New Orleans Metro Skip Tracing Services
Louisiana is the only state in the country whose private law is civil law rather than common law, and that single fact reaches all the way down into how a person is found here. The state has no counties; it has 64 parishes. It has no statewide index of land – a recorded instrument is effective only for property in the parish where it was filed, so an ownership question has to be asked seven separate times to be asked properly across this metro. And Orleans Parish, which most people mean when they say New Orleans, is the exception to nearly every rule the other 63 follow: its deeds and mortgages are not with a parish Clerk of Court at all, but in the Land Records Division of the Clerk of Civil District Court, an office built in 2014 out of three older ones. This page is the records map that follows from all of that. What we do here is records research, opened only where a permissible purpose exists; we hold no investigator’s license and claim none, and none of this is legal advice.
The Records Map in Brief
New Orleans metro skip tracing means working a filing system that exists nowhere else in the United States. Louisiana is a civil-law jurisdiction divided into parishes, and under Louisiana Civil Code article 3341 the recording of an instrument is effective only for property located in the parish where it was recorded – there is no statewide land index to fall back on. In six of the seven parishes the federal government now counts as this metro, conveyances and mortgages sit with that parish’s elected Clerk of Court. In the seventh, Orleans, they sit in the Land Records Division of the Clerk of Civil District Court at 1340 Poydras Street, formed in 2014 by merging the Conveyance Office, the Recorder of Mortgages and the Custodian of Notarial Archives. Orleans was also, until this year, the only parish in the state that elected two clerks of court, one civil and one criminal: Act 15 of the 2026 regular session abolished the office of clerk of criminal district court at the end of 3 May 2026 and transferred its books and records to the civil clerk, now styled the clerk of court for the parish of Orleans. Any Orleans criminal file opened before that date was docketed and indexed by an office that no longer exists. Getting an answer here is largely a question of knowing which of those offices to ask, in which parish, for which kind of record – and, on older Orleans matters, which of them held it at the time. We do that lawfully, under a permissible purpose, from public records and licensed data. General information, not legal advice.
Watch: The Seven-Parish Map
Which office holds which record, and why it matters.
Watch Overview
Louisiana Records Stop at the Parish Line
Why an ownership question has to be asked seven times here.
Start with the piece of Louisiana law that governs everything a records search can and cannot reach. Under Louisiana Civil Code article 3341, the recording of an instrument “is effective only with respect to immovables located in the parish where the instrument is recorded.” Article 3341 also says recordation creates no presumption that the instrument is valid or genuine and none as to the capacity or status of the parties. Read those together and a filed document is doing something narrower than most people assume: it gives notice about one piece of ground in one parish, and it vouches for nothing else.
The companion article says where a document has to go. Article 3346 sends anything creating or relating to a mortgage or privilege over an immovable into the mortgage records of the parish where that immovable sits, and every other instrument into the conveyance records of the same parish. Two indexes, parish by parish, with different contents. And under article 3338, a transfer, a lease, an option, a right of first refusal or a contract to buy or sell an immovable has no effect against a third person at all until it is recorded in one of those two books.
Three practical consequences follow, and they are the reason a search built for a common-law state underperforms here.
First, there is no shortcut to a statewide look. A vendor who says it searched “Louisiana property records” has searched a compilation of parish books, and any parish it did not reach is simply invisible – not empty, invisible. On a metro that spans seven parishes, that is a large blind spot to inherit without being told about it. We treat coverage as something to state parish by parish, and we say which parishes we actually reached.
Second, the vocabulary is different, and the vocabulary is the search. Louisiana law says immovable, not real property. It says privilege where another state would say statutory lien. Its notaries execute authentic acts. A request phrased in common-law terms will still be understood by a helpful deputy clerk, but an index queried in the wrong vocabulary quietly returns less than it holds.
Third, movement between parishes matters more here than movement between counties does elsewhere. Someone who sells in Jefferson Parish and buys in St. Tammany has not merely moved; their recorded life has restarted in a book we have to go and open separately. Tracing that shift across parish lines is the same discipline behind identifying a property owner from an address, applied where the index itself refuses to reach past a boundary.
What all of that changes is the meaning of a negative result. Louisiana’s records are excellent – old, complete and well kept – but article 3341 fixes the reach of any one of them at the parish line, so “nothing found” is never a statement about Louisiana. It is a statement about one parish’s conveyance and mortgage books on the day they were searched. A report that does not name the parishes it opened has not told you what it failed to find, and a report that opened one has told you almost nothing about the other six.
