Mobile, Alabama Skip Tracing and People Search
The person who keeps the deeds in this county is a judge. Not a recorder, not a register, not a clerk of court: an elected Judge of Probate who admits wills in the morning and stamps mortgages in the afternoon, out of the same building. That merger has consequences a search has to plan for, and the consequences here are unusually easy to check, because the Mobile County Probate Court publishes exactly how far back each of its indexes reaches and exactly how far back the scanned images do not. Those two dates are decades apart on some record series, and the difference between them is the difference between a name on a screen and a document you can actually read. This page sets out what that office holds, what its public search shows and hides, where the Mobile metro genuinely ends, and why three of this county’s five neighbors are in another state. We research public records for a purpose the law allows. None of this is legal advice..
Mobile County in One Paragraph
Mobile skip tracing runs through an office most of the country does not have. Deeds, mortgages, liens, plats and marriage licenses in this county are held by the Judge of Probate, an elected judicial officer who is also the county’s chief election official and who appoints its notaries. State court files are somewhere else entirely, with the Circuit Clerk of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit at Government Plaza on Government Street. Valuation and the tax mailing address belong to a third office again, the Mobile County Revenue Commission. The probate court’s public search reaches real property back to 1813, but the scanned images only begin in September 1995, judicial case images in 1995, will images in 1997 and marriage images in September 2019 – so a two-century index sits on top of a thirty-year picture library. Estate claims filed on the recording side stop appearing there after July 1, 2013. The metro is one county, and that county touches three Mississippi counties and only two Alabama ones. We work all of it under a purpose the law permits. General public-records information, not legal advice.
A short briefing on the judge who keeps the deeds
One office, two search systems, and a coastline.
Play the Mobile briefing
A judge keeps the deeds, and that is not a filing quirk
What happens when a court and a recording office are the same office.
Alabama does not appoint a recorder of deeds and does not elect a register. The county’s Judge of Probate does that work, and the Mobile County Probate Court states the arrangement in its own words: the Judge of Probate is the custodian of Mobile County’s public records, including deeds and real estate mortgages, and is at the same time the county’s Chief Election Officer and the officer who appoints its notaries public. The same page lists the judicial docket that office carries: adoptions and contests to adoptions, involuntary commitment of the mentally ill, condemnation of privately owned land for public use, guardianships and conservatorships for minors and for incapacitated adults, the administration of decedents’ estates whether or not there was a will, and trust administration. One elected officer, one building, four unrelated bodies of work. If you have only ever searched in states that separate those functions, the first thing to unlearn in Mobile is the assumption that the courthouse and the recorder are different destinations.
The statewide version of this – how Alabama came to put land records under a judge, and which code sections drive it – is set out in our Birmingham records map and does not need repeating here. What matters on a Mobile file is narrower and more useful: because one office holds both the estate and the conveyance, a death and a transfer of the family house leave their traces in the same index. An estate opened for a decedent who owned property in Theodore or Semmes will, in the ordinary course, be followed months later by a deed out of that estate presented to the very same office. Those two documents name overlapping sets of people, and the second one frequently names them with a current mailing address on it. In a state that scattered probate and recording across two custodians, connecting them is a project. Here it is a walk down a corridor.
There is a second Mobile-specific wrinkle that changes who is sitting on that bench. The court’s own history of the office explains that as the county’s business grew, the Probate Court was given authority to hear matters that had been going to circuit judges, and it became necessary that the person holding the office be learned in the law. It then names the exception rather than the rule. On that page the court lists Baldwin, Bibb, Houston, Jefferson, Marengo, Mobile, Montgomery, Pickens, Shelby and Walker as the counties in Alabama where the Judge of Probate is required to be licensed to practice law, Mobile among them, and says that elsewhere in the state a probate judge need not be an attorney at all. That is the court’s own statement of the position and we report it as such: we have not traced each of those counties back to the provision that imposes the requirement on it, so treat the roster as the custodian’s account rather than as a list we have verified in the code, and confirm the position for any other county before you rely on it. What is not in doubt is the part that matters for correspondence with this office: the person signing an order on a contested estate in Mobile is a lawyer, and the pleadings are read as pleadings.
The history page is also candid about how old and how political the office is. It lists every holder back to Josiah Blakeley in 1813, and it flags the one entry that stops a reader: Raphael Semmes, the former Confederate naval officer whose name is attached to Mobile more than to anywhere else, was elected Judge of Probate in 1867 and federal authorities would not permit him to take the office. Two names later the list settles into long tenures – Price Williams, Jr. served from 1874 to 1914, and a second Price Williams from 1915 to 1937. Don Davis held the office from 2001 to 2025, and C. Mark Erwin has held it since 2025. Continuity of that order is why the register is coherent across two centuries rather than fractured into a dozen incompatible systems.
