what you wanted or anticipated then we would be there to help and support you.
We can even sign post you to different organisations that can support you further if that was needed. As we said this happens in a very small number of cases but when you are looking to find an old friend it is important that you consider all outcomes. That way there are no nasty surprises down the line.
Now we have got these considerations done. You might want to know how to actually find a friend using various systems and tools.
There are a few things you can do. We have written many articles about how to find an old friend so please check out some of the links in this article to see those.
To give you a general overview of how to find a lost friend in England, here goes.
You need to write everything you know about your friend down. Then work out what is fact and what is hearsay. We work off facts. So, your friend was called Margaret Thompson that is (probably) a fact.
It is something we can use to try and find her. If you said that she had three brothers, then again that is something that is checkable. Other things are not so helpful, it’s useful to know that she had a brown dog and loved motorbikes, however this information will not help us to locate her.
So, one we have the facts written down we can use systems and tools like Find My Past to check the facts and start to move forward.
Here is a fictional example of how we find an old friend in the UK.
Margaret Thompson born around 1948 in Cornwall with three brothers.
We would look for her birth record, that would give us her mother’s maiden name. That would allow us to find her brothers birth records. Once we had confirmed those with the same mother’s maiden name, we would be sure we had the right Margaret Thompson.
From that we could look for her parents’ marriage. This would then give us her father’s name.
We could then look for potential marriages for Margaret Thompsons. If we found one, we could order it. Once we had it, we could cross reference her father’s name. If it matched, we would know her married name. Then we could look for second marriages.
Do the same process if we found a potential second marriage. If we didn’t, we can assume that we have her current name. Once we have that we can use publicaly available address systems such as 192 to look for matches.
And that is a basic overview of how to find a lost friend in England.