Where Texas Keeps the Records That Locate a Person
A Texas locate is decided before any searching starts, by choosing which counties to open. There is no statewide index of anything here: the Texas State Law Library states flatly that the state has no single database of court records and that each court keeps its own. Land sits with one elected official, the County Clerk, whom the state constitution calls the recorder of the county. District-court case files sit with a different elected official, the District Clerk. In counties below eight thousand people the constitution allows those two jobs to be held by one person, so even the number of offices you are dealing with is a per-county question. This page is that map: who holds what, what the public court portal leaves out, and where the record trail genuinely thins. Every matter here opens on a stated permissible purpose. Researching public records is what this firm does. Read what follows as general information, not as legal advice.
The Short Version
Texas skip tracing is the work of reading a records system built county by county and never centralised. Deeds, marriage licences and military discharges sit with the County Clerk, the constitution’s recorder of the county. District-court case files sit with the separately elected District Clerk. No single search covers all of that: re:SearchTX reaches part of it on a free subscription and is explicitly not complete across every county, and Texas court case records fall outside the Public Information Act, so the open-records request most people reach for first is the wrong instrument. We work that map lawfully, under a permissible purpose, through public records and licensed data. General information about public records, not legal advice.
Two Clerks, Sometimes One
The office split that decides where a Texas search begins.
Texas puts the two things a locate needs most into the hands of two different elected people, and it gets there by way of a nineteenth-century constitution that is still operative. Article V, section 20 of the Texas Constitution as published by the Texas Legislative Council creates the County Clerk in terms that have barely moved since 1876: elected for each county by the qualified voters, holding office for four years, serving as clerk of the County and Commissioners Courts and, in the constitution’s own phrase, recorder of the county. That last clause is the one that governs a locate. It is why a Texas deed, a Texas mortgage, a Texas mechanic’s lien and a Texas oil and gas lease all land in the same county office, and it is why nobody in Texas has ever had a Register of Deeds or a County Auditor to call.
The second office was created separately. Travis County describes its own District Clerk, in the county’s published description of the office, as a constitutional office created by Article V, section 9, elected every four years, whose function is to be recorder and custodian of every pleading, instrument and paper forming part of any legal cause of action in the district courts. Not land. Not vital records. Litigation. That office indexes and secures the court’s records, collects filing fees, holds funds in litigation and money awarded to minors, coordinates jury panel selection and manages the court registry. If your matter is a lawsuit, a divorce, a family or custody case or a legal name change, the District Clerk is where the paper is.
The proviso almost nobody writing about Texas mentions
Read section 20 to its end and it does something unexpected. Having created the County Clerk, it adds a proviso: in counties having a population of less than 8,000 persons there may be an election of a single Clerk, who shall perform the duties of District and County Clerks. So the tidy statement that Texas always runs two clerks is not accurate at the bottom of the population range, and a searcher who insists on finding two offices in a very small county may be hunting for one that was never elected.
How many counties sit below that line is checkable, so we checked it instead of repeating a figure. Working from the Census county population estimates for 2024, 78 of the 254 Texas counties have fewer than 8,000 residents, and 130 have fewer than 20,000. The smallest are Loving with 48 people, King with 215, Kenedy with 330, Borden with 557, McMullen with 565, Kent with 703, Terrell with 718 and Roberts with 837. Those are not curiosities. Several are producing counties in the Permian and the Panhandle where a great deal of recorded mineral activity happens against a very small resident population, which is exactly the combination that makes a recorded instrument more informative than a residential database.
Two cautions travel with that number, and they are the difference between a useful fact and a wrong one. First, the constitution says a combined clerk may be elected, not that one must be, so the count of counties under 8,000 is emphatically not a count of counties running a combined office. Second, we tested it rather than inferring it: Terrell County, at 718 residents, lists a County Clerk and a District Clerk as separate offices in its own county directory. The permission exists and plenty of small counties have declined to use it. The working rule is to confirm which offices a specific county actually runs before addressing a request to one of them, and that confirmation costs a phone call rather than a wasted week.
