Kearney High School Class of Search Guide Guide to Searching for Missing Classmates as of 12/04/2009

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1 Thanks for your interest to serve on our Search Team to help search for our Missing Classmates! Our goal is to obtain current contact information for each Missing Classmate, so we can invite them to visit our Class Reunion website ( fill out a Classmate Profile, and attend our 45 th class reunion in The contact information we need is: current name (in case they ve changed it or if married or divorced); mailing address; home, work, or cell phone number; address (if available). By dividing up the list of our Missing Classmates, we can work together to search online and make some phone calls to hopefully track down our former classmates. This Guide will give you some free online search tools you can use, but if you find other free search tools or have other search techniques that work for you, please let me know so I can share your ideas with all Search Team members. If you have any questions or suggestions, please call me at or me at: siteadmin@khs1967.org Thanks! Chuck Wolf KHS Class of 1967 Website Administrator Page 1 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf

2 STEP 1: SELECT THE MISSING CLASSMATES YOU LL CONTACT Visit our website ( and log on with your Address and Password. If you ve forgotten your password, click on the Forgot Password? link above the green Log On box; your password will be automatically ed to you. If your Address has recently changed, it to me and I ll reset your Address and Password. You can then log on and change your Password to something else you ll remember. Once you ve logged on, click on the 45 th Reunion in 2012 link on the vertical menu bar. Scroll down to the Search List section and click on the link to download an Adobe Acrobat file containing the latest version of the Search List. If you don t have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer, you can download a free copy from: The Search List will contain any Married Name, Address or Phone information that we have, and will list which Missing Classmates have already been assigned to another Search Team member. Review the list of Missing Classmates, and select six (6) classmates who have not already been assigned to other Search Team members. Select classmates who you were (or still are) friends with, or if you still know their parents, brothers or sisters, other relatives or mutual friends who may know how to reach them. A few phone calls to family or friends may be the fastest way to obtain current contact information. If the classmate is a woman, it helps if you know whether she is single or married, and what her married name is. Searching online for a woman s maiden name will be difficult (unless she is single or kept her maiden name when she married or divorced). Details later in Step #3. your list of six (6) Missing Classmates to Chuck Wolf at: siteadmin@khs1967.org If you are willing to search for anyone, I ll assign you six (6) classmates who you can search for. After you ve completed your search (or exhausted your leads), please let me know your results by to: siteadmin@khs1967.org STEP 2: CONTACT ANY RELATIVES OR FRIENDS YOU KNOW If you still know a Missing Classmate s parents, brothers or sisters, other relatives or mutual friends who may know how to reach them, call or them to see if they will share the Missing Classmate s contact information with you, or if they will ask the Missing Classmate to call you. If they don t have their current contact information, do they at least know their married name or what city or what state they live in? Do they know another relative or friend who knows how to reach them? Do they know the Missing Classmate s birthday? (That will help you narrow the online search later on.) Look through your Log yearbooks to identify any possible brothers, sisters, cousins or relatives with the same last name who graduated before or after Page 2 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf

3 STEP 3: OBTAIN THE FULL NAME OF THE MISSING CLASSMATE: The classmate that you knew as Scott may legally be named John. A middle name will help you narrow your online search. The good news is the full legal name of every classmate was printed in our Graduation Program which you can download and print from the 45 th Reunion in 2012 page on our website. Or copy and paste this shortcut into your browser: You ll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer to open and print this.pdf file. Of course, many women in our class may now be married, divorced, and/or have new last names. Finding a woman by her maiden name is difficult (unless she is single or kept her maiden name when she married or divorced). Only a handful of states allow online searches of their Marriage License records; most states (including Nebraska) will only provide Marriage License records to the bride or groom by mail for a fee. However, there are a few websites you can check: You have to be a Member, but membership is free. However, the search only works if the woman has registered her maiden name and contact information with this website. This free service lets you check various public record databases to see if she has obtained a professional or occupational license, purchased property, registered to vote, etc. Search for her maiden name and you may find a record that changed when she got married. Once you obtain her married name, you can continue the search using the steps listed below. Otherwise, you may have more luck using the Step #4 techniques to search for the name of her father, mother, or brother if you know their name. Once you find one of her relatives, hopefully they can provide you with contact information to reach her. She may remain in contact with other KHS classmates, so her best friends from our class. You ll find a link to Send a private message to their address below their Classmate Profile stored on our website ( plus you can post a message on our Message Forum that all classmates can read and respond to. If you think she is single or kept her maiden name after marriage or divorce, then continue the search using the steps listed below. Page 3 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf

