Where Delaware Keeps the Records That Locate a Person
Almost every state records search begins by choosing a county. In Delaware that instinct sends you to the wrong place for most of what you want. The court that holds the debt claims, the evictions and, in the Judiciary’s own words, “the great majority of all criminal cases” is the Justice of the Peace Court – a single statewide court whose locations carry numbers rather than county names. Its civil ceiling is twenty-five thousand dollars, it takes every summary possession proceeding in the state, and a tenancy appeal from it never leaves the Justice of the Peace system at all. Alongside it sits CourtConnect, one free search covering three trial courts that will search judgments against a person or a business directly. Counties matter in Delaware for exactly one layer, and it is not the courts. Everything used here is a public record or licensed data, and the lawful reason is written down before a file opens. General information about Delaware records practice, not legal advice.
The Court With a Number Instead of a County
Delaware’s entry-level court is one statewide institution, and most of the state’s records pass through it.
The Justice of the Peace Court is authorised by Article IV, Section 1 of the Delaware Constitution, and the Judiciary describes its scale without hedging: it “is Delaware’s entry-level courts through which pass the great majority of all criminal cases.”
Its locations are identified by number, and the court’s own operational notices are where you see it: read on the fifth of August 2026, they name Court 3 (Georgetown), Court 6 (Harrington), Court 7 (Dover), Court 8 (Smyrna), Court 11 (New Castle) and Court 20, and state that “Justice of the Peace Court 11 (New Castle) and the Statewide Virtual Hearing Criminal Court operation will remain available 24 hours every day.” Those notices change – they are posted against a judicial-resource shortage and carry dates – so treat the numbering as the durable point and the hours as something to re-read. A request addressed to “the Kent County justice court” has not named an office; a request naming a numbered court has.
What it hears on the civil side
The civil jurisdiction is narrow in money and wide in subject:
- Contractual disputes where the amount in controversy does not exceed twenty-five thousand dollars.
- Replevin actions – brought to recover possession of personal property unlawfully taken – under the same ceiling.
- Negligence cases not involving physical injury, again under the same ceiling.
- All landlord and tenant summary possession proceedings in the State of Delaware, with jury trials authorised in those summary proceedings.
Read that last item carefully, because it is the one that changes a search. Delaware does not distribute eviction jurisdiction across county courts. Every summary possession case in the state begins in this one court system. For anybody working tenancy matters, the whole state is a single docket rather than three.
And the appeal route that doubles back
Appeals from the Justice of the Peace Court go de novo to the Court of Common Pleas in both civil and criminal cases – except landlord and tenant possession cases, which are appealed to a three-judge panel of Justices of the Peace. A tenancy dispute can therefore be filed, tried and appealed without ever leaving the Justice of the Peace Court. Somebody searching the Court of Common Pleas for the appellate history of a Delaware eviction will find nothing, and the nothing will be accurate and useless.
The criminal side is broader than the name suggests
The court hears misdemeanours listed at section 2702 of Title 11 and all criminal violations; most Title 21 motor vehicle offences that do not involve physical injury or death; violations of the County Code and of municipal ordinances; truancy cases; enumerated fish and wildlife and alcoholic beverage violations; miscellaneous violations initiated by other state agencies; and a limited juvenile jurisdiction. It issues summonses, arrest warrants and search warrants on probable cause, conducts initial appearances and bond reviews, and issues capiases – the bench warrant that follows a failure to appear or a failure to pay a court-ordered fine.
That capias jurisdiction is worth noting on a locating page. A capias is generated precisely when somebody has stopped turning up, which makes it one of the more reliable signals that an address on file has gone stale. Where the job is locating somebody nobody has heard from rather than reconstructing a case history, that signal is worth more than it looks: a capias dates the point at which the last address the court held stopped working, and a date attached to a failure is the one thing an ordinary address history almost never supplies.
