Page 7 | To ask how I can find my friend?

Knitterbabe · 2021-03-31T22:49:50+00:00

I was great pals with my friend Angela all through secondary school, but we lost touch after leaving school, bar a couple of letters, I haven’t heard from her since. No social media in those days! I have tried searching on Facebook, but have no idea of her married name, so no luck. We attended a convent school in Birmingham. Any ideas of how I might attempt to find her?

GreenlandTheMovie · 01/04/2021 14:11

@WiseOwlOne

The drama from some posters!! Presume she is not on the rin OP!

I found a school friend recently by putting her sir name in to RIP, one of her kids was on FB and i contacted them and she emailed me. We had a good chat. A few of us emailed her.
There was no reason why she wouldnt have wanted school friends to find her. We were great friends back in 1989.
Some people cant understand how easy it was to lose touch before fb

Oh I know! I have one friend a bit like this who refuses any social media presence "in case people look her up". As far as I know, no-one has ever stalked her or shown any great interest in her, she has few friends and since she doesn't live in her country of birth, has lost touch with all previous friends. Its a bit of a shame really and I do often wonder what has caused her to feel like that.

She is single and would very much like to meet a partner, but refuses point blank to use any form of OLD or to give out anything but a telephone number and only then to people she knows really well. Which is fine in itself but she misses out on being invited to social events on FB, etc because people just accidentally forget to include her or update her.

God yes though, the extreme scenarios being suggested by some posters - perhaps they actually are in witness protection or on the run!

ToffeeNotCoffee · 01/04/2021 14:14

@AcornAutumn

This can't be true....my address is a matter of public if I do probate myself? Shit.

My Dad did probate for his mum after she died. The probate record has his name and address at the time. Look up probate on the internet. You will inevitably see the address of the person probate was granted to.

Keep it to yourself if you do it though. The dram llamas on this site will accuse you of stalking the dead.

AcornAutumn · 01/04/2021 14:25

[quote ToffeeNotCoffee]@AcornAutumn

This can't be true....my address is a matter of public if I do probate myself? Shit.

My Dad did probate for his mum after she died. The probate record has his name and address at the time. Look up probate on the internet. You will inevitably see the address of the person probate was granted to.

Keep it to yourself if you do it though. The dram llamas on this site will accuse you of stalking the dead.[/quote]
Oh this is terrible! An actual address? Do you have to pay to see it?

I won't tell mum because she'll be worried.

Becstar90 · 01/04/2021 14:32

Did you have any mutual friends with her? If so go on their fb page and search their friends for her first name on their friends list

BarefootByMoonlight · 01/04/2021 14:43

If she has an address listed then maybe she will be ok being contacted and welcome the gesture.

I can appreciate people being delighted at someone getting in touch again - a schoolfriend sent a birthday message via SM and months later (when I eventually saw it) I was delighted she did and we have been in touch since and I am very glad she sent that initial message.

I’m also glad she then left it up to me rather than repeated attempts though.

In the same inbox as the lovely birthday message was a message from another classmate that began ‘Not sure how to say this but I’ve always been able to follow you’

Maybe he was just wanting to reconnect too (as I would have been easy to follow in the press/SM previously due to work) and worded it badly but there were other messages too so I blocked him and was quite frightened by it.

What he (presumably) doesn’t know is that I escaped an abusive relationship, police involved, whole family moved house and in genuine fear for my life and DC, online stalking - and that is not as uncommon as we might wish to believe.

So I can appreciate being delighted as with my female friend’s single positive message, and being quite terrified as with the male classmate’s creepily worded and repeated messages.

Not everyone who pulls up the drawbridge is ‘precious’ or ‘stuck-up’ or even unfriendly.

Sometimes we are scared, and for good reason need to be careful. That doesn’t need to mean shut off forever but it can mean being wary of repeated messages or the wording.

MN is usually on the ball recognising this and I’m not sure why this thread has been so fractious.

A simple, honest and non-creepily worded message with no pressure might be just what we need, but there may be good reasons why we can’t/don’t want to respond, and both positions are equally possible and understandable.

KarmaNoMore · 01/04/2021 23:46

I was tracked by one of my childhood friends, I had not seen her in almost 40 years we have not only moved cities but countries. I am still very touched that she made the effort to find me. We were like sisters and despite the time and the distance we are in contact regularly these days.

She said it took her three years to find me, she said she befriended in Facebook anybody she thought could know me or my cousins until she found someone I was friends with.

RaspberryCoulis · 01/04/2021 23:55

I think a lot of people are very unaware of how much of your "private" information is in the public domain. Anyone can request a copy of your birth or marriage certifcate, a will, a death certificate. If you know how to use Ancestry search effectively you can easily find a married name, mother's maiden name, siblings. It's not hard, it's not illegal.

