When a scandal broke shortly after 1900 to the effect that John D. Rockefeller had a notorious family secret in the form of a bigamist/swindler father still liv

When a scandal broke shortly after 1900 to the effect that John D. Rockefeller had a notorious family secret in the form of a bigamist/swindler father still living in the United States, Joseph Pulitzer offered an $8,000 reward to a press corps that utterly hated Rockefeller as a monopolist to go and locate the father. After a frenzied 18-month search, they failed to find him before he died. A Wikipedia write-up on this appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Avery_Rockefeller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Avery_Rockefeller. This is equivalent today of the press being unable to find Bill Gates's father even after being offered a rather large monetary reward and after applying all of its vast resources to the effort - even as the father continued to live in the continental U.S. It was a lot easier to "disappear" 100 years ago, before the advent of modern technology, than it is today. There is something vaguely creepy about how one's whereabouts can so easily be tracked with the modern tools at hand.