Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee Counties

Milwaukee Skip Tracing and People Search

Wisconsin puts one thing on your side and three things in your way. On your side: a single statewide court index that answers a name query for all seventy-two counties at once, so a four-county metro is one search rather than four. In your way: a county’s paper is split across three separate offices, not two; property assessment is run by each individual town, village and city rather than by the county; and the word after a place name – Town, Village or City – is a legal classification that changes which government holds the record. There are nineteen places in this metro where the same name belongs to two different municipalities in the same county. This page maps all of it, office by office and statute by statute. One thing about us before the map: this is records research, conducted only where a permissible purpose exists. We are not licensed private investigators and hold no investigative license. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

Four Southeastern Wisconsin Counties Court, Land and Probate Indexes Since 2004
ThreeRecord Offices in Every County
NineteenSame-Name Municipal Pairs
Ten YearsStatutory Floor on Eviction Display
Since 2004Records-Based Locating

The Short Version

Milwaukee skip tracing means reading four adjoining Wisconsin counties – Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee – as one records system with three tiers. At the state tier sits Wisconsin Circuit Court Access, a statewide case index defined in Wis. Stat. section 758.20, which the director of state courts is forbidden to prune below fixed minimums for eviction filings. At the county tier sit three separate custodians: the register of deeds for recorded land instruments and vital records, the clerk of circuit court for case files and the judgment and lien docket, and the register in probate, an office the county’s own judges appoint. At the municipal tier sits the assessor – and in Wisconsin that is a town, village or city assessor, not a county one. Miss the tier and you look in a place the record was never kept. We work all three lawfully, under a permissible purpose, from public records and licensed data. General information about public records, not legal advice.

Watch: How a Milwaukee Locate Runs

State index, county custodians, municipal assessor – in that order.

▶ Video Overview

Every Wisconsin County Has Three Custodians

Two of them are obvious. The third is where estate files hide.

Ask most researchers where a county keeps its paper and you get two answers: the recorder and the court clerk. Wisconsin has three, and the third is a genuinely separate office with its own appointment route. Working a Milwaukee-area file without knowing that costs you the entire probate side of a person’s paper trail.

The first custodian is the register of deeds. Wis. Stat. section 59.43 makes the office responsible for recording every document submitted to it that is not prohibited by law from being recorded, and the detail that matters operationally is the timestamp discipline: the register must endorse the date, hour and minute of recording on each document and record documents in the order received. That produces a strictly ordered chain, which is why a Wisconsin title question resolves by sequence rather than by argument. The same office carries the county’s vital-records duties under sections 69.05 and 69.07, so births, deaths and marriages sit alongside deeds – one visit, two very different kinds of answer. The register also has to note on each conveyance the real estate transfer fee paid, or the statutory reason it was exempt, which means a transfer that looks like an arm’s-length sale and a transfer that was really a family arrangement are distinguishable on the face of the record.

The second custodian is the clerk of circuit court, who holds the case files and, critically for anyone chasing money, the judgment and lien docket. Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee each elect their own, and each docket is its own universe. A judgment sitting in the Milwaukee County docket is not in the Waukesha County docket until somebody puts it there.

The third is the register in probate, and it is the one nobody outside Wisconsin expects. Under Wis. Stat. section 851.71 the office is not elected and not appointed by the county board – the judges of the county appoint and may remove the register in probate, and only with the chief judge’s approval. Before taking up the work the register swears the constitutional oath and files it, with the order of appointment, in the office of the clerk of circuit court. Section 851.72 then makes the register responsible for filing and keeping all papers properly deposited. The county board’s only role is fixing the salary. So the estate file for a deceased Milwaukee-area property owner – the one that names the heirs, the personal representative and the addresses they gave the court – is held by an officer whose authority runs from the bench, not from the courthouse’s administrative side, and asking the clerk’s counter for it is asking the wrong window.

There is one more wrinkle specific to this metro. Section 851.71 carries a special provision for counties with a population of 750,000 or more: in those counties the judges still appoint the register in probate and any deputies, but they cannot remove them except through dismissal charges made and sustained under the civil-service procedure at section 63.10. Of the four counties here, only Milwaukee County is in that bracket. Census vintage-2024 estimates put Milwaukee County at 924,740, Waukesha at 417,029, Washington at 138,727 and Ozaukee at 93,956, against 1,574,452 for the metropolitan statistical area as a whole. The practical translation is unglamorous but real: the probate counter in Milwaukee County is a career civil-service operation and the ones in the other three are smaller, more personal offices. Requests are worked differently, and knowing which you are dealing with sets a realistic expectation before anybody promises a client a date.