The index reaches 1813. The pictures start in 1995.
Every record series in this office has two different start dates.
This is the single most practical fact on the page, and no aggregator that ranks for Mobile County records mentions it. The Probate Court’s online search, branded Landmark WEB, describes its own coverage precisely: real property records from 1813 to the present, estate claims filed in Recording through July 1, 2013, marriage records indexed from 1813 to the present but viewable only from September 2019 to the present, and election records. More than five million documents sit behind it. Registering and searching the land records index is free; viewing or buying an image costs ten cents per page, and a purchased image stays available for download and printing for ten days. High-volume users can take out a monthly subscription with the court instead, priced in monthly increments and purchasable up to two years in advance.
Read that carefully and a shape appears. An index entry and an image are two different things, and in Mobile County they are separated by decades. The Records Division’s own inventory of what is available on computer makes the separation explicit series by series: real property indexes run from 1984 to the present, while real property document images begin in September 1995. Judicial record indexes run from 1965, judicial case images from 1995. Will images begin in 1997. Active Uniform Commercial Code images go back to 1972. Deed Books cover 1813 to 1958 and Mortgage Books 1851 to 1958, while the Real Property Books series runs from 1958 to the present. Map Books run from 1872 to the present, Minute Books from 1814 to 1984, Administrative Account Books from 1814 to 1946.
Four consequences follow, and they are the reason a Mobile search either works or quietly does not.
What the split actually costs you
First, a hit is not a document. A name can return in an index that goes back two centuries while the instrument behind it exists only as paper or microfilm in the Records Division. If your researcher reports a match and cannot tell you what the document says, you have an index entry, not evidence, and the two are worth very different amounts in a filing.
Second, the pre-1958 split matters on inherited land. Before 1958 a deed and a mortgage against the same parcel sat in two separate book series. Long-held family property on the western side of the county, or down toward Bayou La Batre and Grand Bay, frequently has its last meaningful recording well before that date, so a search that opens only the modern Real Property series returns a blank on a parcel that has a perfectly good chain behind it.
Third, marriage is a trap in Mobile specifically. The index runs from 1813, so a marriage will be found. The image does not exist online before September 2019, so the details on it – the parties, the officiant, the addresses given – have to be obtained from the office rather than read on a screen. A vendor who reports “marriage record located, 1998” and stops there has told you almost nothing.
Fourth, ten cents a page is not a pricing note, it is a discipline. When images are cheap, the temptation is to buy everything with a matching surname and sort it out later. The ten-day download window punishes that: an image bought and not read inside ten days has to be bought again. We pull what the file needs, we read it the day we pull it, and the report says which instrument book and page it came from. That same instrument-level discipline is what drives our work tracing the owner behind a specific address rather than reporting whatever a data broker has cached.
One office, two search systems
And a date in 2013 where a whole record type moves between them.
Because the Probate Court is a court and a recording office at once, it runs two entirely separate public search systems, and confusing them is the commonest way a Mobile search comes back empty. Landmark WEB is the land side: real property, marriage, election records. The judicial side of the court publishes its dockets, calendars and party and attorney searches through a different portal, Benchmark WEB, alongside its filing-fee schedules and its material on adoption, involuntary commitment, conservatorships, estate administration, guardianships, legitimation and name changes. A search of one is not a search of the other. Ask an aggregator for “Mobile County probate records” and you will get a link to whichever of the two it happened to index.
The seam between them has a date on it. Landmark WEB carries estate claims filed in Recording through July 1, 2013. A claim against an estate is a filed, docketed, fee-bearing document – the Probate Court’s fee schedule prices filing and docketing each claim at $4.50 – and it is one of the better address sources in probate work, because the claimant has to identify itself to be paid. If your search of the land system returns no claims for an estate opened in 2018, that is not evidence there were none. It is evidence you searched the system that stopped carrying them five years earlier.
Name changes sit here too
The judicial list carries an item that matters more to locating work than to anything else on it: name changes. An adult name change in this county is a probate matter, filed in the same office that holds the deed to the house. That is why a Mobile file that has gone cold on a surname is not necessarily a dead file. It is why we check the judicial index rather than assuming a person vanished, and it is one of the few places where a court record explains an apparent disappearance completely and innocently.
