Update on Classmate Search
I got us started. The rest is up to you!
Okay. Here’s where we are in round numbers. Slide rule accuracy.
What I’ve done so far: The Alumni Association gave me contact information—addresses, and some emails—for about 410 of our 560 classmates, and passed along 110 names of classmates for whom they had no contact information at all and names of another 40 or so that have passed away.
I then set up this free Substack as the central point for reunion planning and invited classmates for whom I had an email address—about 180 or so (a combination of the alumni list and my own contacts)—to join. That worked pretty well with about 150 of those invited touching the site and reading the posts.
To cast a broader net I mailed letters to all 410 classmates who had left addresses with the Alumni Association. My letter also included an appeal to the recipients to find and reach out to classmates for whom we had only names.
About 30 letters came back marked “return to sender.” So 380 letters were not returned and therefore may, or may not, have gotten through to the recipients. In any case, in the weeks after mailing the letters—and also thanks to the superb assistance of a number of you in tracking down classmates—we got another 70 signed up on the Substack. Considering that some of the addresses had likely not been updated for years, or even decades, this was a pretty good result.
Bottom line: Of our 520 surviving classmates we still have no information other than names for about 90. After reaching out to 410 classmates by a combination of email and regular mail we now have about 220 classmates who have signed up for the reunion updates on Substack. That leaves another 300 or so who either never actually received any communication about the reunion, or got the communication and decided not to participate. We have no way of knowing which, but imho I’d guess a good percentage of the classmates for whom we had contact information saw something about the reunion and were just not interested, and that’s fine.
Where do we go from here? From this point on we are going 100% virtual. I’ve done what I can and we now have a “live” connection with about 40 percent of our former classmates (including you!) who were interested enough in the reunion to visit the Substack.
If you want to continue the search for classmates, I’ll soon be sending out a separate email with a link to a Google Sheet (a group-editable spreadsheet) with the names of the classmates we have no contact information for and the names of classmates who we believe have passed away. Since anyone with the link will be able to edit the Sheet I’m not going to post the link on the website. If you would like access, just send me an email at poly74@substack.com.
