Westchester & Rockland Skip Tracing Services
Three counties, three separately elected county clerks, and underneath them a layer of towns and villages that New York law makes the legal keeper of its own paperwork. A single Lower Hudson address can sit inside a village, inside a town, inside a county at the same moment, and all three of those governments file things about it. The counties say so themselves — each of the three tells you, on its own website, about a record it does not hold. And the Hudson runs down the middle of the metro, so following that instruction is a drive, not a corridor.
What is genuinely different about these three counties
There is no single Lower Hudson index. Westchester, Rockland and Putnam each elect their own county clerk, each runs its own land-records room, and none of the three searches the other two. The layer below them is not decorative. Under New York’s Local Government Records Law a town’s records officer is the town clerk and a village’s is the village clerk, so a village inside a town inside a county produces three separate custodians for one street address. The counties will send you down there themselves. Rockland’s clerk states that small claims and all landlord-tenant disputes are handled by towns and villages only; Rockland’s archive notes that marriage licenses are normally held by the towns and villages; Westchester’s land-records page sends survey questions to the municipal building department. Then the river gets in the way. Westchester and Rockland face each other across the Hudson for the whole length of their shared boundary, and the crossing between them in the middle of the metro is the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge at Tarrytown. Beyond it you go a long way north before the next span. The county line here is water, which is why White Plains, New City and Pomona are three errands rather than one.
Watch: reading a Lower Hudson address from the bottom up
Which counter gets opened first when a request names White Plains, New City, Carmel, Nyack, Yonkers, Peekskill or anywhere else between them.
Play the walkthrough
Three county clerks, and nothing shared between them
They are neighbors on a map and strangers in an index. Here is what each one actually keeps.
New York gives land recording to the county clerk, and the Lower Hudson has three of them. They are not branches of one another. Each is separately elected, separately staffed and separately indexed, and a name run at one counter has told you precisely nothing about the other two. That sounds obvious written down; in practice it is the single most common way a search of this area comes back empty while the paperwork sits eleven miles away.
Westchester — the deepest stack of the three
The Office of the Westchester County Clerk sits at 110 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in White Plains, and its Land Records Division describes its own job as recording every document pertaining to real property transactions occurring in the county. The same division processes New York State Mortgage Tax, New York State Transfer Gains Tax and federal tax liens, and it houses the county’s Map Division, where subdivision maps are filed. Its own page states the reach of the collection plainly: land records including deeds going back to 1680 and mortgages recorded as far back as 1950. That is not a marketing number, it is the office describing its own holdings, and it means a Westchester chain of title can be walked back further than most American counties can manage.
The legal side of the same office is where a searcher usually ends up. Court records filed there are open to the public for inspection unless sealed under New York law, and the office is reached through the Richard J. Daronco Courthouse at 111 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Matrimonial records are the standing exception — the clerk states they are sealed and available only to the parties or the attorneys of record, and other actions can be sealed on a judge’s order.
Rockland — a smaller office with a longer memory
The Rockland County Clerk works out of the Rockland County Courthouse at 1 South Main Street, Suite 100, in New City, and files and records mortgages, deeds, satisfactions and assignments. What makes the county useful is what sits behind the counter rather than on it. The Rockland County Archives holds collections spanning the county’s history from its establishment in 1798 to the present, in a purpose-built facility: Building S at the Pomona Health Complex, 15,800 square feet, completed in August 1998, holding over 33,000 cubic feet of records at archival temperature and humidity.
The holdings list is worth reading rather than skimming, because several of these are address-bearing records that no commercial database touches. Supreme Court records run 1847 to 2010 with an index to court records from 1847 to 1982. Census record books cover 1855 to 1925. Naturalization papers run 1812 to 1991 — nearly two centuries of filings in which somebody stated where they lived and who vouched for them. There are tax and assessment rolls for each of the county’s towns through 1964. And there is a quiet historical detail with a practical edge: the archive holds Orange County deeds and mortgages from 1703 to 1800, partially, because the land that became Rockland was part of Orange County until the county was carved out. A pre-1798 Rockland property question is an Orange County question, and the Rockland archive is where that seam is documented.
