Gathering your starting information

Background Check

There are tons of public records available on the internet today but there is no single place you can go to find all the information you seek. The more information you have on the person before you start the better. If you want to conduct a background check, information such as criminal records, motor vehicle records, and vital records may be found at both the state and local levels. For instance, you will probably need to know the city, state, and/or county the person was living in when any criminal offense took place in order to find records that pertain to that incident. If there are any recent criminal actions, only the local city/county records may be available as some counties are slow transmitting their data to the state level. Be especially thorough when looking for criminal records.

People Search

If you are trying to find someone, one of the easiest ways to gather information is to start with the obvious: the phone book. If you think they're in your area just thumb through the phone book to see if they're listed. Who knows, you may get lucky and find an address and telephone number for the person you seek. If a phone book isn't readily available for your search area try a White Pages People Search. In fact, this is my preferred way of doing phone book lookups. For best results using this method, try not to be too specific with your initial search. Use more general searches such as S Smith instead of Steve Smith or N Tennessee instead of Nashville Tennessee to get more results at the beginning. Then gradually get more specific until you find the result you're looking for.

Don't stop there! Google is your friend when it comes to searching. If you have a name and know the city for instance, use both when doing your search to help narrow down the number of results returned. Here is an example of typical google results when searching for someone:

Our original search term: Vernon Owens has returned 2,000,000 results! It will take a bit of time to get through all of those! If you can narrow your search down a bit you can do much better. For instance, let's put in a city and state an see what the results are:

Now that narrowed it down a bit. There are still 119,000 results returned but take a good look at the very first result:

Thanks to Google and their phonebook results, we now have a middle initial for Vernon Owens as well as a telephone number, an address, and a zip code. Oh, and one other thing. See that map link out there at the end of the address? Guess what. When you click that here's what you will find:

You can even get a satellite view if you want it:

So we started gathering our information with just a name: Vernon Owens, and so far we have quite a bit of new information including an address, a telephone number, and a middle initial(may be useful, you never know). We also have a map which shows all the surrounding streets and allows us to get driving directions, if needed, to the newly found address with just a few keystrokes.

Keep in mind that not every search will yield the information you were searching for and that there are other methods that can be used to get the same data.

Next:

Gathering your information for a background check or people search - Part 2

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