I was making one last concerted effort to locate my sister recently and discovered that a lot of the People Search facilities on the Internet did not live up to their advertising hype. I was very disappointed in the results provided by some of them and the service level was virtually non-existant in all but a few.



My sister married a Church of England Boy in 1972 and because my family were strict Catholics my parents had a big problem with the marriage and refused to speak to the married couple. Even though I continued a friendship with my sister and her husband my parents asked me to try and broker a settlement and a return to constructive dialogue after about 5 years. So in 1977 I spoke to my sister about joining me at a restaurant with my parents and resuming a quality relationship with them. They both objected to this proposal and then disappeared within a week and I had no means of contacting them even though I tried various methods over the next 28 years.

This time I was determined to locate them and I had some new information that had come to hand suggesting they were living in a resort town 4,000 km to the north of where I lived. But I was drawing a blank on the People Search ervices that I tried and I was becoming frustrated with the lack of basic information and poor customer service available.

I decided that I would review the most commonly used services and start with some known data on some prominent people and some criminal type people. Using this method, where I already knew the results that I was expecting, led to some very surprising results.

It seems that the vast majority of these People Search services simply do not deliver the information that you are paying for and I found that the results that I bought were incorrect, outdated or missing important information. All of them advertised that they were the best source of information for missing persons and that they could provide full civil records and information of criminal records.

I was indeed lucky to find a handful of sites that delivered what they promised and provided helpful guidelines to assist getting the best results. Once I had located these six sites I really punished them by doing numerous searches and checking the results against the information that I already knew. Four sites came through this grueling test proceedure and you can read about them at my blog if you are interested in finding someone that you have lost contact with.

I am pleased to say that I did find my sister and her husband and their very large family of children and grandchildren and went to visit them late last year. Locating them proved to be very easy once I was using the right People Search tools to find them. I was astounded because within 2 minutes of starting my search I had their address and phone number and was talking to them on the phone.