It’s pretty common for people to lose touch with their oldest friends, people they knew during the earliest years of their lives. If you had good friends you met in college, high school or even earlier, it’s possible that you’ve lost touch with them since then.
That doesn’t make you a bad person, even though you might feel guilty about it. It just means you’ve both been busy.
Maybe it’s only recently that you have been able to stop and take a breath. And maybe you’re also thinking about trying to reconnect with those people with whom you were so close, so many years ago.
But how can you try to find those people? Where do you even start?
1. Look Through Social Media
Social media is an amazing tool, especially when it comes to keeping up with other people. In June 2019, over two billion people used Facebook on at least a monthly basis, which is more than a quarter of the world’s population. That means there’s a pretty good chance you can find your old friends there.
If your friend had a pretty unique name, you can start just by searching that name. However, for people with less unique names, you should start working your way through your connections.
You may want to search for people who went to your high school during your senior year. Then, browse through all the people who have indicated that in their profiles.
2. Ask Mutual Friends
Even if you haven’t kept up with a specific person, other people in your life may have, even if it’s at a very basic level. If you’re still in touch with some mutual friends, ask them if they’ve heard anything from the person you’re searching for. It may surprise you how easily you’re able to get back to the person in question.
You may even be able to use this tip in conjunction with social media searches. While you’re looking through social media, consider adding anyone you find who you used to be good friends with during your school days. Then you can ask your new social media friends if they’ve heard from the friend you’re looking for.
3. Talk to Your Parents
It might amaze you, even decades down the line, how much your parents may have kept in touch with the people you used to hang out with the most. After all, it’s possible that your parents were friends with your friends’ parents–or even with the friend you’re searching for–and that friendship may have continued, even in a fairly passing manner, up until today.
If your parents did know your friends or your friends’ parents, it’s definitely worth it to ask your parents if they’ve heard anything lately. Who knows? You may even get information that could lead directly to a conversation with someone you haven’t talked to in years.
4. Try Your Old Yearbook
Yearbooks can contain all sorts of information, and that includes interesting tidbits regarding people who aren’t in your life anymore. The yearbook committee may have asked people where they were planning to go for college, for example, which may give you even more ways to try and cross-reference information.
Plus, if you asked people to write notes in your yearbook, you may be able to find a note from the person you’re trying to find. Though not extremely likely, you very well might stumble across an old phone number that you could try to call. Or you can perform a phone number lookup to see if there’s any more current contact information associated with that old number.
5. Use a People Search Engine
If you don’t know where someone lives now, you might not even be sure where to start with this. Many of these tips can take a lot of time and effort, which can be annoying if you don’t have a lot of free time. Instead, when looking for people, your first stop should be PeopleFinders.
With PeopleFinders, you don’t have to make guesses and hope you’ll run into the right person on a social media website. Instead, you can try and perform a people search with information you know was correct when you knew the person in question. The information you get back may include vital knowledge, like up-to-date phone numbers, addresses and more.
Conclusion
The people you knew during your formative years likely made a huge impact on your life. And there’s nothing quite like reminiscing about those days. If you’re trying to find those people so you can reminisce, renew those friendships, or just find out what they’ve up to lately, look no further than PeopleFinders.
Image attribution: patpitchaya – stock.adobe.com