Orleans Parish Is the Exception to Everything
The one parish where the general rule does not apply – and where 2026 redrew part of it.
In most Louisiana parishes the arrangement is admirably simple: one elected Clerk of Court is the custodian of public records and holds conveyances, mortgages, marriage licenses and the notarial acts filed there, all under one roof. Orleans Parish does not work that way, and a searcher who assumes it does will ask an office that genuinely does not have the file.
Orleans land records live in the Land Records Division of the Clerk of Civil District Court, on Poydras Street. That division is recent as an entity and ancient as a set of books. Three separate offices – the Conveyance Office, whose conveyance records for the parish run from 1827; the Recorder of Mortgages; and the Custodian of Notarial Archives – were folded together, with the consolidation completed in February 2014. Sales, mortgages, building contracts and judgments of possession are all filed there now. The City of New Orleans directory entry for those records still lists all three former office names, which is a fair reflection of how the material is actually organized: a unified index from 2014 forward, and pre-merger series behind it that have to be approached on their own terms.
That matters on a real file more often than it sounds. A chain of title that crosses 2014 crosses an administrative seam. A mortgage cancelled in the 1990s was cancelled by an office that no longer exists under that name. Anyone quoting you a clean, uniform Orleans title history without acknowledging the merger is describing a database, not the records.
The Notarial Archives, and why they are not a curiosity
The archives absorbed into that division hold the acts of Orleans Parish notaries going back to 1733, including acts of sale for real estate. For a genealogist that is a treasure. For a locate it is occasionally decisive, because in Louisiana the notary is not a witness-of-signature the way a notary is elsewhere. A Louisiana notary is a civil-law officer commissioned by the state who drafts and executes authentic acts – instruments signed before the notary and two competent witnesses, which Louisiana law treats as carrying far stronger evidentiary weight than an ordinary signed document. Much of what an attorney must do in other states can be done here by a notary. The consequence for research is that a great deal of Louisiana’s documentary record about who owned what, and who was party to what, was generated by notaries and is filed as notarial acts rather than as ordinary recorded paper.
Two clerks until 3 May 2026, and what the merger did to the indexes
Orleans was, until this year, the only parish in Louisiana that elected two clerks of court. The parish is served by two separate district courts – a Civil District Court and a Criminal District Court – and each of them elected its own clerk: the Clerk of Civil District Court holding civil filings and, as above, the land records, and a Clerk of Criminal District Court holding the criminal side. Everywhere else in Louisiana a single clerk has always held both.
That ended in 2026, and anyone still describing it in the present tense is describing an office that has been closed for months. Act 15 of the 2026 Regular Session – Senate Bill 256, effective on the governor’s signature on 30 April 2026 – provides in section 4 that “the office of clerk of criminal district court for the parish of Orleans shall be abolished at the end of May 3, 2026,” and that immediately afterwards its authority, functions and duties, together with “all of the books, papers, records, monies, actions, and other property of every kind and description,” pass to the clerk of the civil district court, “who shall thereafter be referred to as the clerk of court for the parish of Orleans.” Section 5 goes further and deems every statutory reference to the criminal clerk to mean the surviving clerk. Both courts still sit. One clerk now serves both.
For research that consolidation is not a footnote, it is a custody change with a date on it. An Orleans criminal matter filed in 2019 was created, numbered and indexed by an office that no longer exists, and its paper reached the surviving clerk in May 2026 as a transferred series rather than as native civil-side inventory. So the practical question on an older Orleans file is not “which of the two clerks” any more; it is whether the index being searched is the consolidated one or the criminal clerk’s own, and whether the person answering the phone in the new office was working in the old one. The metro also has one fewer clerk of court than it did in April: seven parishes, seven clerks, where there were eight. A national aggregator that flattened the old split will not have noticed the merger either, and either mistake produces the same result – a person who comes back looking cleaner on paper than the record supports. Where the current address is likelier to sit in a court file than in a deed, the approach is the one set out in our guide to searching someone’s court records.
