Your Chance to be a Detective
How to Search for Classmates
Here’s a very brief summary of what I did to look for classmates. I encourage you to conduct your own searches, using these and other tools. And if you have questions, please let me know rlesaar@mac.com. I’ll do my best to answer.
There are still 318 classmates from whom we have heard nothing; these are the people listed on The Missing page and the same people who have a dot before their name on the Directory pages. That’s roughly ¾ of the entire class. So anything you can do to help locate them and tell them about the Reunion would be wonderful.
First, even though I’ve broken it up and numbered the entries, it’s not really a linear process; there’s a lot of back and forth required to find people, so don’t take the following as completely step-wise and set in concrete.
1. I started with Facebook, because it’s widely used and because its users now tend to skew older (which we of course are!) You’ll quickly be surprised by how many people have the same name so if you get a long list of returns, you might want to use the filters. After hitting “People” in the top menu, I used “City” of Glenview and then “Education.” In addition to Glenview, for “City” I also used whatever city I could find in either the 1984 or 2007 Reunion books. For “School” I used Glenbrook South (of course) and any college mentioned in either of the Reunion books.
2. Once you think you have a hit on Facebook, it’s time to verify. Pick a person and go to the About tab. See if it gives Glenbrook South and our year in the “Work and Education” area. Also check the Friends tab to see if you can find that this person is friends with someone else you know for certain went to South and was in our class.
3. If you can’t find something to verify this person, especially if the city is missing, check the Likes and Check-Ins tabs to see if you can infer what city they live in and then match it to the Reunion books.
4. Try LinkedIn. Since this is used more for business connections, try both the name you know and the more formal versions of first names when searching; e.g., try both Bob and Robert. LinkedIn does a pretty good job of making these name connections, but it’s worth checking and trying all variations.
5. A key to using LinkedIn for verification is comparing the information from the Reunion books to the profile for both school and company/industry.
6. Side note on photographs: Don’t rely on photographs to make an identification. It’s too easy to convince yourself that, why yes, that could be the same person I knew in high school. (And, by the way, facial recognition software places special emphasis on ears. Turns out ears are quite distinctive. Who knew?)
7. Another note on photographs: Most people tend to use the same photograph for all of their social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) So if you think you’ve found someone on one social media source, look for the same picture on others.
8. Looking for addresses, try MyLife. Once you select a name from the search results, see if the address in either Recent Address or Past Addresses matches what’s in the Reunion books.
9. As a cross-check to MyLife, and to get phone numbers and email addresses, now try FastPeopleSearch. Here you’ll need not just a name but also a city and state, but you should already have some idea of those from earlier searching. For the phone numbers, take a close look at the area codes. You may be able to match an area code location with an earlier address. For example, someone may now live in New York City, but if you find a code of 872, then that could be a cell phone number obtained when living in Chicago.
10. Generally, women are harder to find than men, because (1) they may have changed their last name, and (2) there are fewer women on LinkedIn and Facebook than men (43% compared to 57% for both platforms). So…sometimes, if you know the husband’s name from one of the Reunion books, you could search on him and then see if you can find a connection to a family member with the classmate’s name
11. There are other sites, pay sites, which I did not use, but which provide much more information on marriage and divorce records, etc. They may help you zero in on a particular classmate.
12. Finally, the most difficult task is confirming a death. It’s also where we want to be most careful. We don’t want to pronounce someone early! Again, remember that many people have the same name and even live in the same area. For example, someone living less than a mile from us (also in DC) has the same name (including middle) name as my wife. What are the odds? Pretty high it seems, so be especially careful in this arena.