Archivist Search Resources

FamilyTreeNow.com. Go ahead, first look yourself up. You’ll likely see various places where you lived, your age, any relatives, and other personal details. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of your record because your landline and cell phone numbers might also be readily available. Be careful using Whitepages, BeenVerified, TruthFinder, and many of the other big people search sites. It’s very easy to get duped into signing up for a monthly membership.

Try a reverse phone number search.
Many people search sites let you do a reverse lookup, where you search by a number and not by the person’s name. There are also specialty sites built to give you a head start if you have an old number.
Spy Dialer boasts “billions of phone numbers” and lets you search by phone, name, address, or email. ZLOOKUP and USPhonebook are free options that give results for people and businesses.

Turn to Google. Type in the person’s name and put it in quotes for more accurate results. You can also try adding the area code or a city or words like “contact,” “number” or “cell.” Be sure to also look at the Images on the Google search results page. You may find a photo of the person that leads you to another possible clue. The more details you have, the better. Do you know where this person works or lives? What about their hobbies? Do they have a blog or website? If the person does have a website, turn to Who.Is. Here, you can look up who owns a domain, and often, a phone number and email address are listed, too.

A Facebook search is one of the best places to start looking for someone online. Although you should search each of the different platforms, begin with Facebook as it’s the world’s largest social networking site. This considerably improves your odds of finding people. You can search for someone using various filters, just type the person’s name in the search bar, then click on the People tab. Once the search results appear, tap See All. From this list, you’re able to choose to filter the results by Friends of Friends, City, Education and Work. To help refine your search, pick a combination of filters. A friend of a friend
If you believe you and the person you are searching for have a friend in common, click on that Friend’s tab to view a list of their friends.

In addition, you can search the People You May Know page, which can be found on the Find Friends page. There is also a setting to turn on suggestions for People You May Know in your News Feed and notifications. Log into Facebook and click on Settings from the drop-down arrow beside the question mark icon at the top of the page. Open the Notifications page from the left panel and open the drop-down menu for People You May Know. From here, you can decide whether you want these notifications and whether you receive push notifications, emails or SMS messages.

If you don’t want to use this option, when you log into Facebook, look at the top panel and tap on the button next to Create that looks like two people. This will show you your friend requests and will also share a list of People You May Know, based on the number of friends you have in common.

A web address may be the key
Another search technique is to use a person’s name at the end of social media sites.

For example, https://www.facebook.com/personsname.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/personsname
Instagram: https://instagram.com/personsname/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/personsname/

One final option for Facebook is to perform a reverse phone number lookup simply by typing their phone number into the search bar.

While it’s not common for someone to share their phone number within a Facebook post, this method may prove helpful because people often connect their phone number for verification purposes. One security feature Facebook provides is to send a text message to users when their account is accessed from unfamiliar locations or devices.

If you happen to have a person’s number, but can’t find them on social media, this is a great option.

What if you know very little about the person you’re looking for? While it may seem your search has ended before it had a chance to begin, remember Google is a powerful tool that can make your search easier. Type in details like their name or username along with keywords related to location, marital status or occupation to refine the results.

Did your name and keyword search result in an enormous amount of information, or did it fail to return any findings? You can give Google another try by doing an image search.
Start at images.google.com and enter the person’s name. Like your original Google search, you can help narrow down the results by including additional information such as where the person lives or works.

Scroll through the images. Once you find their picture, click on it to visit its linked social media page.

www.zabasearch.com A middle initial from a Saber Yearbook, excludes excessive returned results. Do not enter a State on the first try, for unusual names.