Finding Someone in Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands or American Samoa
A national people-search that returns nothing on a person living in these three places has told you almost nothing, because the recurring federal survey that mainland tooling is built on is not run there at all. These are U.S. jurisdictions, served by domestic post, with U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals living in them and courts that keep real files. They are simply not wired into the mainland pipeline, and the three of them are not wired the same way as each other. This page sets out what is actually different, territory by territory, with the statute or the agency behind every claim.
The One-Paragraph Orientation
Do not read a national database miss as evidence that a person is not there. The Census Bureau states plainly that the American Community Survey is not conducted in the Island Areas, and its published-areas list for that survey covers the states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico only. Go instead to the territory’s own institutions, and pick the right one, because the three differ. Guam has a District Court established by Congress and its own Supreme and Superior Courts. The U.S. Virgin Islands has a District Court plus a Supreme Court and a Superior Court created under local law, and its land records sit in two districts, not counties. American Samoa has no federal district court at all, its people are U.S. nationals rather than citizens by birth, and Congress has never passed an organic act for it. Post reaches all three as domestic mail. Written requests, sent early, still do most of the work out here.
Watch: Why the Island Areas Sit Outside the Pipeline
A short walk-through of the one structural fact that reframes this whole search.
Runs about eighty seconds
Why the National Search Came Back Empty
The cause sits a long way upstream of any consumer website. It is in which federal instruments are run where.
Begin with the sentence that reframes the whole exercise. Announcing the detailed results of the 2020 Island Areas Censuses, the Census Bureau explained why it had to use a long-form questionnaire in the first place: “Other surveys, such as the American Community Survey (ACS), are not conducted in the Island Areas.” The Bureau said so in its own release for the 2020 count of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and used identical wording for Guam. The comparison it drew is the telling part: the long form was modeled on the ACS questionnaire “used in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.”
Check that against the survey’s own inventory and it holds. The Bureau’s table of geographies the ACS publishes for opens with a row reading “States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico” at a count of fifty-two, and Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa appear nowhere in it. The recurring annual population instrument that the mainland address economy is built on top of does not run here. What runs instead is a separate census on a ten-year cycle, and by the Bureau’s own advisory the 2020 round of it was degraded by the pandemic, with social and economic tables excluding the group quarters population and cells suppressed where the numbers were not reliable.
We will not tell you what any commercial database does or does not hold, because no vendor publishes a coverage map and we are not going to guess at one in public. What we will tell you is how we read the result, as a matter of our own practice: a national no-result on one of these three territories carries no information for us at all. It is not weak evidence of absence. It is the absence of evidence. We do not price it, weigh it, or report it to a client as a finding, and if a search of ours ends there it has not started. The same caution applies in reverse, and it is the more expensive error: an old mainland address that surfaces for someone who has since moved to Tumon or to St. Thomas will keep surfacing, unrefreshed and unchallenged, because nothing in the ordinary flow of national data is going to contradict it. Our note on how an address gets tested rather than merely retrieved sets out the discipline that applies with more force here than anywhere on the mainland.
There is a second, blunter piece of federal plumbing that says the same thing in customs law. Under 19 C.F.R. 101.1, the “customs territory of the United States” includes only the States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. All three of our territories sit outside it. That is not a trivia point: on 30 July 2026 the Postal Service brought in an interim final rule revising the Domestic Mail Manual to handle customs clearance and duty prepayment on goods mailed from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands into that customs territory. Note what the rule takes for granted while it does so. The mail is domestic. The parcel needs a customs form; the letter you write to a court clerk does not stop being a domestic letter.
Hold on to the Puerto Rico contrast, because it is the control that proves the mechanism rather than a digression. Puerto Rico sits inside the customs territory, and it is named in the ACS publication list. It is in the pipeline. Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa are not, and the difference is a matter of which federal programs reach where, not of anybody’s obscurity. If your person is in fact in Puerto Rico, that is a materially easier search and it has its own guide on this site; nothing on this page is written about it.