One Search Across Three Trial Courts, and It Will Look for Judgments
Free, no account, and it will answer a question most name searches cannot be asked.
The counterpart to the court-not-county point is how Delaware lets you search. From the Judiciary’s civil docket search page:
“The Superior Court, Court of Common Pleas and Justice of the Peace Court now offer the ability to access civil case information online 24-hours a day through CourtConnect. CourtConnect allows access to civil dockets by: searching a person’s name, business name or case type; searching for judgments against a person or business; displaying case information or activities.”
Three separate trial courts behind one query, free, with no account. Notice how the search is organised: by court, and by person or business name. Not by county. The structure of the tool matches the structure of the judiciary, and both of them decline to make county the organising unit.
The judgment search is the part to use deliberately
A name search hands you a list of cases and leaves you to work out what the results mean. An explicit judgment search against a person or a business is a different instrument, and for enforcement work it is the one worth reaching for first. It answers whether anybody has already obtained a judgment, which tells you about competing creditors, about whether an address was ever successfully served, and about whether the subject has been findable recently by somebody else.
It has limits that ought to be stated with it. CourtConnect covers civil case information for those three courts, so it is not a criminal history and not a substitute for one. It is a docket index: the sequence of what was filed, not the filings themselves. Where the useful detail is inside a document – an address recited in a complaint, an affidavit of service, a garnishment answer naming an employer – that comes from the court, not from the index. And Chancery and Family Court are separate institutions with their own arrangements. Enforcement mechanics once somebody is located are covered in our note on collecting a Delaware judgment.
The Short Version
Delaware skip tracing runs on courts rather than on counties. The state has only three counties – New Castle, Kent and Sussex – and they are the right unit for exactly one thing, which is land recording. The court layer is statewide. The Justice of the Peace Court, authorised by Article IV Section 1 of the Delaware Constitution, is the entry-level court “through which pass the great majority of all criminal cases”, and its locations are identified by number, not by county. It hears contract, replevin and non-injury negligence claims up to twenty-five thousand dollars, and it holds every summary possession proceeding in the state – with tenancy appeals going to a three-judge panel of Justices of the Peace rather than out to the Court of Common Pleas. CourtConnect then puts the civil dockets of the Superior Court, the Court of Common Pleas and the Justice of the Peace Court behind one free search that can be queried by person or business name and, usefully, for judgments against a person or business. What it will not give you is the document behind the docket line, which comes from the court itself. On the boundary side Delaware is unusually forceful: its Address Confidentiality Act restricts not only how a protected address is obtained but how a lawfully obtained one may afterwards be used, with criminal exposure attached, and a written demand against internet publication that binds for three years even after certification ends. Our own limits: public records and licensed data only, a lawful reason recorded before the file opens, general information rather than legal advice.
Watch: Naming the Right Delaware Court
Why a county is the wrong unit for most of this state’s records.
Watch Overview
The One Layer Where Delaware’s Counties Do the Work
Three of them, the fewest in the country, and the land record is what they are for.
We counted rather than assumed. Filtering the Census Bureau’s 2020 national county file to Delaware returns exactly three entries – New Castle County, Kent County and Sussex County – and all three carry class code H1 on the Bureau’s class-code list, its marker for an ordinary functioning county. Nothing inactive, nothing folded into a municipal government. Three plain counties, which is the smallest number any state has.
Because the courts are statewide, those three counties matter for a narrower range of things than a researcher’s habits expect – but where they do matter, they matter completely. Land recording is county work, so a deed, a mortgage or a recorded lien is a three-office question and each office indexes only its own. An instrument recorded in Sussex is not in the New Castle index and the New Castle index will not say so.