Legitimation is on the same list, and so is condemnation of privately owned land for public use. Eminent domain proceedings are worth naming in a port county: a taking for a road, a rail spur or a terminal expansion produces a court file that names the owner, the parcel and, usually, where the compensation was sent. That is a dated address generated by the government rather than volunteered by the subject, which is exactly the kind that survives.
None of these are exotic. They are ordinary county filings that a national database has no reason to hold, which is why working the judicial index of this office directly outperforms a name search by a wide margin here.
What a recording fee schedule gives away
The most informative document the office publishes is a price list.
Fee schedules are written for closing attorneys, so nobody researching a person ever reads one. That is a mistake, because the Mobile County schedule quietly confirms three things about the index that no marketing page will tell you.
The first is the names-on-instrument fee. Under the schedule’s citation to Ala. Code § 12-19-90(b)(24), where an instrument conveying an interest in property recites more than two grantors or grantees, mortgagors or mortgagees, lessors or lessees, transferors or transferees, assignors or assignees, buyers or sellers, an additional dollar is charged for indexing each name beyond two in the direct index and each name beyond two in the reverse index. Two things fall out of that single line. The office maintains a reverse index as well as a direct one, which is what makes a search by a person’s name possible at all rather than only a search by parcel. And every additional party on a multi-party instrument is separately indexed and separately paid for – so a deed out of an estate with six heirs on it puts six searchable names into the register, not one. For heir work that is close to ideal, and it is the mechanical reason locating beneficiaries for a probate or estate practice is more tractable in this county than in most.
The second is a local tax that exists nowhere else. Alongside the statewide charges – $2.50 per page under § 12-19-90(b)(22), a $1.00 recordation stamp, a $2.00 special recording fee, deed tax at fifty cents per $500 of the interest conveyed under § 40-22-1(c) and mortgage tax at fifteen cents per $100 under § 40-22-2 – the schedule adds a $10.00 Mobile County Special Tax on every taxable document, citing local Act 87-616. It is a small sum and a large signal: this county’s recording regime was set by a local act aimed at this county, and a national tool that models Alabama as one uniform jurisdiction is already wrong about the cost, and probably about more than the cost.
The third is what the schedule bothers to price separately, because that is a map of what actually gets recorded here. Oil, gas and mineral leases have their own line at $7.50 per page, with mineral tax charged per acre on a sliding scale under § 40-20-32 depending on whether the lease runs ten years, twenty, or longer, and mineral conveyances are priced per acre as well. That is a Gulf Coast county’s fee schedule, not a suburb’s. There is a line for recording a certificate of judgment at $5.50, which is how a money judgment reaches Mobile County land in the first place; a line for plats and maps at fifty cents per lot, capped at $200 for one map; a $5.00 line for recording a living will; a $5.00 business entity filing fee; and a line for celebrating the rites of matrimony at $7.50, because the judge who keeps the deeds can also perform the wedding.
Recording itself has moved with the times without losing the paper trail. The court’s recording office sits on the first floor of the Mobile County Government Center Annex at 151 Government Street, next to Government Plaza, with the windows open from eight to five on weekdays; electronic recording through approved vendors began on March 5, 2014. For an asset question that turns on what is recorded against a person’s land rather than on where they sleep, that register is the starting point, and it feeds directly into judgment enforcement work in Alabama.
A one-county metro with three Mississippi neighbors
Where Mobile actually ends, and what sits on the other side.
The federal metropolitan definition of Mobile is a single county. Not two, not seven: Mobile County and nothing else. That makes the county line the operative boundary of every search here, and the Census Bureau’s county adjacency file shows what is on the far side of it. Mobile County adjoins five counties. Two are in Alabama: Baldwin County across the bay and Washington County to the north. Three are in Mississippi: George County, Greene County and Jackson County. A county whose neighbors are mostly in another state is not a normal search problem, and the ordinary assumption – that a subject who moved locally is still inside the same records regime – is wrong more often here than almost anywhere.
What changes across that western line is the custodian itself. Mississippi has no probate judge holding the county register, and its judiciary lists a Chancery Court among its trial courts where Alabama has none – so the office that answers a land question, the court that hears an estate, and the words you have to use to ask are all different the moment the line is crossed. A person who moves twenty minutes west from Grand Bay into Jackson County has not merely changed county; every index you had open stops answering, and we confirm the current custodian with that county directly rather than assuming the Alabama arrangement travels. Greene County is the one people forget entirely, because it is rural and does not appear on anybody’s mental map of the metro, and it is the reason we check the adjacency list rather than the skyline.