What the recorder of the county actually holds
The best way to see how broad a Texas County Clerk’s holdings are is to read one. Tarrant County publishes its County Clerk divisions in the office’s own words, and the list runs longer than most out-of-state guides suggest. Real estate records cover deeds, plats, liens, powers of attorney and oil and gas leases. Vital records make the office the registrar of birth and death records, the issuer and keeper of every marriage licence, and the recorder of assumed name certificates and military discharge records. The same office runs the county courts at law civil docket, the probate courts including guardianships and mental health matters, and the county criminal courts where misdemeanours and appeals are filed. It also maintains a marks and brands register and a property fraud alert service.
Nearly every item on that list is somewhere a person can leave a trace. An assumed name certificate is a small business trading under a name, filed by an individual, carrying an address. A military discharge record filed for benefits purposes belongs to someone with a reason to stay reachable. A marriage licence changes a surname, which is the single most common reason a Texas subject appears to evaporate out of a database that only ever knew one spelling of a name. And an oil and gas lease, recorded in the county’s real estate index like any other instrument, ties a named lessor to a specific tract in a specific county, which across the Permian and the Eagle Ford is frequently the most durable link a mobile person has left behind. On a locate where somebody has simply stopped appearing, that one document resolves more Texas files than any other: the county that issued the licence is often nowhere near the county the search began in, and the name it created is the name every later record carries.
The corollary is the trap. Ask a County Clerk for a district-court file and you will be told, correctly, that the office does not have it. Ask a District Clerk for a deed and you get the same answer in reverse. Neither office is being unhelpful. They hold different things because two different sections of the constitution told them to, and a request addressed to the wrong one does not get forwarded.
No Single Texas Index
What re:SearchTX reaches, and the four things it does not.
Start with the sentence that reframes everything else. The Texas State Law Library, in its own guide to Texas court records, puts it without hedging: the state maintains no one database in which every Texas court record can be searched, and responsibility for keeping records rests with each individual court. That is not a complaint about technology. It is the design. Every proposition on this page follows from it, and it is the reason a competent Texas search opens with a decision about jurisdiction rather than a query.
What exists instead is a set of partial systems, and knowing the edge of each one is the actual skill. re:SearchTX is the closest thing to a statewide civil index. The Library’s description is precise and worth reading closely: it offers a free subscription plan letting you search records from multiple counties and courts, it includes civil cases from district, county and probate courts, it may not have all records from all counties in Texas, you can find case information and preview certain documents, and access to full documents and other features may be available for a fee. Four separate limits sit inside that one paragraph. It is civil, so the criminal docket is not there. It is a subscription even at the free tier, so it is an account rather than an open index. Its county coverage is expressly incomplete. And the documents themselves, as opposed to the case information, may sit behind a charge.
The appellate side runs on something different again. Cases from the Texas Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals and the intermediate courts of appeals are searchable through the Texas Appeals Management and eFiling System, usually called TAMES, and files available online there can be viewed free. Anything not online is a request to the specific court. So a Texas subject with a trial-court matter and an appeal has generated records in two systems that do not talk to each other.
The exclusion that changes how you ask
Here is the fact that separates a Texas records request that works from one that gets politely refused. Access to Texas court case records is governed by common law, statutory law and court rules, and, in the Library’s flat statement of the judiciary’s own open-records position, a Texas court’s case records sit outside both the Public Information Act of this state and the federal Freedom of Information Act. Most people approaching a Texas court file for the first time reach for a public-information request, because that is the instrument Texas is famous for and it works beautifully against a state agency or a city. Against a district clerk holding a case file it is simply the wrong tool, and the refusal it earns is correct rather than obstructive. Court records are reached through the court’s own rules and the clerk’s own process. When the file you need sits behind a district clerk’s counter rather than a portal, order a Texas locate and we request it through that process and corroborate it against the county’s recorded instruments.