Putnam — small, and correspondingly specific
The Putnam County Clerk’s Office is at 40 Gleneida Avenue, Room 100, in Carmel. It runs land records, court filings, business certificates, naturalization, pistol licensing and passports out of one building, and it operates a Records Center and Micrographic Bureau for the older material. Two things about the Putnam office repay attention. It offers a free Fraud Alert service that emails a property owner when a document is recorded in their name — and the office’s own note beside it, that other owners in the county may share the same name, is a candid warning about exactly the failure mode that wrecks name-only searches. And its business-certificate rules carry a locating detail most counties leave unstated, which is covered further down this page.
Where the older files physically live
Age moves records out of the building. Rockland’s clerk is explicit about it: court files commenced in roughly the last six years sit at the courthouse in New City, and files commenced more than about six years ago sit at the Archives Building on Sanatorium Road in Pomona. A file request card gets filled out at whichever of the two locations holds it, files are viewed on site only, and the clerk warns in terms that removing documents from either premises is a crime. Anyone planning a Rockland records visit around a matter more than six years old is planning a trip to the wrong town unless they check first.
One address, three governments, three sets of records
New York’s village-inside-a-town arrangement is not a quirk of naming. The statute gives each level its own custodian.
Most states stop at county and city. New York does not. A village is an incorporated government that sits inside a town, which sits inside a county, and all three exist simultaneously for the same piece of ground. The person living at that address is a resident of all three at once, and each of the three keeps files the other two do not.
This is settled by statute rather than by custom. Article 57-A of the Arts and Cultural Affairs Law — the Local Government Records Law — defines a “local government” to include any county, city, town, village and school district, and requires each one to designate a single records management officer. It then names who that officer is: “In towns, the town clerk shall be the records management officer… In villages, the village clerk shall be the records management officer.” The same article provides that town records no longer needed for the day-to-day business of an office are transferred into the town clerk’s custody. So the town clerk and the village clerk are not administrative conveniences. They are the legally designated keepers of two distinct bodies of record covering overlapping ground.
The county tells you how many there are
Westchester publishes the count itself. Its clerk maintains a public directory of city, town and village clerks with a phone number for each, and that directory runs to 42 entries: six cities, seventeen towns and nineteen villages. The six cities are Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Peekskill, Rye, White Plains and Yonkers. Two of the nineteen village entries are listed by the county as “Village/Town” — Mount Kisco and Scarsdale — because those are coterminous village-town governments where the two boundaries are the same line.
Read that directory closely and the traps announce themselves. The City of Rye and the Town of Rye are two different governments with two different clerks and two different telephone numbers, and neither is the Village of Rye Brook, which is a third entry. The Town of Pelham and the Village of Pelham Manor answer on the same number, which tells you something about how small some of these units are. A request that says “Rye” and stops has not identified a jurisdiction; it has identified three of them.
What the lower level actually holds
Three examples, each stated by the county rather than inferred. Rockland’s archive lists marriage records for 1908 to 1935 and then adds the general rule beside them: marriage licenses are normally held by the towns and villages. A marriage license is one of the strongest name-change and address documents in American public record, and in this metro it is usually not at the county at all. Westchester’s land-records page says surveys are not usually filed with the county clerk and recommends beginning instead with the local building department in the municipality where the property is located — that is the county sending a property question one level down, in writing. And the Rockland archive’s tax and assessment rolls are organized by town: Clarkstown, Ramapo, Haverstraw, Orangetown and Stony Point, each rolled separately through 1964.
The practical instruction that follows is unglamorous and it is the whole job. Establish which village, which town and which county an address belongs to before deciding anything is missing. A national vendor’s record will say “Westchester County, NY” and consider the question answered. It has not started. Where the search is for a person rather than a parcel, the same layered logic applies across the state, which our statewide New York locate guide works through in more general terms.
The cases with the most addresses in them never reach the county
Small claims and landlord-tenant matters are decided in village and town halls. The county clerk sees them only if somebody carries them there.
