In 2002 someone with the creative username "dan crenshaw" posted three separate guides for the JRPG Suikoden 3. to gamefaqs.com. This consists of the most popular comprehensive guide to the entire game, a list of all the story scenes and endings in the game, and a list of all the things the private detective you can hire in the game can tell you about the underage anime girls that are part of your army (it's a JRPG).
After first going "Huh, that's weird" about the user name, I checked with the site howmanyofme.com to see if this was a common name. It is not. There are 13 Dan Crenshaws in the United States. There are 103 Daniel Crenshaws - which is his legal name - some of whom will be called Dan. Let's dive deeper.
The timing of these guides is just fantastic. Dan Crenshaw finished high school in 2002, presumably around summer, and these guides were written and published in the months after that and stopped being updated in ealy 2003, when his wikipedia article tells me that his university education was kicking off. Let's dive deeper.
Next step is a bit awkward because at this point I was losing focus and since I am not American I don't know your internet service providers, but he does leave an email adress, which is dshaw999@bellsouth.net. It does sound to me like someone with that adress in 2002 is probably in the south, which he was, but I haven't actually looked that one up too much.
Here's a link to the list of guides for Suikoden 3: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/536777-suikoden-iii/faqs The link for the post will have to be to a picture of main character Geddoe, the one-eyed mercenary that I am now convinced he has built his entire persona around.
That 'howmanyofme.com' website seems kind of sus. I searched a generic name like "Mohammad Khan" of which there should be hundreds in the US and it said "There are 2 people in the U.S. named Mohammad Khan."
Unfortunately that's a good point, and I absolutely did use the first page I found without doing any kind of source criticism. Is there a better source for the numbre of Dan/Daniel Crenshaws out there?
No idea. Is there still an active Suikoden community (sorry don't play the game so idk)? Would it be possible to make a post on their forums or subreddits to see if anyone knows the original Dan Crenshaw who posted that?
I did check this, but the suikoden forums I found seem to go for years without responses. Anyone with relevant knowledge would also have had to keep their interest for a dead game series going for more than a decade, so I think that's a dead end without a lot of patience. I only checked for official Suikoden forums though, I have all of Reddit blocked, so I don't know about them.
I'd try White Pages. You can do some semi quality e-stalking with just names and ages.