What that split means when you are placing somebody
The practical effect is that a Delaware file usually splits cleanly in two. The court question – has this person been sued, evicted, charged, or had a judgment entered against them – is answered statewide in one pass, which is fast and cheap and rarely needs a county at all. The property question – do they own anything, has anything been recorded against them, when did the last instrument change hands – is answered county by county, and here the county is the whole game. That gives an asset search behind a Delaware judgment a fixed and unusually small shape: New Castle, Kent and Sussex, all three, every time. With only three recording offices in the state there is no cost argument for searching the one the last known address sat in and inferring the rest, and no honest way to describe a single-county result as an asset picture.
Geography compounds it in a way peculiar to a state this size. Delaware is roughly a hundred miles from top to bottom and narrow throughout, and the three counties are stacked north to south with sharply different economies: a dense, employment-heavy north around Wilmington, a state-government and agricultural middle around Dover, and a coastal south whose population swells seasonally and whose housing stock includes a great deal of short-term and second-home accommodation. A person who moves within Delaware often changes county, and in doing so changes recording office, without moving far enough to disturb an employer or a school.
The state lines press in from three directions at once. Pennsylvania sits directly above New Castle County, Maryland runs along the entire western boundary and around the southern end, and New Jersey is across the river. In a state this narrow, a genuinely short move very frequently crosses a state line, and we treat the neighbouring jurisdiction as part of the first pass rather than as a fallback after an empty result. Wilmington and its immediate metro have their own specialised problems, particularly around business addresses, and those are handled on our Wilmington skip tracing page. The general approach to placing somebody in this state sits on finding someone in Delaware.
Which Delaware Institution Holds Which Fact
Middle column is the custodian. Right column is the habit that sends the request somewhere else.
Most of the errors below come from importing a neighbouring state’s mental model. Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey all organise more of this by county than Delaware does.
| What you want | Which institution | Where the request goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| An eviction or summary possession case | Justice of the Peace Court, statewide All of Them | Looking for a county housing court. Every summary possession proceeding in Delaware is in this one system. |
| A tenancy appeal | A three-judge panel of Justices of the Peace | Searching the Court of Common Pleas, which takes every other appeal from this court but not this one. |
| A debt or contract claim under the ceiling | Justice of the Peace Court, by numbered location | Naming a county rather than a court number, which does not identify an office. |
| Whether a judgment exists against someone | CourtConnect, judgment search across three courts | Running a plain name search and reading the results by eye instead of using the judgment query. |
| The document behind a docket entry | The court that holds the file | Expecting an index to contain an address. The index says what was filed, not what it said. |
| Deeds, mortgages and recorded liens | The Recorder of Deeds for that county | Searching one county. Three offices, three indexes, and no cross-reference between them. |
| Criminal history | Not CourtConnect | CourtConnect is civil case information. Treating a clean civil search as a clean record is the standard error. |
| Chancery or Family Court matters | Those courts, separately | Assuming the three-court civil search reaches them. It does not. |
| The residence of an Address Confidentiality Program participant | Nobody, and the statute reaches further than that | Assuming that lawful acquisition settles the question. In Delaware the later use is regulated too. |
Six Delaware Searches That Miss Politely
Each returns a technically accurate answer to a question nobody meant to ask.
A County Court Sought for an Eviction
There is no such court here. Summary possession is one statewide system and the search never started.
A Tenancy Appeal Chased Upward
It went sideways instead, to a panel of Justices of the Peace, and left no trace where it was sought.
A Clean Civil Search Read as a Clean Record
CourtConnect indexes civil dockets. It was never a criminal history and does not claim to be.
One Recorder of Deeds Searched
Three counties, three indexes. The other two answer honestly about their own records only.
An Index Line Mistaken for the Filing
The address that would settle the file is inside the document, which the docket only points at.
A Delaware Line Treated as Distance
Three state borders sit within a short drive of most addresses here. Short moves leave the state routinely.
Two Refusals, One of Which Delaware Enforces With a Criminal Statute
This state regulates what happens to an address after it has been lawfully obtained, which makes the boundary unusually concrete.
