Anyone who finds people for a living, as private investigators do, knows the frustration of locating women. They change their names. Often many times over the course of their lives. This is a challenge to the heir finder who has a name from many years in the past that she has to update in order to locate her subject.

Use the free portion of a people finder site that allows you to search by first name and date of birth. But you also have to use a workaround on sites that require a last name to perform the search. This involves the handy wildcard. In this case, we’ll apply the asterisk.

At the site peoplefinders.com enter a first name in that field and an asterisk (*) in the last name field. Add date of birth or year of birth. This will work until the search interface is changed — which may happen just as soon as the powers that be see this tip!

That’s tip #1 in Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women. Do you know of other sites where a skip trace by first name can be performed?