Historical Research: Finding People From Over 40 Years Ago

Going Back to the Early 1970s

We’ve had a few cases where clients asked us to identify people who were either employed at, or did contract work for, two different buildings (one a former business) that existed over 40 years ago. In both cases, our clients didn’t know the people’s full names, and the business had been closed for several decades.

Case #1: Finding a Car Mechanic

In one, a lawyer hired us to find a car mechanic who had worked in Denver some time in the early 1970s. We had his last name (which fortunately was unique — better than trying to find someone with the last name of Smith or Jones!), his wife’s first name, and the name of a dealership (which had closed over twenty years ago) where he had once worked. Researching proprietary databases wasn’t useful because their information didn’t go back that far. Surprisingly, old local telephone books from that era didn’t contain any people with that last name.

One track of investigative research that was fruitful, however, was researching business owners of the former car dealership through our state’s Secretary of State database, then researching contact information for these people and their family members. It took a lot of calls and hitting dead ends, but eventually we found a contact who remembered this car mechanic. Unfortunately, he had died years ago, but we were able to conduct an interview with one of his-coworkers from that former dealership, who gave us information useful for the lawyer’s case.

Case #2: Finding a Building Contractor

In a current case, we needed to determine the identities of building contractors who built a school building in 1970, and later remodeled a school gymnasium in 1972. Our client, a law firm back east, only knew the names of the buildings. Fortunately, in our state, school districts are mandated by law to keep business records, contracts and architectural plans on file in case the school requires any remodeling.

To our amazement, we learned that this school district had gone above and beyond the mandate by also keeping every scrap of paper associated to a contract, even scribbled notes. Such a find is a PI’s dream come true. We visited the off-site storage facility where boxes of these notes had been stored, and sifted through box after box, looking for any mention of a contractor’s name…eventually, we found the names of contractors and subcontractors for these buildings, nearly 40 years later!

This last case shows how, even in this digital age, old-fashioned footwork can solve a case. If we had relied solely on the documents faxed to us by the school district, we never would have learned the identities of the contractors.

Have a great week, Writing PIs

 

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During the Holidays, People Turn to PIs to Help Find Missing Relatives

The holidays are a time of celebrating with friends and family, a time when people often grow nostalgic about those with whom they’ve lost contact.  Sometimes people try to look up missing loved ones on the Internet (who aren’t always missing, by the way — sometimes their contact information fell through the cracks years ago), but there’s little or no information about their whereabouts online.

Online Detective Sites: Save Your Money

If you’ve been searching for contact information for a missing loved one on the Internet, and you’re only finding out-of-date addresses and phone numbers, resist the urge to pay an online detective site. A lot of their Internet ads promise to locate people for $19.95, $24.95, or more, but unless that person has stayed put, living in the same residence for at least two or more years, those Internet databases probably aren’t going to help you. Instead, you’ll end up paying good money for old, wrong or irrelevant information.  Unfortunately, if you have a question about the search results, there’s no live person to help you out.

Hiring a P.I. to Find Someone

Often, a qualified private investigator can locate a person efficiently and quickly.  Of course, there’s a lot of different variables that come into play when trying to locate a person — it can be more difficult to find someone, for example, if they have a very common name (e.g., Jane Smith), or there’s scant data about the individual, or the person has taken steps to not be found, etc.

One avenue of research P.I.s use to find people is through proprietary databases. But there’s more to their use than simply plugging a name or other identifier into them — an experienced P.I. is skilled at sifting through search results (sometimes reams of it), pinpointing relevant data, and often using it as a basis for further research.

What Are Proprietary Databases?

These are privately owned, password-protected online databases that are not available to the public. The proprietary databases we use cull their information from many different public records.  We once asked a customer rep if she knew exactly what public records her proprietary database pulled from, and she said, “There’s so many, it’d take me a day to tell you just some of them.”  One proprietary database advertises they pull from billions of public records.

Our proprietary database companies’ clientele includes private investigators, law enforcement, law firms, collection agencies and others who are professionally qualified. All clients of such databases, including the authors of this blog, have gone through background checks by these companies before they are allowed to access information in the databases.

Researching Public Records

A qualified P.I. is also knowledgeable about searching public records, many of which are online, to locate someone. Below are a few examples of such public records:

County assessors’ sites.  These contain lists of owners of real property, along with information about the assessed value of that property

Privately owned cemeteries and mortuaries.  Here can be found burial permits, funeral service registers, funeral and memorial arrangements, obituaries, intermediate orders and perpetual care arrangements.

Court records. In reviewing these, a P.I. might find addresses, phone numbers, relatives’ names, places of employment, and more.

Additional means a P.I. might use to locate a person are through interviews, Internet research, investigating social media, surveillances and trash hits (searching garbage).

How a P.I. Handles Others’ Expectation of Privacy

If you contact a P.I. to help you find a missing relative, keep in mind that a professional investigator won’t simply hand over the found person’s private contact information to you.  Instead, after the P.I. locates the relative/loved one, the investigator will:

• Inform the found person (through a phone call, letter or in person) that he/she has been hired to locate them by a client, and provide that person’s name.
• Provide means for the found person to locate the client (through a phone number, address, email address, etc.).

These precautions are critical to protect others’ privacy. Unfortunately, there have been cases where criminals and others with questionable motives have hired P.I.s to find people.

Initial Screenings of Clients

Prior to accepting your case, a P.I. will likely conduct an initial screening to verify your identity, review your criminal background and check the legitimacy of your request.  You’d want the same privacy protection and options if someone was wanting to locate you.

It’s our experience that most “missing” family members are delighted to have been found by their loved ones.  And it’s rewarding to the investigator to have brought families together again.

