Researching Katie

When I began my research, I was only able to find basic pieces of information about myself that were remotely true. From a whitepages.com search I was able to find my home phone and cell phone's service provider, but the location given were not exactly correct. Both locations came up with towns near my hometown, but were both about 15 minutes away from where I actually live. 

Then while looking up my zip code on the fact finder I found some basic information on my town, like the total population of 11,946 people and the median age of 42 in 2010. After looking through the information on this website it was easy to come up with a demographic for my hometown; a small, middle class, mostly white suburban town.

Afterwards I began searching myself on Google and came up with very little. With just my name only one picture of myself and a few links to my social networking sites came up. Then once I added my address a few articles from my high school that included my name also came up. This included an article saying where I was attending college and one listing me in the Senior Musical cast list. I decided to search my real name, Caitlin, instead of Katie and surprisingly wasn't able to find any information.

I really don’t have many accounts online so I didn’t expect much else to be found. When I tried searching myself on Facebook from a different account I was only able to see my profile picture and our mutual friends, which I expected due to the privacy settings I had set myself.

I also decided to check ansetry.com because a few years ago I had created a family tree and had found out information tracing back to my parents great, great grandparents from the website. I was surprised that when I searched myself nothing came up. When I was creating my own tree, I was  even contacted by my mom’s  Great Uncle about sharing our information and was able to correlate our information that dated back fairly far. I am curious if in the future information on myself will be available from this site jut like I was able to find out my family’s history.

After searching myself I am generally happy with the way I am represented on the web. Due to the privacy settings and few accounts I have online, little is to be found. From the information collected I was able to tell that I am a student at the University of Wisconsin, from Chappaqua, NY, a small town,  who had taken part in the Senior Musical and uses Verizon Wireless as her cellphone provider. I think that overall, the less information available about myself will not only help me be safe online but also protect the way I am viewed by potential employers, friends or family.