How an Orleans property is described
Orleans property is identified in a way no other American city uses. A New Orleans property file is pulled by municipal district number, square number and address – the square being the New Orleans term for a city block – rather than by a modern sequential parcel identifier. The Real Estate and Records office at City Hall keys its ownership files that way, and the deed citation you eventually want is retrieved through it. The assessment side has been simplified in living memory: New Orleans was, remarkably, a city with seven separate elected assessors, each running their own district, until voters replaced them with a single parish assessor. Anything written about Orleans assessment before that consolidation describes a fragmented system that no longer exists.
Seven Parishes, Eight District Courts
Every parish line is also a courthouse change.
Court files are frequently the freshest address in a whole locate, because a plaintiff, a sheriff or a judge has recently had to believe in one. In this metro there is no single place to look for them. Seven parishes are served by eight district courts – six judicial districts covering the six outlying parishes, plus Orleans, which runs a civil district court and a criminal district court as separate institutions – and the numbering tells you nothing intuitive about geography.
Orleans Parish is served by the Civil District Court and, separately, the Criminal District Court, and it is the one parish whose civil trial court is not usually referred to by a district number the way the others are. Jefferson Parish is the 24th Judicial District, seated at Gretna. St. Bernard Parish is the 34th Judicial District at Chalmette. St. Charles Parish is the 29th Judicial District at Hahnville. Plaquemines Parish is the 25th Judicial District, whose courthouse is at Pointe a la Hache with a clerk’s annex at Belle Chasse – a detail worth holding onto, because Belle Chasse is at the top of the parish near the city and Pointe a la Hache is a long way down the river from it. St. John the Baptist Parish is the 40th Judicial District, and its Clerk of Court sits at Edgard, on the west bank of the Mississippi, in a parish the river runs straight through.
St. James Parish is the outlier. It belongs to the 23rd Judicial District, which also covers Ascension and Assumption parishes – neither of which is in this metro at all – with judges riding circuit between courthouses, the St. James one at Convent. So a St. James filing sits in a court whose caseload and calendar are shaped substantially by two parishes outside the metropolitan area. A search that treats “the New Orleans courts” as one system will find that file last, if at all.
Jefferson Parish splits itself at the river
Jefferson deserves its own note, because it runs a court structure built around the Mississippi. Below the district court it operates two parish courts of limited jurisdiction: First Parish Court, at Metairie, covering the East Bank, created by the legislature in 1962; and Second Parish Court, at Gretna, covering the West Bank and Grand Isle, created in 1966. They handle smaller civil claims, misdemeanors and parish ordinance violations. For a locate that means an ordinary Jefferson Parish small-claims or eviction record may sit in one of two courts depending on which side of the river the matter arose – and “East Bank” and “West Bank” in this region are directional conventions of the river, not of the compass, so they cannot be inferred from a map coordinate.
The practical instruction we take from all of this is to establish which parish and which court a subject’s paper trail belongs to before doing anything else, rather than searching a single index harder. If the underlying matter is a money judgment, the enforcement sequence that follows is set out in our Louisiana-specific material on collecting a judgment in Louisiana.
The Metro Got Smaller in 2023
Most published guidance is describing a definition that was retired.
Ask what “the New Orleans metro” contains and you will get two different answers depending on how recently the source was written, because the federal delineation of metropolitan areas changed for this region. The New Orleans-Metairie metropolitan statistical area now consists of seven parishes: Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, Plaquemines and St. James.
St. Tammany Parish is no longer among them. Metropolitan areas are built by applying commuting criteria to a central county or parish and the ones around it, and on the current application of those criteria St. Tammany no longer joined to the south shore; starting with data released for 2023 it was split out into a metropolitan area of its own, the Slidell-Mandeville-Covington MSA, consisting of St. Tammany alone.
Two things follow, one clerical and one substantive.
The clerical one: a great deal of published material about this region still describes a north-shore metro, because most of it was written against the older delineation and has never been revisited. Any statistic, market comparison or “we cover the whole metro” claim written against the older definition is now measuring a different footprint than a reader assumes. We would rather name the seven parishes than gesture at a boundary that moved.
The substantive one is more interesting, and it is a warning against reading the change as a statement about where people are. A federal metro definition is a commuting measure. St. Tammany leaving the New Orleans MSA describes a change in where north-shore residents work, not a wall across Lake Pontchartrain. People, deeds, judgments and family still cross that lake constantly. So we hold the seven-parish definition for describing the metro precisely, and we hold no such boundary at all when following an actual subject. A trail that goes north over the causeway, west toward Baton Rouge, or out of state entirely gets followed to wherever the records are, and the statewide picture is the subject of our companion page on finding someone in Louisiana. Being exact about the metro and being flexible about the search are not in tension; conflating the two is how a locate stops at a line that only ever existed in a statistical table.
