HOWTO find old FASS members

The Fass 50th anniversary reunion is coming in January 2012. We want to find all the old FASS members and invite them to come, either to Waterloo, or to attend remotely via webcam.

Contact all your FASS friends that you are still in touch with, and get them to join the FASS group on Facebook and/or join the upcoming fass reuinion mailing list.

If everybody does their part we can try to reach most of us. You can help find old FASS-mates by pulling out your old fass programs. I have scans of many old programs and if you have a program I don't, please scan it and send it to me. (Notes on how to scan are below.)

Type in the names of people from old shows into Facebook, Linked-In, and other places to search like Google. You may get multiple results -- here are some hints to see if you've found the right person.

The Fass photo archives are going online soon, and many videos are online. Use those to remember what people looked like and compare it to the Facebook photo.
Check the person's "networks" -- focus on those who were at Waterloo or who are Canadian
Click to see a list of the person's friends. If they have friends from Waterloo or other Canadian places, they may be the one.
Judge their age from their photo, and the typical ages of the photos in their list of friends to see if they are roughly the right age.
If you can't figure out who it is, it doesn't hurt to send a message to the likely contacts and ask if they are the person who was in FASS. Making these sort of connections are what the social networks are for.
Don't forget that many people may have married and changed their last name. On Facebook, they are encouraged to include their old last name in their profile even though it doesn't search. So if you search for their original name, you may see somebody pop up with a totally different last name -- check them out.

As noted, you can also try regular web searches and phone white pages searches. In the USA sites like zabasearch show you a person's age sometimes, and former addresses and that can help identify people, but there is nothing quite that detailed for Canada.

Yes, some old FASS members have gone up into the flies (or descended through the trap), and if you knew them, consider making a page or two about their life that could be put on the web, and also printed out to go in a book at the reunion, perhaps with some photos. Even if you're not up to this, we'll make a topic in the FASS facebook group for listing their names.

Catch them self-googling

Most people do a google search on their own names. If you create a web page with a string like "Looking for so-and-so from FASS theatre company" in it (also include important keywords like UW, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada elsewhere on the page) then many people will find it when they do the search. If you want to get very fancy, create a special web page named <their-name>.html and put their name in the title. Link to the page with link text of their name. They will probably see this, or somebody else looking for them will. Of course, explain on the page that we want them for the reunion -- possibly link to these pages here.

Scanning

If you have old programs, memorabelia, videos and photos not already in the archives, scan them in. Posters and T-shirts are best laid out flat in somewhere diffusely lit to avoid glare, and photographed with a digital camera. Avoid flash which may cause glare -- put the camera on a tripod instead.

Old programs can be scanned on a scanner. If the program is just type and line art (no photos, no special use of colour) the best way to scan is 300 to 600dpi bitmap. If there are B&W photos, use grayscale mode though 600dpi bitmap may be best for halftoned photos. Play with the "threshold" setting. If colour is used as more than the background, make a colour scan at 300 ppi.

Also scan old tickets and similar items -- and perhaps bring them to the reunion.