This is the part of the Lower Hudson record map that costs people the most, and one of the three counties states it outright. On its court records page the Rockland County Clerk answers the question directly: “Small claims actions (under $3000 and all landlord-tenant disputes) are handled by towns and villages only.”
Consider what that sentence means for anyone trying to establish where a person has been living. A landlord-tenant proceeding is, by its nature, a document about an address. Somebody filed a petition naming a dwelling; somebody was served there or was not; a judge in a village hall heard it. That is a dated, sworn, publicly filed statement about a residence — and it is sitting in a justice court in a village, not in the county clerk’s index in New City. Search the county alone and the file is invisible.
How a justice-court judgment climbs to county level
The Rockland clerk sets out the route in the same place, and it is worth following because it explains why some of these cases do eventually surface at the county and most do not. A judgment must first be obtained in a village or town justice court. The justice court issues a transcript of it. The transcript is then taken to the county clerk’s office, where filing it costs $10, and where an additional $5 buys an execution — against income or against property — which is then delivered to the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department, Civil Division.
Three steps, two buildings, and a fee. Which means the county-level index of small-claims judgments is not a record of small-claims judgments. It is a record of the ones a creditor cared enough about to walk upstairs. Anyone reading a clean county index as proof that a person has no judgment history in the county is reading a filtered list and treating it as a complete one. The mechanics of turning one of those transcripts into money are covered separately in our guide to collecting a judgment under New York law, and the locating half of the problem in our notes on finding a defendant for a small-claims filing.
What the county index does hold, and how it is searched
Westchester’s judgments and liens page describes its side of the same system, and two of its statements shape how a search has to be run. First, the index is organized by name and by name only — the office states you must know and search by a debtor’s last name. There is no address-first route into it. Second, the county clerk states that judgments are enforceable against real property for ten years and twenty years against personal property, which sets how far back a search of that index is worth running before it stops telling you anything actionable.
The Westchester index is also broader than its own county’s litigation. The clerk states that transcribed judgments from other New York State counties, foreign judgments and New York State tax warrants filed in the office all appear in it, alongside monetary judgments, mechanic’s liens, broker’s liens and notices of pendency. A judgment that began somewhere else entirely can therefore show up in White Plains, which is precisely why the index is worth checking even for a person with no obvious Westchester history. Reading court files generally as a locating tool is set out in our guide to working a person’s court record.
The metro’s internal boundary is a river
Westchester and Rockland look adjacent. In practice they are two errands, and the court map is the only thing that treats them as one place.
Westchester and Rockland face each other across the Hudson for the whole length of their shared boundary. That boundary is water, and water is not a road. Two addresses that a mapping tool shows as a few miles apart — one in Tarrytown, one in Nyack — are separated by a crossing, and crossings on this stretch of the river are scarce. There is the span at Tarrytown, the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, carrying the traffic between the Westchester and Rockland shores in the middle of the metro. Beyond that you go a long way north.
How long is worth stating with a source. The New York State Bridge Authority operates five Hudson River bridges — Bear Mountain, Newburgh-Beacon, Mid-Hudson, Kingston-Rhinecliff and Rip Van Winkle — and Bear Mountain is the southernmost of the five. Everything else the Authority runs is further upriver still. The Authority’s own listing for Bear Mountain gives its connecting counties as Orange and Rockland on the west, Westchester and Putnam on the east, and describes it as the Peekskill and Fort Montgomery crossing on State Routes 6 and 202. It is 2,255 feet long and opened to the public on November 27, 1924; the Bridge Authority bought it from its private builders in 1940. That one crossing sits at the point where four counties nearly meet, at the far northern end of the Westchester-Rockland line, which tells you how tightly packed that corner is and how empty the rest of the boundary is.
What that does to a working day
It makes the metro’s records geography honest in a way most metro pages will not admit. Two counties in the same statistical area, sharing a border, with a searcher who needs both, means an actual trip in each direction. The clerk in White Plains and the clerk in New City are not a short hop from one another, and the Rockland archive in Pomona is a third stop again. This is why a locate here is planned as a sequence rather than a sweep — establish which county owns the filing first, then which municipality inside it, and only then decide whether anyone needs to be at a counter at all.
