Here's my idea. I just emailed it to Grace Davis.
If you want to help, "adopt a search". Right now, the best database aggregator - a service that searches across many databases - is http://boards.news.yahoo.com/boards/. Go on there and look up some random name. Search your own last name, or whatever strikes your fancy. Look at the records for someone. Take notes in a flat text file. Figure stuff out. Say you are searching on... I'll look up all the people named "Keesha" and I am going to pick Keesha Robinson. Vicki in Abeline is looking for Keesha, and registered her in the ICRC Red Cross database. Study the record. Do some searches on alternate spellings of Keesha... Keisha? Kesha? Kisha? What do you find... Search on Keesha's mom, who is in the ICRC record. Call Vicki, email Vicki, introduce yourself politely and say that you are a volunteer who is helping to search for Keesha. Tell Vicki everything you know, and then ask a lot of questions. If you got the name off some other board, and there's no ICRC record, see if you can get enough info to fill out the ICRC record. Explain that all that info will go on the internet. Give Vicki your number and act as a point of contact. (This is especially useful if the person LOOKING is also an evacuee and has a 504 area code that is not reliably working.)
But, most of all, get information about the other people. Who else is Vicki looking for? Who might have been with Keesha? Who in the family is known to be safe, and who else is missing? What are their full names and relationships and where did they live and where were they last seen? All of THAT nebulous information should be in your flat text file, but it also can go here on http://familymessages.org. That site is picked up by the yahoo aggregator and by others. You can slam all the vague uncategorizable info into the Notes field, and it will be searchable. This will let sideways connections happen in surprising ways.
Look for who else is looking for keesha, we'll call that hypothetical person Darrell. Call them, and give them Vicki's number so that if one of them finds Keesha, they'll call the other!
Please be intelligent, tenacious, tactful, a good listener, not brusque. It is therapeutic, I think, just for the survivors to talk to someone and be in touch regularly and know someone is working on it. You may find yourself helping them look up other information. Or be talking for 10 minutes and then suddenly they go, "Oh yeah. And what about my cousin." Maybe you'll then search on that cousin and that will be the key to everyone having phone numbers, finding housing, etc.
Practice saying "I am still not finding their name anywhere, but I am going to keep looking, because a lot of people have only just begun to report themselves safe." Reassuringly, to people who are on the verge of tears. Practice apologizing for not knowing how to spell people's names... read back the spellings because... I cannot always understand people's Louisiana accents even while they are spelling, and they get real impatient with me for being an annoying clueless WASP. (If you are not an annoying clueless WASP, good.) Also, you need to have the attitude that... You need to not have some kind of odious "charitable organization" attitude about who is deserving and who isn't. You got that??? Not everyone has it together. also... not everyone can read or write, I have run across this more often than I expected, not like completely can't, but just, not so good at it. You are going to talk with some elderly people who ramble or repeat themselves, be patient with them since they probably need the most help of anyone out there.
I'm thinking about making a wiki not to track the progress of this, but to put resources and instructions.
I will check back.
So, that is a way that YOU can help, without me having to coordinate it. GO FOR IT!
If you are going to do it, give me a shout in the comments below. And, keep track of your success stories.
I can't leave until my credit card gets here in the mail (been expecting it since Monday), but started doing this yesterday. I spend eight hours and only made two contacts, so I was frustrated - but am still plugging away. Will go in the morning if my credit card is in today's mail.
Posted by: Marta | September 14, 2005 at 11:25 AM
Aw. Only 2 contacts? Do you mean you only spoke to 2 people, or only connected up two sets of people?
Posted by: badgerbag | September 14, 2005 at 11:28 AM
I'm having trouble parsing how to help this way, and helping like this is right up my alley! I've got unlimited LD, and good phone manners.
Posted by: Lea | September 17, 2005 at 06:58 AM
I'll email you Lea, maybe you can help with a family right now who is asking for online search help!
Posted by: badgerbag | September 17, 2005 at 07:52 AM