Three Territories, But Only Two Legal Footings
Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands stand on the same one. American Samoa does not, and that difference changes what documents a person is likely to hold.
The Department of the Interior administers federal relations with all three through its Office of Insular Affairs, and it keeps a published glossary of what the status words mean. Three of its definitions carry the weight here. An unincorporated territory is an insular area in which Congress “has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.” An organic act is the body of law Congress enacts to govern such an area, usually including a bill of rights and the shape of its three branches. An organized territory is one for which Congress has enacted an organic act; an unorganized territory is one for which it has not. Run the three territories through those definitions and you get two footings rather than three: Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands land on the same one, and American Samoa stands alone on the other. That is the more useful fact, because it tells you which two records systems you can reason about together and which one you cannot.
Guam
Congress was categorical. “Guam is declared to be an unincorporated territory of the United States”, says 48 U.S.C. 1421a, which goes on to give it a government of three branches. That section is part of the Guam Organic Act of 1950, so Guam is both unincorporated and organized. A small oddity worth knowing if you ever quote the statute: it still fixes the seat of government at “the city of Agana”, the spelling that predates the restoration of Hagatna. Citizenship follows separately, under 8 U.S.C. 1407, which declares persons born on Guam on or after 11 April 1899 and subject to United States jurisdiction to be citizens of the United States.
The U.S. Virgin Islands
Same category, different history. The islands were acquired from Denmark under a convention ratified by the Senate in 1916, and the 1954 organic act codified at 48 U.S.C. 1541 declares them “an unincorporated territory of the United States of America”, fixing the capital at Charlotte Amalie on the island of Saint Thomas. Citizenship for people born there runs through 8 U.S.C. 1406, which reaches back to former Danish citizens resident on 17 January 1917. So: unincorporated, organized, and its people citizens at birth, exactly as on Guam.
American Samoa
Here the pattern breaks, and it breaks in ways that show up on paper. Interior’s own American Samoa page states it without hedging: “Even without an organic act or other explicit Congressional directive on governance, the people of American Samoa adopted their own constitution in 1967”, holding their first constitutional elections in 1977. Read that against Interior’s own glossary and the classification follows: no organic act means unorganized. The statute Congress did pass, at 48 U.S.C. 1661, still reads as an interim measure nearly a century on, vesting “all civil, judicial, and military powers” in whoever the President directs, “until Congress shall provide for the government of such islands.”
And the nationality difference is real, not a technicality. Interior states it in one line: “Unlike citizens of other U.S. territories who are U.S. citizens, American Samoans are U.S. nationals.” The mechanism is in the immigration code. 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(29) defines “outlying possessions of the United States” to mean American Samoa and Swains Island – those two places and nothing else – and 8 U.S.C. 1408 then provides that a person born in an outlying possession is a national, but not a citizen, of the United States at birth. Interior adds that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not exercise jurisdiction in American Samoa and that the territory controls its own immigration and border matters.
Why any of this belongs on a page about finding a person: status determines paperwork, and paperwork is what a records trail is made of. A U.S. national is not a U.S. citizen, and that distinction can surface in a passport annotation, in an employment eligibility file, in a federal benefits record, or in the naturalization route a person took later if they moved to the mainland. If you are working from a document and something in it does not match your assumption about citizenship, the document may be right and the assumption wrong. Treat that as a lead rather than an error, and never as evidence that a person has misrepresented themselves.
Which Court, and Whether a Federal One Exists
Written inquiries live or die on being addressed to a court that has jurisdiction over the matter and the file.
Court files are the most productive public record in all three territories, because a case caption carries a name and an address that somebody swore to at a particular date. But you have to write to the right building, and the three structures are genuinely different from each other. The Department of Justice keeps a per-jurisdiction index of court resources, and it is unusually useful here precisely because it says what does not exist as well as what does.
