Kathy of  Basildon reunited with her mother last Christmas after 37 years apart, introducing her for the first time to her grandaughter, Grace. 

Kathy employed the people-finding expert Robin Brown, 87, who uses 192.com to search through the edited electoral roll to find missing family and friends.

Mrs McGoven briefly reconnected with her estranged mother when she was thirteen but lost touch again in subsequent years. Then, in adult life, Kathy decided to find her once and for all, and contacted Robin Brown. “Robin found my mother after just three hours of searching, said Kathy. It’s been wonderful to reunite.”

World War Two veteran Mr Brown runs his website using 192.com to power his people searches. In Kathy’s case, Robin was able to identify her mother’s address, by looking on 192.com to see who her mother was living with, namely, her boyfriend whose name was supplied to Robin by Kathy. Before passing on the address, Robin advised Kathy to approach her mother gently, by first writing her a letter of introduction.

“ I wrote a letter to my mother and within a few days I got a phone call.  We just made small talk but it was lovely,” said Kathy.   

Of the five applications Mr Brown gets a day to find missing people, he expects to successfully covert two of these, often reuniting people who have been out of touch for decades.   

“192.com is the centre of my operations,” he said, “Giving me access to wealth of data, from telephone directory records to  births marriages and deaths indexes, and the edited electoral roll, supplying names and addresses that otherwise would be buried in local libraries.”

“The people searches that give me the most pleasure are the ones that lead to reuniting close relatives who have been missing a lifetime. It really brings home to me how important the family unit is,” he said.

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com said; “We help reunite hundreds of families a year and we are delighted to have helped Kathy find her Mother.”

192.com is being used by Melinda Messenger and Dominic Littlewood of Channel 5’s Cowboy Builders to track down fraudulent traders.

Protect yourself from cowboy builders by verifying their identity and business credentials on 192.com 

• Enter a name and surname into our people search boxes, and see if a trader is operating under an alias.
• Download a Company Credit Report on 192.com and find out if the trader has County Court Judgments against them. County Court Judgements are legal notices saying the trader has failed to pay a debt.
• Is the trader a Company Director? 192.com will show how many other companies the trader may be involved in, and find out if the trader operates under more than one business address.
• Download the relevant Company Credit reports to find out if any Companies the trader operates through have failed or are struggling.

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com says: “Don’t be fooled by a glossy website or business card, check out a builder out against the public records 192.com and check directly with any trade association, the builder claims to be a part of.”   

If you suspect you’ve been a victim of a cowboy builder, report the matter to the relevant legal authorities.  

Conduct your 192.com background check here

• 26.5 million new edited electoral roll records now available
• 192.com to reunite more friends and families than ever

We’ve  published millions of the latest edited electoral roll records; uploading 90% of the 2012 edited electoral roll to the site.

The new records will boost our capacity to reunite missing family and friends, allowing site visitors to find people who’ve moved house or registered to vote for the first time.

The edited electoral roll is the UK’s single most extensive directory of names and addresses; giving a greater coverage of the population than the entire phonebook or the networking giant, Facebook.

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director at 192.com commented: “With the launch of the 2012 edited electoral roll we have greatly enhanced our people-finding service.”

The edited electoral roll is a vital tool for finding lost friends and family. It is used by the public, professional people finders, family tracing agencies and missing persons charities. It’s also a critical tool for identity verification, used by businesses ranging from e-commerce websites to estate agents.

Recent beneficiaries of 192.com’s people-finding capacity are:

• Adam Blake and Fallan Kelly, finding their fathers with 192.com’s edited electoral records.
• Martin Murray of the 1960’s Rock group the Honeycombs who found an ex–band mate on 192.com.
• Kathy McGowern, 41, of Basildon who reunited with her mother last Christmas after 24 years apart.

Sending a Christmas card? Then send it to the right address.

• Millions of Christmas cards are sent to the wrong home
• Post early – 70% want a Christmas card by mid December   
• Find the right postal address with edited electoral records on 192.com

750 million Christmas cards will be sent this year, with Posties processing 130 million items on December 12; dwarfing the 60 million packages handled every day.

Yet many cards won’t reach their intended destination in time for Christmas Day; with wrongly addressed letters redirected to the National Returned Letter in Belfast.  Last year the centre successfully redirected 5.2 million items.

