Lost and Found: The Guide to Finding Family, Friends, and Loved Ones

by Troy Dunn

If you are among the millions of people who are looking for someone from your past, you are about to embark on an exciting journey. Perhaps your search is one of the "big five" most common search categoriesóadoptee, birth parent, lost love, old friend, or military buddy. Or you may be searching for a past co-worker, former neighbor, childhood friend. This book contains the strategies and information you will need to complete your search as quickly and simply as possible.

75 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

Reviews

[David]

Just a few weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from a secretary at Nottingham University I’d forgotten all about, and I remembered we’d gone out a few times. What are you doing these days she asked, did you get married, any kids, where do you live? I just told her the lot as I have nothing to hide, everyone else knows all about me. She said she’d married, had three kids, divorced, married again, another kid, lives in Beeston near the campus. Both husbands were lecturers at the university. We had a jolly chat. If you’re ever up this way drop in for a drink, blah blah. I took no offence and was pleased she’d thought enough about me to want to keep in touch and know what I was up to. I told her how busy I am with various things. When she started saying how she rather missed some aspects of the past and her youth, some things that stuck in her memory, etc, I could have told her to stop whining and get a life but knew she already had one. Maybe the English just like to gossip openly. In contrast to this, just over two years ago a screenwriter in San Diego contacted me after finding my name in a writers’ forum on the Internet. We were both delighted and chatted again about our old acquaintance, but even after several months of emails and working on a script together he never divulged any personal information or replied to innocent queries about his private life. These things seemed perfectly natural impulses in me, but he always avoided answering anything about what all his friends and relatives and colleagues must all know all about. So I think it must be a cultural thing with Americans. He also often gave me little condescending lectures that took my breath away as I’d been completely unaware of giving offence, and the humour especially seemed to jar with him. Over here we just laugh and talk openly about anything and everything, even laugh at ourselves, whereas the hackles over there seem to be on a light trigger mechanism. I noticed this even on my one and only visit to the States. I was physically slapped more than once, and he himself once escorted me away from a party for my own protection as he said because I had been ‘offending too many people’, when all I’d been doing was chat (openly and wittily) about the War of Independence from an English perspective. I also got a bit sick of the inspirational quotes that seemed to lace all conversation. All talk had to be conducted on a superficial level with a great deal of smiling; try scratching the surface and there was hell to pay. Maybe the psychiatric profession has commandeered the deeper levels, whereas here there is little need for them as pleasant and harmless small talk soaks it all up. We see nothing strange about regurgitating every aspect of our private lives to someone we used to know who had the rather nice impulse to get back in touch.