Guam: a congressional district court plus a local supreme court
The authority is 48 U.S.C. 1424(a), and it is worth reading closely because it does two jobs in one sentence. Judicial authority is vested in a court established by Congress “designated as the ‘District Court of Guam'”, and in a judicial branch of Guam that “shall constitute a unified judicial system” including an appellate court “designated as the ‘Supreme Court of Guam'” and a trial court “designated as the ‘Superior Court of Guam'”. The same section names the courts of record. So Guam runs a federal trial court and a complete local court system side by side, and the local trial court is where an ordinary civil matter, a family case or a probate will sit. DOJ’s index confirms the federal side: Ninth Circuit above it, District of Guam, with a bankruptcy division. The District Court itself publishes instructions for conducting an online record search and a separate route for submitting a written record-search request, which is the more reliable path when you cannot work an electronic docket yourself.
The U.S. Virgin Islands: a congressional district court, and an appellate court built locally
The wording at 48 U.S.C. 1611(a) is different in a way that matters. Judicial power is vested in the District Court of the Virgin Islands “established by Congress, and in such appellate court and lower local courts as may have been or may hereafter be established by local law.” Congress named Guam’s Supreme and Superior Courts in the federal statute; for the Virgin Islands it left the local appellate court to the territory to create, which the territory did. Section 1613a preserves the older arrangement under which the District Court heard local appeals before that court existed, with review running to the Third Circuit. DOJ’s Virgin Islands index, updated in December 2025, accordingly lists the Third Circuit, the District Court of the Virgin Islands and its bankruptcy division on the federal side, and the Virgin Islands Supreme Court and Virgin Islands Superior Court on the local side. The federal court operates on both St. Thomas and St. Croix, publishing separate bankruptcy hearing schedules for each, which is your first clue that geography inside this territory is not a formality. The territorial judiciary operates its own public case-search portal; it is not on a domain we link to from here, so search for the Judiciary of the U.S. Virgin Islands by name rather than trusting a third-party mirror of it.
American Samoa: no federal court at all
This is the fact most likely to be got wrong, so take it from the Department of Justice rather than from us. Its American Samoa court-resources index, updated in May 2025, lists three federal headings and gives the same answer under each. U.S. Appellate Courts: None. U.S. District Courts: None. U.S. Bankruptcy Courts: None. Under local courts it lists the High Court of American Samoa. The statute books agree by their silence: chapter 8A of title 48 has a whole subchapter headed “The Judiciary” for Guam and chapter 12 has one headed “Judicial Branch” for the Virgin Islands, while chapter 13, which covers American Samoa, runs from section 1661 to section 1670 and contains no provision establishing a court of any kind.
Two practical consequences. First, do not send an American Samoa inquiry to a federal clerk, because there is not one to send it to; the territory’s own court is the institution that holds the file. Second, be careful with anything you read about how that court is composed. The DOJ page itself carries a description of the Appellate Division sourced to a directory published in 2000, and we are not going to repeat a twenty-five-year-old account of a bench as though it were current. If the composition of the court matters to your matter, ask the court. For the general question of how to approach any court file when you are the one doing the asking, our guide to searching court records jurisdiction by jurisdiction covers the mechanics that carry over.
Who Keeps the Book on the Land
Every mainland tool assumes a county recorder. Not one of these three has a county.
Property is the second great record layer, and it is where mainland software fails most visibly. A search interface that asks you to pick a county before it will run is not merely inconvenient here; it is asking a question with no answer. None of these three territories is divided into counties. What each has instead is specific, and worth knowing before you write to anybody.
