Next to her, her slightly older brother and mother are dressed to the nines for the family photo.

And underneath the family picture, a heart wrenching plea from the children's aunt in the United States to help find the family, who are among the countless people unaccounted for since Tuesday's powerful quake struck Haiti.

"My sister, her husband and their two young kids... Please oh please help us find them so my mom and i can actually sleep at night," the message posted on the online missing persons page set up by CNN says.

In less than 48 hours since the quake reduced much of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince to rubble, the CNN missing person's billboard has swollen to more than 200 pages, each with around a dozen pictures of people whose loved ones are trying to locate.

Some of the pictures bring good news. Above the picture of 45-year-old Cesar Blum, who works as a telecommunications manager in Port-au-Prince, the word "FOUND", all in capital letters, shouts out the joy of his family.

But most carry pleas to help find the missing, or calls for help from on the ground in Haiti.

"My daughter, Chelsey, is a Fulbright scholar doctoral student in Haiti. We need help trying to locate her. She speaks Creole and was staying in Port Au Prince," wrote a mother from Illinois.

"My brother-in-law's wife Emily Sanson-Rejouis survived the earthquake at the UN building and made her way back to their hotel," wrote another person in a message written in hasty desperation.

"The hotel has collapsed and the family are trapped (my brother-in-law Emmanual and their three little girls Kofie-Jade, Zenzie, Alyahna). She can hear at least one of their voices (the youngest 2 yr old Alyahnna's) and needs urgent assistance to rescue them. They are buried in the rubble but there might be a small air pocket."

A link showing a map to the hotel was posted with the message.

A group called The Extraordinaries has started a similar site "to harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time."

On that site (beextra.org/haiti), users can post pictures of missing persons or pictures taken on the ground in Haiti. As of Friday, the site will have a service which will match the pictures of the missing to photos sent in from Haiti.

The names of uncles, aunts, siblings, parents and friends also are being posted on the Facebook page of the 16,000-member "Largest Facebook Group of Haitians."

The International Committee for the Red Cross is helping, too, with a site called Family Links, where the names of missing persons are listed in alphabetical order.

Just under the letter A, the list of names was several hundred long, scrolling down the computer screen and spilling over to page after page after page.

"At this stage, the website allows people in Haiti and abroad to register names of relatives... It will incorporate responses to queries as they become available," Robert Zimmerman of the ICRC said in a statement.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News