The one map that does unite them
The courts do. The New York State Unified Court System groups all three of these counties into a single administrative district: the 9th Judicial District, styled Mid-Hudson, whose counties are Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Westchester. Supreme Court practice across the three is administered together even though the record custodians are entirely separate. That is a genuinely useful asymmetry: a litigation matter may be a Ninth District matter while the underlying deed, judgment transcript and marriage license each sit with a different county or municipal officer.
The southern boundary of this page
South of Westchester the record system changes completely, and this page does not attempt to cover it. The five boroughs run on their own arrangements, with a different vocabulary for the same offices and a different route into property records altogether; that ground belongs to our New York City locate page. Nassau and Suffolk are a separate matter again. What is written here applies to Westchester, Rockland and Putnam, and stating that boundary is more useful than pretending to a coverage area we would then have to hedge.
What each route returns on a Lower Hudson name
Including the two rows where the honest answer is that we are not what you need.
| Route | What it produces here | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|
| People Locator Skip Tracing | The right county, the right municipality inside it, and the instrument or filing that stands behind the addressSourced | Nothing is reported that a named Lower Hudson office or a lawfully licensed dataset will not carry; unresolved questions come back labeled as unresolved |
| Consumer people-search sites | Marketing and header files, compiled into candidate addresses worth testing against the three county indexes | Nothing in that compilation was ever filed with a custodian — no recording reference, no index number, no date any office wrote down |
| Records directory sites | Links and phone numbers for the county offices, which is genuinely useful for orientation | They hold no records themselves; several of them rank above the actual clerk for the clerk’s own subject |
| Calling a county clerk yourself | Authoritative confirmation of a document you can already name | Westchester’s judgment index is searched by debtor’s last name only, and no county office will run a person search on your behalf |
| A national call-center trace | Fast turnaround and a confident-looking report | Works from a state-level coverage table with no concept of a village clerk, a town justice court or a coterminous village-town |
| Declining to search | A real row on this table, and sometimes the only defensible one. Two things put a Lower Hudson request here: the reason given for wanting the location is not one the law recognizes, or the shape of the file suggests the person has deliberately kept their whereabouts from this particular requester. Either way nothing is opened at any of the three counters, and the question belongs with an attorney, with the court, or with law enforcement. | |
Where a request goes beyond locating a person into asset, business or enforcement research, the range of work and what evidence each product returns is set out on our skip tracing services overview.
Four Lower Hudson filings that carry a dated address
Each one is a person putting a location in writing, in front of a named office, on a known date.
The assumed-name business certificate is the most underrated of the four. Putnam County’s clerk attaches a condition that most counties leave unsaid: a business certificate can only be filed there if the business is physically located in Putnam County, and P.O. boxes are not acceptable to determine business location. That is a rule written to force a real address onto the filing. Rockland’s clerk adds its own friction in the same direction — certificates are submitted at the land-records counter with official picture identification, and the fees must be paid in cash or by money order, with personal checks refused. A self-employed person who has been hard to reach through consumer data has often, at some point, stood at one of those counters with photo identification and a physical address.
Naturalization files are the second, and Rockland’s run unusually deep. The county archive lists naturalization papers from 1812 to 1991. A naturalization file names the applicant, the date, usually a residence and often witnesses who lived nearby. For genealogical and heir work this is frequently the record that breaks a wall no database can see over, because it predates every commercial dataset by a century and a half.
Assessment and tax rolls are the third, and they are organized the way the metro actually works — by town. Rockland’s archive holds rolls for Clarkstown, Ramapo, Haverstraw, Orangetown and Stony Point running into the 1960s. A roll is not proof of present occupancy and is never treated here as if it were; it is a dated statement that a named person was assessed for a named parcel, which is a strong lead requiring a second, independent source before it goes in a report.