Not a screening product, and the Justice of the Peace Court is why that comes up here
Because every summary possession case in Delaware sits in one court, property managers find that court easily and reasonably ask what else we can tell them. So the limit needs stating without softening. This firm is not a consumer reporting agency, and what leaves this desk is not a consumer report. An eviction docket read here is a locating input, never an eligibility opinion about the person named in it.
What that rules out is specific rather than vague. No output from this desk may be used to decide whether somebody gets a tenancy in Newark or Rehoboth, whether they are hired or promoted, whether credit is extended to them, or what an insurer will charge. Those decisions run through a regulated product with disclosure duties and a dispute route attached, and a locate report has neither and cannot acquire them by being used as though it did. The work we take from Delaware landlords and lenders is the work that arrives after a tenancy has ended or a balance has gone unpaid. If you are looking at an application rather than a loss, the right answer is a screening company and that is the answer you will get.
Lawfully obtained is not the end of the question in this state
It is tempting to treat “we got it legally” as the whole of the ethics. Delaware declines to, in statute. Section 9619(c) of the Address Confidentiality Act provides that a person who lawfully obtains a programme participant’s actual address, and who then discloses or uses that address in a manner the subchapter does not authorise, may face criminal penalties under sections 873, 876 and 932 of Title 11 – the same penalties subsection (b) attaches to obtaining the address by fraud or misrepresentation in the first place. The legislature deliberately regulated the downstream use, not merely the acquisition.
We take that as the governing principle for Delaware files generally rather than only for programme participants. An address we obtain lawfully is still not ours to publish, to resell, or to hand onward to somebody whose purpose we have not established. Nothing from a bank or brokerage account interior is obtained or reported; where a matter truly needs it, the route is a subpoena or court order your attorney seeks. The lawful reason for a Delaware search goes into the file at the moment it opens, and it is what any later question about the research gets answered from. What a creditor may actually reach once someone is found is general legal information and sits with Delaware wage garnishment limits.
How a Delaware File Is Run
Statewide first because it is cheap, county second because that is where it costs something.
Sweep the Courts Before the Counties
The three-court civil search covers the whole state in one pass, including a direct query for judgments. It is the cheapest broad signal Delaware offers and it runs first.
Name the Numbered Court, Not the County
Where a Justice of the Peace matter needs following up, the request identifies the numbered location holding it, because a county name does not identify an office in this system.
Open All Three Recording Offices
Property questions are asked of New Castle, Kent and Sussex together rather than of whichever one the last known address sat in, since no index reaches into another.
Pull the Paper That Carries the Address
A docket line proves a case existed. The complaint, the return of service or the garnishment answer is what carries a place, and that is requested from the court holding it.
The Address Confidentiality Act, and Why It Binds Us Twice
Delaware restricts how a protected address is obtained and, separately, what may be done with one already held.
Delaware’s Address Confidentiality Act sits at Title 11, Chapter 96, Subchapter II, and is administered by the Department of Justice, with the substitute address designated by the Attorney General. Certification runs for three years unless it is withdrawn, cancelled or otherwise terminated.
Eligibility, taken from section 9613 rather than summarised, covers five groups: a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, kidnapping or stalking who has filed for a protection from abuse order or has been named a victim in a criminal or delinquency proceeding and states a fear of future violent acts; a person holding a valid agreement with the Department of Justice; a member of the same household as a participant, with a parent or guardian applying for a minor and an attorney-in-fact for an incapacitated adult; a person who has obtained or is seeking relief from a domestic violence programme, certified by its director; and a reproductive health service provider or employee who fears for their safety because of providing those services.
Delaware pushes the substitute address out to live cases
Section 9612 does something worth stopping on. On certification, the Department of Justice “will provide notice of that fact and the program participant’s substitute address to the appropriate officials and parties involved in an ongoing civil or criminal case in which a program participant is a victim, witness, or party.” Delaware does not wait to be asked. It notifies the case.