Baldwin County is next door and is not this metro
The other correction worth making early is eastward. Baldwin County – Daphne, Fairhope, Foley, the Eastern Shore, the beaches – is directly adjacent, is where an enormous share of Mobile’s outward residential movement goes, and is not part of the Mobile metropolitan statistical area, which is Mobile County and nothing more. That matters because a great deal of published “Mobile area” data silently includes or excludes it, and because a Baldwin County deed is recorded with the Baldwin County Judge of Probate, a different elected officer with a different index and a different counter. Baldwin also appears on the probate court’s list of counties whose Judge of Probate must be a licensed attorney. A search that treats the two counties as one metro will produce a confident answer from the wrong register.
The court file is a different building again
State court records for this county are not in the probate office at all. The Thirteenth Judicial Circuit is Mobile County’s state courts, its Circuit Clerk is Ashleigh Long, and the office sits at Government Plaza, 205 Government Street, Suite 913. Alabama’s judiciary also publishes case information for circuit and district courts on demand without a subscription, under the name Just One Look – which is a materially better public-access position than several neighboring states offer, and it is worth knowing before anybody sells you a proprietary Alabama court sweep. Assessment, appraisal and the address a tax notice is actually mailed to belong to neither of those offices; they belong to the Mobile County Revenue Commission, which handles appraisal, assessment and property tax. Three offices, three indexes, one person.
The archive in the attic
One last Mobile peculiarity, and it is not a curiosity for genealogists alone. The Probate Court created an Archives Section in 1989, after the court’s colonial and historic records were found in the attic of the Mobile County Courthouse, French and Spanish colonial material among them. The court has been the custodian of this county’s records since 1812 and describes its records library as the largest among Alabama probate courts, which it attributes to the age and population of the county. The archive holdings read like the history of a port: Translated Record Books covering 1715 to 1841, original Spanish and French records, a census of Mon Louis Island from 1814, ferry records, a boat book from the 1890s, surveys of the Washington and Mobile county line, a map collection of United States Army Corps of Engineers surveys from 1771 to 1883, and repair records for Fort Gaines and Fort Morgan at the mouth of the bay. Naturalization record books are held as an index only, for 1833 to 1871. For a modern locate this rarely decides a file, but for heir property – land held in common by descendants for generations, which is a live issue on the Alabama coast – it is sometimes the only place the chain is written down.
Which Mobile office holds which record
Three custodians in one county, plus what happens over each line.
| What you need | Mobile County, Alabama | Over the Mississippi line | Baldwin County, Alabama |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deeds, mortgages, liens, plats | Judge of Probate, Recording Index from 1813 | Chancery Clerk of the county | Baldwin County Judge of Probate |
| Estates, guardianships, name changes | Probate Court, judicial side | Chancery Court | Baldwin County Probate Court |
| Circuit and district court files | Circuit Clerk, Thirteenth Judicial Circuit | Mississippi circuit and county courts | Its own circuit clerk |
| Valuation and tax mailing address | Mobile County Revenue Commission | County tax assessor | Its own assessing official |
| Scanned images online | Property from September 1995, judicial from 1995, wills from 1997, marriage from September 2019. | Varies by county. | |
| Metropolitan area membership | Mobile County alone. Baldwin sits outside it, and the Mississippi counties are outside it again. | ||
Read down the first column and the reason a one-database search fails becomes obvious: a single Mobile County resident generates paper in at least three unrelated custodians, and any move of twenty minutes in most directions adds a fourth in another jurisdiction. Driver and vehicle records are a separate track again, held at state level and released only inside the narrow list of purposes that federal driver-privacy law permits, which is why they are not a routine step in a locate and never a first one. Pulling those threads into one sourced answer is the whole of our skip tracing work, and in a county assembled like this one the assembly is most of the job.
Six Mobile searches that ask a record for something it never held
Each of these has cost somebody a month.
Asking for the Recorder
Time spent looking for an office Alabama does not have, while the deed sits with a judge.
Index Hit Reported as Evidence
A name matched in an 1813-forward index while the image does not exist before 1995.
One Portal, Half an Office
The land system searched, the judicial system never opened, or the reverse.
Baldwin Counted as Mobile
An Eastern Shore address searched against a register that has never held it.
The Line West Ignored
A subject in George, Greene or Jackson County, Mississippi, searched under Alabama rules.
A Blank Read as an Answer
No estate claims found, in the system that stopped carrying them in July 2013.
