There are many reasons to find a person from your past. was recently called in on a case involving an elderly man. He wasn’t ill. In fact, he was pretty spry for his age – at least physically. His spirits were pretty low because he had several children he hadn’t had contact with in more than 40 years.
He didn’t really think of it as a missing person search, he saw it more as a search for some people he had lost. He had married a girl in the ‘50s when they were both teenagers. Very quickly they had three children. The marriage didn’t last and the couple divorced early in the ‘60s. He hadn’t seen the three children – 2 girls and a boy – since the ‘60s. He was sure by now he had to be a grandfather. He had no idea how to locate people, but he really wanted to see them and find out more about his possible descendants.
One of the first steps to find missing persons is to gather all the information the client has about the people we are trying to locate. In this case, he had a vague recollection of their full names and was guessing about birthdates. This is not unusual in cases where there have been decades between contact. The next step in a missing person investigation is to verify and confirm the accuracy of this initial information.
In this case, we discovered the name he provided for his eldest daughter, Lila, was a nickname for Delilah. His son he called Buddy or Cal. The boy’s name was legally Herbert Calvin. The birthdates were also jumbled. Some months were correct, some years were correct, but not for the children he had designated them.
To make matters worse, the marriage and visits all happened in a very large metropolitan city. In cases like this, finding people is like looking for a single grain of sand on a beach. The population grows every day, women marry and change their names and people move around a lot. This people search revealed that every one of the family members had moved out of state and that meant the scope of our work expanded to include the entire nation.
It takes experience and resources to find a missing person. You will find that those who are successful and know how to find missing persons are professionals like .
-Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations, All in Investigations
