Free Family Locator Services and Directories?

Looking for a long lost relative you haven’t seen in years? Perhaps you are one of the millions of people adopted and now looking for your birth parents. Maybe you’re an amateur genealogist tracking down family history. Regardless of the reason, many people go to the internet for help in trying to find family members or friends. Try a search on the phrase “free family locator services” and you’ll get plenty of results. When I first did this I was pleasantly surprised by what appeared to be plenty of free choices, but as I began to click one link after another my enthusiasm slowly turned to disgust. Why, you ask?

False advertising.

I spent the better part of an hour visiting all the sites that claimed to be free, only to find out that most weren’t free at all. Even the ones that were free to sign up for wouldn’t allow me to see the results of my search without paying a fee. Indeed, when they say “free to search” they aren’t kidding. What good does it do to search a name and have the results come back and say, “Yeah we found him, but if you want to know what we found you’ll have to pay.”

Look, I have no problem with web sites charging for their services. That’s what businesses do, right? What gets me going are sites that advertise themselves as free when they really are not, or don’t offer anything substantial. What really gets my goat is that many of these so-called family locator services include the statements about being free right on their main pages. The user is asked to register, again for free, and only then is he taken to a page that informs him of the fees. Meanwhile, they have your name, age, zip code, and email address at no charge to them because you just registered. Is it possible they use this tactic to harvest information and build their data base? You bet!

If you really want free, you’re better of just doing a straight Google search on the name you’re looking for. It may take several months of searching, but you’d be amazed at what you can find if you are patient and thorough. I Googled by own name once, and after several hours of following links, I came across a book containing a single quote from and interview I gave nearly fifteen years ago! Amazing.

Anyway, I’m not trying to trash family locator services. I’m just warning you so you know. For many people, searching for lost relatives is already a trying and emotional experience. They don’t need the extra heartbreak of spending a fortune to find the information they need.