Which Office Holds Which Record
Seven parishes, seven Clerks of Court – eight before May 2026 – and the Orleans offices layered on top of them.
| The record you want | Where it sits in Orleans Parish | Where it sits in the other six parishes |
|---|---|---|
| Deeds and conveyances | Land Records Division, Clerk of Civil District Court Unique | That parish’s elected Clerk of Court. |
| Mortgages and privileges | Same division, mortgage records side | Parish mortgage records, per article 3346. |
| Notarial acts | Notarial Archives, acts from 1733 | Filed with the parish Clerk of Court. |
| Civil case files | Clerk of Civil District Court | Clerk of Court for the 24th, 34th, 29th, 25th, 40th or 23rd District. |
| Criminal case files | Clerk of Court for the Parish of Orleans – a separately elected criminal clerk until 3 May 2026 | The same single clerk who holds the civil files. |
| Smaller civil and ordinance matters | Handled within the Orleans court structure | In Jefferson, First Parish Court at Metairie or Second at Gretna. |
| Property identification | Municipal district, square and lot | Parish assessor parcel and legal description. |
The same table, walked: one debtor, six counters
An ordinary skip tracing file makes the table concrete faster than any description of it. Take a composite request we could receive tomorrow: a creditor holds a money judgment from the Orleans Civil District Court against a debtor whose only known address is an apartment in Metairie, three years stale. Here is the route through the offices above, and what each one actually hands back.
1. Civil case files, Orleans – Clerk of Court for the Parish of Orleans. Pull the suit itself. It returns the petition, the address at which the debtor was cited – usually the same stale one the client already has – counsel of record, and the piece the client almost never has: the sheriff’s return, which says whether anybody was actually found at that address or whether service failed there. A failed return is not a dead end. It is a dated statement by an officer that the subject was already gone, which tells you when to start looking.
2. Deeds and conveyances, Orleans – Land Records Division, 1340 Poydras Street. A name search returns nothing. Under article 3341 that is a finding about Orleans Parish and about no other ground in Louisiana. It closes one parish and says nothing about the remaining six.
3. Conveyances and then mortgages, Jefferson Parish Clerk of Court. Two separate books, because article 3346 splits them. Conveyances return an act of sale of a Metairie house two years after the judgment; the mortgage records return the loan that financed it and the name of the lender. One transaction, two entries, and a search that opened only the conveyance side would have found the house and missed the encumbrance on it.
4. Property identification – Jefferson Parish assessor. Returns the parcel, the legal description and the assessment mailing address. Note that the mailing address is not required to be the house; when it differs, the difference is itself a lead.
5. Smaller civil matters – First Parish Court, Metairie. The house is on the East Bank, so this is the First Parish Court and not the Second at Gretna. It returns a rule to show cause filed against the debtor as a lessee at a different Metairie street address, dated later than the act of sale – so the house they bought was let to somebody else while the debtor was renting elsewhere, and the freshest address on the file is the rental, not the property they own.
6. Criminal case files, Orleans. Now one clerk, but for anything before 3 May 2026 the file was raised in the abolished criminal clerk’s own series, and the pre-merger index has to be asked for as such.
Six counters in two parishes, and three dated addresses – the one the debtor was cited at and left, the house they bought, and the one they were renting when the rule to show cause was filed. None of the three contradicts the others, because each was true on its own date. The work is deciding which one is current and which office will still vouch for it, then fixing it to a parish: under Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure article 1291, service is made by the sheriff of the parish where service is to be made or of the parish where the action is pending, so getting the parish wrong does not merely slow the answer down. It hands your process to a sheriff who cannot act on it.
Civil Law Changes What a Record Is
Successions, forced heirs, usufruct, community property.
Louisiana’s civil-law inheritance does more than rename things. It creates categories of interest in property that have no clean equivalent elsewhere, and those categories show up constantly in locate and asset work – usually as an apparent contradiction in the record that turns out not to be one.
Succession, not probate
What other states call probate, Louisiana calls a succession, opened in the district court of the parish. Successions are one of the highest-yield surfaces in this kind of research, because they produce a document that names living people and, frequently, current addresses: the judgment of possession. In Orleans that judgment is among the instruments filed into the land records themselves, which means a succession can be discovered through a property search rather than a court search. Where the task is to identify and locate the people named in one, that is the work described on our page for heir location services.