How a Mobile County file is worked
Custodian first, coverage dates second, the lines third, limits in writing.
Settle the Purpose
What the search is for, and whether the law permits it, before any index is opened.
Pick the Right Custodian
Probate for land and estates, circuit clerk for court files, revenue for the tax address.
Check the Coverage Date
Every series has an index start and an image start, and we work to the earlier one.
Test the Lines
Baldwin, Washington, and the three Mississippi counties, each on its own terms.
The limits we work inside, set out before you hire us
Some of these will lose us the work. They are still the limits.
This is a public-records research practice and nothing more decorative than that. The people doing the work read indexes, pull recorded instruments and use lawfully licensed data. They hold no investigator’s license in Alabama, and they will correct a client who assumes otherwise rather than let the assumption stand.. Several results competing for this query lead with a licensed investigator’s badge, which advertises a differently regulated trade to a differently situated buyer; what stands in place of a badge here is knowing that a Mobile County deed is with a judge, that the images start in 1995, and that the claim you are looking for left the land system in 2013. Nobody here conducts surveillance. . The contents of private financial accounts are outside what we touch; an instruction to go after them ends an engagement rather than opening one. And every file starts with a purpose the law permits, established at intake and fixed as the boundary of the work afterwards.
Two boundaries need saying flatly rather than in a footnote. We are not a consumer reporting agency and what we produce is not a consumer report. It may not be used, in whole or in part, as a factor in any decision the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs – the federal provision on permissible purposes of consumer reports sets out what those decisions are, and they include tenant screening and rental applications, employment, hiring, promotion and retention, credit eligibility and credit terms, insurance underwriting and professional licensing. If that is your purpose, the correct route is a properly regulated screening provider running a compliant, disclosed process, and we will say so instead of taking the money. A Mobile landlord or employer who has genuinely lost a person and needs them located is a normal client; what we will not do is hand over a file to be used as a screening decision with the label filed off.
Safety, and why this page argues against itself
Everything above is an argument that a person in Mobile County is unusually findable: two centuries of name-indexed land records, a reverse index the fee schedule proves exists, estates that name heirs, marriage records from 1813, court files a mile from the water. That argument cuts both ways, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Someone who is hard to find in this county is frequently hard to find on purpose, and the same index that lets a creditor reach a debtor lets somebody reach a person who moved specifically to get away from them. People live where they live; the question is never whether they are hiding, it is whether the person asking is entitled to know.
So a request that reads as an attempt to close a distance the other person chose to create is declined here, and it gets more scrutiny at intake than an ordinary file, not less. The indicators are consistent and they are treated as disqualifying rather than as objections to be talked around: a stated purpose that falls apart under one follow-up question; no legal process of any kind behind the request; urgency attached to the street address itself rather than to the underlying matter; a protective order, a domestic violence history or a no-contact condition anywhere in the background; or an unwillingness to say plainly who the client is. When that is the shape of a request the answer is no, the reason is given, and the file is not quietly handed on to somebody else. If you are the person being looked for and you believe records in Mobile County are exposing you, the offices named on this page and a local victim-services advocate are the right first calls, and Alabama’s rules on shielding an address are a question for a lawyer rather than for us.
The rest of the edges are ordinary. Where the matter is a judgment, we can locate a person and identify what is recorded against their Mobile County land; the enforcement instruments are your lawyer’s to file, and whether a judgment reaches anything across the Mississippi line is a legal question we do not answer. Where the matter is service, our product is a verified address an authorized server can act on – we do not serve papers, and whether service was properly effected is for the court and your counsel. We do not report on anyone’s immigration status. Everything on this page is general information about public records and is not legal advice.
Who opens a file in this county
People who have the name already and need to know which counter holds the rest.
Probate Practices
Heirs named on a deed out of an estate file
Creditors With a Certificate
A judgment recorded against county land
Authorized Servers
An address confirmed before the first attempt
Heir Property Owners
Coastal land held in common for generations
Title and Closing Desks
A missing party on a pre-1958 chain
Relatives Across the Line
Kin scattered west into Mississippi
What unites them is not the kind of matter but the stage they are at. The name is settled, one or two old addresses are half-trusted, and the missing piece is routing: which of Mobile County’s three custodians would hold the answer, whether the record predates the scanning, and whether the trail has already crossed a state line. Send the name, whatever address history the file still contains, whatever identifying detail you already hold, and the purpose the search serves. Workable requests usually get a first read back within 24 hours. Anything that has to go through the Records Division for a pre-1995 image, or through a Mississippi chancery clerk, runs longer – and it runs longer precisely because those records are being worked rather than assumed. Our wider Alabama locating coverage sets out how the rest of the state is organized.
