I’ve sleuthed, with mixed results. I usually have no intention of reconnecting with the person, I’m just curious to learn what’s become of them. It’s always shocking when I find they died, sometimes long ago, or that they’ve come to some other bad end. Sometimes it’s gratifying just to locate them and fill in some blanks.
But it’s bizarre how sometimes there’s seemingly no trace of someone. There are, as I sit here thinking about it, at least four people I’ve searched for off and on and come up empty. For one thing, a couple of their names are too common for internet searches to return anything meaningful, and it’s especially maddening when some celebrity type has a similar name because it can be impossible to get past that. But I also keep coming back to the question: how can there not be some reference to someone of my generation, even if they never joined the online world themselves?
