The Internet and Connections.
I've had a lot of fun in the past few months connecting with old friends from my yout(h) in Ohio on Facebook. I was singing the praises of FB to The Sister. She said she was in touch with pretty much everyone from back then that she wanted to be, save one female friend. The issue with tracking down female friends is that they get married and take their husbands name and become hard to find. (I know, not always.)
I have one friend from the old days who serves both as memory and bridge. He lived in the hometown until five or so years ago and kept up with folks I haven't seen in 35 years. He was my first stop when I decided to track down the friend for The Sister. My friend didn't know who the sister's friend had married, but did know the sister's friend's sister. (this would all be much easier if I used names, but this is the internet and ....) Fortunately the Sister's friend's sister had a unique last name and I was able to Google, er track, her down.
Now there's the question of the email to the friend's sister. (My friend is done in the story, so from now on, the friend will refer to The Sister's friend - the target of our investigation.) My goal is to a) get through the spam filter and b) not have the email forwarded to the police. Plus, I could have the wrong person.
But to keep this from dragging on, the email worked, people responded and now my sister has the email address of a long lost friend from childhood.
Here's the neighborhood. We lived in the white house in the lower left side of the map, they lived in the white house opposite it, next to the empty lot (now Raney Playground).
posted by Lee at 6:03 PM
2 Comments:
I've had a couple similar experiences looking up 1) a woman I used to work with and 2) an old girlfriend.
In situation #1, in the course of my work, I encountered someone with the same (distinctive) name, sent her an e-mail and asked if she'd ever worked at our common employer. Her reply indicated that she was creeped out but sufficiently intrigued to reply. Connection made.
In situation #2, I Googled an old girlfriend on her birthday. Because she has the same name (and same distinctive spelling) as a (relatively) famous academic, I had to go through several pages of hits to find a link that wasn't for the namesake--one of those high school reunion sites, where I found her married name. Googling that got me a link to a church website where I found not only an e-mail but a photo (proof positive, even after 28 years). Turns out she lives only about two hours away from me. Although not creeped out, she seemed skittish (sense 2) when I suggested lunch.
My wife says I'm a stalker.
Thoughts?
There are a couple of people (Cathy Ober, for instance, the Eckerts) that I'd like to track down but I haven't found a non-stalking way to do it. I think if you find info in public sites, then it's all good.
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