Several other categories of court record are closed or partly closed, and each one is a place a search legitimately stops. Some records are sealed or restricted to the parties, which the Library notes typically covers family cases and cases involving minors. The standard route for sealing a civil record is Rule 76a of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, though other law can apply. On the criminal side, records can be sealed by an order of nondisclosure or removed altogether by expunction, and an expunged matter is not merely hidden from you, it is gone. Documents that remain public are frequently redacted for privacy. None of that is an obstacle to be worked around. It is the boundary of what a lawful search returns, and a report that pretends otherwise is worth nothing.
Records get destroyed, and absence is not evidence
The last limit is the one that silently produces wrong conclusions. How long a Texas court keeps a case file varies by court and by record type. Some are kept permanently; many are destroyed a set number of years after the case closes, under the local government retention schedules published by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission for district courts, county courts and justice and municipal courts. Individual courts vary from the recommendations, so the only reliable answer for a specific file is the court holding it.
The practical consequence deserves stating plainly, because a great deal of confident nonsense is written on the other side of it: failing to find a Texas case is not proof that no case existed. It may have been sealed, it may have been expunged, it may sit in one of the counties re:SearchTX does not cover, it may never have been digitised, or its retention period may have run out and the file may have been destroyed. We report what a search reached and what it could not, separately, which is the only honest way to hand over a negative result. That discipline carries into every matter we run, including the statewide sourcing described on our companion page about finding someone in Texas.
One narrower rule is worth carrying because it comes up constantly in rental matters: Texas has no general process for removing or sealing an eviction from a person’s record, apart from a few rare situations. An eviction judgment in Texas is durable in a way that a criminal record subject to nondisclosure is not.
Watch: Reading a Texas County
Which clerk, which court, which index.
Watch Overview
Where the People Actually Are
Eight counties, half the state, and 246 more.
Texas has 254 counties and the population inside them is distributed about as unevenly as any state manages. On the 2024 Census county estimates, the eight largest are Harris at 5,009,302, Dallas at 2,656,028, Tarrant at 2,230,708, Bexar at 2,127,737, Travis at 1,363,767, Collin at 1,254,658, Denton at 1,045,120 and Fort Bend at 958,434. Those eight sum to 16,645,754 people against a state total of 31,290,831 across all 254 counties, so slightly over half of Texas lives inside eight of its county record systems. That is the arithmetic behind the whole search strategy, and it is shown here rather than rounded into a claim, because a reader should be able to check it.
Each of those eight is worth naming for a reason rather than listed for effect. Harris is the single densest concentration of Texas filings of every kind and the default first county on a Houston-area matter. Dallas and Tarrant are two separate county governments with two separate clerks sitting inside one continuous urban area, which is why a subject who moves from Oak Cliff to Arlington changes records jurisdiction without meaningfully changing city. Bexar anchors San Antonio and the counties feeding it. Travis holds Austin and, because it also hosts the state government, an unusual concentration of people whose employment record trail is a state one. Collin and Denton are the suburban counties north of Dallas that absorbed most of that metro’s growth, and they are the two most common places a Dallas County subject is actually found. Fort Bend plays the same role south-west of Houston. A Dallas-only or Harris-only search is the most common single reason a findable Texas person reads as missing.
Because those metros are where most matters land, we maintain separate pages that go deeper than a statewide view can: the county and court detail for skip tracing in Houston, the two-county split behind Dallas and Fort Worth locates, and the central-corridor material on searching Austin and San Antonio. This page stays on the statewide question: which office, which index, which limits.
The other half of Texas
The remaining 246 counties hold 14,645,077 people, and they behave nothing like the first eight. On the same 2024 estimates, 130 of the 254 have fewer than 20,000 residents and 78 have fewer than 8,000. At the far end, Loving County has 48 residents, the smallest of the 254, with King at 215, Kenedy at 330 and Borden at 557 close behind. A county of that size does not run a searchable online index because there is no volume to justify one, and in practice records work there is done by telephone and in person with people who know every name in the county.
