How to approach a childhood friend on facebook

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The other day I found someone on facebook who was my best friend in childhood. Since when they abruptly transferred schools many many years ago they never made any attempt to contact me I'm not sure if they remember or care that I exist now.
I'm not sure how to contact this person to maximize the chance of a response.
I already tried sending a friend request which on facebook doesn't let you send any text along with it unfortunately.
It's been about a week and there's been no response to the request (and facebook doesn't tell you if they ignored it). I'm not sure if they don't want to talk to me or if they don't remember me. I remember them but then since I've really had no social life that's not hard. I'm not sure what to do to try to reopen communication with this person and it is very important to me since they were the only friend I had ever had in my life. I could attempt to cancel the friend request and resend it incase they didn't see the original (Not sure facebook allows this though) or I could try facebook's message service though I'm not sure what to say and I don't think it will go to their email (incase they don't login reguarly which means they won't see it).

If the person allows anyone to send him/her messages without being on their friends, then it will let you send them a message.

I have sent a message along with the friends request when I add someone to let them know who I am. I dunno why it wouldn't let you.


You can say something like "Hey (insert friend's name here) remember me from (insert elementary, middle, or high here) school? It's me (insert your name here) and I was the one who was an outcast and had no friends, remember that? (tells a little about yourself from when you were in school)"

I have had this situation. You have to jog the person's memory but in a positive way (don't say "I was the one with no friends"). Here are some things I did.

Sent a message at the same time that I sent the friend request that referenced our shared experience. You could say something like "we were in Mrs. X's 3rd grade class together, I brought my [whatever it was] in to school and we played with them at recess". If you used to be friends many years ago, there must be something specific that you remember doing together or talking about together. Bring that up to help their memory.

Change your profile picture to one of you as a child. The adults we become may barely resemble the children we used to be. People look at a picture of adult you and think "who is this person?". Only your family got to see the slow transition from child face to adult face. I had a few friend requests ignored until I changed my profile picture to an old 5th grade school photo. I changed it back to an adult photo after we had re-established connection.

Good luck. It's a very fulfilling thing when this works. But you have to remind the person of the child you used to be with a message reminder of shared experience and a photo reminder (by profile picture) of how you looked like then.

people change with time.....i had send request to many of the people who lived in the same building i lived in but they never accepted my request it hurt me quite a lot then i blocked all of them........

I have friended (or attempted to friend) people from my school days on Facebook many of times.

What I usually do is just send them a friend request. If they accept fine, if they don't accept, fine. I am in my early 30's so I don't feel as connected to these people, and in some cases it can be a little ackward to socialize with them again.

Strangely, I got back in touch with my best friend from middle school via Facebook. He moved away my 8th grade year, and I tried to rekindle the friendship with him over the years, often being rebuffed. We didn't talk to one another from many years after having a cuss-fest via e-mail. He accepted my friendship a couple of years back, it took me six months before I mustered enough to actually write him about what was going on in my life. Even though it is a distant acquaintaceship that is mostly conducted via e-mail, the second go-round of the friendship has lasted longer than the first time.