Seat: Little Valley
Start with the systems most likely to change your read of a person. Then cross-check custody, registries, and paper-trail sources before you go wider.
Run county and statewide court portals first. Civil, criminal, family, and lower-court systems are often separate, so this is where most missed records happen.
Use jail, corrections, and registry systems to catch records that do not show up in a normal court search.
Recorder, assessor, prosecutor, records-request, and licensing sources help verify addresses, liens, ownership, agency records, and local context.
Federal court and incarceration systems sit outside local portals. Run them before you decide the search is clean.
New York has the rare convenience of a Unified Court System: every state-level court runs through a single structure with statewide-searchable databases (WebCivil Supreme, WebCrims, NYSCEF). The Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) governs records requests — strong on paper but inconsistently enforced; NYPD in particular is notoriously slow. NYC has its own infrastructure (NYC DOC for city jails, ACRIS for property, City Clerk for marriages) that overlays the state system across all 5 boroughs.
Typical response · 20 business days for FOIL acknowledgment; full response can take 60-180 days in NYC; instant for online court and registry lookups