The land record itself is the fourth, and Westchester’s is the deepest available in the metro — deeds back to 1680, mortgages back to 1950, plus filed subdivision maps in the Map Division. A deed is the strongest single piece of evidence in ordinary records work because it is signed, notarized, dated and indexed against a name. Its weakness is equally plain: it proves ownership at a moment, not residence today, and in a metro where a great many properties are owned by people who do not live in them, that distinction has to be stated rather than assumed.
Beyond those four sit the usual national residue — motor vehicle files, mail forwarding, employment data, licensed datasets. Those exist, they are used where the law and the purpose allow, and they work no differently in Yonkers than anywhere else in the country. The four above are the ones this particular corner of New York generates that a general checklist will miss.
Six ways a Lower Hudson search comes back clean and wrong
None of these is bad luck. Each follows directly from how these three counties are arranged.
The county searched, the village never
A name is run at the county clerk and comes back empty. The landlord-tenant petition naming the person’s apartment is in a village justice court, which Rockland’s clerk states is where all such disputes are handled.
“Rye” treated as one place
The county’s own clerk directory lists the City of Rye and the Town of Rye as separate governments with separate numbers, with the Village of Rye Brook alongside them. One town name can mean three custodians.
A clean judgment index read as a clean history
Only judgments somebody paid $10 to transcribe from a justice court reach the county index. An empty county result is a filtered list, not a complete one.
A marriage license hunted at the county
Rockland’s archive states plainly that marriage licenses are normally held by the towns and villages. A name-change trail can go cold at a county counter that was never going to have it.
An older Rockland file sought in New City
Court files older than roughly six years are at the Archives Building in Pomona, not at the courthouse. Same county, different town, and files cannot leave either premises.
One county searched because the map looked close
A White Plains address and a New City address look adjacent on a map. They answer to two separately elected county clerks with no shared index, and if the Rockland file is more than about six years old it sits in a third town again, at Pomona.
The order these files are worked in
Four steps, and the jurisdiction question is settled before a single index is opened.
Put the lawful reason on record
Service of process, enforcement of a judgment, an estate or heir question, a due-diligence check. It goes in writing before anything is searched, and a request whose stated reason does not fit the facts around it is declined.
Resolve the address to all three levels
Which of the three counties, then which town, then whether a village sits inside that town. A single street address in this metro routinely answers to three governments, and each of them files different things.
Work the county index and the municipal layer separately
Deeds, mortgages, liens and transcribed judgments at the county clerk. Marriage licenses, building department files and justice-court matters at the town or village. Neither half is a substitute for the other.
Get a second source to agree, then hand it over
No conclusion rests on one record. What arrives is the address, the specific office or licensed dataset behind each element, the date it entered that record, and a plain statement of anything still open.
What this work is, and the lines it stops at
Stated here in full rather than compressed into a footer, because none of the commercial pages competing for this search states it anywhere.
This is documentary research, not investigation. The practice reads public records and lawfully licensed data. . That is worth saying out loud on a Westchester page in particular, because at least one page competing for this exact search is written specifically to sell to private investigators. We would rather describe the work accurately, because the description is also the product: every element traceable to a named Lower Hudson office, an index number or a recorded instrument.
A lawful purpose comes first, in writing, every time. Nothing opens on a Westchester, Rockland or Putnam name until the reason for the search is documented and fits the surrounding circumstances. Curiosity is not a purpose. Neither is a reason that changes when it is questioned.
Deception is not a technique used here. . Beyond the ethics, an address extracted that way has no provenance, and provenance is the whole of the product: a Ninth District judge is entitled to ask which office produced the document and on what date, and there would be no honest answer to give.
A private financial account is a closed door here. This practice does not touch balances, transaction histories or account numbers, whoever the client is and whatever the purpose. The Lower Hudson record map makes the line easy to draw: a mortgage recorded with a county clerk, a mechanic’s lien in the Westchester judgment index, a judgment transcribed up from a village justice court — each of those was filed, indexed and made public, and we read them closely. The account sitting behind the instrument was never filed with anyone, and opening it is not ours to do.