The internet-publication demand, and its three-year tail
Section 9616A goes further still, and it is worth naming precisely because it is the section people misattribute. Subsection (a) makes it an offence to post, display, solicit, sell or trade a participant’s actual address, telephone number or image on the internet with intent to incite violence against them or to place them in objectively reasonable fear. Subsection (b) is the one that reaches ordinary publication: no person may post or display publicly on the internet the actual address or telephone number of a participant where that participant, or a parent or guardian of a minor participant, or a person holding power of attorney for an incapacitated adult participant, has served a written demand not to disclose it, supported by a sworn statement describing a reasonable fear for safety. And the demand remains effective for three years even if the participant’s certification is withdrawn or cancelled before that period ends. Protection outlives enrolment by design. (Section 9617, one section further on, is a different subject entirely – the waiver process by which a federal, state or local government agency may ask the Department of Justice to disclose an actual address.)
The sentence that governs how we work in this state
Then the provision that a records firm should read as directed squarely at itself: a person who lawfully obtains a participant’s actual address and subsequently discloses or uses it in a manner the subchapter does not authorise may be subject to criminal penalties under sections 873, 876 and 932 of Title 11.
Delaware has legislated the thing our whole industry tends to treat as settled by the acquisition. Lawful sourcing is not a licence for onward use. So requests that read as an attempt to reach a former partner, a person who has sought protection from abuse, or somebody whose relocation looks designed to put distance between themselves and whoever is asking are refused here outright. Not scoped down to a county. Not answered in part with a warning attached. Not referred to a firm that would take them. No framing changes that, and neither does the reason volunteered or the account given of the relationship.
If you are the person a search like this would be looking for
This is the wrong firm to be talking to, and saying so is more useful than anything we could sell you. The Address Confidentiality Program is run through the Delaware Department of Justice; a domestic violence programme or service can certify an application; and the court can issue or extend a protection from abuse order. We administer none of that, we are not competent to advise on personal safety, and nothing written on this page is instructions for keeping yourself out of reach.
Court-connected work still stands
A server or a marshal holding a Delaware case number, a named party and an attorney behind the request is completing something a court has already set in motion, and Delaware’s own statute contemplates it by routing notice of the substitute address into ongoing cases. Papers a court is waiting on and a private search for somebody’s home are not the same request, and this state has drawn that line in the legislation rather than leaving it to a firm’s discretion. Which one has arrived is settled in writing before a Delaware file is opened. Putting a located debtor in front of an enforcement officer is dealt with in our note on locating a judgment debtor.
Who Sends Us Delaware Work
Six recurring requests, and the Delaware institution each one turns on.
Attorneys Placing a Party
A statewide civil sweep before anybody pays for a county search
Creditors Reading Priority
A judgment query that shows who else already reached them
Servers With a Short Window
A current address before a return date arrives
Families Tracing an Estate
Recorded instruments across all three county offices
Lenders Holding a Shortfall
A debt that already exists, never a decision still to be made
Managers After a Move-Out
A summary possession file that sits in one statewide court
What a Delaware Report Commits To
Each finding names the institution behind it and says whether that institution is a statewide court or one of three county recording offices, because in Delaware those two answers carry very different weight. Anything taken from a civil docket index is labelled as an index entry rather than as a document, and where the address came out of a filed paper the report says which paper and what date it bears. Recording offices that were not searched are listed as not searched. A civil search that returned nothing is never written up as a clean record, since it was never a criminal one. Public records and lawfully licensed data are the only inputs, and no Delaware file opens until its lawful reason has been put in writing. That has been the practice at this firm since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Delaware court handles evictions?
The Justice of the Peace Court, and it handles all of them. Its stated jurisdiction covers all landlord and tenant summary possession proceedings in the State of Delaware, with jury trials authorised in those summary proceedings. There is no county housing court to look for. The appeal route is also unusual: while appeals from this court normally go de novo to the Court of Common Pleas in civil and criminal cases, landlord and tenant possession cases are instead appealed to a three-judge panel of Justices of the Peace, so a tenancy dispute can run its whole course without leaving the Justice of the Peace system.