The State Law Library names seven counties as having online databases for both district-clerk and county-clerk records, and for recording separately: Bexar, Collin, Dallas, Denton, Harris, Tarrant and Travis. Its wording is that larger counties with online databases include those seven, so there are certainly others and the list should not be read as exhaustive. But those seven alone account for 15,687,320 residents out of 31,290,831. Roughly half of Texas is covered by county systems a searcher can reach from a desk. The rest is a different job, done a different way, and any vendor describing a uniform statewide search is describing something that does not exist.
Geography compounds it. The Permian counties in the west, the Panhandle counties in the north, the Rio Grande Valley and the border counties, and the ranch country between the metros each move people on their own logic, and none of them share an index. A rig hand who works out of Midland and sleeps in Reeves County appears in neither county’s residential data reliably, but he may appear on a recorded instrument, a marriage licence or a JP-court file. That is the trade a Texas locate constantly makes: less database, more record.
Choosing Which Counties to Search
The decision that is made before any searching happens.
In a state with a unified court system, the hard part of a locate is the search. In Texas, the hard part comes earlier: deciding which of 254 jurisdictions to open, in what order, and when to stop. Get that wrong and no amount of diligence inside the wrong county rescues it. The rest of this section is how that decision is actually made.
Follow the transaction, not the address
Texas rewards a search that chases recorded events rather than reported addresses. A deed names a grantee. A lien names a debtor. An oil and gas lease names a lessor with a mineral interest in a described tract. An assumed name certificate names a person behind a trading name. A marriage licence names both parties and produces the surname change that breaks so many database matches. Every one of those is in a County Clerk’s index, keyed to the county where the property or the event sits rather than to where a person sleeps, which makes them stable in exactly the situations a residential address is not. On an energy-corridor matter, or in the small counties generally, this is usually the more productive line of attack. It is also how researching what a Texas judgment could actually reach has to be done here: with no statewide index to sweep, the county list is built out of the transactions a person has already left behind, and a mineral interest recorded in a county they never lived in counts for as much as a deed in one they did.
Watch the courts a case moves between
Texas trial courts are tiered in a way that moves a file across offices. Justice of the peace courts and municipal courts run their own records, and neither is a district or county court. When a case is appealed out of a JP or municipal court, it may be transferred to a county court as part of a new trial rather than a review on the record, which means the county-court file is a fresh proceeding with its own paperwork and its own service addresses. A small-claims matter that started with a JP therefore can produce records in two different clerks’ offices in the same county, and a search that only checks one of them will conclude, wrongly, that the dispute went quiet.
Treat a court address as evidence, with a date on it
Court files are frequently the freshest address in a Texas picture, because somebody had a legal obligation to state one and a process server or a judge treated it as good on a specific day. What makes the date load-bearing here rather than incidental is that Texas gives a searcher almost nothing to re-check it against: no single statewide court-record database, 254 separate sets of clerks, and a tiering that can leave one dispute with two service addresses months apart in two offices of the same county after a JP matter is retried in a county court. The age of an address cannot be refreshed by querying one more system, because there is no one more system; it has to be re-established in whichever county the person actually appeared in. So we record when an address was asserted, by whom and in which court, and we say all three in the result, because on a Texas file the age of an address is usually more diagnostic than its source.
Know when the record simply is not there
Four separate mechanisms remove a Texas record from reach: sealing under Rule 76a, party-only restriction in family and juvenile matters, nondisclosure or expunction on the criminal side, and destruction under a retention schedule after a case closes. Add the counties re:SearchTX does not cover and the counties with nothing online at all, and a nil return can mean six different things. Distinguishing them is most of what a competent negative report is for. Where a matter is a judgment and the question becomes what happens after the person is found, the mechanics differ again and are set out in our guide to collecting a judgment in Texas.
Who Sends Us Texas Files
The people who need the county map read for them.