This is not a consumer reporting agency and the file you receive has no such standing. Certain decisions belong by statute to a regulated consumer report, and not one of them may be made on the strength of this file: selecting a tenant for a unit, hiring an employee or promoting or dismissing one, extending credit or repricing it, underwriting or rating insurance, granting a professional license, and the further purposes set out under the Fair Credit Reporting Act at 15 U.S.C. § 1681b. That matters more than usual on a page about a metro whose landlord-tenant disputes are decided in village halls: locating a former tenant who left owing money is work we do; screening the next applicant is not, and we will send you to an agency with adverse-action procedures rather than blur the two to win a file.
The safety question, and why these particular records sharpen it
Requests that would put a person at risk are declined, and the record set described on this page is exactly why that has to be said here. Look at what New York has already decided to close. Westchester’s county clerk states that matrimonial records are sealed and available only to the parties or the attorneys of record. Rockland’s clerk states that the public may view any legal or court document other than mental hygiene, matrimonial and youthful offender files. Two separate counties, the same three exclusions. Those are the files in which somebody who left a dangerous household may have had to state, on paper, where they went — and the state has already answered whether the public gets to read them.
A page that has just spent several thousand words explaining how much residential detail sits in village justice courts and county land indexes owes the reader the other half of that. So here is the other half. Three things end a Lower Hudson file on the spot: indications of domestic violence, stalking or harassment anywhere in the request; a protective order sitting behind it; or a requester who cannot state a reason for needing one named person’s location that holds together when it is examined. When any of those appears the work stops, nothing at all is handed over, and nobody tells the person being looked for that an inquiry was made. Intake tightens on a request like that; it does not relax. A polished, sympathetic account of why the address is needed counts against the request rather than for it. Being hard to find is not evidence of wrongdoing, and nobody here reads it that way. People live where they live, and some have made careful, lawful arrangements to keep an address out of circulation. Where the underlying matter is custody, safety or protection, it belongs with counsel, with the court, or with law enforcement — not with a commercial locate.
Finally, nothing on this page is legal advice. It is general information about how three New York counties and the municipalities inside them arrange their records. It does not address your matter, it creates no professional relationship, and what you may lawfully do once an address is confirmed is a question for your own attorney.
The six requests this desk sees most from these three counties
Each one wants a different document at the end, which is why the intake question is what you need to prove, not who you are.
Counsel filing in the Ninth District
An address that will survive a challenge, with the county and the filing date behind it
Creditors holding a justice-court transcript
Where the debtor is now, and what has been recorded against them since
Servers working both banks
A corrected address plus which county, town and village actually govern it
Closings stalled on a missing signature
An absent grantor or unlocated party holding up a Lower Hudson transfer
Executors tracing a distributee
Heirs followed through deeds, naturalization files and archived rolls
People looking for their own relatives
Somebody located quietly, with the first approach left entirely to the person who asked
Property owners across all three counties send a recurring version of this work: a former occupant who moved out owing rent and left no forwarding address. That request touches a relationship the Fair Credit Reporting Act covers, so it arrives with the boundary set out above attached to it — the person who has already gone can be located, and nothing that comes back may be used to evaluate whoever applies next. Those are two different jobs and we keep them apart.
If we cannot name the office it came from, you do not pay for it
Every element in the report is labeled with the custodian standing behind it — a named county clerk, a town or village clerk, a justice court, or a lawfully licensed dataset — and with the date that office recorded it. Because Westchester, Rockland and Putnam are three separate searches rather than one, the first thing owed to you is scope rather than an answer: within 24 hours of a workable request you have the county that owns your filing, the town or village sitting underneath it, and a named list of whichever of the three counters still has to be opened before anything is called confirmed. Then, when the answer your matter needs turns out to be held by none of the three counties and by none of the municipalities inside them, you are told exactly that and the locate fee comes back, because an inference presented as a finding is worth less than nothing. Refunding is the cheaper mistake; a confident address four years out of date is the expensive one.
Westchester, Rockland and Putnam locate questions
Which office holds deeds and land records in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam?
