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?