Forced heirship and the legitime
Louisiana is the last state to keep forced heirship. Certain children cannot be disinherited and are entitled to a minimum share of the estate called the legitime, regardless of what the will says. The category is narrower than it once was – it turns on the child’s age at the parent’s death and on permanent incapacity – and the exact test is a question for a Louisiana attorney, not for us. What it means for research is straightforward: an estate here can have interested parties who do not appear in the will, and a search that reads only the testament may miss the person who actually holds a claim.
Usufruct and naked ownership
The interest that most often confuses an out-of-state reader is usufruct. A surviving spouse commonly holds a usufruct over the decedent’s share of community property – the right to use it and take its fruits – while the children hold the naked ownership underneath. So a Louisiana title search can show a house whose owner does not live in it and whose occupant does not own it, with both positions entirely regular. Reading that as a transfer, a fraud or a stale record is a mistake we see made regularly on files that reach us second-hand.
Community property
Louisiana is a community property state, so property acquired during a marriage is presumed community and a spouse’s interest may not appear on the face of an instrument. On asset-facing work that presumption changes which names are worth searching and which recorded interests are worth reading twice; the rules themselves are laid out on our page covering Louisiana community property law.
We report what these records show and identify the interests they create. We do not opine on whether a legitime is owed, whether a usufruct has terminated, or what any of it entitles anyone to. Those are legal questions for your attorney, and this page is general information rather than legal advice.
How New Orleans Locates Go Wrong
Six failure patterns particular to this metro.
One Parish, Called Statewide
A land search that reached one set of parish books and was reported as a Louisiana search.
Asking a Clerk Who Cannot Help
An Orleans deed request sent to an office that has never held Orleans deeds.
The Pre-Merger Criminal Index
An older Orleans criminal matter searched only in the index consolidated in May 2026, never in the abolished criminal clerk’s own series.
Usufruct Read as a Transfer
An owner who does not occupy and an occupant who does not own, mistaken for a bad record.
Wrong Bank of the River
A Jefferson matter filed at Metairie hunted for at Gretna, or the reverse.
A Retired Metro Definition
Coverage scoped to a footprint the federal delineation stopped using in 2023.
How We Run a Seven-Parish Locate
Fix the parish, name the office, cross the lines, cite the source.
Establish the Parish
Which parish a subject’s paper trail belongs to, before any index is queried.
Name the Right Office
The parish Clerk of Court, or in Orleans the consolidated clerk, its pre-2026 criminal series and the Land Records Division.
Work the Adjoining Books
The remaining metro parishes, then the north shore and other states as the trail requires.
Attribute Every Finding
Each conclusion tied to the office it came from, with the gaps stated rather than smoothed.
Our Remit and Its Limits
What a research firm will and will not do on a Louisiana file.
Several firms competing for this search open with an investigator’s license. We do not, because we do not hold one and do not claim one. People Locator Skip Tracing is a public-records research practice that does skip tracing, not a licensed private investigative agency. What we bring to a New Orleans matter is fluency in the seven-parish filing system set out above, together with lawfully licensed data used only where a permissible purpose exists. We confirm that purpose before a file opens. We do not conduct surveillance. We never pretext – no calling a subject’s employer under a false identity, no impersonating a relative, no misrepresenting who we are to get a record released. We do not reach into anyone’s private financial accounts or their contents. Every fact we return can be pointed back at a named custodian – a parish Clerk of Court, an instrument in the Land Records Division on Poydras, a district court docket, a licensed source – and it holds when the other side asks where it came from.