Can I search Delaware court records for free?
Yes, for civil matters in three of the trial courts. The Judiciary states that the Superior Court, Court of Common Pleas and Justice of the Peace Court offer access to civil case information around the clock through CourtConnect, which allows searching by a person’s name, a business name or case type, searching for judgments against a person or business, and displaying case information and activities. It is a civil docket index, so it is not a criminal history and it does not deliver the filed documents themselves. Chancery and Family Court are separate institutions with their own arrangements.
How many counties does Delaware have, and do they matter for a search?
Three, which is fewer than any other state. Filtering the Census Bureau’s 2020 national county file to Delaware returns New Castle, Kent and Sussex, all three carrying class code H1, defined as an active county or equivalent feature. They matter enormously for one layer and hardly at all for another. Land recording is county work, so deeds, mortgages and recorded liens are a three-office problem with no index reaching into another. The trial courts, by contrast, are statewide, and the entry-level court identifies its locations by number rather than by county name.
What is the money limit in the Delaware Justice of the Peace Court?
Twenty-five thousand dollars, applied to several kinds of civil case. The court’s stated civil jurisdiction covers contractual disputes, replevin actions brought to recover possession of personal property unlawfully taken, and negligence cases not involving physical injury, in each case where the amount in controversy does not exceed that figure. Landlord and tenant summary possession is handled separately and is not capped in the same way. On the criminal side the same court hears the misdemeanours listed at section 2702 of Title 11, most motor vehicle offences without injury or death, county code and municipal ordinance violations, and truancy.
Why does a Delaware court case have a number instead of a county?
Because the Justice of the Peace Court is a single statewide court whose locations are numbered. The court’s own operational notices name Court 3 in Georgetown, Court 6 in Harrington, Court 7 in Dover, Court 8 in Smyrna, Court 11 in New Castle and Court 20, and record that Court 11 and the Statewide Virtual Hearing Criminal Court operation stay available 24 hours every day. The consequence for a records request is practical rather than cosmetic: naming a county does not identify an office in this system, so a follow-up request has to name the numbered location that actually holds the file if it is to reach the right clerk.
Does a clean CourtConnect search mean someone has no record?
No, and this is the most common misreading of the tool. CourtConnect covers civil case information for the Superior Court, the Court of Common Pleas and the Justice of the Peace Court. It is not a criminal record search and does not present itself as one, notwithstanding that the Justice of the Peace Court also carries an enormous criminal caseload. It is also an index of dockets rather than a document repository, so an entry confirms that something was filed without telling you what the filing said. Chancery and Family Court matters sit outside it entirely.
What should I know about how you work in Delaware?
There is no surveillance here, no doorstep enquiry, no cover story, and no approach to a Delaware court or Recorder of Deeds that any member of the public could not make in exactly the same way.
Can you locate someone in Delaware’s Address Confidentiality Program?
Delaware also regulates what happens afterwards: a person who lawfully obtains a participant’s actual address and then discloses or uses it in a manner the subchapter does not authorise may face criminal penalties under sections 873, 876 and 932 of Title 11. We do not work around any part of it. We do not follow anyone.
Open a Delaware File
Send the name, whatever address history you have even if it is only a town, and what the research is meant to achieve. The statewide civil sweep across three courts runs first because it is fast and covers the whole state, including a direct check for judgments already entered; where a Justice of the Peace matter needs chasing, the request names the numbered court that holds it rather than a county; property questions go to New Castle, Kent and Sussex together; and the report distinguishes an index entry from a document that actually recites an address. Where enough detail arrives to act on, you will normally have a first read back within 24 hours. Would you rather sound the question out before committing anything to a file? Get in touch and you will hear plainly whether Delaware’s records are likely to answer it.
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