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Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women – Tip #2

Tamara Thompson — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:34:33 +0000

In tip #1 of Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women I mentioned one free people finder site and the wildcard tool that can bypass the last name requirement — most helpful in locating women who are probate beneficiaries, potential witnesses in a legal matter or the birth mother of someone relinquished for adoption long ago.

There are many Internet sites for identifying current last names of women — searching by first name only — for whom the investigator may only have a birth name or former married name. Each site returns different results so you’ll want to use more than one, if at first you don’t find what you’re looking for.

At the site, classmates.com, I performed a similar search to the one I did in tip #1, except that there’s no field to restrict the results by year of birth or full birthdate. In that case, I entered just the first name and a state. The results give last names and birth names and the name of the school with the attendance years. You can use this to narrow the birth year. The tip #1 search site returned 17 matches. I supplied first name, age and state. Classmates returned 67 matches associated with first name and state. Very few of these matched the age of the subject, based on the listed graduation years. It’s a limited source but still supplements other sites.

Do you have a favorite website or database that allows searching by first name?

Plaxo People Finder

Tamara Thompson — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:25:16 +0000

Social networking sites continue to refine their people finder tools — and some unintended ones are being exploited by savvy investigators. Linkedin, MySpace, Facebook all have internal search engines to find their member webpages. Linkedin and MySpace have multiple search engines, returning different results. (I demonstrate this in my presentation, Social Networking Sites: Investigating People On the Internet). Conducting the same search from a major search engine will block some sites set by the user to “private” but will return links to private profiles on public sites. The Internet has not been tamed.

Okay, on to Plaxo and their fairly recently introduced “Advanced People Search”. Here’s where an Internet researcher can gather intelligence on people within and outside of their contacts. Again, people review your privacy settings, the memory of which tends to fade over time!

At the advanced people search screen select “People” and enter a name. A list of users tells you whether you are connected to them. Select a name to see their profile, the public portion of their page and the connections they’ve established with other site users. You can also search people by school, company or job title and forward results to your email. Try your own name for a surprise.

I’m writing a longer version of this post for the FMS Research newsletter.