Guam: one jurisdiction, villages, and a single land department
Guam is a single island jurisdiction. Below the territorial government sit villages, each with an elected mayor, coordinated through the Mayors’ Council of Guam, a body constituted under chapter 40 of title 5 of the Guam Code Annotated. Villages are the unit a Guam address is described in, and a mayor’s office is a real point of contact within a community rather than a ceremonial one. Land records are not held village by village: the Government of Guam’s Department of Land Management is the territorial office responsible for them. We have not found a public online index of Guam land records that we would rely on, so we treat that office as a written-request destination rather than a database, and we would rather say that than imply a search tool exists that we have not used. If you are approaching this from the property end rather than the person end, our page on working backwards from a property to its owner explains what that layer can and cannot establish anywhere.
The U.S. Virgin Islands: two districts, not counties
The Virgin Islands divides its recording function geographically, and the geography is islands. The Office of the Lieutenant Governor, which supervises the Recorder of Deeds, states that the office “has two Districts (St. Croix and St. Thomas-St. John)” and exercises jurisdiction over the filing and recording of deeds and other instruments relating to real property, with the recording duty set out at title 33, section 2362 of the Virgin Islands Code. That office is on a territorial domain we do not link out to, so seek it by name: the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The practical upshot is simple and it catches people out. Asking about St. Croix land in the St. Thomas-St. John district is asking the wrong district, and an inquiry that does not name an island is an inquiry somebody has to guess at. The same office also lists a GIS and street-addressing program among its divisions, which is the clearest available signal that address standardization across the territory is live work rather than settled history.
American Samoa: a land system Congress deliberately left alone
Treat this section as the one where we tell you what we could not establish, because that is more useful to you than confident prose. What is documented, and is in the United States Code, is that Congress carved American Samoan land out of the federal public-land system entirely. Section 1661(b) of title 48 provides that “the existing laws of the United States relative to public lands shall not apply to such lands in the said islands of eastern Samoa”, and directs that Congress “shall enact special laws for their management and disposition”, with revenue from those lands reserved to the benefit of the inhabitants. That exclusion is written into the act accepting the cessions of Tutuila and Manua, and section 1661(b) still reads that way in the code today.
What we are not going to do is describe how land is held, transferred or registered in American Samoa today, or set out any procedure touching communal land or matai titles. We could not verify any of it at a primary source we could read, and a plausible-sounding paragraph about somebody else’s customary tenure system is exactly the kind of thing that gets repeated for years after the person who wrote it has forgotten they were guessing. Land and title questions in American Samoa are decided under American Samoan law by the territory’s own court, and they are the territory’s to answer. If your matter turns on them, that is a question for the High Court of American Samoa and for counsel admitted there, not for a records-research firm on the mainland. We hold a related boundary for the same reason when a matter reaches onto tribal land, which our page on judgments that run into tribal court jurisdiction works through in detail.
Four Record Layers, and What Each One Can Actually Confirm
Set against the mainland assumption each layer replaces, so you can see where a habit will mislead you.
| Layer | Guam | U.S. Virgin Islands | American Samoa |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal court | District Court of Guam, Ninth Circuit, with a bankruptcy division | District Court of the Virgin Islands, Third Circuit, sitting on St. Thomas and St. Croix | None. DOJ lists no federal appellate, district or bankruptcy court |
| Local court | Supreme Court and Superior Court of Guam, both named in 48 U.S.C. 1424 | Virgin Islands Supreme Court and Superior Court, created under local law per 48 U.S.C. 1611(a) | High Court of American Samoa, under the territory’s own 1967 constitution |
| Land records | Department of Land Management, one territorial office; villages with elected mayors, no counties | Recorder of Deeds under the Lieutenant Governor, two districts: St. Croix and St. Thomas-St. John | Federal public-land laws expressly do not apply; tenure governed by American Samoan lawAsk locally |
| Status of the person | Citizens at birth under 8 U.S.C. 1407 | Citizens at birth under 8 U.S.C. 1406 | Nationals, not citizens, at birth under 8 U.S.C. 1408 |
| Post | Domestic mail to all three. All three sit outside the customs territory defined at 19 C.F.R. 101.1, which covers only the States, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico | ||
| The mainland assumption this breaks | Pick a county; pull a statewide court index; trust a national database miss; treat the three as one place | ||
Read the table down the American Samoa column and you can see why an inquiry drafted for the mainland fails there in four separate ways at once. Read it across the bottom row and you can see the one thing that works identically in all three: a properly addressed letter, posted domestically, to a named office. That is an unglamorous conclusion for a research page to reach, and it is the honest one.