Named custodian, named index, named limit
Each finding comes back attached to the office that produced it and the index it came out of, with the coverage dates of that index written beside it. Where a record exists as an entry but not yet as an image, we say so rather than letting a hit stand in for a document. Where a search has run out of jurisdiction, that is stated in plain words instead of arriving as a suspiciously thin report. Locating and verifying is what we own; the legal steps afterwards belong to you and your counsel. .
Mobile County records: the questions we get
Which Mobile County office holds deeds and mortgages?
The Judge of Probate. Alabama has no recorder of deeds, and the Mobile County Probate Court states on its own site that the Judge of Probate is the custodian of the county’s public records, including deeds and real estate mortgages. The same elected officer runs the county’s elections, appoints its notaries, and hears estates, guardianships, conservatorships, adoptions, involuntary commitments and eminent domain matters. Recording happens at the Mobile County Government Center Annex, 151 Government Street, on the first floor.
Can I search Mobile County property records online, and what does it cost?
Yes, through the Probate Court’s Landmark WEB system. Registering and searching the land records index is free. Viewing or buying an image costs ten cents per page, and a purchased image is available for download and printing for ten days after purchase. Frequent users can take out a monthly subscription with the court instead, bought in monthly increments up to two years in advance. The system holds more than five million documents and covers real property from 1813 to the present.
How far back do Mobile County records actually go online?
Further as an index than as an image, which is the trap. Real property records are indexed from 1813, but real property document images start in September 1995. Judicial record indexes begin in 1965 and judicial case images in 1995. Will images begin in 1997. Marriage records are indexed from 1813 but only viewable from September 2019. Deed Books cover 1813 to 1958, Mortgage Books 1851 to 1958, and the Real Property Books series runs from 1958 to the present. An older document usually has to be obtained from the Records Division rather than read on a screen.
Where are Mobile County court records, and who is the circuit clerk?
With the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, which is Mobile County’s state courts. The Circuit Clerk is Ashleigh Long, at Government Plaza, 205 Government Street, Suite 913. That is a different office and a different building from the Probate Court’s recording windows. Alabama’s judiciary also publishes circuit and district court case information on demand without a subscription, under the name Just One Look, so an Alabama court check does not require buying access to a proprietary aggregator.
What is the difference between the Probate Court and the Revenue Commission here?
The Probate Court holds the instruments – what was conveyed, by whom, to whom and when. The Mobile County Revenue Commission handles appraisal, assessment and property tax, which is where the valuation and, more usefully for a locate, the mailing address a tax notice actually goes to are held. Those two records disagree more often than people expect, and the disagreement is frequently where a current address is hiding. We read both and report which office said what.
Does the Mobile metro include Baldwin County and the Eastern Shore?
No. The Mobile metropolitan statistical area is Mobile County alone. Baldwin County – Daphne, Fairhope, Foley and the beaches – is adjacent, is a common destination for people leaving Mobile, and sits outside that metropolitan area with its own Judge of Probate holding its own land records. Mobile County’s other neighbors are Washington County, Alabama, and three Mississippi counties: George, Greene and Jackson. We search across those lines when the trail leans that way, on each jurisdiction’s own terms.
Why did a search of the probate system show no claim against an estate?
Possibly because you searched the wrong half of the office. The Probate Court runs two separate public systems: Landmark WEB for land, marriage and election records, and Benchmark WEB for judicial cases, dockets and party searches. Landmark WEB carries estate claims filed in Recording only through July 1, 2013. A blank result for a later estate is evidence about the system searched, not about whether claims exist. We record which index was checked, and what it covers, so a negative can be read properly.
How do you operate in Alabama, and under what rules?
What comes back is not a background check and not a consumer report: this firm is not a consumer reporting agency, so a result cannot lawfully be used for tenant screening, an employment or promotion decision, credit, insurance underwriting or professional licensing. Those purposes need a regulated screening provider. There is no surveillance in any of it, and we say no to requests that would need it.
One county, three custodians, and a date on every index
Send the name, the last address anyone trusted, and the reason the search is being made. The subject gets placed against the right custodian first, the coverage dates of that custodian’s index get checked second, the Baldwin and Mississippi lines get tested wherever the trail leans, and what comes back to you carries the office, the index and the limit in writing. Contact us to open a Mobile County file.
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