District Court Trial Counsel
Parties and witnesses across separate county dockets
Abstract-of-Judgment Holders
The debtor, and the county the real property sits in
Citation Servers on a Return Date
A confirmed address in the right county, before the deadline
Texas Rental Housing Operators
Property managers tracing a departed resident on a balance
Probate and Mineral Title Work
Heirs and lessors named on instruments in far counties
Texas Families Out of Touch
A relative last known in a county nobody remembers
What these clients share is that they already have the name. What they do not have is the map: which of the county’s elected officials holds the record that answers their question, whether that county puts anything online at all, and whether the person is still in that county. Send the name, the most recent Texas address anyone has actually vouched for, any identifiers sitting in your file, and the lawful reason behind the request. A first read on a workable Texas request normally reaches you within 24 hours, and a file that has to be worked across several counties takes longer only because the corroboration is genuinely being done rather than assumed.
One boundary belongs here rather than buried at the bottom, because it applies directly to two of the audiences above. Our Texas output is not a consumer report, and this firm is not a consumer reporting agency. If the Texas question in front of you is whether to rent to a rental applicant, whether to hire someone, or how to price credit or insurance, our findings cannot answer it and must not be put to that use. Tenant screening, employment screening and credit or insurance underwriting are regulated activities that demand a consumer reporting agency. We are not one. A property manager tracing a former resident who left owing a balance is a different question entirely, and that one we can take. The line is not who is asking; it is whether the answer will be used to make an eligibility decision about a consumer.
Which Texas Office Holds It
The map in one table, with the limit on each row.
| What you need | Which Texas office holds it | The limit on it |
|---|---|---|
| Deeds, liens, oil and gas leases | County Clerk, as recorder of the county Constitutional | Indexed by county of the land, not by residence. |
| District-court case files | District Clerk, a separate elected office | Civil, criminal, family, divorce, name changes only. |
| County-court and probate files | County Clerk | Includes appeals arriving from JP and municipal courts. |
| Marriage licences, DBAs, discharges | County Clerk vital records | Filed where the event happened, not where they live now. |
| A multi-county civil search | re:SearchTX, free subscription tier | Civil only; not all records from all counties; documents may cost. |
| Appellate filings | TAMES, the appeals eFiling system | Appellate courts only; offline files are a court request. |
| An open-records request for a case file | Not available. Texas court case records fall outside the Public Information Act and the federal FOIA; access runs through court rules and the clerk. | |
Read that table down the right-hand column and the shape of a Texas locate becomes obvious. There is no row where a single lookup answers a whole question, and the last row is the one that surprises people most. Assembling those partial answers into one defensible statement about where a person is, sourced office by office, is the core of our skip tracing services, and in Texas the assembly is genuinely most of the work.
The One Texas Request We Refuse
Where the state has deliberately closed the trail.
Everything above this section explains how findable people are in Texas. This section is about the case where the state has decided they should not be, and where we agree with it.
Inside its Crime Victims’ Services division, the Office of the Attorney General operates an Address Confidentiality Program for this state. In the agency’s own description, it helps survivors of family violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and stalking keep their addresses out of public records, and eligibility also extends to victims of child abduction. An applicant qualifies with a protective order or a temporary injunction, or with documentation of the crime such as police reports, medical records or court documents.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it explains what you are actually looking at when you hit one. A participant is given a substitute post office box address to use in place of the real one. Mail goes to the programme first and is forwarded on, which the Attorney General notes can delay delivery by three to four days. The substitute address lets a participant receive mail, enrol children in school, get a driver’s licence and register to vote without those transactions writing a real street address into a public file. Participation runs three years at a time and is renewable by fresh application. A participant must notify the programme at least ten days before moving or changing a name, and if mail comes back four times, participation can end. The address is disclosed only under a court order, to law enforcement for an investigation, to the Department of Family and Protective Services for an investigation, to the Department of State Health Services for official notifications, with the participant’s consent, or as needed to run the programme.
That is the law deliberately breaking the record chain this page has spent several thousand words explaining, and we do not go looking for a way around it. An address that resolves to a substitute post office box of that kind is a boundary, not an obstacle to be routed around with a different data source. When a request looks like a route back to a person who left specifically to get clear of whoever is asking, we turn it down and tell the requester that is the reason. The signals are consistent: a permissible purpose that does not survive one direct question, no court process behind the request, urgency attached specifically to the street address rather than to the matter, or an account of the relationship that shifts when asked about twice. We would rather turn away a legitimate client who explained themselves badly than complete one search that puts a person fleeing abuse back in front of someone they escaped.
