Austin & San Antonio Skip Tracing
A Texas locate splits in two before it starts. Real property, marriage records, assumed names, probate and the county courts at law sit with the County Clerk. Everything filed in a district court — the civil suits, the divorces, the felony files, the name changes — sits with a completely separate elected officer, the District Clerk. Ask the wrong one and you are told the record does not exist. Do that across the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos and San Antonio–New Braunfels metro areas and you are dealing with two offices in each of thirteen counties, no statewide index over the top of them, and a state law library that says plainly there is no single database to search. This page is about working that structure on purpose. We research public records and lawfully licensed data under a permissible purpose; this is general information about Central Texas records practice, not legal advice.
The Short Version
Skip tracing across Austin and San Antonio is mostly a question of knowing which of two elected clerks holds the record you want. Travis County states the division on its own courts page: district court records are kept by the Travis County District Clerk, and county courts at law records are kept by the Travis County Clerk. Bexar County runs the same split with different furniture — one County Clerk holding land, marriage, probate and military-discharge filings, one District Clerk running civil, criminal and juvenile district files, and three separate probate courts where Travis has one. Land records add a second constraint: Section 11.001 of the Property Code says an instrument is only effectively recorded in the county where a part of the property sits, so there is no shortcut across the thirteen counties these two metro areas contain. We ask what lawful purpose sits behind a search before touching any of it, and we return findings named to the office and index they came from.
Watch: Working the Texas Clerk Split
Why a Central Texas locate touches two offices per county.
Watch Overview
The Split That Happens Before Anything Else
Two elected custodians, one county, and no index above them.
Texas does not hand a county’s records to one recorder. It runs two separately elected custodians in the same courthouse, and they do not overlap. Travis County states the division on its own courts page in two sentences: district court records are maintained by the Travis County District Clerk, and county courts at law records are maintained by the Travis County Clerk. The same page notes that the District Clerk also runs jury impanelling — a detail worth holding onto, because it means that office is touching a far wider slice of the county’s adult population than its docket suggests.
The District Clerk is not an administrative appointment. Travis County describes the post as a constitutional office created by the Texas Constitution, Article V, Section 9, elected on a four-year cycle, and it lists Velva L. Price as the current officer. That constitutional footing is why the split is not a local quirk you can negotiate around: it is the arrangement the state itself set up, repeated county by county, and it produces two different filing rooms, two different fee schedules, two different search interfaces and two different answers to “do you have anything on this person”.
What each office is statutorily required to keep
Section 51.303 of the Texas Government Code sets out what a district clerk must do, and one subsection is unusually useful to anyone trying to find a person. Subsection (a) gives the clerk custody of the court’s records. Subsection (b) requires the clerk to record the acts and proceedings of the court, to enter all judgments under the direction of the judge, and to record all executions issued and the returns on those executions — which is to say, the record of a writ that came back unserved is itself a filed record. Subsection (c) is the one that matters most: the district clerk must keep an index of the parties to all suits, alphabetical, by full name, cross-referenced to the other parties, with a pointer opposite each name to the minutes carrying the judgment. That is a person-indexed spine through a county’s entire district-court history, and it is required by statute rather than offered as a courtesy.
On the county clerk’s side, Section 191.006 of the Local Government Code is a single sentence and it is the whole permission structure: “All records belonging to the office of the county clerk to which access is not otherwise restricted by law or by court order shall be open to the public at all reasonable times. A member of the public may make a copy of any of the records.” Note the shape of it. The default is open; the exceptions are elsewhere, in other statutes and in court orders, and some of them are severe. The section that follows on this page is about those exceptions, because knowing where the door is closed is what stops a locate turning into a problem.
What is NOT in either office
The Texas State Law Library keeps a guide to Texas court records that is blunter than any vendor page on the subject. Two of its statements do most of the work. The first: “Texas doesn’t have a single database where you can search all court records for the state. Each court is responsible for keeping their own records.” The second, and the one that catches people out: “Court case records are not subject to the Texas Public Information Act or the federal Freedom of Information Act.” A public-information request is not the instrument for a court file in Texas. Access to court case records runs on common law, statute and court rules instead, which is a different route with different limits, and a requester who fires off a PIA request at a district clerk has not merely wasted a week — they have used the wrong mechanism entirely.
