The late great medium Gordon Higginson insisted on starting his readings by handling a possession, frequently a photo or jewelry, of the sitter or the person in spirit they wanted to contact. The reason he did this, and I would like you to do this if I read you in person, is that it works. Objects accumulate storehouses of information apart from what a medium will observe about you psychically.
In the case of a missing person, objects can hold essential psychic information about owners/users. In some cases that information can further open up to a full mediumistic contact. The quality and nature of object-information can be more clear and more valuable than that provided by a sitter who is caught up in a cycle of grief. For a medium, grieving people pose a difficulty because they tend to construct walls against emotions to protect themselves, which results in slower ‘emotional traffic’. Most grieving people feel “stuck” and this is why. The grief process can move very slowly, if we need information NOW, we may be best to go around it. Because mediumship is like a three-way conversation, if one of the three parties is unfit to communicate, the results are diminished.
If you need information about a missing person, I suggest using a combination of psychometry and reading individuals connected to the missing, but who are themselves not caught up in grief over events. You cannot anticipate the best source of information, so the more readings made among those close to the missing the better the composite results. The sitter’s intellect and life experiences have nothing to do with it, and can even be an obstacle. It’s about loving connections. Remember the phrase ‘From the mouth of babes’, it is possible in some cases that a child may turn out to be the clearest source of information, due to loving connection and lack of bias.