The programme’s own caution belongs here too, because it is honest in a way that flatters nobody: the Attorney General says plainly that the programme is one part of staying safe, and that it does not guarantee safety or replace other safety measures. A survivor’s protection rests on more than a substitute mailing address, and part of that structure is that people in our line of work do not treat the confidentiality as a puzzle. If you are the person at risk rather than the person searching, the programme takes applications directly and works with advocates who can help prepare one.
How a Texas File Runs
Scope the counties, work the two clerks, corroborate, source it.
Scope the Counties First
Which of the 254 the evidence actually points at, in what order, and why.
Work Both Clerks
County Clerk for recorded instruments and county-court files; District Clerk for district-court files.
Date Every Address
Who asserted it, in what filing, on what day, and how far the confidence extends.
Name the Source, State the Gap
Each finding traced to the office it came from, with the counties we could not reach said out loud.
How Texas Locates Go Wrong
Six failure patterns specific to this state’s records.
Deed Office, Docket Question
Weeks waiting on a County Clerk for a district-court file that office never held.
The Public Information Act Request
An open-records request aimed at a court file that the Act does not reach at all.
The Suburban County Line
A Dallas or Harris search that never reached Collin, Denton or Fort Bend.
Reading re:SearchTX as Complete
A nil result treated as proof, on a civil-only index that does not cover every county.
The Surname That Changed
A database match that failed because a marriage licence in another county rewrote the name.
The Destroyed File
An absence read as innocence, when a retention schedule had already disposed of the record.
Where a Texas Records Firm Stops
The remit, stated before you engage rather than after.
Most of the Texas field competing for this search opens with a licence. What this firm does is research public records and trace people. What we bring to a Texas matter is fluency in the county-by-county filing system set out above, together with licensed data drawn on only where the law permits the request.
Permissible purpose comes first, on every Texas matter, before anything is opened. We ask what the request is for and what lawful basis sits behind it, and we expect an answer that would survive being written down. A request that cannot state one does not get worked. That is not a formality we perform once at intake; it governs which sources may lawfully be touched for a given matter, and it is why the same name can be researched for one client and declined for another.
Three things we will not do, whatever the fee. We do not reach into private financial account contents: recorded property, judgments, liens and other public filings are open ground, and the inside of a person’s bank account is not. And we do not conduct surveillance or physical pursuit. If a finding cannot be pointed back to a named Texas office, a filed instrument or a licensed source you could go and read for yourself, it does not go in the report.
What we hand you is research, not a consumer report, and this firm has never operated as a consumer reporting agency. Our Texas findings must not be used to decide a rental application, to screen a job applicant, or to grant or price credit or insurance. Those decisions require a consumer reporting agency, which we are not. Where that is what a matter needs, we say so at intake rather than after invoicing.
We also do not give legal advice, and this page does not contain any. It is general information about how Texas public records are organised. What a judgment creditor may do once a debtor is located, how an abstract of judgment behaves against Texas property, and what portion of a person’s earnings is reachable in this state are legal questions for your counsel, though the general framework on the last of those is summarised on our page about Texas wage garnishment rules. Where the point is service, our job ends at a verified current address; the citation itself goes out through a process server, a person the court authorises, or the constable or sheriff, and we neither serve it nor offer a view on whether service was good.
Last, a scoping note that keeps us honest. When a Texas file closes, you get what we found, where each finding came from by name of office, and what we could not reach. If four counties were searched and two more should have been but had nothing online and no response by phone, that goes in the report. A locate that hides its own gaps is not a locate; it is a guess with a letterhead.
Our Commitment on Texas Files
Every Texas answer we return names the office it came from by title and county, and states which counties we reached and which we did not. Where an address rests on a court filing, you are told which filing and what date it was asserted, so you can judge how much weight it carries. Where the record runs out, we say the record runs out rather than dressing a database echo as a finding. We locate and document; the legal decisions stay with you and your counsel.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between the County Clerk and the District Clerk in Texas?