The same guide describes the statewide e-filing research portal as offering a free subscription covering civil cases from district, county and probate courts while noting that it “may not have all records from all counties in Texas”. We quote the exclusion rather than a coverage statistic on purpose: figures about that portal’s back-catalogue depth, per-page fees and participating-county count circulate widely and we could not confirm any of them at the portal itself, which serves an identical application shell for every path including paths that do not exist. Travis County’s District Clerk does confirm, on its own site, that the office is integrated with that portal as an approved e-filing system under Rule 21(f)(10) of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure and Rule 2.7 of the statewide rules for electronic filing in criminal cases. Integration for filing and completeness for searching are different claims, and only the first is documented.
Travis, and Then Bexar
The same constitutional split, arranged differently at each end of the corridor.
It would be convenient if the two counties were mirror images. They are not, and the differences are the part a generic Texas page cannot give you.
Travis County
The Travis County Clerk organises itself into a Recording division — real property, marriage licences, assumed names and domestic partnerships — alongside Misdemeanor, Civil, Probate and Elections divisions, plus custody of the Commissioners Court record. So one office in Austin holds the deed index, the marriage index, the DBA index and the county-court-at-law civil docket, and that combination is precisely why it is the first place a Travis County locate goes: those four indexes cross-reference each other on the same name.
Where that office physically sits has moved. At the time of writing, the Clerk’s Recording Division office at 5501 Airport Blvd., Suite 100B is temporarily closed, with plats, research and copy requests available there by appointment only. Recording services are running from the Civil Family Court Facility at 1700 Guadalupe Street, Suite 4.300, and marriage licences and assumed-name recordings from the Pct. 4 Substation in the Ray Martinez Office Building, 4011 McKinney Falls Parkway, Suite 1200. That is an operational notice and it will change; the reason to write it down is that a locate that depends on a walk-in records pull is a locate that depends on which building is open this month, and nobody discovers that from a database.
Travis County lists a single Probate Court. Its court system otherwise runs Civil, Criminal and Juvenile courts, a Drug Court, a Veterans Court, a DWI Court and the Justices of the Peace — and specialty dockets matter to a locate because a person who has been through one has a documented recent point of contact with the county that a deed index will never show.
Bexar County
The Bexar County Clerk, currently Lucy Adame-Clark, publishes its own list of what it files, and the list is longer and stranger than Travis’s. Counted from that list, ten classes: assumed business names and DBAs; birth and death certificates; Commissioners Court minutes; DD-214 military discharge records; e-filing for civil, criminal, bond-forfeiture and probate cases; marriage licences; mental health filings; personal financial statements; real property and land records; and notices of trustee sale, which are the foreclosure notices. That last one is a locating signal in its own right, because a trustee’s sale notice is a dated, addressed, named filing about a property in distress.
Bexar’s official public records search runs on a separate hosted service under the Clerk’s name rather than on the county’s own domain, and the office also operates a mobile records unit that goes out to the public rather than requiring a trip to the courthouse. On the court side, Bexar County runs three probate courts — the county’s own description is that “the Probate Court system is divided into three separate courts with each Probate Court headed by an elected judge”, all three at 100 Dolorosa in San Antonio, with court-ordered mental health cases assigned to Probate Court 1. The Bexar County District Clerk, Gloria A. Martinez, splits the district-court side into Civil District Courts, Criminal District Courts and a Juvenile division, with a Presiding Court and a Monitoring Court sitting over the top.
Why the asymmetry changes the search order
Three probate courts against one is not trivia. Probate is where a person’s last documented address, their heirs, their surviving spouse and the disposition of their property all land in one file, and a county that needs three courts to carry that load is a county where probate is a productive first look. Conversely, Travis County’s concentration of recording, marriage, DBA and county-civil work inside one clerk’s office means a Travis locate can often be advanced without leaving that office at all. Same statutory architecture, two different efficient routes through it — and the reason a page that says “we cover Central Texas” is not worth reading is that it cannot tell you which route to take.
| Record | Office that holds it | What it gives a locate |
|---|---|---|
| Deeds, liens, plats | County Clerk, recording division County of the land | Ownership, mailing address on the instrument, dated chain. |
| Marriage licence, assumed name | County Clerk | Name changes and business ties on the same index. |
| Probate, guardianship, heirship | County Clerk, filed into the probate courts | Last address, heirs, surviving spouse, estate representative. |
| County court at law civil and misdemeanour | County Clerk | Smaller civil suits; appeals up from JP and municipal courts. |
| District court civil, family, divorce, felony | District Clerk Different officer | The statutory alphabetical party index; judgments and executions. |
| Legal name change | District Clerk | The record that explains why a person vanished from every index. |
| Protective order applications | District Clerk, under Gov’t Code 51.303(f) | A boundary, not a lead. See the closed-records section below. |
| DD-214 military discharge | County Clerk, but confidential 75 years | Nothing, for us. Gov’t Code 552.140 lists who may look. |
Thirteen Counties, Two Metro Areas
Not one region. Two, and the recording statute keeps them apart.
