Pipl is a well-regarded “people search engine” that helps folks find other folks.
A section of Pipl that collects stories asks users to “Tell us your story and explain why is it really important for you to reunite with the person you’re looking for.”
Definitely an interesting idea, and the collected stories linked from the left side of the site are fascinating — but they don’t seem to explain the importance for the storytellers to reunite with the person they’re looking for. Instead, they are more like testimonials for Pipl and how the site has helped bring reunions about.
But they’re still fascinating stories — of finding a mother after four years, learning that a best friend had died, finding an ex-boyfriend who had the storyteller’s college diploma in his possession, reconnecting with a brother lost for seven years.
Just as an aside, although Pipl searches the “deep Web,” I’m not sure how effective it is since no “advanced search” feature is in evidence. If you’re searching for someone with a common name, you can’t enter a middle name, for example, or a birth year.
If I were to tell a story about how satisfying a reunion can be, I’d tell about finding my childhood best friend, Claudia, whom I haven’t seen in about 45 years but am now in touch with. Over the last year or so, I’ve had some social-media-powered wonderful reunions with old friends, former students, and others — all more or less through Facebook. If I were to tell a story about the importance of finding someone, I’d tell about my high-school boyfriend. Not because I have any great need to reconnect with him, but because he so mysteriously disappeared just a few years after graduation. His parents have never been able to find him, and I’d love them to have some peace if they’re still living. Oh, what the heck, I’ll throw his name out there — William Scott Carson (he went by “Scott”), last seen in the Santa Barbara area in the mid-70s.