A number of the major mobile phone service providers offer “family locator” products which give parents the ability to see the real time location of their child on interactive maps they can view on the computer or smart phone. Parents can also define locations or areas, and receive updates when their children arrive at or depart from those locations, or enter/exit pre-set boundaries. Verizon and Sprint each offer “family locator” products, which cost between $5 and $10 a month, and are easy to set up, use and maintain.

During the pre-internet days, researching your family tree involved sifting through stacks of old paper records or microfiche in dusty library archives. But nowadays, anyone with a computer and internet connection can visit a genealogy website and quickly trace their family tree back many generations.

As a private investigator, I’ve used genealogy websites a number of times to help develop a profile on the subject of an investigation. They can be particularly helpful in missing persons cases because they can provide a list of family relatives, including siblings and parents, and dates of birth for both the subjects and their relatives.

For example, a missing persons case might be to find a John Smith who was born in NY state, is in his 50’s and has a sister whose married name is Susan Miller. Without a critical personal identifier like a Social Security number or date of birth, finding information about the correct John Smith might be very difficult since there are likely many John Smith’s fitting that description.

Using a genealogy site, you could research Smith families from NY with siblings John and Susan in the correct age range. Susan’s married name Miller should help you find the correct John Smith and his date of birth. This will give you the critical personal identifier you need to do more detailed research. Best of all, most of the information on genealogy sites is very inexpensive, if not free, to access.

A few of the more popular and useful genealogy sites are:
Genealogy.com
Ancestry.com
FamilySearch.org

It’s a classic Dateline story: McDermott’s family reported the long-time boyfriend of Newtown-John missing in 2005, when he didn’t come back from a fishing trip in California. Authorities initially thought that he had fallen overboard and died, but eyewitnesses claimed they saw him get off the boat in port. This sparked the theory that McDermott had faked his own death and disappeared to escape his mounting debt.
In 2007, Dateline NBC hired Klein to find him, and Klein recently claimed McDermott sent him irrefutable evidence that he is alive, in exchange for Klein calling off the investigation.

Having spent almost 15 years in the field of corporate IT, one tool that Klein used to find McDermott caught my eye: Klein built a website, www.findpatrickmcdermott.com, and tracked the locations of its visitors from their internet protocol (IP) addresses. Klein believed McDermott would learn of the website, visit it frequently, and that by tracing his IP address they’d know where he was living. When I first heard about the website, I thought of two possible kinks that might prevent his trap from working:

• McDermott could be using a proxy server, indirectly connecting him to the www.findpatrickmcdermott.com website. The result could be McDermott appearing as a visitor from China, when he’s actually surfing the web halfway around the world. There are many free applications and web proxies for people who want to surf the web anonymously.
• McDermott might be using an internet service provider (ISP) like AOL, which has its web and email servers in Virginia. The result: McDermott visits Klein’s website using AOL from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, but appears to Klein as an IP address in Virginia. The same issue can come up tracing emails by IP address, and can result in a Gmail user in New York appearing to be emailing from Northern California (where Google’s email servers are).

Klein claimed his trap worked, since frequent website visits from someone moving along the Mexican Pacific coast led him and his team south of the border. They found a number of eyewitnesses there who swore they’d seen McDermott in that area. But we may never know if the IP trap worked, since Klein won’t say where McDermott is living, only that he is alive. While IP tracing may produce misleading results, it can be an effective tool for a tech savvy private investigator. The reality is most people are unaware of the “digital trail” they leave everyday, when they surf the web, send email, or make calls on their cell phone. And that trail can provide law enforcement and investigators with important leads, particularly in missing persons cases.

If you’re trying to locate a former classmate or colleague, lost relative or old flame, try your luck with these free, public online tools which require knowing the person’s name or phone number:

PIPL is a query engine that finds people’s profiles and deep web pages on websites and online databases that cannot be found with regular search engines, such as Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn.

Yahoo! People Search is a tool that searches for people’s phone numbers, addresses and email addresses. It also includes a reverse phone number lookup where you input the phone number, and it identifies the owner.

SuperPages People Search is a tool that searches for people’s phone numbers and addresses. It also includes a reverse phone number lookup where you input the phone number, and it identifies the owner.

WhitePages People Search is a tool that searches for people’s phone numbers and addresses.

Facebook is a social networking website that facilitates reconnecting with former classmates. First create a profile for yourself, input the schools you attended, then search for classmates on the “Find Friends” page.

LinkedIn is a professional networking website that facilitates reconnecting with former colleagues. First create a profile for yourself, input the companies you’ve worked at, then view the lists for current and former employees on the company page.

If you don’t have any success with these tools, don’t give up hope! Bluevision Investigations offers effective missing persons search services, accessing non-public online databases and research services that are only available to licensed private investigators.