Austin and San Antonio get marketed as one corridor. For records purposes they are two distinct Census metropolitan statistical areas, and the boundary between them is not decorative — it is the line at which a completely different set of clerks takes over.
The Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos metro area contains five counties: Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell. Note the current title; this metro area was previously published as Austin–Round Rock–Georgetown, and a document citing the old name is a document written before the rename. The San Antonio–New Braunfels metro area contains eight: Bexar, Comal, Guadalupe, Medina, Wilson, Atascosa, Kendall and Bandera. Five plus eight is thirteen, and Comal County is worth flagging on its own — New Braunfels straddles the Comal–Guadalupe line and sits at the seam between the two metro areas, which is exactly the sort of address that gets searched in the wrong county twice before anyone checks.
Why you cannot search all thirteen at once for land
Section 11.001 of the Texas Property Code is one sentence and it governs the whole problem: “To be effectively recorded, an instrument relating to real property must be eligible for recording and must be recorded in the county in which a part of the property is located.” Recording is county-bound by statute. There is no state-level deed index that a shortcut could run against, because the legal effect of recording attaches in the county where the dirt is. A person who owns a house in Kendall County, holds a lien recorded in Bexar and is being sued in Travis has left three separate paper trails in three separate offices, and the only thing joining them is a name searched three times.
The court side has the same shape for a different reason. The State Law Library’s guide names Bexar, Collin, Dallas, Denton, Harris, Tarrant and Travis as larger counties whose district clerks put district court records online; the rest is county-by-county, and for records not available online the guide says plainly that you contact the district clerk’s office. That is the honest state of it. Across the smaller counties in these two metro areas — Caldwell, Bastrop, Bandera, Kendall, Medina, Wilson, Atascosa — a search often means a request to a named office rather than a query against an index, and building that into the schedule is the difference between a result and an excuse.
What this looks like against the rest of the state
The same architecture repeats statewide, which is why the discipline transfers even though the specific offices do not. Harris County runs the split at a scale of its own, and a matter that starts in Austin and ends on the Gulf Coast turns into a Houston records problem with the same two-office question at the front of it. Where a subject has left Central Texas but stayed in state, the search widens through our statewide Texas skip tracing coverage rather than restarting.
It is worth seeing what the alternative looks like, because it explains why Texas researchers develop habits that make no sense elsewhere. In California, San Diego County folds the assessment roll, the recorder’s index and the county clerk function into a single elected officer — the Assessor / Recorder / County Clerk — so a researcher working a San Diego County locate asks one office a question that takes two offices to answer in Texas. Neither arrangement is better. But a Texas requester who assumes the California shape will be told, correctly and unhelpfully, that the clerk they called has never heard of the file.
Where a Corridor Locate Actually Breaks
Six failure modes we see repeatedly in Travis and Bexar work.
The Wrong Clerk Said No
A district-court file asked of the county clerk comes back as “no record”. That is a true answer to the wrong question, and it is the single commonest dead end here.
A Name Change Nobody Looked For
Legal name changes are district-court records. A subject who is missing from every index under the name you hold may be fully documented under another one, filed with the district clerk.
The Seam at New Braunfels
An address on the Comal–Guadalupe line, at the join between the two metro areas, searched in one county and abandoned. The record is usually sitting one county over.
A Public-Information Request for a Court File
Court case records sit outside the Public Information Act in Texas. The request is not merely slow — it is the wrong instrument, and it will not be treated as a records request at all.
Land Searched Statewide
An operator who expects one deed index for Texas finds nothing and reports the subject owns nothing. Property Code 11.001 pins recording to the county of the land; the search has to go there.
A Portal Mistaken for the Record
The statewide research portal is described by the state’s own law library as possibly not carrying all records from all counties. Absence there is not absence in the clerk’s office.
What these have in common is that none of them is a failure of effort. Each is a structural feature of the Texas records system producing a confident, wrong negative. The general method behind resolving them is the same one described in how a records-based locate is actually built; what changes here is the order and the offices.
A Locate, Office by Office
The order we work Travis and Bexar matters, and it is not the same order.
Fix the Person, Not the Name
Full name, approximate age, prior counties, any known spouse. The district clerk’s index is alphabetical by full name and cross-referenced to other parties, so a middle initial is worth more here than a guess at an address.
Pick the Office by Record Type
Land, marriage, DBA, probate and county-court civil go to the County Clerk. District civil, family, divorce, felony and name change go to the District Clerk. We decide this before a single search runs.
