Jane Angelich carried the guilt around for more than 4 decades. Years ago, she had been heartless to someone and had never admitted her actions. Oftentimes, she remembered the individual she had hurt and wondered: Had he ever forgiven her?

At last, she resolved she could carry her burden no longer. So last winter she went online and looked up the individual she had mistreated. Then she apologized for telling him to "drop dead" when he phoned her house back in 1961.

They were both 10 years old at the time.

"When something is nagging at you for forty-eight years, you need to clean it up," states Ms. Angelich, 58 years old, a pet-products company chief executive director in Novato, California. "That was the nastiest thing I ever did to anybody."

Along with helping folks reconnect with old flames, childhood friends and even long-lost relations, the World Wide Web is giving rise to a more novel phenomenon: the decades-late apology. The World Wide Web permits us to converse by e-mail, a variety of communication that frequently makes us more fearless and less premeditated—and at times even more contemplative—about what we articulate. There are even sites, such as ThePublicApology.com and PerfectApology.com, committed to helping our pursuit for remission.

And among all those folks we're discovering from our past online, there's bound to be someone we wronged for some reason, correct?

In covering this column, I picked up stories of people asking forgiveness for everything from failing to bring back a library book to going steady a college roommate's ex-boyfriend. One man apologized to his brother-in-law for telling his sister a long time before not to wed the man. Another told of getting hold of a university that had accepted him thirteen years earlier and apologizing for never filling out the questionnaire they had mailed him inquiring why he decided not to attend. "I merely desired to set things aright," he stated.

Not all belated apologies come through the World Wide Web, of course. I heard from one woman who had picked up the telephone to say she was remorseful to her sister for confronting her about her weight increase, another who had phoned her mother to apologize for being bitter over being brought up without a father, and a former employee who phoned her ex-bosses to apologize for penning a book tearing apart the company after being pink-slipped.

Last spring, out of the blue, Michelle Joyce's elder brother gifted her with his old Cub Scout knife and stated he was sorry for chasing her about the kitchen and feigning to assault her with it when she was 6 and he was 10.

Mike Gerard, Ms. Joyce's brother, states his apology was prompted by a volume that encouraged readers to think of the unsettled issues in their lives, no matter how minor. "As you become older, you recognize that you expend your entire life attempting to protect your younger sister, and that was once I let her—and myself—down," states the 38-year-old former Army Ranger, who lives in Bixby, Okla.

Ms. Joyce, 33, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina., and books corporate seminars for a living, states she did not believe the incident justified an apology and felt bad to discover it had afflicted her brother for a long time. "But I was touched that it meant that much to him to make it right," she states.

All this brings up the question: simply because there's someone from our past we may apologize to, should we? After all, how useful is an act of contriteness—whether offered over the internet or differently—that arrives many, many years late?

Take my acquaintance, who lately got an extended e-mail from a guy she dated in college, apologizing for the way he treated her at a bar one night in 1987. He stated he had forever rued his conduct. She states she had no idea what he was discussing.

(At this stage I would just like to state that if you're a man I dated—I won't name names—and you believe you owe me an apology: I assure you I'll remember why. So feel free to solicit pardon.)

Rachel Golden was unaffected when she discovered herself on the receiving end of a late apology. After a dear friend from high school married 5 years ago, she dispatched a present to the bridal shower since she could not attend. She never got a thank-you note, and she wasn't invited to the wedding ceremony. As a matter of fact, she never heard from the friend again.

Flash forward three½ years. One day Ms. Golden obtained a message, thru MySpace, from her onetime friend: "I trust everything is fine. Sorry about the shower. Here is my telephone number."

Ms. Golden did not respond to that message—or the following one she got 6 months afterwards. "It wasn't just the lateness, though it was astronomically late," states the 27-year-old publicist, who dwells in New York. "If she had been more earnest, if she had leastways told me what had occurred, it would have helped." Ms. Golden's friend, Simone West, states she could not afford to invite all her friends to her wedding ceremony and that she had so much happening in her life at the time—wedding preparation, honeymoon, moving apartments, new occupation and a new child—that she did not get all her thank-you notes composed. "I didn't understand Rachel was so disturbed," states Ms. West, 28, a hairdresser in New York. "If I had, I'd have seized the initiative to apologize way before I touched base on MySpace."

Naturally, many apologies—for things like stealing or backstabbing a co-worker—are severe and in truth should be made. But we exist in a self-help civilization, where therapists, 12-step syllabus guides and talk-show hosts are always reminding us that forgiveness and gratitude are the path to happiness (and temperance). A lot of times, a long-overdue apology, much like a confession, does more for the individual proffering it up than it does for the one incurring it.

When an old high-school rival of Kathy Somes got hold of her by Classmates.com last March, Ms. Somes, 46, apologized for her demeanor a long time ago, which included placing chewing gum in the girl's hair, hitting her with a rubber-pellet gun and blowing a horn into her ear during band practice.

"I did not actually care if she accepted my apology or not," states Ms. Somes, an investment funds analyst in Kirtland, OH. "I felt more genuine." (And, she states, her schoolmate did accept her apology.)

Jane Angelich, who told her fifth-grade crush to drop dead in 1961, concurs. She explained in her e-mail to him that she hung up on him because she did not know how to talk to a boy at the time and was mortified that her mother was listening. He responded to her apology, she states, and said he didn't recollect the incident. "It was nice to recognize, though, that fortunately he wasn't marked for life," she states.

All the same, there are times when a little contriteness can go a long way (like on a deathbed)—and some of the times it actually is never too late to say you are sorry.

Laura Shumaker discovered this last year, when a former schoolmate of her autistic son apologized to her for ribbing the boy years before, when they were both in middle school. Though the fellow, who's in his early twenties, hemmed and hawed, it was the recognition of his conduct that counted to her.

"I wept the whole way home," states Ms. Shumaker, 54, an author who lives in Lafayette, California. "In life you do not recognize what's behind the surface and why an individual acts a certain way, so you have to be tolerant."

So what do you do if you're flooded with the impulse to apologize for something you did ages ago? Here are a few tips:

• Make certain you're apologizing for the sake of the other individual and not yourself. (The woman I interviewed who apologized to her sister—a year afterwards—for bringing up her weight gain states her sister got distressed all over again and accused her of "reminding her that she was overweight.") If your motivations are self-serving, don't bother stating you're sorry.

• Reject mailing an apology thru a social-networking site. It is too disrespectful. Utilize the telephone. Or at least compose an e-mail, which manifests a bit more consideration.

• Ask how your actions impacted the other individual. "The most beneficial gift you'll be able to extend is the willingness to at long last discover precisely what the other person felt like as a consequence of your actions," states Karen Gail Lewis, a marriage and family therapist in Cincinnati.

• Be earnest. Explain why you did what you did, and why you're apologizing now.

• And—at the risk of sounding like your mother—attempt to apologize in a more opportune way next time. My 21-month-old nephew Zach did it last weekend, after hurling one of his playthings at me. If he can do it, you can as well.