How To Find Someone

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How to find someone is something we are asked about on a daily basis.

We specialise in finding people across the UK and beyond. We’ve successfully located people all around the world and regularly find people in Canada, Ireland, Australia. We’ve even located old friends and lost family members in Thailand, Spain, South China Seas, Paraguay and even Libya.

My name is David Oates, I’m the Head Researcher here at Relative Connections, you can view my LinkedIn profile here.

I am also the director of an Ofsted registered adoption support agency.

How to find someone – various methods.

As one of the UK’s leading People Tracing companies we’re often involved in finding people with only fragments of information.

We do this accurately and consistently but how?

We use a combination of people tracing systems that reveal various pieces of information about a person, and lots of research into old archives and documents. Coupling this access to data with our team’s years of experience and I think you can see we’re well placed to help you work out how to find someone.

It’s amazing how far back you sometimes need to go to make finding where someone is now even possible. Our team are very experienced at pulling all this together and of course have the added experience of doing this work every day.

The best research team in the UK for finding someone you’ve lost touch with.

Our research team are now widely considered as the best research team in the UK for finding missing people. They really know their stuff and can find people with only the smallest amounts of information.

The key to doing this is to know where to find the information that can move a search forward. Information that you can ‘hang your hat on’ and say with confidence that is the exact person.

Many people conducting their own research end up chasing red herrings. It’s so easy to end up on the wrong path and order documents for someone with the same name who isn’t the correct person.

Not all the systems we use are available to the public, some we have to be licensed to use but if you need to find someone there are things you can do yourself.

So if you’re wondering how to find someone’s address, make a cup of tea and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Imagine of stick people with a magnifying glass over one of them. This is to represent our article called How to find someone.

How to find someone

If you require more information on our service to locate people please visit the People Finder page.

It is worth mentioning that as professional people finders we access a higher level of information than a homemade super sleuth.

Further to this we can also perform limitless number of searches on all our systems at no extra cost, this gives us a massive advantage on a home researcher who using websites that charge per search.

So if you are super serious about finding the person quickly it will much more cost effective to us our service to locate the person you are looking for. As we provide our services on a no trace no fee you have nothing to lose.

You can read our testimonial page to find out how we have helped people just like you.

Ok, so that’s the sales pitch over, if you are still reading then we can presume that you are determined to locate a person yourself so here are our top pointers for locating a person in the UK, alas we do not cover other areas of the world so cannot offer advice for these areas although some of these techniques will presumably be able to help you.

How to find someone in the UK…

There are various methods you can use for locating people most of these centre around the internet so this is where we begin.

The internet has revolutionised the way we search for people we have lost touch with. Prior to the internet if you were looking for someone chances are you had to dig out the phone book and phone around people with the same surname in the same area, trying to find a relative who could pass on a message or supply you with a number.

Sometimes you had to phone where they used to work to see if they still worked there or if someone knew where they had gone.

These are still greats tactic for finding people but now nearly all records regarding peoples whereabouts are available online and for a small fee (be careful though as they soon add up) you can find out various pieces of information that can lead you to the persons current whereabouts.

The rise in popularity of “how to find someone” style programmes

Finding a person online is so popular, people have seen programs like ITV’s Long Lost Family and BBC1’s Family Finders (something we are on!) and rightly thought that they would like to research their own family history, genealogy is great fun.

It’s a great way to spend an evening and it can be thoroughly absorbing, getting lost in your own families past is great fun but locating living people can be more problematic and this is what we are going to concentrate on here.

If you are new to this we would always recommend having paper and a pen handy so you can write down everything you have done.

You are building up a picture of the ‘someone’ you have lost touch with so it’s good to be able to see your progress as your search develops.

If you are going to locate someone in your spare time then it’s good to have everything wrote down for when you return to your search. You can soon work out where you got up to and where to go next, it will also save you money.

Some people believe that you can find someone for free but the truth is most data that is worth having, has to be paid for, although there are certain searches that you can carry out for free.

How to Find Someone’s address

Google Search – Type in the name of the person you are looking for in quotation marks and see what matches appear, if the name is common add the area of your search outside the quotation marks, “John Smith” Liverpool.

You can narrow it down further by using the first half of the postcode, “John Smith” L12. This is an easy way to find someone online. You will most likely find links to news articles or stories about that person, for example if they were in the local paper for helping the community.

Friends Reunited – Was an excellent resource for finding old friends and it’s now free, which makes it one of the best ways to find someone’s address in fact. (NOTE – this article was initially posted in 2012, since then Friends Reunited decline is complete and it’s no longer running)

Facebook – Again a great way to find someone, just create an account and get searching. Most people have a picture on there too so you can confirm it’s the right person. A great people search system and a top way to find a person.

123people.co.uk – Works in a similar way to Google. An excellent way to trace someone especially as it includes email addresses, so when people ask us, how to find someone’s address we’d direct them to this site.

LinkedIn – Most people who are in business of some kind where employees or employers are on LinkedIn, if you have not heard of it, it is simply a Facebook for business people. Employers encourage their employees to have a LinkedIn account so it is always worth checking to see if the person you are looking for is on there.

How to find a person by paying for data

As soon as you pay for your data you can achieve twice as much in half the time. Suddenly there is light at the end of the tunnel to help you find someone. Like everything in life you get what you pay for.

If you are thinking that you want to find a person completely for free, you would be best served getting a copy of the phone book for the area of the county you are looking for and picking up the phone and making a lot of calls, this is the closest thing to a free people search as you can come, and still you have the cost of your calls and your time.

People often forget to factor in their own time when they are personally searching for someone.

Once you accept that you need to spend money to access good data you will be able to move forward very quickly. One of the best, most cost effective ways to locate a person you have lost touch with is to try and electoral roll search. An electoral roll search will provide you will a list of all the people will a particular name in a particular area, it will also give you their address.

The downside to the electoral roll search and the thing that the companies that provide the electoral roll as a people finder service don’t tell you is that the electoral roll has been edited since 2003 and now over 50% of UK adults choose to opted of the edited version.

This means they are still eligible to vote but that their data is not made available to companies. If you search for a person you have lost touch with using an electoral roll search and they have opted off the edited version you will not be able to obtain their address through this type of search. Trace companies that offer to locate the person for you will have other systems that they use to get around this issue, these are not publicly available.

Another issue with the electoral roll is the information on it is quite old by the time it is made available to companies and then to you it is potentially useless.

Let’s take the 2021 electoral roll for example, the data was collected in September 2020 and released in January 2021 already everyone who has moved in this period is now listed at their old address, as the year progresses the situation becomes worse as more and more people move.

So if you’re wondering how to find someone you have lost touch with it might be worth looking at other methods.

There are other find a person searches that you can perform yourself things such as birth, death and marriage searches can help as can company searches to locate directors and bankruptcy searches. The truth is, you will not be able to match the skills of a professional researcher or the tools they have at their disposal to find someone’s address.

Well we hope this article has given you some good advice and that you are ready to get moving with your own search.

This is just the tip of iceberg there is so much more that can be done.

If you’ve read this article and started to realise the cost and time needed to carry out your own searches then now might be a good time to have another look at our testimonials page and see if our service might be right for you.

We’ll do everything needed to find your exact person and locate their current address for you. You’d be using the UK’s leading people finding service and we support you every step of the way.

Each search we do starts with a phone call so if you would like some more advice in relation to our people tracing service please call us on 0113 2825900 and we will be happy to help you to find someone in the UK or beyond.

We hope this short guide has helped you to learn how to find someone.