We are not a consumer reporting agency
It needs saying plainly on a New Orleans records page, because a steady share of the people who arrive here are Orleans and Jefferson landlords hunting a tenant who left without a forwarding address. Louisiana gives that situation a particular shape. An eviction here begins with a written notice to vacate which Code of Civil Procedure article 4701 says must allow the lessee “not less than five days from the date of its delivery,” and if the premises are not surrendered the lessor proceeds by rule to show cause under article 4731, which “shall state the grounds upon which eviction is sought” – filed, in Jefferson Parish, at First Parish Court in Metairie or Second Parish Court in Gretna according to which bank of the river the premises sit on. So the landlord who reaches us usually arrives holding a real court record with a name, an address and a date on it. That is exactly the situation in which the line below matters most. People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we produce is a consumer report. Our reports are general public-records research. They are not assembled, and may not be used, for any purpose covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act – that includes tenant screening or any decision about a rental application, employment or promotion decisions, credit and lending eligibility, and insurance underwriting. If your need is to evaluate an applicant rather than to locate a person who has already gone, that is FCRA-regulated work and it belongs with a consumer reporting agency that performs it under the statute’s requirements, including the applicant’s disclosure and adverse-action rights. Ask us and we will say so and point you on. Locating a former tenant so that a Louisiana eviction judgment or a money judgment for unpaid rent can be enforced, or so that process can be served on them, is a different question, and one we can take.
Requests we decline
Seven parish books, notarial acts running back to 1733, and a judgment of possession that prints the names and often the addresses of living heirs: Louisiana keeps a record open enough that the limit on using it has to be stated out loud rather than assumed. We decline requests where the purpose appears to be to reach someone who moved to get away from the requester. That covers stalking, harassment, intimidation, and any attempt to circumvent a protective order or a custody arrangement. We do not accept work against a protected party, and where the situation is unclear we ask, rather than proceeding and hoping. Louisiana takes the same position institutionally: the Address Confidentiality Program run by the Secretary of State under Louisiana Revised Statutes 44:52 gives a victim of abuse, sexual assault or stalking a substitute address to use with state and local agencies, precisely so that the public record does not become the thing that leads an abuser to a door. That is the law deliberately closing a trail, and we do not go looking for ways around it. Declining a file costs us a job; the alternative costs somebody a great deal more.
Where our work stops and a lawyer’s begins
On a collection matter we can locate the debtor and identify immovable property and other recorded interests they hold in the parishes we searched. What is then done with that – the writ, the seizure, the garnishment, the revival of a judgment – is your attorney’s instrument and your attorney’s judgment call, exercised under Louisiana procedure. On service, we develop and verify an address and fix it to a parish, because article 1291 makes service the job of the sheriff of the parish where service is to be made or of the parish where the action is pending, except as otherwise provided by law. An address that is right about the street and wrong about the parish is not a small error in this state; it is handed to an officer without authority over it. In Orleans that fixing also means saying whether the matter belongs on the Civil District Court or the Criminal District Court docket, and, for anything filed before May 2026, which clerk’s series it was indexed in. Making the attempt is not our role, and whether an attempt amounted to good service under Louisiana procedure is a question for the court and for your attorney. We supply the facts and name the office each one came from; what gets filed on the strength of them is your counsel’s call.
Who Sends Us Louisiana Files
The people who need the parish map read for them.
Civil District Court Counsel
Parties and witnesses across seven parishes
Judgment Creditors
Debtors and recorded immovables
Process Servers
Addresses fixed to the right parish
Succession Counsel
Heirs named in a judgment of possession
Title and Land Researchers
Chains that cross the 2014 merger
Separated Families
Relatives lost across the parishes
What those six requests share is not a missing name. It is that Louisiana keeps the answer in more places than one query can reach: seven Clerks of Court, seven parish assessors, eight district courts, Jefferson’s two parish courts either side of the river, and – in Orleans alone – a Land Records Division holding what a Clerk of Court holds everywhere else in the state, with a criminal series that changed custodians in May 2026. Tell us the name, whatever address was last believed, any identifiers sitting in your file, and the purpose the search serves; if the matter is already in suit, the parish and the docket number save us a step. Most files get an initial read back to the client within 24 hours. One that has to be carried through several parishes’ conveyance and mortgage books takes longer only because each book is genuinely being opened rather than assumed.
What We Promise on a Louisiana File
Every answer we return names the office behind it – a parish Clerk of Court, the Land Records Division on Poydras, a district court file, a licensed data source – and states which parishes were actually reached and which were not. On an Orleans matter opened before May 2026 it also says which clerk’s series the file came out of. Where the record supports two readings, you get both rather than the tidier one. We find and verify; the legal calls belong to you and your attorney. Lawful records research since 2004, under a permissible purpose, with no pretexting and no access to private financial accounts.
Frequently Asked Questions About New Orleans Locates
Where are New Orleans deeds and mortgages actually recorded?