A 192.com survey found 30% of households saying they receive Christmas cards addressed to previous occupants; meaning at least 8 million cards go missing each year.

The poll is a reminder to get a move on: just 3% of us want to receive a Christmas card on Christmas Eve, with 71% preferring a Christmas card by mid December.

“Cards sent to the wrong place can amount to missing Christmas cheer,” said Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com.   

“Checking our edited electoral records will help you confirm you’ve got the right address. These records tell you where someone lives, who with and for how long – ideal for helping your Christmas card arrive on time, and on the right doormat.”

The last posting dates in the UK are December 20 for 1^st class items and December 17 for 2^nd class items.

Last posting dates

Tuesday 20 December for 1st Class items

Saturday 17 December for 2nd Class items

Thursday 22 December for Special Delivery items

Monday 12 December for airmail items to Western Europe

Friday 9 December for Eastern Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan

192.com have reunited thousands of families in time for Christmas. Reunitees include Adam Blake and Fallan Kelly, who found their respective Father’s through 192.com. Fallan will this year spend the Christmas holiday with her Dad for the first time.   

Just after midnight on June 6, 1944, the British 6th and American 101st 82nd Airborne divisions invaded Nazi occupied France. Packed into wooden gliders, the troops skimmed through night skies to seize strategic targets ahead of the Allied invasion force assembled in 7000 ships off the Normandy coast. D-Day had begun.  

Among the British glider troops was Ron Lawrance, now 90, living in a Devonshire care home. Sixty-seven years earlier, adrenaline raced through his young veins as he watched the ground approach; joining a battle predicted by his Commanders to cost 10,000 Allied lives.   

The assault had mixed results. While British glider-borne troops captured the ‘Pegasus’ Bridge across the Orne River, and disabled  German artillery at Merville, dense cloud and anti aircraft  gunfire over the Cotentin Peninsula broke up the American air-borne formations, causing troops to be dropped over an area of 1,000 square miles. This caused confusion amongst enemy ranks, but established a chaotic and lethal front line.  

For gliders closing on their intended targets, landing wasn’t guaranteed. German forces had stretched wire across potential landing sites, and low lying areas had been flooded; crashing gliders, bogging troops down into killing grounds of sniper and machine gun fire.  

Whether by wire, water, gunfire or sheer bad luck, Ron Lawrence’s glider crashed-landed; stranding him meters away from the enemy. What happened next is unclear. We do know that Ron was captured by German forces, that he escaped, and walked for days back to the Allied lines, surviving by eating anything he could, including the tongues of dead animals.       

Weeks later, the scene was joined by Robin  Brown, now 86 and running a people-finding website in Kent. In 1944, Robin was in the Royal Engineers, tasked with supplying logistical support to the invasion and maintaining  roads and bridges.

Robin recalls an uncertain and dangerous environment. “I was stationed in the town of Bayeaux. Many of the local women were too friendly with the Germans. Long after the enemy left we still had to look out for women snipers, believe it or not.”          

November 2011, and Robin’s and Ron’s lives would coincide when Jean Sanders Crook, Ron’s former employer, asked Robin to find her old friend with whom she had lost contact with in the 1980s.

Within just two days, Robin had used marriage records on 192.com to trace Ron’s daughter, thereby finding the man himself.

Explaining his  astonishing search result, Robin said:

“One didn’t have all this information on the internet until about the mid 90s. I can now access complete records of births deaths and marriages along with edited electoral roll data.”

“Using 192.com I found out that there were four Ron Lawrances  who married in the 1940s. Only one married an Eileen, the name of Ron’s fiancee, supplied by Jean Sanders Crook.  This told me her maiden name was Riley. I was then able to check all the births that came from this surname and check them against the name of his daughter, also provided by Jean.  It was then not too difficult to scan all the marriages and find the daughter’s current family name.

Once Robin had identified the right daughter, he was able to contact her via her listing on 192.com finding Ron, and so reuniting him with Jean after 30 years.  

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com said: “It’s an extraordinary and moving story; from Ron’s experiences as a young man to Jean and Robin finding Ron again after all these years. It’s a source of great pride here when we help old friends to reunite, and we hope this remarkable reunion can encourage others to do the same.”

Breaking news! Facebook business reviews are now live on the site.

Have you got a favourite pub, shop or restaurant? Is there a business that you feel strongly about?

