Expert: Cesar - 6/27/2009

Question
We were friends as teenagers in Germany. My friend married a man from Colombia and moved there. I moved to the US. We occasionally ran into each other when both of us visited Germany at the same time.
I lost her address and cannot remember her married name. Is there a site in Colombia where on can look for lost friends? Anyway I can post my information so that she may see it?
I read your answer from 2007 but hope that the internet will make my search possible.
Thank you.

Answer
Dear Ulrike:

I usually recommend looking at White Pages at the place where you think the person is located. I am currently in Medellín, Antioquia (Colombia) and I have the white pages from it. There is access to White Pages for other cities/states if someone goes to a place that has them such as a long distance phone service store, but I am not near to one. That requires me to make a special trip for it or be near one when I look for a name.

As I mentioned before, there is a website that publishes Yellow and White pages in Colombia: www.paginasamarillas.com (that company is Publicar).

You need to know where to look in that web page. I placed instructions at:

http://www.cesarusa.com/find_people.htm

I think I am going to create a page where I list people looking for other people and I can place you in that page.

Telecom is a large phone company in Colombia and their website is:
www.telecom.com.co

Carvajal lists in its website links to PaginasAmarillas.com and ought to be the owner as you can see at: http://www.carvajal.com.co/empresas-esp/publicar/publicar.html

You could try http://www.quehubo.com/
but it is not really a White Pages company (they say they are a Yellow Pages company).

You can always do Google searches (and other similar ones such as with Copernic) and use techniques such as boolean searches such as: Colombia and "páginas blancas" or "paginas blancas"

Please note that in Spanish the spelling of pages is "páginas", but some sites might display it as "paginas".

There is a website where you can download phone directories from Colombia. I looked at the file sizes and they were very large such as from 39 to 552 megabytes.

You can try (type the name at): http://www.directorioamarillascolombia.com/paginas_blancas.php

Most people in Colombia use both last names: the first and last one. Last name in Spanish is "apellido". Name is "name", middle name is "segundo nombre".

You can do all kind searches in the Internet including at social websites such as in MySpace, Hi5, etc. You can place ads in newspapers such as El Colombiano and El Tiempo, etc. You could even hire a private investigator.

You could contact entities such as Registraduria:
http://www.registraduria.gov.co/

which handles the IDs of Colombians, but I do not know if they would release any information to you.

If you know the name of the business the person works at then you could look up for the name of the business.

Best wishes,

Cesar
www.CesarColombia.com