4 STEP 4: SEARCH ONLINE TO FIND A CURRENT ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER There are a lot of online businesses that will try to sell you people search results for a onetime, monthly, or annual fee, but many will provide limited information for free. Don t subscribe to any paid services. If we can reduce our list of 108 Missing Classmates down to a dozen or so classmates that we can t track down for free, then we ll subscribe later to one of the paid services for 24-hours to search for those final Missing Classmates. I recommend that you search for your own name first, just for practice, then search for each Missing Classmate that you selected. Search in the following order: In the People Search box, fill in the First Name, Middle Name (not just the Middle Initial), and the Last Name. Fill in the Age as 60 (then try age 59 or 61 in subsequent searches). Veromi will give you free results with Possible Employment, City and State, and Possible Relatives and their Ages. Does the Possible Employment fit the classmate s interests? Do you recognize any of the Possible Relatives? Does the Age range match our classmate? Print out the page or write down the results for all possible matches. View Details will only give you Veromi s price list; do not buy. Again, you should repeat the same search using both age 59 and 61, then evaluate the results. If the Missing Classmate has a common first name, search for their parent or sibling who has a less common first name, then ask the parent or sibling how to find your Missing Classmate. In the People Search by Name box, fill in the First Name, Middle Name (not just the Middle Initial), and the Last Name. In the All 50 States dropdown box, click on the State provided in the Veromi results. (If you received multiple results from Veromi, you ll need to search for the Classmate in each State.) Then click on Free People Search. Zabasearch should give you a Mailing Address and a work or home Phone Number for free. Clicking on other links (such as Get the Dirt ) will send you to an Intelius website that ll try to sell you additional information. If Zabasearch doesn t give you the Mailing Address and Phone Number, try the PIPL website. Fill in the First Name (including the Middle Name), Last Name, City and State. PIPL has links to both free listings (in white) and paid listings (in yellow), but I ve found PIPL displays a lot of extraneous results, websites and blogs that you ll have to review to see if they provide any other clues that may help you contact your Matching Classmate. Page 4 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf

5 Fill in the First Name, Last Name, City and State, and click Find. White Pages will find the Work or Home address, Age Range (sometimes), and Job or other Helpful Information. Either Zabasearch, PIPL, or White Pages should be able to give you a Mailing Address and either a Work or Home Phone Number for every possible match for your Missing Classmate. This site is affiliated with White Pages but sometimes gives different results. In the People Search box, fill in the First Name, Last Name, City and State, and click Search. The site should give you a Street Address and Phone Number, and possibly an Age Range. 411 has a lot of Sponsored Links to services like MyLife that charge for additional information. If you find a Possible Employment in Veromi or a Job listing in White Pages, use Google to search for the company s name. If the company has a website, it may include a Staff Directory or list of key personnel that you can check for the Missing Classmate s name and find their work phone or address. The website should also list the company s postal mailing address. STEP 5: WRITE OR CALL EACH POSSIBLE MATCH You will need to write or call each possible match to find out if they really are our Missing Classmate. It s your choice whether you want to write a brief letter or call them on the phone, but here is a sample script: I am searching for (Missing Classmate s name) who graduated in 1967 from Kearney High School in Kearney, Nebraska, so we can invite them to our next class reunion. Did you attend Kearney High School? If you send a letter, include your name, mailing address, phone number and address so they can reply and let you know whether they are or are not our Missing Classmate. STEP 6: WHEN YOU VE MADE CONTACT WITH A MISSING CLASSMATE: Congratulations! It s great to re-connect with an old friend! Write down their current contact information, including: a. First Name and/or Nickname they prefer to be called b. Last Name or Married Name c. Mailing Address with City, State, and ZIP d. Home, work, and/or cell phone (if they are willing to share with other Classmates) e. address Page 5 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf

6 If they don t have an Address, ask if they know the address for a friend, neighbor or family member who would be willing to pass on KHS 1967 class reunion information that we can to their friend. (If not, we will send class reunion information to them by postal mail.) Ask if they have access to a computer with Internet, either at home, work, school, a public library, or the nearby home of a friend, neighbor, or family member that they can use. Encourage them to visit our website ( to fill out a Classmate Profile. It s free and will let them communicate with other classmates, post current photos of themselves and their family, and receive information about our next class reunion in the summer of Encourage them to visit other pages on our website: view the Classmate Profiles of their old friends, fill out the Class Reunion Survey, view photos from our 40 th Reunion in 2007, take the KHS Quiz or Who Are They? photo contest, re-live the KHS Memories of 1967, learn what their KHS/KJHS Teachers are now doing, or visit In Memory to find out which classmates are now deceased. They can join the online discussion in our Message Forum. If they don t have Internet access, you can download an Adobe Acrobat version of a fill-in-theblank Classmate Profile that you can send them by postal mail. The classmate can fill it out with pen or pencil, then mail back to me. I ll enter their answers into their Classmate Profile on the website so other classmates can view it. Please me (siteadmin@khs1967.org) any negative or positive results, including any current contact information that you obtained from the Missing Classmate. Let me know whether you or the classmate will fill out their Classmate Profile on the website or by mail. If you have any suggestions for improving this Guide or other techniques for searching for missing classmates, me your ideas so I can share them with the entire Search Team. Thanks! Page 6 of KHS1967-SearchGuide.pdf