I have a "pilot" group of emails from our last reunion. About 37 of the 50 have been to the website and reaction has been very positive. I decided to start expanding the base so I went to classmates.com which boasts "260" members listed for the Stebbins class of 75. I put together a basic form letter and started sending off emails plugging the site. Classmates won't let you include a website or email address in the email so I spread the website name out with spaces (h t t p:// s t e b b i n s 7 5 . c o m) to get around their block. Anyway, out of the initial 40 people I've sent the message, 2 have opened the message in the past 10 days. Looking closer, I'm finding classmates information is not correct. The person listed in my class, cick on their profile and they are from another school, state, year... This is frequent, not just a couple. Has anyone else tried classmates.com in this way.. to find classmates I mean? My success rate has been 1 for 40 so far. I've had much better luck with facebook.com. How are you searching for the missing in action? Thanx, Jeff

Make sure you click FAQs above and then click General Questions, Question #9. There's a lot of tips there for finding Classmates.

Messages on Classmates.com don't have a good response rate at all. Facebook is much more recent & easier to contact people, if you can sort out all the name duplications. I'm thinking of adding a profile question to ask what social networks people are on, maybe a set of checkboxes. Some people join those & not ours & just need a reminder. Others like having all the bases covered. They have different features.

Hi Jeff, Since you can join just about any group you want on classmates.com, it does get confusing as to who was really in your class. We have more than one high school in our town, so I joined both groups myself, because I went to junior high with a lot of the kids at the other high school. Eventually I got smart and created a group just for our junior high.

Anyway, we have gained the most success in finding people in three ways. We started with a search committee and divided the alphabet. It turned out one person was a virtual bulldog and would not give up. She tried every search engine she could find and even called a lot of phone numbers to track people down or rule them out. She has been wonderful.When she finished her list, she took on everyone elses.

Secondly, we have a member who is heavily into geneology. She has many, many data sources at her disposal and she knows how to use them. She knows which ones are free and she has geneology "friends" around the country she can email for help. She has helped us sooo much, not only in finding our classmates, but confirming who is deceased and then sending off for their obituaries so that I could make a very nice In Memory page.

Thirdly, we have a classmate who is a private investigator. We only turn names over to her that we really want to know about. Frankly, some people really don't want to be found and really don't want to participate. I had to tell the bulldog to just let it go after a while. No one can say we didn't try!

We're close to getting 50% of our classmates as members now and that's without substracting the deceased. I don't know how that compares to the usual success rate, but I'm pretty happy with it.

Good luck!
Retha

I have to agree--genealogy tips really help. Here in CA we have a birth index with mother's maiden names and that helps us determine siblings. So we contact their families that we have listed in other years--we're a multi-year site. If we don't know who's in which family, I send messages to all the grads with the same last name, asking if they know the ones we have missing.

We have three questions on our profile that also give us clues. We're a small town and have multiple generations who went to the school so one question is "Family History living in [our town]:" Next is "Family members who are [school name] grads:" followed by "Other classmates you keep in touch with:" Those questions you can still use on a single year site.

I located a few thru classmates.com I put the address of the site minus the http:// on every bulletin board I could. The ones we did find where truly that person but we live in a small town.

Hi I am working on my class website. I saw your post "Secondly, we have a member who is heavily into geneology. She has many, many data sources at her disposal and she knows how to use them".

could you ask if she would share some of the websites with me? my email toogie4444@att.net. thanks

You have a Bucket List Survey. That sounds cute. What kind of questions do you have? If you don't mind I would like to do that on my website.
Esther

Thanks everyone... http://ancestry.com was a real good source. I not only confirmed or received new birth/death dates for 14 of our 16 deceased classmates, I found several new classmates. It cost $20 for one month but one month is all I need for now. Facebook has definitely been better than classmates or the other social networkds.

thanx, jeff

classmates is terrible. Myspace and facebook have been a godsend for me. I put our class creator site a year and 1/2 before our reunion and by the time our 20 year came I had found 240 of the 320 students. Not too bad. We were lucky, we had someone who worked at the Licensing dept and looked up missing students and if they were in our state I got an address and sent them a letter.

Finding students is the hardest thing ever. Just started a long time in advance and post the site anywhere and everywhere you can. Start a facebook page and a myspace page for your class. People will find you too.

Good luck

-Sherry

There is two way that you can put your site on classmates
1. when you contact a classmate send them privite message you can put you site address there and it will turn into a like to your site.

2. start an reunion event on classmates and reference you site there.

if you try to do it in the everyday notes they will block it out.
tip dont use a formtype letters for each classmate cause classmate will site you for spamming.

I put my site name in a graphic and then uploaded it as my picture. I don't know how successful it was.