I don't know if newspapers were publishing it, but this story is not very comforting:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-05/states-hospital-dat...

I can imagine an usecase - if your relative or friend is unexplainably not found at home or office, so is effectively 'disappeared' from you - then in a pre-internet era you might not want to search all the hospitals in new york to check if (s)he's there.