Finding People - something all of us must do at some point in our life. Whether it is looking for your 'better half' in the supermarket, or trying to find an old flame on the Internet.

The Internet is full of tools to find people for free, and the demand is quite high - yet I am surprised when I see advertisements selling a reverse telephone number lookup for $35.00, when you can get it for free here.

By far, the best page for finding people for free is to be found at "Finding People". They have created a whole site dedicated to finding people for any reason at all, whether it be finding someone's telephone number or finding out someone's married name, they have actually built search engines to do it.

There are a number of other sites out there that are dedicated to doing the same thing, but usually they simply overwhelm you with data, for example there is Zabasearch - a search engine geared to finding people. Zabasearch is just like a large data dump - you will find so much data that you have no idea where to look. It is good for tracing every single address someone has had for the last 30 years or so, but if that person has a common name, the sheer mass of data is overwhelming - much of it will be no longer valid nor useful.

I looked myself up in Zabasearch and found every address I lived at for the last 30 or so years including my old email addresses and old phone numbers that I had not seen nor used in over 20 years! Comprehensive? Yes. Useful???

Finding-people.com has come up with a couple of unique search solutions for finding people. They built a search engine to help find married/maiden names! How on earth can you do that? It is actually quite clever... they built a search engine that pulls obituaries out of the Internet. Obituaries are the one way you can publicly look up someone's married or maiden name.

How it works: When someone dies, there is often an obituary published and the funeral home often arranges this as the family is usually grieving. They will usually place obituary notices in the newspaper and more often, online. There is where you see family members listed with married names - clearly connecting them to the person who has passed on.

Other search tools on the Finding-People.com website:

• Resume lookup
• College & University search
• Alumni search - finds graduates of high schools, colleges, etc.
• Reverse Telephone lookup
• X-Ray searches of Social Networking sites
• X-Ray searches of business networking sites
• Tricks and tips
• Links to arrest records and the National Sex Offender Database (Free)

• Genealogy resources and record lookup (Free)

So how did I use it?

The whole reason I got into it was because a friend of mine had just gotten divorced and he asked me if I had the contact to an old high-school friend whom I had not seen for at least 20 years.

I like a challenge, and so I went and began hunting. I used the alumni search tool over at finding-people.com and found the woman he was seeking on a list of alumni with her name listed like this: Jane (Doe) Smith.

From there it was easy. I was then able to use another search tool and found her profile on a Social Networking site. I passed the information on to my friend who subsequently contacted her. He found out that she too was recently divorced, and yes she would like VERY MUCH to meet for a coffee and chat.

To make a long story short, they have rekindled an old flame and are enjoying some time together ever since.

Maybe it will work this way for you too, but be aware that the person whom you are interested in may not be interested in you, and so you are to break off the contact and not 'stalk' them over the Internet. You could be sued or even arrested for 'stalking' and even have a restraining order put on you for harassment!

Don't let that scare you. A single contact is not stalking and you will immediately know if the one you seek was waiting to hear from you or not!

Most recently, I found an old Navy pal of my recently deceased father, and when I informed him about my father's passing, he put a notice up on the navy website and we received many wishings from other sailors telling us nice stories about my dad's navy days.