A summary of the links, searches and other resources that have been established to bring people together, who were blown apart by Katrina and her aftermath.

NEW! CNN is devoting the weekend of 9/17 and 9/18 to display of pictures of the children who have been separated from their families; the hope is that many can be reunited with their families.

This page is devoted to registries and Katrina-specific searches. On the Navigation Bar above is a link to the Forum Page, where you will find both listings of the safe and the missing, as well as Katrina-specific discussions.

Registries
Attention has focused on the missing children, with the publication on September 5th of the Katrina-specific site by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Pictures of the unidentified  children are posted at their web site.

If you know someone who is stranded by flooding, contact the United States Coast Guard Search and Rescue . There are phone numbers as well as registration forms. Update: Monday 9/5 The New Orleans Times-Picayune has urgent bulletin board posts calling for the rescue of specific people here.  

A major resource is the International Committee of the Red Cross registries, which I remember from the Kosovo refugee crisis. Their lists begin at this page. You can consult a list, register yourself, and register your relative, all with links from their "locate" page. Each link is also listed in the green area to the right. This is the same thing as the American Red Cross Family Locater, the number the President gave in his September 15th speech, 1-877-568-3317.

CNN has great resources and can be counted on to maintain their list pages for a long time.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLA) lists are now on the Forums Page.

The software at Family messages.org is impressive; they now list people registered alphabetically by state, and color coded as to current status.

The American Red Cross is a day or two late, but as of 9/02/05 they have a link to the ICRC Family Links site, listed above. More to the point is their special telephone number 1-877-LOVED-1S.

Another resource may be the National Next of Kin Registry (NOKR), which has a disaster registry you may want to use. They are a private, non-profit organization.

The first attempt by the FirstGov.gov web site was, mildly put, not very good, so it was not included here. Now there is a range of generally good information on who to contact for what, and where. The site includes searches, housing, employer-employee contacts, and more. It definitely merits a place on this list now.

For the South Mississippi area, the combination list maintained by the Gulf Coast News numbers over 40,000.

The joint TextAmerica and NBC website , called, confusingly, either "Callhome" or MissingKatrina.com, is a resource with listings from corporate America, in particular, trying to locate their employees. Also, it is a place to upload photos of the missing.

Searches
The ultimate search tool has appeared on the web, but is hard to find.  IceRocket  is a search engine for blogs, but they have set up their search engine to search names at the International Committee for the Red Cross, NOLA sites, MSNBC, and Yahoo. Hurray! 

The search engine Lycos has amassed a good selection of web sites devoted to reuniting evacuees with family and friends.

Google, too, has entered the fray with a Katrina-specific search page . On examination, it seems far more limited than one would anticipate. That is, the primary database search seems to be using only the 20,000 names registered at KatrinaSafe.com. Although Google mentions the International Committee for the Red Cross searches, it is not clear that they actually have access to them--though I don't know why not. The Google site recommends signing up with KatrinaSafe.
com, a website which obscures its origins. Once again we have a commercial site with almost no background or "about" information, and warnings that your personal data is not private.