Work the County of the Instrument
Property Code 11.001 sends land searches to the county the land is in. We run each of the relevant counties in the two metro areas separately rather than trusting an aggregator to have merged them.
Corroborate, Then Name the Source
Two independent records agreeing, each identified by office, index and pull date, with an honest note on what the file does not settle. An address we cannot second-source is reported as exactly that.
Who Sends Us Central Texas Work
Six requesters, six different first offices.
Counsel of Record
Parties and witnesses in a district court file
Collections Firms
Debtors after a judgment and its execution return
Bail Bond Sureties
A defendant who stopped appearing
Executors and Heirs
A beneficiary named in a Travis or Bexar probate
Leasing Offices
Former tenants with an unpaid balance
Title and Escrow
A missing grantor in the chain of title
A surety carrying a Texas bail bond has the tightest clock of the six, because the obligation is fixed and the window is short; that work sits with our surety bond recovery locates and it starts at the district clerk rather than the deed index. At the other end, an estate administrator looking for an heir usually starts where the file already is, in the probate court that opened the estate — and in Bexar County that is one of three. Where a matter is not about money at all, but about a family member nobody has heard from, the approach is set out in our guide to locating a missing person, which is a different posture with different boundaries. All of it sits under our wider skip tracing services.
Records That Are Lawfully Closed
The limits are as specific as the sources, and they are not negotiable.
Military discharge records: a San Antonio-shaped closure
Section 192.002 of the Local Government Code requires the county clerk to record the official discharge of anyone who served in the US armed forces, the reserve or an auxiliary after 1915, and forbids the clerk from charging a fee for it. That makes the DD-214 a genuine county-clerk record class — Bexar County lists it among the ten classes its Clerk files. It also makes it a record class that people assume is reachable, and it is not.
Section 552.140 of the Government Code closes it. For any DD-214 or other discharge record first recorded with a governmental body on or after 1 September 2003, the record is confidential for the 75 years following the date of recording, and during that period it may be inspected, copied or disclosed only under that section or a court order. The section then names, and we counted them from the enacted text, seven categories of person who may look: the veteran; the veteran’s legal guardian; a spouse, child or parent, or if none is living, the nearest living relative; the personal representative of the estate; a person named in an appropriate power of attorney executed under Subchapters A and B of Chapter 752 of the Estates Code; another governmental body; and an authorised representative of the funeral home assisting with the burial. A skip-tracing firm is on none of those seven, and neither is our client.
For records filed before September 2003 the statute goes the other way and gives the veteran an affirmative right of removal: under Section 192.002(c)(2), the veteran or the veteran’s legal guardian may direct the clerk in writing to destroy every copy of the record the clerk makes readily available to the public, and the clerk must comply within fifteen business days. A record can therefore be lawfully gone from the county clerk’s public shelf by the veteran’s own instruction. When a discharge record does not appear in a Bexar or Travis search, that is one of the reasons, and it is not an invitation to look somewhere else for it.
Safety comes before the locate
The Texas Address Confidentiality Program is administered by the Office of the Attorney General — not, as in several other states, by the Secretary of State — and it is run out of a post office box in Austin, in Travis County. It exists for survivors of family violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, stalking and child abduction, and it works by substituting a programme post-office box for the participant’s real address on the public record while the programme forwards the mail on. Where a request looks like an attempt to reach someone who left because of abuse, someone protected by a Texas protective order of the kind a district clerk accepts applications for under Section 51.303(f) of the Government Code, or someone who has deliberately cut contact for their own safety, we stop the work and tell the requester we will not continue it. Paperwork does not change that answer, and neither does a matter that began as a debt or a service of process and turned into this halfway through.
Where the consumer-reporting line falls in a Texas tenancy
People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we hand back is a consumer report. The distinction is practical rather than technical. A San Antonio property manager may use a located address to send a demand letter or to have a suit served over an unpaid balance from a tenancy that has already ended. The same address may not be used to decide whether to rent to that person, and we will not assemble a file for a tenant-screening, hiring, credit or insurance decision. Those decisions belong to a consumer reporting agency operating under the FCRA, with the notice and dispute rights that regime carries. If that is what a matter needs, we say so at intake and decline the work rather than reshaping a locate to look like a screening report.
How we work, and what we will not do
Section 191.006 opens the county clerk’s records to any member of the public unless another law or a court order closes them, which is a wide door and exactly why the discipline has to come from us rather than from the doorkeeper. We ask every requester what lawful purpose sits behind the search before a Travis or Bexar index is touched, and we work only public records and lawfully licensed data. We do not touch private financial account contents. This page is general information about Central Texas records practice, not legal advice, and the legal decisions that follow a locate belong to you and your attorney.
