I wanted to track down some people. The unknown grandchildren of a known deceased person to whom my wife is related. All the on-line family trees have the person's children and grandchildren marked "private." with no information available. So I resorted to a few research tricks I used before I retired. I looked on "find a grave" and got the DOB and DOD and location where he lived. I then did a newspaper archive search for the the person. I learned where the person went to high school, looked up the wedding announcement, his obituary. That gave me the names of his children and some of the grandkids. .I even had the guy's yearbook picture. Then I looked up each of the surviving kids. Checked linkeden, facebook and zillow. Within 2 hours I had the entire family tree down to the 2 yr old great great grandson, knew where they lived and worked. I had various pictures of each child/grandchild. Had pictures of their homes, the homes' worth, what cars they drove and their criminal histories. Even got exact birth dates for half of them. These people are scattered across the midwest and Pacific coast. And I got it all for free without leaving my desk. Amazingly, much of this is available regardless of how private you try to keep things.