Examine Your Checklist
We now want to examine the information of your checklist. We'll start with the name. Is the name of your target the full name with the proper spelling? Many surnames have been changed simply by dropping a last letter or changing an I to a Y. Some names have been dramatically shortened to become more American. Women change their names by getting married. Of course, there are those individuals who change their names to deliberately avoid being found by anyone from their past.
My experience with names has been that the more uncommon or unusual the name, the easier it is to find. For example, if you are looking for a John Smith, you can imagine the difficulty in singling out the right John Smith, even if you knew his location. There are numerous Smith's in every community and many John's or J. Smith's as well. However, if you are looking for a John Archibald Baucus Charterboat Smith, you should have a reasonable expectation of quickly narrowing the list down.
What if you don't have the full name or the correct spelling? This is not the death of your investigation. Simply go to an official record where that person's information would be or could be kept. The old hometown is a very good place to start. If any family resides there you can get most of your checklist filled from them. Probably, your search will be over as family members will usually be able to put you in contact with the person you seek.
If family is unknown to you, the local school will usually have records that can fill in many blanks, but most certainly will give you the proper spelling of the full name. A school yearbook might also give up information about hobbies, nicknames and friends all of which might prove to be useful.
In the same hometown, the county seat might hold the birth record of your missing person, where you could get full and proper spelling of the name, the date of birth and usually parent's full names.
If there is a local newspaper it may be possible to cross reference the names and look for any "hits" then read those articles that might hold even more information about your target or their family.
From this point in your search if you don't have the actual location of your missing person you might develop information on what college or trade school was attended which could lead to a place of employment of a professional organization that your missing person might belong to.
Hopefully, you'll see as we go along that you might find your person at any step of the search. Also, I'd like to point out that the only costs and probably phone calls you've made and the only physical activity has been walking to the phone and lifting the receiver. So far so good.
