It’s often the case that people use the internet to make contact with old connections or people they’ve just lost touch with. There are various ways of doing this and this article explores whether using email alone is the best way of finding long lost friends and relations.
One current concept is called six degrees of separation. So for example, we all know someone who knows someone, who knows someone etc and that if we multiply this by 6, then we have someone that we can claim a connection to. So each person knows one person in the chain, until the sixth person, who turns out to know the person you need to find!
But you cannot expect a concept like 6 degrees of separation to be valid in real life at all times. But if you persevere you can have a degree of success in finding people, simply by using an email address, rather than searching the web.
First port of call should be your social networking site membership - with a message to people asking if anyone can help. If you have say 100 friends on your networking site, then 1 email to these 100 people should at least generate some leads.
From your addresses, highlight the one you want to trace and send out a request for assistance to do so. It may well be that this simply generates some ‘People finder’ websites, which is not actually finding people by email alone, but email will certainly kickstart the process of finding them.
Remember though, however you search, that some people may not wish to be found, so they have taken care to ensure that they do not have a widely known email address and are not registered with any networking sites, nor do they have their contact details on any websites, or maybe they just have a new email address. If so, they remain unknown - please respect their privacy.
However, when you want to locate people, email is a great method (but email alone may not be the best method). The best results will come from using all 3 methods - web search, social networking sites and also people finder sites. Don’t put all your faith in finding someone based on the 6 degrees of separation theory: it really isn’t that simple, you need to use all the tools you can in your search.