How Can You Find Out If Someone is Married?

There are some different reasons you might want to go online and find out if someone is married. For example, maybe you’re dating someone, and you have a suspicion they aren’t being honest with you. 

You can go online and find marriage records and divorce records, but there are some things to know in doing so. 

The following are some tips if you’re trying to find out the marital status of a person. 

Searching Marriage Records

Marriage records are technically public records, but that doesn’t always mean it’s easy to find them.

Marriage records can be stored at the city, town, or county level. There may be restrictions to seeing a marriage record. For example, under the law in Virginia, you can only access marriage records if you’re one of the parties in the relationship unless the marriage occurred over 25 years ago. 

If you have a legal reason to access records, for example, because of a legal proceeding or because you’re married to someone already and don’t think they’ve been totally honest with you, you might have a better chance of accessing marriage records.

Depending on your county and state, you might simply be able to find a marriage certificate online, but you would probably need to know the full and pre-marriage name of one of the involved people and have a general idea of when they were married. If you know the state and county where the marriage took place, that’s also helpful. 

Divorce records are also publicly available, so they may be worth searching for. 

If you’ve done a thorough online search and you can’t find marriage or divorce records, you might try getting in touch with the clerk of the county. The county clerk can be a helpful resource for you. You can visit their office and do a public records search, and depending on the location and the laws, a county clerk might be able to provide you with information about a marriage license on the phone. You may have to pay a fee if you’re going to use the county clerk to find marriage information. 

Search Newspapers

An old-fashioned but still effective way to figure out someone’s marital status is to search old newspapers. This can be challenging because you have to search through various databases, but you might be able to find the original announcement. 

Social Media

If you can find someone online via their social media profiles, even if it doesn’t directly state their marital status, you might be able to do a little digging and figure things out. 

You can also upload an image of the person you’re searching for and reverse-search it. Then, you’ll get access to results with that photo or similar photos. You might even be able to look through the profiles of people the person is connected to on social media and sees if you can find relationship evidence there. 

For example, maybe their close friends or family have photos of them attending their wedding or spending time with the person and their spouse. 

Look for Wedding Registries

If someone doesn’t have a social media presence or you think they aren’t being honest on the social media profiles you have access to, you can look for online wedding registries. If someone had a wedding in the past decade or so, there’s a high likelihood you can find a registry listed online. A lot of this information is saved for a number of years, although, of course, not everyone has a registry. 

Hire a Private Investigator

If everything else fails and you really feel like someone is married and isn’t being honest with you about it, you can consider hiring a private investigator. 

Private investigators have access to advanced tools, and they usually start with advanced background checks to find the person you’re interested in learning more about. They might be able to find if the person was at one point living with a different name and also look for jointly owned properties which can give clues about relationship and marital status. 

A private investigator may have access to information in specialized databases, and that can help them figure out if a person was married at one point and is now divorced or if they’re still married. If they’ve shared property with someone or cars or have shared the same address for long periods of time, a private investigator is likely going to conclude they’re married or in a long-term relationship. 

It’s not always easy to figure out someone’s marital status if the information isn’t readily available online, but there are ways to do it.