When the object of a search is a parcel rather than a person, that same three-office split is what drives our general approach to identifying the owner behind an address – the recorded instrument, the case index and the estate file each answer a different part of the question.

CCAP Is an Office. WCCA Is the Search.

Almost everything written about Wisconsin court records confuses the two.

Search the term most Wisconsin residents use for looking someone up and the results are a wall of imitation sites with hyphenated domain names, none of them run by the court system and none of them accurate about what they are describing. So begin with the vocabulary, because getting it right is the difference between reading a court record and reading a scrape of one.

CCAP stands for Consolidated Court Automation Programs. It is an administrative office of the Wisconsin court system – the judiciary’s information-technology arm. By its own published account the program began in 1987 as the Circuit Court Automation Program, aimed at automating county trial courts, and in 2001 merged with the court system’s Office of Information Technology Services, widening its remit to the appellate courts and the administrative offices and eventually to a single electronic filing system. CCAP is a department. It is not a website, it is not a database you search, and it is not a background check.

The thing people actually mean is Wisconsin Circuit Court Access, and unusually for a court records system it has a statutory definition. Wis. Stat. section 758.20(1) describes the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access internet site as the site of the consolidated court automation programs, which it calls the statewide electronic circuit court case management system established under section 758.19(4) and maintained by the director of state courts, providing information regarding the cases heard in the circuit courts.

Read that phrase carefully, because it is the single biggest structural advantage a Wisconsin locate has. Statewide. One name query reaches the circuit courts of all seventy-two Wisconsin counties at once. In a great many states a civil docket search is a county-by-county errand, and a four-county metropolitan area therefore means four separate searches, four interfaces and four chances to miss a filing. Here the four counties of this metro fall out of a single query, and so does the rest of the state, which matters enormously when a subject has moved from Milwaukee to Madison or up to the Fox Valley and stopped generating southeastern Wisconsin paper altogether.

What the statute guarantees will still be there

Section 758.20(2) does something most public-records statutes never do: it tells the custodian what it may not take down. For a civil case that is not a closed, confidential or sealed case, the director of state courts may not remove case management information for a fixed minimum period. Where a writ of restitution has been granted in an eviction action, that period is at least ten years. Where an eviction action was dismissed and no money judgment was docketed, it is at least two years.

That is a display floor written into law, and it makes the eviction file the most durable publicly visible address record in Wisconsin. An eviction action names a defendant at a specific rental address on a specific date, and the statute keeps that visible for a decade after a writ issues. For anyone reconstructing where a person lived and when, it is the sturdiest fixed point available, and it is why rebuilding a chain of previous addresses in this state usually starts with the housing docket rather than with a commercial address history.

What it will not do for you

Three limits, and they are the ones the imitation sites never state. First, the statute’s own carve-out language – closed, confidential or sealed – marks out material that is simply not there to be found online, and a name that returns nothing is not evidence that nothing exists. Second, the system indexes cases, not people: matching a common surname to the right human being is your problem, not the court’s, and Wisconsin has no shortage of shared German and Polish surnames across four counties of the same metro. Third, and most misunderstood, an address in a case caption is the address someone believed to be good on the day of filing. It is a dated snapshot with a court’s credibility behind it, which makes it valuable evidence and terrible gospel. We treat every captioned address as a lead requiring a second, independent confirmation before it goes in a report.

Town, Village or City Is a Legal Fact

Nineteen places in this metro share a name with a different government.

In most of the United States, “town” is a casual word for a settlement. In Wisconsin it is a class of municipal corporation, and the difference between the Town of Brookfield and the City of Brookfield is not a matter of emphasis. They are two governments, with two clerks, two sets of ordinances, two assessment rolls and two treasuries, sitting next to each other in Waukesha County. An address written “Brookfield, WI” has not yet told you which one.

