Locator : A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Lost Family, Friends, and Loved Ones--Anywhere,Any Time

The founder and president of the country's premier agency for locating lost people provides all the tools anyone could need to complete a successful search.

Troy Dunn is founder and president of International Locator, Inc./BigHugs.com in Cape Coral, Florida, the largest licensed investigation agency in the United States specializing in missing persons. He will be familiar to television viewers from his many appearances on such programs as "Sally Jessy Raphael" and "Unsolved Mysteries." Since its founding a decade ago, International Locator, Inc., has reunited thousands of people in all fifty states and many other countries.

Getting Your Feet Wet

Here is what you need to do in order to search successfully:

Be persistent.

Be patient.

Be creative.

Turn over every stone--no piece of information is too small; nothing is insignificant.

Keep these four things in mind at all times. You have to view your search as a process of elimination. When you acquire an important document only to discover that it contains no new information, you are still one step closer to your reunion: You've eliminated one more possibility and narrowed your search effectively. If you've tracked your subject down, located his or her phone number, and made that final call--only to discover that the name is the same but the person is someone else entirely--you're still a step closer: That's another lead checked off, another avenue exhausted. You have to keep at it and stay positive. With persistence, patience, creativity, and attention to detail, you'll eventually find your person. Trust us, we've done it thousands of times.

Start with a Name

There are two parts to every search. The first part is getting the name of the person you are looking for; the second part is actually looking for (and locating) the person. If you are trying to find a long-lost relative, an old friend, or anyone you have previously known and since lost contact with, you probably already have his or her current or previous name. This means that you've won half the battle before you've even begun!

If you are adopted, you probably do not know the name or names of your birth parents, and your search will have to start at the very beginning. With that difference in mind, this first chapter provides two overviews: first, an overview of the basic approach when looking for someone whose name you already know; second, an overview of the basic approach when looking for an adoptee or birth parents.

Throughout the book, and throughout your entire search, keep these words in mind: The easiest way to move forward in locating people is to go backward in time, tracing them from their beginnings. This is the first principle of locating. As you will see, the fastest way to find people is generally to go back to the family, friends, and places they knew earlier in their life. Of course, it isn't always as easy as it sounds to track down this kind of information, but The Locator will help you go backward in time in both the simple cases and the hard cases.

Searches: The General Approach

As mentioned above, some parts of The Locator are written from the perspective of the adoptee or birth parent, since those are the worst-case scenarios, where little or no information is available. If you are embarking on a nonadoptive search, you'll have to pick and choose which information applies to your case and which doesn't. As you read this book, however, you'll find that almost all the techniques are the same. We strongly suggest that you read everything in the book, because you can find ideas and techniques from all sorts of searches that will apply to your own unique situation.

Nonadoptive searches usually involve one or more of the following: old friends and relatives, lost loves, deadbeat dads, missing children, and people who are or were in the military. Brief introductions to each situation's specific techniques are covered in chapters four through seven, but the general techniques from all of those chapters apply to your case as well, no matter who you are or whom you're looking for.

It will be hard for you to imagine just how much of a head start you have over adoptees and birth parents, who usually don't even know the names of the people they're looking for. However, there are some cases where you may be looking for an old friend, a family member, or a person important to you, whose name you don't know. Maybe your mother never told you your father's name. Maybe you're working on a family tree and you know you have a second cousin but can't find any references to her in your family's albums or files. Maybe you want to find a doctor or fireman who helped you once but never knew who the person was. There are thousands of possible scenarios where you may not know the person's name; in those cases, you'll want to follow some of the adoption techniques as well.

We also suggest that you look over the "useful terminology" section on page 4. Most of the specialized language refers to adoptions, but some of it will explain things you'll need to know about in a nonadoptive search too. You should at least remember that there's a glossary there so you can refer to it later on if you come across a term you don't understand.

Adoptive Searches: The General Approach

Every search is different. Right now you are in a unique situation, looking for a unique person. However, it is also true that every search is similar to all the searches that have gone before it, and there is much to learn from the experiences of other people. Learning from their achievements is what this book is all about.

There are numerous ways to approach any given search, but in all cases, the first step is to find the birth name of the adoptee and the full names (or partial names if the full names are unavailable) of the birth parents. Later on, we'll go over many of the ways you can track down these names and tell you what to do after you know the names.

But for now, instead of moving forward to tell you what steps you'll be taking in the future, let's move backward to the adoption itself. It's important that you have a real-world framework for locating your child or birth parent, to give a sense of order to something that most people see as a random series of events. We can't stress this enough: You're not alone in your search; many others have made the same journey, and, with persistence, they have succeeded. You will too.

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Excerpted from The Locator: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Lost Family, Friends, and Loved Ones--Anywhere,Any Time by Troy Dunn, International Locator Inc. Staff
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.