During the pre-internet days, researching your family tree involved sifting through stacks of old paper records or microfiche in dusty library archives. But nowadays, anyone with a computer and internet connection can visit a genealogy website and quickly trace their family tree back many generations.

As a private investigator, I’ve used genealogy websites a number of times to help develop a profile on the subject of an investigation. They can be particularly helpful in missing persons cases because they can provide a list of family relatives, including siblings and parents, and dates of birth for both the subjects and their relatives.

For example, a missing persons case might be to find a John Smith who was born in NY state, is in his 50’s and has a sister whose married name is Susan Miller. Without a critical personal identifier like a Social Security number or date of birth, finding information about the correct John Smith might be very difficult since there are likely many John Smith’s fitting that description.

Using a genealogy site, you could research Smith families from NY with siblings John and Susan in the correct age range. Susan’s married name Miller should help you find the correct John Smith and his date of birth. This will give you the critical personal identifier you need to do more detailed research. Best of all, most of the information on genealogy sites is very inexpensive, if not free, to access.

A few of the more popular and useful genealogy sites are:
Genealogy.com
Ancestry.com
FamilySearch.org

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.