Six Assumptions That Break at the Water’s Edge
Each of these is a habit that works on the mainland and produces a wrong answer here.
“The database found nothing, so they moved on”
The instrument that would have registered them is not run here. The Census Bureau says the American Community Survey is not conducted in the Island Areas, and lists the states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as its published geographies.
“Search the county recorder”
There is no county to search. Guam has villages and a single territorial land department; the Virgin Islands records in two districts, St. Croix and St. Thomas-St. John. A form that demands a county has no valid entry.
“File it with the federal district court”
Correct on Guam and in the Virgin Islands. In American Samoa there is no federal district court, no federal appellate court and no federal bankruptcy court, on the Department of Justice’s own index.
“Send it international, allow six weeks”
Post to all three moves as domestic mail. The 30 July 2026 Postal Service rule on duty collection concerns goods entering the customs territory; it does not turn your letter to a clerk into international correspondence.
“They must be a U.S. citizen”
On Guam and in the Virgin Islands, at birth, yes. A person born in American Samoa is a U.S. national and not a citizen at birth, under 8 U.S.C. 1408 read with the definition at 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(29).
“One page will cover all the territories”
Two have organic acts and one does not. Two confer citizenship at birth and one confers nationality. Two have federal trial courts and one has none. The category is administrative, not descriptive.
How We Work an Island-Areas Search
Fewer moving parts than a mainland trace, and a great deal more written correspondence.
We pin the territory before anything else
Which of the three, and where inside it. St. Croix and St. Thomas-St. John are different recording districts; a Guam address belongs to a village. Getting this wrong at the start wastes the whole first round of correspondence, since a written inquiry is not something you can re-run the same afternoon.
We state the purpose and check the boundaries
Your lawful purpose is recorded at intake, not assumed at the end. This is also where a covered use under the Fair Credit Reporting Act or a safety concern gets raised, and where we say plainly if the answer is that we should not take the work.
We work the institutions that actually hold the file
Territorial and federal court indexes where they exist, written record-search requests where they do not, the relevant land office, and licensed sources used strictly within their permissible-use rules. No pretext calls, no private account contents, no live handset location, none of which anybody can lawfully obtain.
We hand you the source, not just the answer
Every address comes with the office or index it came from and the date it was good, so you can weigh it or take it to a court yourself. Where the records will not carry a confident answer, we report that, and we say which inquiry is still outstanding rather than rounding a gap up to a result.
What We Are, What We Will Not Do, and Where We Stop
Set out in full, because a page that names three jurisdictions and a court in each has to be clear about its own limits too.
We are a public-records research firm, working since 2004, and this page sits inside the same skip tracing and public-records practice we run everywhere else rather than alongside some separate island service. We are not licensed private investigators and we make no such claim: there is no surveillance in what we do, nobody knocks on a door for us, and we do not have somebody stationed in Hagatna or Charlotte Amalie waiting to walk past an address on your behalf. Nor do we reach anything unavailable to us lawfully – no live handset location, no cell-site data, no message or mailbox contents, no account access, no private channel that other firms are somehow missing. On a topic where the honest answer is often “write to the clerk and wait”, that promise is worth more than a faster-sounding one.