The reason this bites in records work rather than only in civics class is Wisconsin’s assessment structure. Wis. Stat. section 70.05 organizes the assessment of general property by taxation district – by town, village and city – with an assessor for each, who since 1977 must hold a Department of Revenue certification under section 73.09 before taking office. A county-level alternative exists, but it is opt-in and deliberately hard: under section 70.99 a county assessor system requires a resolution or ordinance passed by 60 percent of the entire membership of the county board, after which the appointment is made from a Department of Revenue list of examined and certified candidates. The default across Wisconsin is therefore municipal assessment. There is no automatic county-wide assessment roll to search, which is why a request for “the Waukesha County property records” is a request to a body that does not hold what you are asking for.

The nineteen collisions, county by county

These are not anecdotes. They come from the Census Bureau’s 2024 county-subdivision gazetteer file for Wisconsin, read in full and tallied rather than summarized.

Waukesha County carries eight collisions and is the worst offender in the state’s south-east. There is a City of Brookfield and a Town of Brookfield; a City of Delafield and a Town of Delafield; a City of Oconomowoc and a Town of Oconomowoc; a City of Pewaukee and a Village of Pewaukee; and a City of Waukesha and a Village of Waukesha. Eagle, Merton and Mukwonago each exist twice over, once as a town and once as a village. Waukesha County has twenty-two villages, eight cities and eight towns in all – thirty-eight separate municipal governments in one county.

Washington County carries five: a City and a Town of Hartford, a City and a Town of West Bend, and Germantown, Jackson and Kewaskum each appearing as both a town and a village. Washington is the most town-heavy county of the four, with twelve towns against six villages and three cities.

Ozaukee County carries six across only sixteen municipalities: a City and a Town of Cedarburg, a City and a Town of Port Washington, and Belgium, Fredonia, Grafton and Saukville each existing as both a town and a village.

Milwaukee County carries none, for a reason that is itself worth knowing: it has no towns whatsoever. Every square foot of it is inside one of ten cities – Milwaukee, West Allis, Wauwatosa, Greenfield, Oak Creek, Franklin, Cudahy, South Milwaukee, Glendale and St. Francis – or one of nine villages: Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, Bayside, River Hills, Brown Deer, Greendale, Hales Corners and West Milwaukee. Nineteen municipalities, zero towns. It is the one county in this metro where the town-versus-city question can never arise, and that asymmetry is itself a locating clue: an address in a “Town of” anything in this region is not in Milwaukee County.

Two further traps in the same data

The City of Milwaukee is not confined to Milwaukee County. The Census subdivision file lists Milwaukee city as a county subdivision of Washington County and of Waukesha County as well, because the municipality’s boundary crosses both lines. A postal address reading Milwaukee therefore does not fix the county, and a filing about that property may sit in West Bend or in Waukesha rather than downtown. Second, two villages here straddle county lines outright: Bayside sits in both Milwaukee and Ozaukee Counties, and Newburg sits in both Ozaukee and Washington. For a village-line address in either place, “which county holds the deed” is a question about the specific parcel, not about the village.

None of this is exotic to residents, which is exactly why it is dangerous. Local people write the municipality without the class word because everyone around them knows which is meant. National databases then normalize the address, drop the qualifier and hand you a record that points at the wrong government. Our first step on any file from this region is to resolve the municipality to its class and its county before a single index is opened.

Which Tier Holds Your Answer

The southeastern Wisconsin records map in one table.

What you needWhich tier holds itWhy it goes wrong
Civil, eviction, family or small claims filingState – Wisconsin Circuit Court Access StatewideConfused with CCAP, the IT office that runs it.
Deed, mortgage, lien, satisfactionCounty – register of deeds, per countyFour separate indexes; a metro move changes office.
Estate, guardianship, trust papersCounty – register in probate, appointed by the judgesSought from the clerk of circuit court instead.
Judgment lien against real propertyCounty – judgment and lien docket, clerk of circuit courtAssumed to be statewide; it is county-only.
Assessment, owner of record, parcel dataMunicipal – town, village or city assessorRequested from a county that does not hold it.
Birth, death and marriage recordsCounty – register of deeds, under the vital-records duties at Wis. Stat. sections 69.05 and 69.07.

The shape of the table is the shape of the work. One state-level index gives you breadth cheaply; four county-level custodian sets and roughly ninety municipal assessment rolls – one for each taxation district across the four counties – give you depth expensively. A locate that only uses the free statewide tier will find the people who have been sued and miss everyone who has merely bought, sold, inherited or been assessed. Assembling all three tiers into a single sourced answer is the substance of our skip tracing services, and in this metro the assembly is genuinely most of the labor.

The Lien Docket Publishes an Address

And Wisconsin’s marital property rules change who owns what.

