Voice Case Information System (VCIS)
Each state’s bankruptcy court has a Voice Case Information System that you can call to gather information on bankruptcy cases for free. Simply call the phone number and follow the prompts to retrieve records. You can usually search by case number, name or social security number over the phone. Find out the VCIS phone number for your state.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER)
The PACER service provides online access to U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents nationwide. You can register for free, but accessing bankruptcy records costs $0.08 per page.

BirthDatabase.com – Database of 120 million official government birth records with date of birth and place of birth by subject name.

Social Security Death Index (SSDI) – Database of birth dates, death dates and last known residence for millions of deceased individuals with United States social security numbers whose deaths were reported to the United States Social Security Administration. Birth years for the individuals listed range from 1875 to last year.

SSN Validator – Tool that instantly identifies valid and invalid social security numbers by verifying whether a number has been issued, the state in which the number was issued, and if the number was reported as belonging to a deceased person.

The recent tragic homocide of bikini model Jasmine Fiore by her reality TV star husband, Ryan Jenkins, is an example of how useless a criminal background check is if your private investigator or background check service doesn’t use good data sources.

In 2007, Jenkins pleaded guilty in Calgary, Canada to assault. He was sentenced to 15 months probation and ordered to undergo counseling for domestic violence and sex addiction and to stay away from the person involved. Subsequently, Jenkins starred in the VH1 reality show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The production company behind the show, 51 Minds, issued a statement saying that they used an outside company to run background checks on its contestants and were not aware of his record.

How Jenkins’s criminal record slipped through the cracks is unknown. Some of the top background information databases, which only licensed private investigators can access, require you to input several identifiers, such as the subject’s name and birth date. If you have the incorrect birth date or misspell the name, the database will tell you that no records were found; in other words, it will wrongly tell you that the subject’s record is clean.

Perhaps the background check company only looked up its contestants in U.S. databases, hence missing his record in Canada. Perhaps they misspelled his name, and his record came back clean. Perhaps his name is misspelled in the court record, so it wasn’t found. Or perhaps the database they used wasn’t comprehensive. Unfortunately, there are many ways that a criminal background check can fall short. A good private investigator will have reliable data sources and try inputting different spellings of the subject’s name, for example, to make sure no records are missed. Before you marry or hire someone, make sure to get a thorough background check.

I recommend first checking this free website since it’s easy to use:

RootsWeb – Free database of records created by the members of an online genealogy community, containing almost 6,000 divorce records.

Since RootsWeb only contains 6,000 divorce records nationally, it may not contain the divorce record you seek. The next step is to search the court records for the state where the person allegedly got a divorce. This is the website for Connecticut divorce records:

Connecticut Civil & Family Court Cases – Search for divorce records (the legal term is “dissolution of marriage”) by party name. Case information is displayed and available online for one year to a maximum period of ten years after the disposition date.

RootsWeb – Free database of records created by the members of an online genealogy community, containing more than 600,000 marriage records. To search for a record, you must input the last name of one of the involved parties; first name, state and year of marriage are optional fields.

USA People Search Marriage Records – Database of marriage records compiled from government agencies for 14 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Utah, West Virginia. You have to pay to view detailed records, but the search results page, which is free to access, shows marriage record titles, which can be enough to confirm if someone was married, particularly if that person has a unique name. Note that the records for Connecticut span 1966-2002 only. To search for a record, you must input one of the following: the name of one party or the city or state where the marriage occurred.

Since neither of the above online databases is comprehensive, you may not be able find records of a marriage even though it did occur. Another approach is to request this information from the state or town or city where the event occurred. In some states you can only obtain your own marriage records but, in Connecticut, anyone over the age of 18 can request a copy of any Connecticut marriage or civil union certificate. You have three options to find records of marriages occurring after 1897, but you must know the names of the bride and groom and the city and date of the marriage:

Option A – Request the record from Connecticut’s State Vital Records Office in person or by mail for $10 per copy. To make a request, you must fill out the relevant form:
Marriage record request
Civil union record request

Note that this can be a VERY slow process. Turnaround time for requests through the mail currently take more than four months.

Option B – Request the record directly from the town or city vital records registrar where the event occurred for $10 per copy. This is faster than requesting the record from the state, but processing times vary by town or city. To make a request, you must fill out the relevant form:
Marriage record request
Civil union record request

Option C – Request the record online from VitalCheck. Processing time is 5-7 days, and the fee for the first copy is $22.95 ($10 per copy plus a processing fee).

For records of marriages occurring before 1897, you’ll likely have to do some onsite research. You can contact the Connecticut State Library’s History and Genealogy Unit at (860) 757-6580 to see if they will research a small request for you, or else visit the library at 231 Capitol Avenue in Hartford. The state library houses the Barbour Collection, which includes most Connecticut vital records to about 1850, as well as the Connecticut vital records that have been microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, which includes most records to about 1900. The vital records microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah can also be accessed at a local Genealogical Society of Utah Family History Center.

If the above methods are too time-consuming or you don’t have all the information required to make a request, the fastest approach is to hire a private investigator. Private investigators have access to background information databases including marriage records and can quickly do the research for you.