Reconnecting on Facebook

Several years ago I received an invitation to join a social networking site called Facebook. My daughter believed we could keep in touch through the site and share photos and news. It was a wonderful idea. We, at this time, lived across the country from each other and were always looking for ways to keep the connection going.

After sending invitations to all her siblings and some of the friends she had remained in contact with from school, she had quite a list of friends.

I was a little slower to make a list of friends of my own. I spoke of Facebook at work and we would sneak onto the site during our lunch and sign up and invite each other to be friends. Sending pokes, pictures and jokes to one another broke up the monotony of the day and allowed us to stay in contact after work hours.

So with my little group of friends my time spent on Facebook increased. I started playing with the applications and so I was off collecting eggs and building a little farm. In setting up the profile, there was one section that requested information on the high school and college attended as well as the name of my past and current employer.

Then a little box began to pop up with the names of people I might know. These people had also attended the same high school and I recognized some of the names. I added the ones I remembered and started catching up. I was happy to have found those classmates that I had lost contact with after moving across the country.

That was when I decided to actively seek out the friends with which I had lost contact. Friends that moved away while we were still in high school. Some special friends that as a teenage girl I had traveled to spend the weekend at their new home in the country. I searched for them sporadically and then one day in my gmail in box there was a request from one fo the twins. They had it seems had been seeking me out as well. With their request we were finally able to reconnect after 25 years. This was a great day for me.

I spoke of the memories I had with these girls to my co workers. We spent hours talking about the chances of finding long lost friends and reconnecting.

There are still people I would love to connect with. People that I lost contact with during and after high school and college. To me facebook showed me it's most redeeming quality as the ability to find these people from our past.

Coming from a time before computers, school friends and church friends grew apart and in truth I never had any idea that a medium would come along that provided a way to reconnect. Before the Internet a name would occasionally show up in the paper that I would recognize. Other than those brief moments there was no real way to find those people that had moved away from the old neighborhood, just as I had.

Another bonus from connecting with Facebook is the ability to find the distant family.  The family that has become separated by miles can now share pictures and news on an instant basis.  When families moved across the country in the early last century, pictures and news were slow to trickle back to the relatives.

Facebook has brought the family pictures back to the family.  It is a way to find out the daily lives of cousins, aunts and uncles. 

My family had been separated since I was young.  Facebook has allowed me to find them after all these years. I have cousins that I am for the first time getting to know.  I have seen pictures of my distant relatives as they are uploaded and shared.  The family history has been told in blogs which are linked and shared.  This is an entire new way to connect and I love it. 

Sure, there are silly applications on Facebook, but there are some amazing bridges being built.  So while you hunt eggs and build farms remember that you can also locate the people that you have missed out on sharing your time. Take a minute to look at the friends list of the people on your friends list and see if you recognize some names out of the past.

In searching for people, you can use many different methods of searching. Once you have added a person, you can see their friends list and by looking at the names, you might see a name of a friend that you had in common.

One search method that I have discovered is by watching for the names that comes up in the you might know these box, When you see a name, you can go to their friends list. Check out the names on their list, these people that appear in the you might know box, may be the younger or older sibling of a long lost friend. I have found the cousin of a person that I am searching for and after looking through their friends list I realize that the one person I wanted to reconnect with was finally listed on this friends list. I was so excited that I just sat and looked at the name remembering the adventures and sometimes trouble we managed to get into while in school. I sent off a friend request and waited patiently on a response.

When the response takes a while, it makes you realize that you might access Facebook more than others. The wait is just one part of the search, but you may find it very rewarding.

Enjoy the chances that are afforded you by accessing Facebook. Researching will allow you to find people that you might have forgotten about until you see their name.  As you connect with your first friends you increase the chances of finding even more people from your past.