How To Find Biographical Information on the Internet

Historic Figures
This site from the BBC incudes brief bios "of the movers and shakers of history". Browsable alphabetically by last name.

Locating People

The Virtual Chase: People Finder Guide
The Virtual Chase is one of my very favourite sites, for so many reasons. One big reason is this People Finder Guide, I recommend it to people all the time. Here's a little about it from the site: "The People Finder Guide began as an article, entitled The People Chase, which appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of The GPLLA Newsletter. We republished it here and kept it up-to-date until 17 January 1999. At that time, the number of excellent people finder resources demanded a better organized guide. Use the People Finder Directory on the right to find telephone, reverse look-up, and email directories as well as databases containing public records, foreign country telephone directories, and professional online databases for discovering information about people."

Virtual Gumshoe
An excellent directory of sites used to find individuals. Organized into helpful categories like: Adoption, Missing Persons, Public Records, Sex Offender Registries, Alumni, Vital Records, Telephone and Email Directories, Unclaimed Property, Cemeteries and Obituaries, Criminal Histories, and many more. Don't forget to check out the FAQ page. This is a great place to start your search for an individual, or information about an individual, when you don't really know where to begin. A very good resource.

Search Systems: Public Record Locator
(Formerly pac-info.com). This one is not so much for locating people as it is for locating information about people you already know. A very large collection of links to free public record databases on the Internet. You can find court records, criminal records, unclaimed property, licensing information, sex offender registries, tax information, missing children databases, and much more for individuals in the US and Canada. Some links are to fee sites but there are many free resources here and the two are clearly differentiated.

Instead of listing each of the MANY telephone/email/reverse lookup databases on the Web, I'm just going to link to Virtual Gumshoe's section on Telephone & Email Directories because it's so comprehensive.

LLRX: Zimmerman's Research Guide: Finding People
A short but very informative article on how to search for and find people.

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Next month's article will continue with biography sites concentrating on specific groups of people (inventors, scientists, artists, etc.), baby name and etymology sources, and some of the great biographical resources you can find

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