Every file opens on a stated, lawful purpose, and we ask what yours is before work begins rather than after. Where a source carries its own statutory restrictions – driver and vehicle records, or financial identifiers – we use it only where a permissible purpose genuinely applies to your matter, and we record which one it was. We do not use pretext. No one here telephones a court clerk, a land office, an employer or a relative pretending to be somebody else, in any of these three territories or anywhere else, and we will not coach you through doing it either. Small jurisdictions have long memories and a pretext call does lasting damage to the next person who needs that office to answer honestly. Nor do we obtain private financial contents – no balances, no statements, no transaction histories.
We are not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we produce is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Our work may not be used to decide any question that statute covers: employment or a promotion, credit, insurance underwriting, housing or a tenancy, a professional or government license, a government benefit, or any comparable judgment about a person’s eligibility. This bears saying on this page specifically, because the territorial framing invites the wrong inference. The Act defines “State” at 15 U.S.C. 1681a(n) to mean “any State, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and any territory or possession of the United States.” The Fair Credit Reporting Act reaches these three places. Being outside the customs territory and outside the survey does not put anybody outside consumer protection. Where a covered decision is what you actually need, that requires a consumer reporting agency together with the disclosure, written authorization and adverse-action steps the Act builds around it, and we will decline and say so.
Then the request we refuse outright. Where somebody has moved to one of these islands, or moved away from one, in order to be unreachable by the person now asking us to find them – after a protective order, a domestic violence matter, a stalking complaint, a report to police, a separation, or a departure nobody was told about – we decline the work, whoever is asking and however the request is framed. A person who has put an ocean between themselves and somebody else has usually done it on purpose and at real cost. That is a decision we treat as final, not as an obstacle to be routed around, and we would rather turn away a genuinely worried relative than be the reason an address reaches the one person it must not. If you are the one who has gone quiet and believes they are being traced, speak to a victim-services advocate or to the court that issued your order about address confidentiality.
Two further limits, both of them about respect rather than liability. American Samoan land and matai titles are not ours to research or explain, and we will not construct a procedure for them from secondary sources; those questions belong to the territory’s own institutions and to counsel admitted there. And where a request would have us assemble a picture of a person’s household, movements or associations in a community small enough that the assembling is itself the harm, we will say no to that too, whatever lawful purpose is attached to it.
Everything here is general information and not legal advice. Statutes are quoted as they read on the dates we checked them, and territorial arrangements do change – the Postal Service rule cited above took effect on the day this page was written and is open for comment. Where you need a ruling rather than a records search, ask a lawyer admitted in the territory concerned.
Who Writes to Us About These Three Places
Almost always somebody whose ordinary tools returned a blank and who could not tell whether that meant anything.
Mainland relatives
A cousin, aunt or parent who went home and whose phone number stopped working.
Estate and probate researchers
An heir named in a will who is on an island the estate’s software cannot address.
Civil litigants
A party or witness to serve, where the right court is not the one the file assumes.
Pension and benefit offices
A beneficiary whose last confirmed address predates a move nobody recorded.
Adoption and reunion searchers
A birth relative whose records sit in a territorial registry, on the territory’s own terms.
Military-connected households
A relative who followed a posting and whose civilian records never caught up.
What almost all of them have in common is that the person they are looking for is not hiding. The trail simply runs into a place the mainland data economy was never built to describe, and it stops there rather than ending. Where the matter is a serving member rather than a relative who followed one, that is a different set of rules altogether and our page on locating a serving member of the armed forces is the one to read instead.
What We Will Say Plainly
Three commitments, all of them about candor rather than speed. We will tell you which of the three territories your matter actually sits in before we quote any work, because that single answer changes everything that follows. We will mark every finding with the office it came from and the date, and mark every gap as a gap – if an inquiry is still with a clerk, you will be told that it is still with a clerk. And we will name the things we could not establish, including the ones we think a competitor would have written up as fact. Where a starting point is solid, an address search usually comes back within 24 hours; where the answer depends on a written request to a territorial office, it depends on that office, and no firm can honestly promise otherwise.
Questions From People Searching Across an Ocean
Why does every people-search site come back empty on Guam or the Virgin Islands?