AcornAutumn · 02/04/2021 00:03

@RaspberryCoulis

I think a lot of people are very unaware of how much of your "private" information is in the public domain. Anyone can request a copy of your birth or marriage certifcate, a will, a death certificate. If you know how to use Ancestry search effectively you can easily find a married name, mother's maiden name, siblings. It's not hard, it's not illegal.

I try to be careful but this does annoy me.

From what's been said here, Ancestry and other sites have taken a bunch of paperwork that wouldn't have been so easy to find, and made it easy to find! People don't consent to having details so easily available.

Presumably being able to get birth certificates helps with fraud, I know the government don't care about that of course.

Cokecake · 02/04/2021 03:11

Ok so suggesting a private investigator is extreme. I’ve never used one but I would’ve thought they just pass the contact details to the person looking for them and not actually contact the person themselves. Anyway I’m glad @Knitterbabe that you’ve found her. Please update us!

My mum has reconnected with her old friends from school a year ago. She was the only one that moved abroad. They hadn’t seen each other for over 35 years since they were 18. They all got married young and had arrange marriages. They managed to contact my mum and now she’s in regular contact with them on wattsapp and they sometimes do video calls. My mum doesn’t have social media. One of them even flew out to visit and stayed over. These things can have happy endings.

Personally I have tried to get in touch with old friends but they are clearly not interested. But these things happen. You won’t know if you don’t try.

Cokecake · 02/04/2021 03:15

I don’t think it simply the case of if you were true friends you would’ve kept in touch. People live busy lives and can have lots of things going on that the world doesn’t know about.

4Mongrels · 02/04/2021 05:03

Presumably being able to get birth certificates helps with fraud, I know the government don't care about that of course

Whilst Ancestry and others make birth/marriage records searchable, it is actually quite difficult to get a copy of a birth certificate that has been issued in the last 50 years. For that, you would already need to know the information that fraudsters would be trying to obtain. If you can’t give exact details they won’t issue a certificate.

HamFisted · 02/04/2021 07:43

@RaspberryCoulis

I think a lot of people are very unaware of how much of your "private" information is in the public domain. Anyone can request a copy of your birth or marriage certifcate, a will, a death certificate. If you know how to use Ancestry search effectively you can easily find a married name, mother's maiden name, siblings. It's not hard, it's not illegal.

They should stop using, 'Mother's maiden name' as a secret answer category in financial institutions etc.

Needcoffeecoffeecoffee · 02/04/2021 08:01

I'm glad it looks like you've found her and hope you reconnect again.
My idea was to look for any of the "old pictures/memories of" the local area and ask of anyone went to your school and the year and often you get lots of responses. Even more if you have an old photo. Obviously it's hard for a whole city I'm not sure of the geography of your school

JinglingHellsBells · 02/04/2021 08:19

That's great news @Knitterbabe

For information...you can stop your name and address appearing on 192.com

192.com is a private company. They have no connection with the electoral roll- they buy information from them.

If you do not want to be found via 192.com, when you fill in your electoral roll details, tick the box to withhold your details from the public register(which 192 buys.)

BertramLacey · 02/04/2021 19:09

One person wants to catch up with an old friend. At that point, all hell breaks loose among the crazy shit stirrers.

It's fine to want to catch up with old friends. I understand that people lose touch with each other. However, there are a few things to bear in mind. For one thing, some people just might not want to be found, for whatever reason. The fact you want to find them doesn't mean they owe you anything if you track them down. Just as it's fine for you to want to find them, it's fine for them not to want to reconnect with you.

So if you can't find someone on FB, and you can't work out what their name is now, maybe stop looking? Or if you send them a card once and they don't reply, just realise they aren't interested, and stop sending them cards. At that point you cross from being interested into something more like harassment.

blowinahoolie · 02/04/2021 19:39

"Instant block. I thought what an absolute nobhead."

🤣

blowinahoolie · 02/04/2021 19:41

"I now do not have my real name on facebook. Like if my name is Louise McDonald, I would have it as 'Lou Mack' IYSWIM. So I can't be tracked down by ANYone."

Same here, I use a pseudonym so no one can identify me at all.

KarmaNoMore · 02/04/2021 20:01

The OP is likely to be around 70 and so is her friend. Please leave her alone, If her friend is not in Facebook that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be found, a lot of us do not bother with it for a lot of different reasons that have nothing to do with hiding.

It is funny however to see so many people saying that is creepy trying to find old friends. I had the same from a co worker who really found it creepy a friend managed to find me after many years, she couldn’t understand why someone would like to reconnect with someone from her past. But then she was a proper bitch that nobody wanted to stay in touch with, we often wondered how being in her 20s she was no longer even in touch with her university friends, if she had any, which we suspect she had not.