Wisconsin’s judgment lien statute contains a clause that almost nobody reads as a locating tool, and it should be read that way. Under Wis. Stat. section 806.15(1), a judgment becomes a ten-year lien on the debtor’s real property only if it is properly entered in the judgment and lien docket showing the judgment debtor’s place of residence. Not merely entered – entered showing a residence. Homestead property exempt from execution under section 815.20 is excluded, and the lien reaches property the debtor owns at entry as well as property acquired within the ten years that follow.

The consequence for research is direct. A properly perfected Wisconsin judgment lien has a residential address attached to it as a condition of its own validity, sitting in a county docket, carrying a date. It is not necessarily current – judgments outlive addresses – but it is a residence a creditor stated and a clerk recorded, which puts it in a different evidentiary class from an aggregated data-broker address with no provenance at all.

The second half of section 806.15 is about geography, and it is why a four-county metro punishes carelessness. The lien reaches real property in the county where the judgment is rendered. A Milwaukee County judgment attaches to nothing in Waukesha, Washington or Ozaukee. To reach across a line, section 806.13 requires filing with the clerk of circuit court of that other county a transcript from the original judgment and lien docket, certified as a true copy by the original clerk. In a metropolitan area where the drive from the Milwaukee County line to a Waukesha County subdivision takes twenty minutes, the paperwork treats that move as an interstate event. It also means the absence of a lien in one county’s docket proves nothing about the other three, and searching one county is a common and expensive false negative.

Marital property changes the ownership question

Wisconsin is a marital property state, and this reshapes what a deed actually tells you. Wis. Stat. section 766.31 provides that all property of spouses is marital property except that which the chapter classifies otherwise, that all property of spouses is presumed to be marital property, and that each spouse holds a present undivided one-half interest in each item of marital property.

So a recorded Waukesha County deed naming one spouse alone does not establish that the other spouse has no interest. The presumption runs the other way, and the classification question is a legal one that turns on how and when the property was acquired and whether a marital property agreement exists. We report what the record shows and flag the presumption; we do not tell you what a court would conclude. Where that becomes the central question – an asset picture, a divorce, an estate – the groundwork is set out in our material on Wisconsin’s marital property rules, and the enforcement sequence that follows a located debtor is covered in our guide to collecting a judgment in Wisconsin. Those are your lawyer’s instruments. What we supply is the located person, the recorded parcels and the docket entries they attach to.

What Wisconsin Opens and What It Shuts

The same statute that publishes an address protects some people’s.

Wisconsin is unusually generous with one particular file. Wis. Stat. section 6.36(1) requires the Wisconsin Elections Commission to compile and maintain an official statewide registration list containing the name and address of every registered elector, along with a unique registration number, ward and aldermanic district, and the dates of elections in which the elector voted. Subsection (1)(b)1 then makes that list open to public inspection under section 19.35(1) and electronically accessible by any person, alphabetically for the whole state and for each county, municipality and ward.

Read the exceptions in the same subsection and the state’s judgment becomes clear. Nobody outside a defined list of election officials may view an elector’s date of birth, operator’s license number or social security account number – and nobody outside that list may view the address of an elector who has been issued an identification serial number under section 6.47(3).

Section 6.47 is the confidential-elector provision for victims of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking. An eligible individual is someone with a protective order in effect; or someone who files an affidavit with the municipal clerk, signed by a sheriff, a police chief or a district attorney, verifying that a person has been charged with or convicted of a qualifying offense in which the individual was a victim and reasonably continues to be threatened; or someone residing in a shelter; or someone with a dated statement from a certified domestic abuse victim service provider. Section 6.46 then requires the clerk to exclude that confidential information from copies of the list. The state has deliberately drilled a hole in its own transparency, in a specific shape, for a specific reason.

It has done the same thing again in a second place. Wis. Stat. section 165.68 establishes an address confidentiality program run by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, under which a participant is issued an assigned address that stands in place of the residential, school or work address. Eligibility covers child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, stalking and trafficking as those terms are defined elsewhere in the statutes, and it expressly does not require that criminal charges have been brought, that a restraining order has been sought, or that anything was ever reported to law enforcement. Participation runs five years and the department may not charge for it.