What We Commit To
Every finding we return names the office it came from — the Travis County Clerk’s recording index, the Bexar County Clerk’s official public records, a district clerk’s civil file — with the date we pulled it and an honest note on what that record does not settle. Where the two counties disagree, we report the disagreement rather than choosing the tidier answer. We research and document; you and your counsel decide what to do with it. That has been the arrangement since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I ask the county clerk or the district clerk for a Texas court record?
It depends entirely on which court heard it. The district clerk holds district court case files – civil, criminal, family and custody, divorce, and legal name changes. The county clerk holds cases from the county courts, county courts at law and probate courts, plus appeals coming up from justice of the peace courts and municipal courts. Travis County states its own version of the division on its courts page: district court records with the District Clerk, county courts at law records with the County Clerk. Asking the wrong office produces a truthful “no record” that means nothing.
Why does one Central Texas locate cross so many counties?
Because these are two separate metropolitan statistical areas, not one region. The Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos area contains Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell. The San Antonio-New Braunfels area contains Bexar, Comal, Guadalupe, Medina, Wilson, Atascosa, Kendall and Bandera. Thirteen counties, each with its own two clerks. Section 11.001 of the Property Code then requires that an instrument relating to real property be recorded in the county where part of the property sits, so land searches cannot be collapsed into one query.
Can you pull a DD-214 to confirm a veteran’s address in San Antonio?
No. County clerks do record military discharges under Section 192.002 of the Local Government Code, and Bexar County lists DD-214 filings among the records its Clerk holds. But Section 552.140 of the Government Code makes any discharge record first recorded on or after 1 September 2003 confidential for 75 years, and lists seven categories of person who may inspect it: the veteran, the legal guardian, a spouse, child or parent or nearest living relative, the estate’s personal representative, a person holding an appropriate power of attorney under Chapter 752 of the Estates Code, another governmental body, and the funeral home’s authorised representative. We are not among them, and neither is a client.
Is there one search that covers all Texas court records?
There is not, and the state’s own law library says so in terms: no one database covers every Texas court record, because each individual court is left responsible for its own. There is a statewide research portal attached to the e-filing system, and Travis County’s District Clerk confirms it is integrated with it, but the law library’s own description notes it may not have all records from all counties. An absence in that portal is not an absence in a clerk’s office, and we do not report one as the other.
What does Travis County actually do differently from Bexar County?
The statutory architecture is identical; the arrangement is not. Travis County concentrates recording, marriage licences, assumed names, probate and county civil work inside one County Clerk’s office, which makes that office an efficient first stop. Bexar County runs three separate probate courts, each with its own elected judge, all at 100 Dolorosa in San Antonio, and files DD-214 discharges and trustee sale notices among its County Clerk’s record classes. Travis lists a single probate court. Where probate is likely to be productive, that asymmetry changes which office we open first.
Can a Texas court record be closed to me even though court records are public?
Yes, and by more than one route. Section 191.006 of the Local Government Code opens county clerk records to the public unless another law or a court order restricts them – and both exceptions do real work. Records can be sealed, redacted, expunged, or made confidential by statute; family cases and cases involving minors are commonly restricted. Separately, court case records in Texas are not subject to the Public Information Act or to the federal Freedom of Information Act, so a public information request is the wrong instrument for a court file to begin with.
Will you locate someone who is hiding for their own safety?
No. The Texas Address Confidentiality Program, run by the Office of the Attorney General from an Austin post office box, gives survivors of family violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, stalking and child abduction a substitute address to put in front of the public record. Where a request looks like an attempt to reach someone who left because of abuse, someone protected by a Texas protective order of the kind a district clerk accepts under Section 51.303(f) of the Government Code, or someone who has deliberately cut contact for their own safety, we stop and tell the requester we will not continue. That holds however well-documented the request appears.
Can a property manager use your report to screen a rental applicant?
No. People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency and nothing we return is a consumer report. A located address can be used to send a demand letter or to serve a suit over a balance from a tenancy that has already ended. It may not be used to decide whether to rent to someone, and we will not assemble a file for a tenant-screening, hiring, credit or insurance decision. Those belong with a consumer reporting agency under the FCRA, with the notice and dispute rights that come with it.
Start With the Name and the County
Send us the full name, the last county you had them in, and the lawful purpose behind the search. We will work the Travis and Bexar indexes and the eleven other counties across the two metro areas, decide which clerk holds what before we search rather than after, and come back with a sourced first read, typically within 24 hours. Contact us if you want to talk it through first.
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