Chances are, if you’re reading this, it means you received The Lance newsletter, and you are already on the OLS Alumni Contact List. Congratulations! High five! But we need your help bringing more Lancers back together.
The thing about this special alumni contact list is, it didn’t exist a year ago. Tracking grade school graduates didn’t really occur to anyone 40, 50, 60 years ago. If you stuck around the White Plains area and remained a parishioner of OLS Church, you might stay in touch with people with little effort. And if you moved away, it was just an accepted thing that you might lose touch with most.
But now, in a day of databases and hyper-connectivity, the notion of not having a current Alumni Contact List seems unconscionable! No email addresses? No cellphone numbers? How could that be?!
So, one year ago, the Lancers Alumni Foundation set out to find the approximately 1,500 living OLS graduates. It has been an interesting — and rewarding — challenge. The first 100 or so were easy. Basically, we tapped into our friends and family.
By sharing our contacts with each other, we were able to establish a sturdy baseline. Then we turned to Internet. Using search and social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, we were able to locate a few hundred more classmates.
Along the way, we had to become resourceful and clever. We would use clues from wedding announcements, college newsletters, home sales, even obituaries to help find our old friends. In some cases, it was a real challenge to locate our female classmates who had gotten married and changed their last names. But in many cases, we were successful!
Then, it started to get more difficult. We might know people in our own class, but what about the class of 1973? Or 1963? The Foundation decided it needed a designated person for each of the 60+ OLS Graduating classes to build the list. A class rep or agent, if you will. But even finding these potential class agents has proven to be a bit of challenge for the older classes.
We even used a people finding service, but that led to only a few new contacts that we could verify. Our experience has been that good detective work, tapping into our collective memories, and channeling Six Degrees of Separation has been more fruitful.
We realize that some people may not want to be included on the alumni list, and we respect those wishes. We don’t want to seem like stalkers! But the truth is, we have re-connected with so many people who were so excited to be found, that it’s worth it to make the effort. Graduates have thanked us for tracking them down, asked about their old
classmates, and shared their lives. These conversations have been quite rewarding.
Our job is not yet complete. There are people to be found. So, if you have any leads to help us locate a few old classmates, please email us at lancersfoundation@gmail.com. We’ll be so glad to hear from you!