Our decline, stated plainly

We do not accept work aimed at reaching a person who has taken steps to keep their location private for safety reasons, and we do not attempt to defeat either of the Wisconsin protections described above. Four signals settle it for us: a stated purpose that collapses on the second question; nothing filed anywhere that an address would actually serve; pressure for a doorstep rather than a mailing address or a phone number; or a described history between requester and subject that reads as abuse or stalking. Any one of them ends the engagement, and we tell the requester which one it was. If you are the person at risk here rather than the person searching, the two Wisconsin routes named above exist for you, and a domestic abuse victim service provider or your municipal clerk is the right first call, not us.

The rest of our boundaries

Our category matters here, because a good deal of the Milwaukee field leads with a license. This firm researches public records and traces people; it is not a licensed private investigation agency, and we advertise no investigative credential we do not hold. A permissible purpose is settled before a file opens. We never pretext – we do not impersonate anyone, misrepresent who we are or why we are asking, in order to extract information from a person or an institution. We do not access private financial account contents, and we do not conduct surveillance. Every item we hand over carries the name of the office or the licensed source it came out of, printed next to it.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act draws a line this firm sits outside. We are not a consumer reporting agency, and a locate report from us is not a consumer report. It must not be used, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing eligibility for credit or insurance, for employment or promotion decisions, for tenant screening or any other rental decision, for the issue of a government license or benefit, or for any other purpose the FCRA covers. Landlords and property managers who send us work are asking us to locate a former tenant who has already left; that is a debt-recovery and service-of-process question, not a screening question, and if what you actually need is a tenancy decision on an applicant you need an FCRA-compliant consumer reporting agency instead of us. This page is general information about Wisconsin public records and is not legal advice.

Where Milwaukee Files Come Apart

Six failure patterns particular to southeastern Wisconsin.

The Missing Class Word

An address reading only “Brookfield” or “Cedarburg”, which names two governments, not one.

Assessment Sought From a County

Weeks lost asking a county for rolls that Wisconsin keeps at the municipal level.

The Estate File Nobody Found

Probate papers requested from the clerk of circuit court, when the register in probate holds them.

One Docket Searched, Four Existing

A clean Milwaukee County lien search read as proof of nothing owed anywhere.

A Scraped Court Index

An imitation site’s stale copy relied on instead of the statutory statewide system.

A Deed Read as Sole Ownership

One name on a Wisconsin instrument, against a statutory presumption of marital property.

How a Milwaukee-Area Locate Is Run

Classify the municipality, sweep the state, then go county by county.

1

Resolve the Municipality

Fix the town, village or city class and the county before opening any index.

2

Sweep the Statewide Index

One circuit court query covering all seventy-two counties, not just these four.

3

Work Each County’s Three Offices

Register of deeds, clerk of circuit court and register in probate, per county.

4

Confirm Before Reporting

Two independent sources per finding, each named, with open questions stated.

Who Sends Us Southeastern Wisconsin Work

People who already have the name and need the jurisdiction.

Four-County Litigators

Parties and witnesses across four circuit courts

Docketed Judgment Holders

Debtors and county-by-county lien exposure

Wisconsin Process Servers

Addresses resolved to the right municipality

Wisconsin Rental Owners

Former tenants who left a balance behind

Probate and Estate Counsel

Heirs traced through the register in probate

Relatives Across the Ring

Family lost between the city and the outer counties

Every one of these clients arrives holding a name and missing a jurisdiction. Send us the name, the last address you have any faith in, any identifiers you hold, and the purpose the search serves. A first read on a workable Milwaukee-area request normally reaches you within 24 hours; where the file has to be walked through three offices in each of four counties, it takes longer, and the extra time is corroboration being done rather than a queue. Rental owners chasing a departed tenant usually reach us through our material on tracing a tenant who left without a forwarding address, and clients whose subject has moved beyond this metro are better served by the statewide picture in finding someone anywhere in Wisconsin.

What We Promise on Wisconsin Files

Every finding arrives labeled with the tier and the office it came from – a statewide circuit court entry, a named county’s register of deeds or register in probate, a municipal assessment roll, or a licensed data source – and with a plain statement of what is still unresolved. If the municipality could not be pinned to a class and a county, you are told that instead of being handed a tidy-looking address. Nothing is dressed up as confirmed on one source. Since 2004 the method has not changed: establish the permissible purpose first, never pretext to get past a gatekeeper, and stay out of anybody’s private financial accounts.