In the Land Records Division of the Clerk of Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans, on Poydras Street – not with a parish Clerk of Court, which is where they sit in the rest of Louisiana. That division was created by consolidating three older offices: the Conveyance Office, founded in 1827, the Recorder of Mortgages, and the Custodian of Notarial Archives, with the merger completed in February 2014. Sales, mortgages, building contracts and judgments of possession are all filed there. A title history crossing 2014 crosses that administrative seam and should be read with it in mind.
Does it really matter that Louisiana has parishes rather than counties?
Yes, and not only as a naming convention. Under Louisiana Civil Code article 3341 the recording of an instrument is effective only for property in the parish where it was recorded, and article 3346 routes mortgages into that parish’s mortgage records and everything else into its conveyance records. There is no statewide land index to fall back on, so an ownership question genuinely has to be put to each parish separately. Anyone reporting a single “Louisiana property search” has searched a compilation, and whichever parish it missed is invisible rather than empty.
Which parishes make up the New Orleans metro area?
Under the current federal delineation the New Orleans-Metairie metropolitan statistical area is seven parishes: Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, Plaquemines and St. James. St. Tammany Parish was removed under the commuting criteria the delineation applies, and from data released for 2023 it became its own Slidell-Mandeville-Covington metropolitan area. That is a statistical boundary, not a search boundary – we follow a subject across the lake, or out of Louisiana, wherever the records lead.
Do you cover the courts in all seven parishes?
Yes, and they are eight separate district courts. Orleans has its own Civil District Court and, unusually, a separate Criminal District Court; each elected its own clerk until Act 15 of 2026 abolished the criminal clerk’s office at the end of 3 May 2026 and moved its records to the civil clerk, now the clerk of court for the parish of Orleans. Jefferson is the 24th Judicial District at Gretna, St. Bernard the 34th at Chalmette, St. Charles the 29th at Hahnville, Plaquemines the 25th with its courthouse at Pointe a la Hache, and St. John the Baptist the 40th, whose Clerk of Court sits at Edgard. St. James belongs to the 23rd Judicial District, shared with Ascension and Assumption parishes outside the metro. Jefferson additionally splits smaller matters between First Parish Court at Metairie and Second Parish Court at Gretna.
Can you research property and other assets in the New Orleans area?
Yes, through public records and licensed data. That means recorded conveyances and mortgages in each parish we search, notarial acts, successions and judgments of possession, and parish assessment records. In Orleans a property is identified by municipal district, square and lot rather than by a modern parcel number, and assessment there is now handled by a single parish assessor in place of the seven separately elected assessors the city used to have. Private financial accounts and their contents stay outside what we touch, and we state which parishes were covered.
What is a succession, and can you find heirs through one?
A succession is what Louisiana calls the process other states call probate, opened in the district court of the parish. It is a rich source for locating people, because the judgment of possession names those who take and often carries addresses, and in Orleans that judgment is filed into the land records themselves. Two civil-law features shape what you find: Louisiana still has forced heirship, so certain children hold a minimum share whatever the will says, and a surviving spouse commonly holds a usufruct while the children hold naked ownership. Whether any of that entitles someone to anything is a question for a Louisiana attorney.
Is skip tracing legal in Louisiana, and are you licensed investigators?
Locating someone from public records and lawfully licensed data, for a purpose that is genuinely legitimate, is lawful work, and we establish a permissible purpose before a file opens. This is a public-records research practice, not a licensed private investigative agency, and we make no investigative-license claim even though several competitors in this market lead with one. We never pretext or misrepresent who we are. Our results are general public-records research, not a consumer report – we are not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing we produce may be used for tenant screening, employment, credit or insurance decisions governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
How quickly can you locate someone in the New Orleans metro?
Most workable requests get an initial read back to the client within 24 hours. A file that has to be worked through several parish indexes, or that crosses into a court whose records sit under a different clerk, takes longer – not because it is queued, but because each parish’s books have to be opened separately and the result checked against a second source. You receive the address, the office that produced it, and a plain statement of anything still unresolved rather than a confident-looking result we cannot stand behind.
Open a File on the Right Parish
Send the name, the last address you have, and the purpose your search serves. We will fix the parish, go to the office that actually holds the record – a Clerk of Court, the Land Records Division on Poydras, a district or parish court docket – work the neighboring parishes’ books where the trail crosses a line, and come back with an address we can attribute to the counter it came from and to the parish whose sheriff can act on it. Reach us through our contact page if you would rather talk it through first.
Open a Parish File →
