It Takes Time to Find People
I Continue to Wish for a Better 2021
Looking for someone is not the same as finding someone . Finding an address and finding a person are not the same.
· Not everyone shows up in a database search
· Not every address that shows up for someone in a database search is current
Let’s explore some of the persistent limitations and frustrations when searching for people.
I called my first blog post of 2021 my last post of 2020. By that I meant it was a post looking forward to a better 2021. The kind of sentiments usually made at the end of one year and not a month into the next year. While I believed I put out some vital information in that post, a colleague who read it, pre-posting, had this to say:
I think it's interesting and informative as far as it goes and is written in your own inimitable way! It seems to me that you write these in a sort of free-association style, just letting your hair down while enjoying a decent brandy.
I’m glad, at least, he expects I’m drinking decent brandy, not just any brandy.
It did make me think I may take another stab. I realized most of what I’m wishing for in 2021 (as a researcher) is this: that the public records I have access to for some places, would also be available for other places. Which applies greatly to the problem of finding people.
I have written often, with little modesty, that I am good at finding people. I know where to look, all the nooks and crannies of the open-source realm, and I know how to look, the right process and ways to find people. I am not, as I have also written, in the business of finding missing people. My business revolves around addressing the question, “tell me something about a person or company that I do not know;” or perhaps, “tell me that what I think about a person or company is accurate.” To answer those questions, though, I often do need to solve the missing person problem. You cannot provide thorough background research without understanding where to look, nor can you be comfortable with your findings if you cannot tie any “hits”, i.e., lawsuits, criminal, etc., back to your search subject. That requires finding people.
Thus, I find people even though I am not in the business of finding people. Brian Willingham is a fellow master of the database and expert in open-source research. He is in the business of finding people. In a recent post, he explains the costs associated with finding someone, and why it costs what it does. Along the way, he makes a rational case for why it’s worth paying him when you need to find someone.
Permit me to add, from the perspective of someone who has been finding people for a very long time, going way back to the 1980’s when I was an investigator for the Washington DC Public Defender Service. Add why you don’t find people.
When I started looking for people, we did not go online. We opened books. Finding people at that time derived mostly from one source, Ma Bell. We had the “White Pages”, which we used to call ‘the phonebook’. If you had a telephone number, you were listed in the phonebook (unless you paid to be unlisted). Everyone had a phonebook. They’d show up on your stoop, whether you wanted them or not. If you lived in an apartment building, there could be several laying around the vestibule. Investigators knew not to throw out old phone books, and would make an effort to get them from other areas. We also used books that looked like the White Pages but were not. For instance, we had the crisscross, which looked, in tiny print, like the white pages, but instead presented information in other ways. This gigantic book was published by a company called Cole’s. As this Wiki page details, Cole hired typists to key in phone books, so they could re-sort the data. The obvious way to use it was as a “reverse directory” finding a name and address from a phone number. But for finding people what was critical was that it gave a name from an address. The other book we used was put out by a company called Polk, the City Directory. It also looked like and was organized like the phonebook, but it often had more information for a name, such as a person’s occupation. The Polk people went door-to-door, asking people to give them information to put in their books. The story really begins when Cole and Polk realized they could get address and telephone numbers from other sources beyond AT&T/local telephone companies and added that to their books.
I mentioned that you could pay to have your telephone number be unlisted. Also, you did not have to chat with the Polk folk who rang your bell. This left big gaps in our books. Who would have your information then? Trans Union, TRW, Equifax. The Credit Bureaus. The credit bureaus did not rely on you giving them anything. They relied on you needing to give it to Sears and MasterCard and Jim Moran the Courtesy Man, and any First National this or that for a loan or credit card or as we called them back then, charge account. Those guys gave your information to Trans Union, TRW, and Equifax, your name, address, and telephone numbers you wrote down to obtain a loan or credit card and otherwise stay in contact with the people sending you bills. The credit bureaus assimilated all the records from each creditor and made a record for you known as the “credit header”. The credit bureaus then could sell header information to people who did not have an otherwise “permissible purpose” under the Fair Credit Reporting Act to see your full credit report. Or more plainly, if you could not legally get someone’s credit report, you may have been able to get the credit header. By the late 1980’s, credit header information, which was available via the first dial-in databases, became the primary resource for finding people. The old source information, from the telephone companies was flat and limited. With credit headers things came alive:
1. Multiple ways to search – by name, address, telephone number, and to much consternation when it became more known, the social security number.
2. Past and present – The headers did not just contain your current data. They contained your data going back several years. While there are many times when knowing where someone used to live mattered, what this also meant is that if you had an old address, you could now find a newer address as the searchable record would have both, which leads to our third area:
3. Data – It’s a mere header, the tip of a credit report, yet it almost always contained a wealth of useful information. Even your self-reported employer could show up in the header.
Easy access to credit headers changed our ability to find people.
Except we have one more stop. By the mid 1990’s, companies began using the power of the computer to combine this header information with other public records. It meant that in a single search, one could take a name and not only find the addresses associated with it, but also information about liens and judgements, business affiliations, and real property records. This provided ways to find people like never. It was all there. Only time stood in our way.
My contribution today is not to give a history lesson. It is to explain that what matters to people like Brian and me when looking for people is time. Time was a factor with all those historical sources, and made them reliable, but only sometimes. How often did the white pages come out? You moved. When would Cole’s or Polk catch up to you. And for the credit bureaus to have a new address or phone number for you, you had to give your updated details to someone. This took time. Time more than anything is the biggest factor in finding people.
It also takes us back to where we began. Wishing. Wishing we could do something about time. It’s not just the time it takes to update your header records. It is the time to recognize that you may not be in a record. If you move from a home to a rental apartment, you will no longer be listed in real estate records. If you stop using credit cards, there will be no updated information in your header. In Brian Willingham’s post, he walks you through his resources to battle against time. Brian writes, “We utilize multiple cutting-edge investigative databases that aggregate information from a multitude of sources.” He adds, “We then analyze the data and provide the best possible address based on other supporting information.” It is all to fight time. To have the best and most up to date information.
Which is also how time factors. When we, Brian, myself, anyone looking for people, can go on to an online source, any source, it takes less time to find people. If we cannot get that information online, it takes more time.
In 2021, there are all sorts of public record data accessible via online inquiry. It is information used to find people. Except it depends. Some states or counties or cities or utilities or agencies sell that data and others do not. Take voter’s registration records, a public record, and a great potential resource in finding people. Anyone can access this information, typically at an office in your County’s Seat. What if we cannot make it to the County Seat because it's in another county, or there’s a pandemic? For some counties, we can go online to get that information. Some. This is a good example of why I have a long wish list, because there are many places where you cannot get voter registration data online. For 2021, I wish strongly for a year with less pandemic. For 2021, I wish almost as strongly that more public records will be made available online – more ways to beat back the time it takes to find people.