Old Friend Search

How to Locate Old Friends

After a good amount of time, it certainly becomes very easy to lose track of old friends.  Friends come and go throughout our lives and society keeps us so busy that it becomes too much to keep track of every person who has made an impact on our life.  Luckily the trusty 'ol internet allows us to locate old friends and gives a chance reconnect and catch up on some old times.

The first thing you need to do when seeking an old friend using the internet is to write down all that you know about that person.  This includes the person’s full name, last known address, email address, old schools, age, marriage status, if they were in the military, etc.  Some of this information may be hard to come by if you have had no connection in years.  If you need help, try to reach a mutual acquaintance that might have some of the answers you are looking for.

Once you have all the information known about your old friend, you can now use the internet to assist you further.  There are plenty of social sites online that you should check first.  Myspace and Facebook are two places where you can do a search and narrow the search by region.  These sites may be helpful in locating friends who are between the ages of 15-35.  For other inquiries try Infoseek and/or Anywho.  These sites will let you do reverse type of searches where you can type in the phone number and get the persons name and address.

If you happen to know what school or schools the old friend attended, there are a couple of sites that offer free and paid memberships to help you reconnect.  Classmates.com and Reunion.com both offer a variety of search methods and can be very helpful.  If you’re old friend or friends were or are in the military, Militaryconnections.com would be the site you'd want to check first.

The methods we use to locate old friends today makes it so much easier for us to do.  In fact, I should just say the internet is precisely what makes it so easy for us.  Before the advent of the internet, locating old friends was like trying to find a needle in a hay stack.  If you wanted to find a friend you either had to do all the work yourself, searching through countless directories and phone books and spending all day at your local library or spend loads of money on a private investigator to do the work for you.  Today you simply type in your old friends name in a computer and all the dirty work is done for you at a fraction of the cost and time.