Online Class Reunions: Lost Loves Are Found, Gumshoes Stick Around

John Roberts loved getting e-mails from people in his distant past. That’s why he signed up for Classmates.com in the first place, to get in touch with long-lost buddies from high school.

But this e-mail exchange was different.

It started with an innocuous enough question: After high school graduation in Las Vegas, N.M., had Roberts spent time in Pueblo, Colo., in 1969?

Yes, he typed. Why?

Sit down, the next e-mail warned him.

And on the next line: I think you are my father.

High-school-reunion Web sites --which, for a small fee, enable users to get in touch with former classmates--have become much more than places to plan the 20th anniversary of your graduation.

As people flock to sign up, the reunion sites have grown into giant databases on tens of millions of high school graduates in the United States, available to anyone with a modem. Classmates.com, the largest of such sites, has 28 million registered members. And Reunions.com, which recently bought up two large sites, Highschoolalumni.com and PlanetAlumni.com, has registered more than 7 million.

Opportunities abound.

A private investigator tracks down a suspect--then follows a whim and finds the woman who will become his wife. Adopted children track down birth parents. A 63-year-old widower reconnects with his lost love.

The sites’ magnitude and many uses worry privacy specialists, since people who post personal information often don’t realize they’re opening themselves up to something beyond a conversation with an old acquaintance.

Most of the sites were originally created to help alumni find scattered classmates and act as an information clearinghouse for reunions.

Generally, it’s free to join and to give the sites information to post about yourself so that old classmates can find you. You also can view information about other classmates, which often includes such tidbits as how many kids they have or what they do for a living.

If you want to make contact via e-mail, the sites will forward your message (they don’t give out e-mail addresses) if you pay an annual fee--$36 in Classmates.com’s case, $14.95 at Reunions.com.

And some users have realized that that may be a small price to pay for a new way to search the past.

Private eyes sometimes turn to the reunion services when traditional methods fail, said Anne Fields, vice president of investigative services for the California Assn. of Licensed Investigators, though she thinks it’s one of the less effective tools. In one case, she said, an investigator needed to locate a woman with a common name who had been a witness in a case going to trial. The investigator went on a reunion site and began e-mailing people with the woman’s name.

The witness replied.

It’s easy for people to be misled by such e-mails. For one thing, they’re posted as coming from the reunion site. As a result, the recipients generally assume the sender is a not-very-memorable classmate, and they might give out information they would never give a bank or government agency.

Mark Nunez, a fraud investigator for an insurance industry firm, signed up for several sites for those very reasons.

“You get a lot of good leads,” he said. “Knowing where someone came from is always a good start.”

During one of his forays onto the sites, for example, he was able to reach a relative of someone he was searching for, and from there, tracked the man down.

Yet even Nunez, the hard-boiled investigator, was unable to resist the siren song of high school romance.

While he was on Classmates.com last year, a whim led the gumshoe away from his cases and to the high school he attended in Fullerton in the late ‘70s.

One name jumped out at him. Robin Matthews. The proverbial girl next door. He e-mailed her.

She wrote back. She still lived in Fullerton; Nunez at that time lived about 90 minutes away, in San Diego. The two arranged a lunch date.

“When she came out and I saw her ... I don’t know how to put it. It’s like I’m 16 again,” he said.

Nunez has since moved to Fullerton, and the couple plan to marry this summer.

Lighthearted though that story turned out to be, it makes privacy experts shudder. Not everyone is as delighted to be found as Robin Matthews.

“The site gives private investigators and stalkers a real handle on how to find you,” said Beth Givens, director of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “People’s enthusiasm blinds them to the long-term privacy implications. You’re giving quite a bit of information about yourself and you might not realize that that may be used sometime in the future for an unrelated purpose.”

Company officials counter that the sites actually go to great lengths to protect privacy. It’s up to users to decide how much information they want to provide, and they can remove themselves anytime they want. Nunez suggests a dose of Internet common sense: “I would not put an address or a phone number. That’s just plain foolishness.”

But Givens said many people aren’t as savvy as the investigator. In a moment of excitement, they very well might list their home address, thinking only old friends would see it.

At Classmates.com’s Seattle headquarters, company officials said they initially were startled to hear of private investigators and adopted children trolling through their site. And though they expected love connections, they had no idea that so many lonely hearts would find happiness in the arms and e-mail accounts of long-ago crushes.

Both Classmates.com and Reunions.com say they are in talks with Hollywood about the possibilities of developing television shows dramatizing the Internet love connections, using stories sent to the sites by happy users who want to express gratitude or rave about a love connection or a found friend. The sites often feature such stories on their pages to lure more paying customers.

Officials at both sites say they have the rights to the stories, because all users sign off on those rights at the time they connect to the service. Details of how profits would be apportioned from the stories have yet to be worked out.

On Classmates.com, Dan Daniels, a 63-year-old Oregon widower, told the story of an e-mail that arrived one day, asking whether he had once dated a girl named Bobbie back in the 1950s. When he sent an affirmative reply, Roberta Gregory, also widowed, e-mailed back. A month later she flew up from Southern California to see her old boyfriend.

When he saw her in Portland International Airport, Daniels said, he felt the breath leave his body. At age 62, Bobbie Gregory still looked fabulous. Since that visit, the two have gone on a cruise and spent time admiring each other’s grandchildren. (They have 28 between them.) A wedding is planned.

“I never expected it,” Daniels said. “I thought I blew my chances with her 45 years ago.”

Kirsten Miller and John Roberts told another kind of love story on the Classmates.com site.

Given up for adoption in 1970, Miller had always been curious about her birth parents.

In 1995, she found her birth mother. But all the woman could tell Kirsten about her father was that his name was John Roberts and that he often sported a letterman’s jacket from Las Vegas High School in New Mexico.

After a five-month relationship back in ‘69, the two had split amicably. Soon after, Roberts left his job in Pueblo, Colo., with no forwarding address.

Kirsten’s mother had no way to contact him when she discovered she was pregnant.

And finding him all these decades later seemed even more daunting; John Roberts is a common name, and most databases offered thousands of possibilities.

In the spring of 2001, as Miller was poring through Classmates.com looking for her own high school friends, she got the idea of searching for her birth father through the site.

She clicked on the page for the high schools in Las Vegas.

And there was the name John Roberts and a photograph. Was she imagining it, or could she see a resemblance? Miller whipped out her credit card and paid the membership fee so she could send him an e-mail.

Some experts in adoption searches wince at that kind of story.

“I would never advise it,” said Joe Soll, director of New York-based Adoption Crossroads, which helps adoptees embark on searches for their birth parents. Receiving e-mails over high school sites is potentially alarming to birth parents, he said. What’s more, e-mail is easy to ignore; would an unanswered message mean a birth parent is avoiding you, or just that your missive has gone off into the ether of cyberspace?

Yet stories of happy beginnings fuel the desire to try.

Roberts remembers exactly how he and Miller connected. He was home in Santa Fe, cooking bacon for a Mother’s Day brunch for his family. Like many users of alumni Web sites, he had developed a habit of getting in touch with half-forgotten faces from the past, and midway through the morning, he ducked into his home office to check his e-mail. There was the note from Miller.

He brushed the tears from his face and strode into the dining room to tell his family.

Father and daughter met a few months later. Another meeting is planned for later this year.

Classmates.com sent the pair free mugs and T-shirts.