Searching For Living People

About Searching For Living People

Online Search Engines That Will Find Living People

BOOKS, ARTICLES, BLOGS etc.

The Manual to Online Public Records. 2010 (find in a library) -- a new edition is coming out 2013. This is much broader than genealogical information; I'm not sure how much of it will be useful. You might want to ask your local library to interlibrary loan a copy for you if there are no nearby libraries that own it.

About.com articles

ONLINE AIDS

Most of these search engines allow you to search for free, but want you to pay for information. I don't know which "pay for information" sites are better than others but suggest you investigate your options before plunking down a credit card. See what you find for yourself and others you know well to get an idea of how reliable the results might be.

Freeality: This site allows you to search using any one of dozens of search engines, incuding many well known ones and some I've never heard of. It categorizes the search engines into several areas. The ones most likely to be useful for finding living people include:

Geneasearch: People Searching. This is not a search engine, but links search engines of most use to genealogists. Any list created by Joe Beine is bound to be helpful; Recommended.

Free Searching: People Search -- searching is free, but most, if not all results are pay to view.

InfoSpace: this is a pretty helpful site. It will take you to a variety of "pay for results" sites, but also some sites that have open information freely available. I like the neat and orderly display of results.

MyLife: a membership site and I'm not a member, so I can't give you much information. You can become a member for free, but you must give them information about yourself to do so.

People Finder: a pay for results site, although some basic information appears at no cost. I've not used it, but I like the businesslike, clear, direct and uncomplicated layout and would be willing to give it a try if I needed to find someone. People Smart is another that is clean and neat, with no distracting ads; it too is a pay to view site.

Yahoo People Search: this is a web search engine and may be helpful, although you will probably get a great number of unrelated results.

Pipl.com -- takes you to pay for results sites. When I did some testing I was not impressed with what it found as likely matches, but give it a try.

Virtual Gumshoe : Free Resources for Investigors--it is a complicated site, but I can see some helpful information and links can be found in the public records section.