Each county’s own county clerk, and there are three of them with no shared index. The Westchester County Clerk’s Land Records Division at 110 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in White Plains records every document pertaining to real property transactions in that county and states it holds deeds going back to 1680 and mortgages back to 1950. The Rockland County Clerk at 1 South Main Street in New City files mortgages, deeds, satisfactions and assignments. The Putnam County Clerk at 40 Gleneida Avenue in Carmel does the same for Putnam. A search run at one of the three has told you nothing whatsoever about the other two.
How do I find out who owns a property in Rockland County?
Through the Rockland County Clerk’s land records, which cover mortgages, deeds, satisfactions and assignments and can be searched and viewed online as well as at the search room in the county courthouse in New City. Copies are available in person, by mail with a stamped self-addressed envelope, or through the county’s online request system. Two cautions worth carrying in: ownership is not residence, which matters a great deal in a metro with substantial non-resident ownership, and the county clerk’s index is a record of instruments rather than a directory of people.
How do I look up a judgment or lien against someone in Westchester?
Through the Westchester County Clerk’s judgment and lien index, which covers monetary judgments, mechanic’s liens, broker’s liens and notices of pendency and can be searched at the White Plains office or through the county’s online records system. Two things the clerk states directly shape the search: the index is organized by name, so you must know and search by the debtor’s last name, and judgments are enforceable against real property for ten years and against personal property for twenty. The index also carries judgments transcribed in from other New York counties, foreign judgments and state tax warrants.
What is the difference between a town clerk and a village clerk in New York?
They are officers of two different governments that occupy the same ground. A New York village is incorporated inside a town, so one address sits under a village, a town and a county simultaneously. Article 57-A of the Arts and Cultural Affairs Law, the Local Government Records Law, requires each local government to designate one records management officer and then names them: in towns the town clerk, in villages the village clerk. That is why a Lower Hudson address can generate three separate bodies of record, and why identifying only the county leaves most of the work undone.
Why would a small claims or eviction case not show up at the county clerk?
Because it was never filed there. The Rockland County Clerk states that small claims actions under $3,000 and all landlord-tenant disputes are handled by towns and villages only. Those cases are heard in village and town justice courts. A judgment reaches the county only if the winning party takes the justice court’s transcript to the county clerk and pays to file it, which in Rockland costs $10, with a further $5 for an execution that is then delivered to the Sheriff’s Civil Division. So a clean county index is a filtered result, not a complete history.
Where are older Rockland County court files kept?
In a different town from the newer ones. The county clerk states that files commenced within roughly the last six years are at the Rockland County Clerk’s office in the courthouse at New City, and that files commenced more than about six years ago are held at the Rockland County Archives Building on Sanatorium Road in Pomona. Files are viewed on site at whichever location holds them and cannot be removed from either. The same archive also holds Supreme Court records from 1847, naturalization papers from 1812 to 1991, census record books from 1855 to 1925 and town assessment rolls into the 1960s.
Which counties does this page cover, and does it include New York City?
Westchester, Rockland and Putnam only. Those three are grouped with Dutchess and Orange in the Unified Court System’s Ninth Judicial District, styled Mid-Hudson, but their record custodians are entirely separate from one another. The five boroughs of New York City run on a different arrangement with different offices and a different route into property records, and they are covered on our New York City page rather than here. Long Island is separate again. Saying where this page stops is more useful than claiming a coverage area we would then have to qualify.
Are you private investigators, and are there requests you turn down?
No, and yes. This is public-records and licensed-data research.. . Because this is not a consumer report, the Fair Credit Reporting Act keeps it out of tenant screening, hiring, credit and insurance decisions. And we decline outright where a request shows signs of domestic violence, stalking or harassment, where a protective order sits in the background, or where no coherent lawful reason for needing a specific person’s location can be given. New York has already sealed matrimonial and mental hygiene files in these counties; requests circling that territory get more scrutiny at intake, not less, and the subject is never told who asked.
Tell us the address and the purpose — we will find which government holds it
Send a name, whatever address you last had reason to believe, and the lawful reason behind the request. If it runs into one of the boundaries described above, you hear that at no charge. Rather talk it through first? Reach the Lower Hudson desk here for a straight answer on whether these three counties’ records can carry your question at all.
Start a Westchester or Rockland locate