People Locator Skip Tracing Investigation Team has read court indexes, recorded instruments and lawfully licensed data on behalf of legitimate requesters since 2004. Every Wisconsin statute cited above was read in the Legislature’s own published text rather than in a summary of it, and last checked in 2026. General information about public records, not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is CCAP the website I use to look someone up in Wisconsin?

No, and the confusion is nearly universal. CCAP is the Consolidated Court Automation Programs, an administrative office of the Wisconsin court system that provides its information technology. It began in 1987 as the Circuit Court Automation Program and merged with the court system’s Office of Information Technology Services in 2001. The public search site is Wisconsin Circuit Court Access, defined in Wis. Stat. section 758.20(1) as the statewide electronic circuit court case management system maintained by the director of state courts. Sites with CCAP in their domain name are generally not the court system.

Which office holds Milwaukee-area deeds, and which holds court files?

Deeds, mortgages, liens and satisfactions go to the county register of deeds, whose duties are set at Wis. Stat. section 59.43. That office also handles the county’s vital-records work under sections 69.05 and 69.07. Case files and the judgment and lien docket belong to the clerk of circuit court. There is a third office people miss entirely: the register in probate, which holds estate, guardianship and related papers and is appointed by the county’s own judges under section 851.71 rather than by the county board.

Why does a “Town of” address matter so much in Wisconsin?

Because town, village and city are legal classes of municipality, not descriptions. The Town of Brookfield and the City of Brookfield are two separate governments in Waukesha County with separate clerks and separate assessment rolls, and the same pattern repeats nineteen times across Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee Counties. Since Wis. Stat. section 70.05 assigns assessment to each town, village and city rather than to the county, getting the class wrong sends a records request to a government that never held the record.

Do I have to search all four counties separately?

For court cases, no. Wisconsin Circuit Court Access is statewide, so one name query reaches the circuit courts of all seventy-two counties at once, including these four. For everything else, yes. Recorded land documents, probate files and judgment liens are held county by county, and a judgment lien under Wis. Stat. section 806.15 reaches only real property in the county where the judgment was rendered. Crossing into another county requires a certified transcript filed there under section 806.13.

How far back do Wisconsin eviction records stay visible?

There is a statutory floor rather than a removal deadline. Wis. Stat. section 758.20(2) forbids the director of state courts from removing case management information for a civil case that is not closed, confidential or sealed: at least ten years where a writ of restitution was granted in an eviction action, and at least two years where the eviction was dismissed with no money judgment docketed. That makes the eviction docket the most durable publicly visible record of where someone lived and when.

Can you tell me who owns a property in Waukesha or Ozaukee County?

Yes, through public records, though it takes two tiers. Recorded ownership and encumbrances come from that county’s register of deeds, where documents are endorsed with the date, hour and minute of recording and entered in the order received. Assessment and parcel data come from the individual town, village or city assessor, because Wisconsin assesses by taxation district under section 70.05 unless a county board has adopted a county assessor by a 60 percent vote under section 70.99. We also flag that section 766.31 presumes property of spouses to be marital property, so a deed in one name is not the end of the ownership question.

Are you licensed private investigators, and is this legal in Wisconsin?

We are not licensed private investigators and we make no such claim, which distinguishes us from much of the field ranking for this search. We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm. Establishing where an adult can be reached, using public records and lawfully licensed data, for a purpose the law recognizes, is permitted in this state; we settle and record that purpose in writing before any southeastern Wisconsin file is opened. We do not pretext, do not surveil and do not reach into private financial accounts. What we produce is not a consumer report, and the decisions the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs – screening a rental applicant, hiring, extending credit or insurance, granting a license or benefit – are all closed to it.

What if the person moved to keep away from whoever is asking?

Then we decline the file. Wisconsin gives such a person two deliberate protections, and we do not work against either. Wis. Stat. section 6.47 lets a victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking become a confidential elector, and section 6.36(1)(b) then withholds that elector’s address from the otherwise public statewide registration list. Separately, section 165.68 gives Department of Justice address confidentiality program participants an assigned address in place of their real one, with no requirement that charges were ever brought. Where a request reads as an attempt to reach someone who moved for their own safety, we say no and explain why.

Put a Wisconsin Address on Solid Ground

Give us the name, whatever address you are working from, and the purpose behind the search. We will pin the municipality to its class and county, sweep the statewide court index, work the three custodians in each county that matters, and come back with something we can point at a source for. Contact us to open a southeastern Wisconsin file.

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