They are two separately elected constitutional officers holding different records. The County Clerk is described in Article V, section 20 of the Texas Constitution as clerk of the County and Commissioners Courts and recorder of the county, so that office holds deeds, liens, oil and gas leases, marriage licences, assumed name certificates and military discharges, plus the case files of the county courts, county courts at law and probate courts. The District Clerk, under Article V, section 9, is custodian of every pleading and paper in any cause of action in the district courts: civil suits, criminal cases, family and custody matters, divorces and legal name changes. Addressing a request to the wrong one does not get it forwarded.
Does every Texas county really have two separate clerks?
No, and this is where most published guidance is wrong. Article V, section 20 ends with a proviso allowing counties of fewer than 8,000 people to elect a single clerk performing the duties of both District and County Clerks. On the 2024 Census estimates, 78 of the 254 Texas counties fall below that line. The provision is permissive rather than mandatory, so it licenses no assumption either way: Terrell County has 718 residents and still lists both offices separately in its own directory. Confirm which offices a specific county actually runs before sending anything.
Is re:SearchTX free, and does it cover the whole state?
It has a free subscription plan, and it does not cover the whole state. The Texas State Law Library describes re:SearchTX as offering a free subscription plan searching records from multiple counties and courts, including civil cases from district, county and probate courts, while stating that it may not have all records from all counties in Texas. You can find case information and preview certain documents there, but access to full documents and other features may carry a fee. Treat it as a useful partial civil index, never as a statewide answer, and never as evidence that no case exists.
Can I use a Texas Public Information Act request to get a court file?
No. Common law, statutory law and court rules govern access to Texas court case records, and those case records fall outside the reach of this state’s Public Information Act as well as outside the federal Freedom of Information Act. The Act is a powerful instrument against a state agency or a city, and it is simply the wrong instrument here. Court records are reached through the court’s own rules and the clerk’s own process, and a refusal on those grounds is correct rather than obstructive.
Why did a Texas search come back with nothing?
There are at least six honest explanations and they are not equivalent. The record may be sealed under Rule 76a of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure; it may be restricted to the parties, which typically covers family cases and cases involving minors; a criminal matter may be subject to an order of nondisclosure or an expunction; the county may not be covered by re:SearchTX; the county may put nothing online at all; or the file may have been destroyed under a retention schedule after the case closed. We tell you which of those we ruled out and which we could not, because a nil return without that context is worthless.
Can you research Texas property and recorded assets?
Yes, through public records. Recorded instruments against Texas land sit with the County Clerk of the county where the property is, and that index carries deeds, liens, powers of attorney and oil and gas leases among much else. We report ownership and encumbrances as the record shows them, naming the county and the instrument, and we flag where the picture is incomplete. We do not access private financial accounts or their contents, so a bank balance is outside what we do and outside what we will attempt.
Is skip tracing legal in Texas, and what may the result be used for?
Yes, where the purpose is legitimate: Texas public records and lawfully licensed data may lawfully be searched to find someone, and we establish the lawful reason behind a request before a Texas file opens. Our output is not a consumer report and we do not act as a consumer reporting agency, which puts tenant screening, hiring decisions and credit or insurance underwriting outside what it may be used for. Treat all of this as general public-records information rather than legal advice.
Will you find someone who is hiding for safety reasons?
No. The Attorney General’s office here operates an Address Confidentiality Program for survivors of family violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and stalking, and for victims of child abduction, issuing a substitute post office box address so that mail, school enrolment, a driver’s licence and voter registration do not write a real street address into a public file. That is the state deliberately closing the record trail, and we do not hunt for a way past it. A request that looks like a route back to someone who left to escape the person asking gets refused, with the reason stated.
Open a Texas File
Give us the name, the last Texas address anybody has stood behind, the identifiers already in your file, and the lawful reason you need the person found. We will scope the counties, work the County Clerk and District Clerk indexes that matter, and come back with an address we can attribute to a named office and a date. Contact us to get a Texas matter scoped.
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