Guns, Gams and Gumshoes’s Colleen Collins wrote about a particularly difficult “locate” in her article “Hired to Find a Long-Lost Love: A Case with a Surprise Ending.”

Happy Holidays, Writing PIs

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Finding People: First, You Need to Know the Correct Spelling of the Name

One investigative activity we do more than any other is find people.

We find people who are witnesses; long-lost friends; people who might know how to contact a witness; people we need to serve legal papers to; relatives who might know where their cousin, uncle, aunt, grandmother might be…the list goes on and on.

How Do You Spell That?

When looking for a person, the first (and most critical) task is to get the correct spelling of the name. Sounds simple, right? Simple in theory, but it can take some work to get it right. The problem is, lots of people think they know how a name’s spelled — or guess how it’s spelled — and that information filters down to the investigator.

A smart private investigator first asks the source for the spelling of the name, and then double-checks it. For example, a lawyer tells the private investigator to find Sammie Smith. The investigator should ask if Sammie is spelled “Sammie” “Sammy” or does the person go by “Sam” or “Samuel” — and although the name “Smith” sounds like a no-brainer, we’ve gone off the wrong course looking for someone with the surname Smith when actually it was spelled Smythe!

Got Any Other Data?

Of course, a good PI also asks for any other data associated with the name to further narrow the field of people with that same name & spelling. For example, it’s helpful to also have an address or city where the person resides/resided, a date of birth, the name of a spouse, etc.).

What City Does This Dude Live in?

Recently, we read a private eye novel where a criminal told the private eye he should check out a person by the name of (making one up here) Langley Rogers. The private eye didn’t ask any questions (like “How do you spell that?” or “What city does this dude live in?” or “How old’s Langley?” or even “Langley’s a guy, right?”). No, the private eye heard the name, then mentioned it to a police detective who also didn’t ask any questions.

Later in the story, this police detective gets in touch with the private eye and says, “I ran this Langley Rogers in my database. He’s had trouble with the law. He lives in [name of city] but don’t say you heard it from me.”

Uh, did the detective look up a guy whose name is spelled “Langley,” Langlee” “Lang-Lee” (and so on) with the last name spelled “Rogers,” “Rodgers” or ? Even if this fictional detective lucked out and got the spelling right, how many people are named Langley Rogers throughout the U.S.? Could be dozens. Which one is the right guy?

If you’re writing a story and a character says to your sleuth, “Hey, get in touch with Cindy Jones. She knows who killed Max,” your sleuth would be smart to ask, “That’s Cindy with a y, right?”…even smarter to also ask if Cindy/Cindi Jones lives in the neighborhood, how old she is, her husband’s name…

Have a great week, Writing PIs

How to Find Someone: Free Online Research Tips

Updated April 4, 2012

There are various free online resources that specialize in people searches. Some resources offer comprehensive searches in dozens of online sources, including blogs, news archives, personal profiles, photographs, videos and publications. Other resources offer deep web searches, which means their web crawlers find indexes and links to databases that more traditional web crawlers miss. There are also business databases and search engines that offer business information associated to a person’s name.

Research the name using 123.people.com. This online people search engine lets you search globally as well as country-specific (currently, its services include 12 counties and 10 languages). Some search results take you directly to a paid-for service (read the Pipl entry at the bottom of this page about paying for such services…in a word, don’t). But other results are free and potentially useful, such as Bing search results, blog links, website links, microblogs, tag links and more.

Look up the name in Yasni.com. This people search engine looks up the name worldwide, and provides links to online sources that include that name, such as business or network profiles, education, interests, personal websites and obituary listings. The “Advanced Search” option lets you fine tune your search via keywords, name, location and company.

Conduct a deep-web name search by adding the words “database” or “search” (without the quotation marks) to your browser query. According to Marcus P. Zillman, executive director of the Virtual Private Library, in 2006, the deep web consisted of 900 billion pages of information that more traditional search engines either could not find or had difficulty accessing.

Use a social media search engine. According to Silicon.com, there are currently almost 4.5 billion active social networking and other online accounts. Therefore, it’s beneficial to conduct a name search in a social media search engine, such as Socialmention, that concurrently checks dozens of social networking sites.

Check out Biznar. This was previously advertised as a deep web business search engine; however, it now appears to be a more general, yet comprehensive, deep web people search engine. One thing we like about it is the immediacy of the results. Awesome advanced search options, too — you can select search categories such as blogs and social networks, advertising and marketing, finance and economics, government and more.

Search for a name in a business database. Linkedin lists more than 100 million professionals and their contact information.

Searches that were omitted from this list since it was first published:

Pipl. Once upon a time, this people search engine researched the deep web, with results including such online sources as public records, personal profiles, professional and business sites, publications, news articles, blog posts and more. We once found someone who’d seemingly fallen off the earth through a Pipl search.

Unfortunately, Pipl isn’t what it used to be. It still claims to “dive into the deep web” but our recent searches show it pulls up a lot of  links to “sponsored” paid-for search engines, such as peoplefinders.com, where — if you want more data on the person — you must pay $$. The problem with online people search services is that there’s no guarantee how relevant or current the information is, and there’s no live source to interpret the results. If you’re tempted to pay money to one of these online services, you’re better off hiring a professional private investigator.

Surchur. This used to be a real-time social media search engine, but now it’s an aggregate of articles about celebrities, including a disparate listing of items for sale whose only unifying thread is the word “celebrity.” Odd. We’re sorry Surchur bit the search dust.

Have a great week, Writing PIs

Related articles

• The Deep Web – CompletePlanet (sincitygirl73.wordpress.com)
• 10 search engines for the hidden web (disclose.tv)
• 9 Awesome Search Engines That Aren’t Named Google (hubspot.com)