Because the recurring federal survey that mainland data products are built around is not run there. The Census Bureau states that the American Community Survey is not conducted in the Island Areas, and its own list of geographies the survey publishes for covers the states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. What exists instead is a separate census on a ten-year cycle. Treat a national no-result on these three territories as carrying no information either way, and go to the territory’s own institutions.
Are people from American Samoa U.S. citizens?
Not by birth. They are U.S. nationals. Section 1101(a)(29) of title 8 defines “outlying possessions of the United States” as American Samoa and Swains Island, and section 1408 provides that a person born in an outlying possession is a national, but not a citizen, of the United States at birth. The Department of the Interior states the same thing directly. People born on Guam or in the U.S. Virgin Islands are citizens at birth, under sections 1407 and 1406 of the same title. It is a real legal distinction with documentary consequences, not a technicality.
Which court do I write to for a case file in each territory?
On Guam, either the District Court of Guam, established by Congress, or the Superior Court of Guam for ordinary local matters, with the Supreme Court of Guam above it; all three are named in 48 U.S.C. 1424. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, the District Court of the Virgin Islands on the federal side, and the Virgin Islands Superior Court and Supreme Court on the local side. In American Samoa, the High Court of American Samoa, because the Department of Justice’s court index for the territory lists no federal district, appellate or bankruptcy court at all.
Which county should I search for property records?
None of them, because none of these territories has counties. Guam is a single jurisdiction with villages and a territorial Department of Land Management. The U.S. Virgin Islands records through the Recorder of Deeds under the Lieutenant Governor, which has two districts, St. Croix and St. Thomas-St. John, so your inquiry has to name the island. American Samoa is a separate case entirely: Congress provided at 48 U.S.C. 1661(b) that federal public-land laws do not apply there, and land questions belong to American Samoan law and the territory’s own court.
Is post to these islands domestic or international?
Domestic. The Postal Service treats all three as domestic destinations, which is why written record requests remain a realistic tool here rather than a last resort. There is a customs wrinkle in the other direction: all three sit outside the customs territory of the United States, which 19 C.F.R. 101.1 defines as only the States, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and a Postal Service rule effective 30 July 2026 sets out duty collection on goods mailed from them into that customs territory. That concerns goods, not correspondence.
Can you tell me how land and matai titles work in American Samoa?
No, and we would treat any page that offers to as a warning sign. We could not verify the mechanics at a primary source we were able to read, and we will not assemble somebody else’s customary tenure system out of secondary accounts. What is documented is that Congress excluded American Samoan land from the federal public-land laws and directed that special laws be enacted instead. Beyond that, these are questions for the High Court of American Samoa and for counsel admitted in the territory.
Does the Fair Credit Reporting Act apply in the territories?
Yes. The Act defines “State” at 15 U.S.C. 1681a(n) to mean any State, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and any territory or possession of the United States. So a tenancy, employment, credit, insurance or licensing decision about somebody in Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands or American Samoa is a covered decision, and it requires a consumer reporting agency with the disclosures and adverse-action steps the Act builds in. We are not one, and we decline that work rather than sell you something that will not lawfully do the job.
My relative might be in Puerto Rico rather than one of these three. Does this page help?
Only as a contrast. Puerto Rico sits inside the customs territory and is named in the American Community Survey publication list, so it is inside the data pipeline these three sit outside of, and the practical route to finding someone there is different enough that mixing the two would mislead you. We keep a separate guide to searching in Puerto Rico. Start there instead, and come back to this page only if the trail turns out to run to Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands or American Samoa.
Not Sure Which Territory the Trail Runs To?
That is usually the question worth answering first, and it is one we can often settle from what you already hold. Send us the name, the last address you have any confidence in and roughly when it was good, or put the situation to our team and we will tell you which institution actually holds the answer – including when that institution is one you should write to yourself.
Start an island-areas search