Log in to 192.com enter the name of the business and the location. Write your review and tell your Facebook friends exactly what you think of it.  Thanks to our Bing Maps, you’ll also be telling them exactly where  it is.

The techno-wizzes amoungst you can also upload the business contact details to your mobile phone, that is, if it’s able to read the QR code, (that’s graphic which looks like a flat-packed Zebra). 

Go to our business listings and and share the knowledge!

Will your employer survive the recession? Is the company you’re hiring about to go bust?

Find out by reading a Company Credit Report and take our brilliant survey.

Martin Murray of The Honeycombs found his old friend Neville, thanks to a search on 192.com.

Martin, had a number 1 hit in 1964, with Have I the Right. In this video, Martin is the rhythm guitarist in glasses.

Thankfully Martin gave us the right to film his reunion with Neville, their first meeting in 50 years. The reunion was witnessed by 192.com and happened on October 14, 2011.

We are really grateful for the opportunity to film this reunion and share it with you. Enjoy!

RAF Veterans meet for the first time in 40 years in Harrogate this weekend

Ex-servicemen are reuniting thanks to your favorite people-finding website, which helped organisers track missing wing-men.

Colin Blakelock, ex-Assistant Air Traffic Control officer at RAF Masirah in Oman, organised the reunion after an  ex-colleagues found him on Facebook.

“192.com has greatly assisted in finding old colleagues. I put my old RAF mate Mel Crackle’s name into 192.com and where I thought he lived, and wham bam his contact details came up, it was an instant find.”

Mr Crackle, another former air traffic controller will meet up again with Colin at the reunion on Saturday, which is for ex-air traffic controllers and Flight Operations officers as well as other tradesmen based at RAF Masirah between 1971 and 1973.

Mr Blakelock, now living in Canada said:

“We were all 19 or 20 years old then. We lived for nine months in metal huts in the desert with no women around at all, but it was a good laugh.

“Shifts were up to eight hours in length and we would relay weather and air traffic information to military aircraft flying to and from the Far East.

“We’re now grandparents. This should be a fantastic reunion. A few of us have stayed in touch but the great majority have not seen one another since those days.”

Dominic Blackburn, Product Director of 192.com said: “192.com reunites thousands of families and friends a year, and we’re also proud of our track record of reuniting servicemen.”

The reunion will take place from lunchtime on Friday October 7 at the Cairn Hall Hotel, Ripon Road in Harrogate and will feature a dinner on Saturday, October 8.

This Friday September 16, 192.com will reunite missing toe-tappers 

As Strictly Come Dancing  bursts onto our screens, a  mother and son dance-duo will go Back to The Future with a 25^th-year-anniversary tap dance reunion at the Pelsall Community Centre at 8pm on September 16.

“For 25 years we’ve provided the nights which people can forget their worries, make friends and work up a sweat,” said organiser Chris Rhydderch, 34, who runs Chris’s Toe Tappers  dance school with his mother, also called Chris.

The reunion is partly thanks to the leading people-finding website 192.com, which helped Mr Rhydderch trace old foot-tappers.

Often all Mr Rhydderch had was a first name suggested by current dancers, and attendance registers going back to 1996.

The hot-stepper used the edited electoral roll records and free directory enquiries on 192.com to match a name with an address, tweeting victoriously whenever an old dancer was found:  

‘And thanks to @192com I’ve just found another former tapper for our reunion!!!! Nice one!!!! ’ he tweeted on August 15.

“We wanted to do something to celebrate 25 years of tap dancing and 192.com was extremely useful in helping me find our former dancers,” said Rhydderch.

Dominic Blackburn, 192.com Product Director said: “192.com helps thousands of family and old friends reunite, and we’re delighted to be of service for this brilliant dance reunion.’ 

Currently, 70 current and former tap-dancers will attend the event, whose ages range from 14 to 70.

Tap classes were started in 1986 by Mrs Chris Rhydderch for Barr Beacon Community Association, taking up residency at Barr Beacon School. In the 1990’s, classes were relocated to St Martin’s Church, Walsall. Subsequently, her son, Chris joined, teaching adult tap full-time alongside his mother, bringing fresh ideas, new music and a new perspective to the art of tap.

For more information regarding “Chris’s Toe Tappers” 25th reunion please visit Chris’s Toe Tappers official website.

Looking for an on old friend, family member or dancer partner? Then walk this way..