Find People For Free
How to Search for People for Free
To find people for free, first, get in the habit of saving your people searches as you go along. Doing a public-records peoplesearch is an investigation, use investigative tactics in your searches to find people. A person search or criminal background check can't be done effectively in the local white pages or yellow pages, but is fairly easy and even fun using the people search engines to find people for free.
Finding classmates and alumni, locating old friends, getting in touch with co-workers, can start with a simple people lookup or phone number look up. While you may be able to find a free people search engine, it would likely be limited to finding addresses and to maybe find a phone number. But even when using the paid people search engines to find a person, you will only wind up paying a few dollars over a free people finder and a whole lot more information may be available to interest you from your find people for free search efforts.
Work like an investigator and save your results as you go along. You can find a ton of useful information using the initial free people finder stages of the paid search engines to your advantage.
How to People Search
You can build on what you have already found as you look people up. Address search, people-search, phone search, all searching takes some work, but a few useful tips can make your searching experience a lot easier. If you're looking for people, use any of the people-search engines. They will all return a list of individuals you can filter by State and City, if you already have that information in your possession.
But, you may still get a long list from a search if you're searching for a common surname. Two things are useful in whittling down that list. Middle initials and age detail. Use people finder search engines that let you add age and use middle initials and make use of that information if you have it.
Find People For Free
All public records search engines provide free people search, at least initially. Never pay for information until you have used the free searching to narrow down your search. If you are clever about it, if you know how to search for people for free, you won't have to pay at all. If you do decide to pay after you have narrowed your search down, you will pay only when you are fairly certain that what you will get is what you want.
Here's how I tracked down a girl I knew in high school. I didn't know if she was married or who she had married if she was. I knew the month and year of her birth date, but wasn't sure of the day. I used several people listed search sites to get what I needed. I was lucky that her surname was a fairly uncommon one, but the strategy would work regardless.
Using Public Records People Search Strategies
There are quite a few people search engines out there. Some are better at some things than others, try them out to find what you want. Also do a search for "people search engines". Many will come up as "free" people searches, but frequently, while the initial "search" is free, you still are required to pay for withheld information. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to get to get phone numbers and addresses without having to pay for them. Try "free" engines and see what you can find.
To find my long lost friend, I typed her surname into a marriage license search and got two hits, one for a groom and one for a bride. Obviously, the bride was what I was looking for, so I could discount the groom. No information is given however, other than the surname I had entered, so if I wanted to find her married name, at this point, I would have to pay to get the marriage license information.
The cost was twelve or fourteen dollars at that time, it may be cheaper today. If you get a list of results, you can get the whole list for the same price and hope your target is on the list.
Once you have the marriage information, of course, you also have the groom and bride's first, last or maiden names, and that allows you to reduce the size of the new lists using those filters.
Sure enough, the information I received fit the person I was looking for. I used the same search engine I used for the marriage information to try to locate my friend. Her married surname was a common one, so a search brought up a very long list. But, here is where middle initials come in handy. I used her middle initial that I had known in high school, but didn't get anywhere. Then I remembered that back then it was common for the girl to use her maiden surname as her new middle initial along with her husband's surname. This narrowed the list quite a bit, without eliminating everyone. Now is when the age filter comes in handy.
People Search Age
The search engines I used allowed both birth date and age boxes, so first
I used just the age box. This narrowed my list to only a few. I then entered
what I remembered of her birth date. I was sure of the month, but not the
day, so I just guessed at the latter. Then I realized the search engine was
providing me with information by telling me that the birth date was wrong
and even telling me specifically that the day was wrong.
Of course, by telling me what was wrong, it was also telling me what was right; the month and year. One person on the list fit both spousal surnames, correct month and correct age. I was pretty sure this was who I wanted, but I wanted to see if I could use the search engine to get the exact birth date. I thought it was the tenth day of the month, but that's what I was using and it was telling me I was wrong.
So, I started with the 1st, then the 2nd and so on until I got to the 9th, and bingo, the message telling me the birth date day was wrong went away. Now I knew I had the complete birth date. The free information provided told me the city and state and listed possible relatives. The listed relatives can also be very useful in narrowing down your free searches if they are meaningful to you, but at this point, for this particular search, that wasn't needed.
People Search Free- or Not
Now the only thing I would have to pay for here, that wasn't provided free,
was the address and telephone numbers. But, at least at this point, you are
pretty sure you have what you want and if you need that information, it would
have cost only around five dollars, probably less now as the prices have become
more reasonable. It seems to be around two dollars at the time of this writing.
I would have had to pay a private investigator upwards of one hundred fifty
dollars for what I had gotten so far for only twelve dollars, or maybe seventeen
total, if I wanted the phone numbers and addresses.
Try Google
However, with a little more strategy to find people for free, using Google
you can often get even that information for nothing. Using the information
that you now have from your free searching investigation; the proper
surnames,
birth date, the city and state part of the address and possible relatives,
just type some of that information into Google in this format, person,
city, state, zip, and you just might get exactly what you are looking
for complete with street address and phone numbers. Not always, but frequently.
Experiment, try it out.
You might also try a reverse phone search or yahoo and hotmail searches if you have that information, but nothing else to find people for free.
Save your Results
Be sure to save your search results somewhere. I don't know how many times I've spent several hours tracking something down, thinking I would remember how I got there, because it was all fresh in my mind and I could pick up from where I left off the next day or the when I next had time. Yeah sure. Of course, I didn't remember any of it and had to start all over again. Take notes, jot down people and relevant info, denote paths you took.
When you finally nail down the actual persons and addresses and phone numbers and other peripheral information, including even more complete notes on how you found what you found, put it all into a personal information program with a database, designed for that purpose. Your data will be safe, easily retrievable, organized and categorized and most importantly, available, without requiring you to repeat your efforts to find people for free all over again.
