Finding Friends
Using Military Brats Online.
How do you find "lost" friends?
1) Use the resources available on Military Brats Online.
If you have not gone all the way through the MBO web site, please do so. There are a number of alumni organizations that we are linked to and we recommend looking there first to see if your school's alumni organization is listed.

Alumni organizations are "magnets" and attract others who are looking to connect with lost friends and classmates. Often other alumni can be supportive and helpful in your quest to locate specific people.

Also, Alumni web sites often offer guest books or databases of their own which can be helpful in your search.

If your school or Alumni organization is not listed on MBO, try using one of the web search engines such as Yahoo or Lycos to see if there is an alumni or personal web page by someone who went to your school. Be sure to try different word combinations and read all the options available when doing word searchs on the web. (Many search engines offer search options designed to make your phrase or word search more focused.

If you locate a web page for your school, alumni organization or a personal page that would be an appropriate link for Military Brats Online, please submit the link by going to the Add Your Link page of MBO and completing the Link Submission Form. Your search efforts can be shared with others.

2) Use various search engines available on the web.
A number of web sites now offer search engines designed to look for specific individuals. A number of these web search engines are available on Military Brats Online in the Search section of the web site. You may want to try several and keep in mind that if your classmate has married and changed their name, this will make it more challenging.

3) There are professionals who can find anyone for a price. Skip- tracers have been around for many years and generally are used to find people who owe money to others. Your yellow pages could help you to find a local person to work with. There are also some skip-tracers online, however, we cannot endorse any one company or individual.

4) Try Military City Online. In this area of America Online, there are a number of message areas related to brats and alumni organizations.

I sincerely hope that this information will be useful to you in your search.

--Vann Baker

Using The Military-Brats Registry.
Marc Curtis, the webmaster of the Military Brats Registry has provided the following tips for using the Registry database. This database is open to all brats regardless of whether you went to school in state-side or overseas schools.

Getting Started:
When you first start searching you should enter your graduation year from high school in the "Graduation Year" field, with nothing in the other fields. That will return the list of everyone in your age group, and you may end up finding someone you forgot about!

Narrowing the search:
To narrow the search down, enter a portion of the name of a school or military base where you lived. For example, If you went to Patch American High School, enter "Patch" since some people may not enter the whole name. You should even try variations of spelling in case someone accidentally misspelled the name you're entering.

If you're searching for a specific name try entering only the last name with nothing in the other fields...and again, try just a portion of the name since some common names are spelled differently. You can check for new listings daily by clicking on "Check New Users" to see who registered today, yesterday, or a date that you specify.

Notes:
The important thing is that they don't enter too much information or they'll get no response. It's easier to add info later to get fewer names.

Beyond the Registry, I recommend trying www.four11.com or AOL Netfind. I've had surprising good luck with those . . . particularly AOL Netfind (as much as I hate using anything related to AOL!).

--Marc Curtis

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