How Can I Find My Friends?

Learn More About Finding Friends

If you're on PeopleFinders because you want to locate friends you haven't seen in a while, you can use a variety of the records we have on hand to do so. These publicly available records offer you a great chance to reconnect.

Birth Records

Birth records, which are different from birth certificates, can offer a surprising amount of information that may actually lead you to the person you're looking for. That's partially because when you perform a people search with PeopleFinders, that search might utilize birth records in order to craft a full profile of an individual. Because that profile also includes contact information, birth records are a necessity.

Especially if you knew these friends back when you were young, the plentiful information these birth records contain can make the search for your old friends much easier. Even if someone's moved or even gotten married and changed surnames since you were friends, these birth records contain original names, birthplaces and other information that can still help you to locate them now.

Phone Records

Did you ever write phone numbers in your friends' yearbooks right before summer break? Especially if this happened long ago, those phone numbers can be very nostalgic. Unfortunately, they're probably disconnected by now. So how can you use that old phone number to get in contact with an old friend if you can't actually call that number, and you don't have the person's new number?

Thankfully, you can still use this phone number through a reverse phone lookup. Put the old phone number into the reverse phone lookup to find information about the current and previous owners of that number. All you have to do is look through the history and find your friend (or your friend's parents, if the number was for their childhood home) and get to the current contact information for them.

General Public Records

You can learn a lot about someone with information from other public records. Although these public records are useful for a variety of topics, the records can also point you toward your lost friend, making it easier for you to narrow down your choices. When you perform a people search, you might end up with a lot of results, especially if your friend has a fairly common name. Public records information can help you narrow things down.

For example, a person's living addresses are part of public records. When you perform your people search, you can narrow down your results dramatically by just including the city and state in which your friend lived when you were still in touch. Other information like criminal records can also give you more insight into what your friend might have been up to since you stopped talking.

Why Do People Need to Use Records to Find Friends?

Though it may seem odd at first blush, there are actually lots of reasons why public records could be very useful when trying to find old friends. That's because people simply lose contact...for a lot of reasons.

General Disconnectedness

Sometimes life just gets in the way. It's actually quite common for people to lose touch throughout the years, just because of life in general. It's not that you dislike your friend or that your friend dislikes you --- it's just that you started working on different things, likely moved away from each other, and just stopped talking. Especially if one or both of you stay off social media, it's very easy to drift apart.

In this case, it's likely that a friend will really enjoy hearing from you again. If you want to get back in contact, a people search will give you the information that you need to call, text, email or even send a physical letter to reestablish contact.

Changed Contact Information

An individual's contact information changes quite regularly, and it might change quickly and dramatically if some major life event happens. For example, if someone has to change phone numbers in order to get away from someone harassing them at their existing phone number, that can very quickly cut off all of the person's existing contacts.

In this case, it's also likely that your friend will certainly want to hear from you again. Some people have hundreds of contacts and it can be all but impossible to go through each one and update that person on new contact information. In many ways, you're actually helping your friend by checking up on them through your own search.

Estranged and Lost Friends

This is a case that's unfortunately much sadder. It's common for people to lose contact for unexpected reasons, but what if that reason is bad blood between the two of you? You might even regret the reason that you lost contact --- maybe you were the person who forcefully cut the other off and you want to try and repair that bond.

You can get a person's contact information and try to repair that bond again. Remember that even if it's been many years, the wound may still be fresh in that person's mind, depending on what happened. You're going to have to take things much slower than you would if it was just a simple disconnect. But if you're truly committed to rebuilding the relationship, you can do it.

How Can I Get These Records to Find My Friends?

With all these ways to find your friends, it's definitely an exciting prospect. So, what can you do if you want to find those records?

Courthouses and Records Archives

The first thing that many people think of when it comes to public records is courthouses, official records archives, and other similar places to obtain these records through the legal system. These places do have the records in question --- many courthouses maintain local civil records, and some national archives maintain census records, voting records and other nationwide information.

But especially if you're just trying to get back in contact with someone, this definitely isn't the most cost-effective or time-effective way to do it. Although the records are technically free to the public, many record-keeping places charge high administrative fees, making it difficult to actually gain access to records. Plus, you may have to visit in-person or wait many days to have your records requests processed.

An Online People Search

Instead of waiting for public records at a courthouse, you can do everything from the comfort of your own home by looking through an online people search like PeopleFinders. All of the research methods are easy to accomplish with PeopleFinders, and you can likely do it much more quickly than you would at any courthouse or record-keeping location.

If you have someone's old phone number, it's extremely simple to perform a reverse phone lookup and get that person's new phone number. If you have basic information, you can use the people search tool instead to find new contact information. You can even research public records for additional information.

One of the Best Online People Searches

When you're looking to find your friends, it's important to stick with only the best tools. PeopleFinders provides all these tools in one place; you can get all the information you're looking for with just a few pieces of information. And you can even perform a background check before getting back in contact, just to be safe.

PeopleFinders is an industry leader when it comes to online people searches. We have plenty of experience in the people search industry, and have used that to constantly improve. Plus, with over one petabyte of records, which constitutes literally billions of records for millions of American adults, you can be confident you'll find the contact information you need for your long-lost friend.