How to Find Out if Someone is Married?

The disintegration of agrarian, close-knit communities is seen as a primary factor in the evolution of the modern society. While this results in great social, economic and geographical mobility, it also makes it easier for individuals to hide their past and lie about their identity. So if you are wondering whether a partner or someone else is married, here are a few ways to find out more about their marital status.

Go online

The internet is like a double-edged sword – just as its anonymity makes it easy to hide one’s marital status, the plethora of social networking sites and search engines make any kind of privacy difficult. Start by performing a simple web search for the person's name and you may come upon some interesting information, such as his/her name appearing with another person’s on a club's online membership roster. These days almost everyone is signed up with some social networking site or another – be it Facebook, MySpace or others like Twitter and Skype. You can simply type in the person’s name at such a site and view his/her profile which usually indicates marital status. If the status is unclear, scroll through photos and you may chance upon wedding photos or pictures showing the person with a spouse.

Make use of official resources

If you want to get a little bit more involved, you can do a public records search. Till a few years back, the only people who had access to personal information were licensed private investigators, police detectives and the federal government. Now with the newly passed laws, many states have declared marriage archive records as falling under public jurisdiction and so can be viewed practically by anyone who knows how to access them. In fact now you can even do this online and thus from the comfort of your own home. By supplying the person's name, age and the state where he/she is staying in, you can have the requisite information within a short while. You can carry out the same search by physically going to a courthouse and making a request for marriage records – however for this you will have to know the state where you suspect this person got married. Apart from this you can access other public records which will help you find out to whom the house where this person is staying belongs or who is the owner of the vehicle he/she drives. If your search comes up with clues to joint ownership of homes and/or cars that are currently being used by this person you can safely assume that there is more to things than meets the eye. However if the person in question is a foreigner, It may be difficult to determine his/her marital status because they may not have registered their marriage properly in their country of origin or because the foreign authorities may be less than prompt or co-operative.

Tap the media

If you can narrow down when a marriage might have occurred you can check with your local newspaper which usually carries announcements of marriages, births and deaths. It is usual for many newspapers to maintain archives where they have an index and you could check to see if the name pops up in the index.

Other online resources

If wading through hundreds of online search results seems too much work, you can hire the services of an online records information provider to find out if someone is married. In return for a fee, such providers look through a network of multiple data sources to find the exact records you are looking for. They can dig into data from thousands of sources, public and private, and access owner information, address history, carrier, and location details for any phone number. Some of these can trace an email address and find out all about who it belongs to or carry out a reverse search and come up with email addresses of a person you want to know more about.

Hire a private eye

The real-life alternative of the afore-mentioned virtual tracker would be a private investigator. However before you hire one to find out is somebody is married, make sure that the investigator has a valid license. Since this is a rather expensive option, use it only when the stakes are high and you need absolutely foolproof answers to your doubts about a person’s marital status.

Use your own judgment

More often than not, it may be enough to keep your own eyes and ears open so as to gather the truth about a person’s marital status. While more and more relationships begin with dating sites these days, the internet is also a hotbed of lies and deception. In fact according to a survey conducted by MSNBC a few years ago, as much as 30% of users turned out to be married which is almost a third of all those who use online dating services. Some signs that could put you on your guard against married users are a reluctance to post their photos online, being irregular in their contacts with you, calling you or asking to web-chat with you always at set hours or at very odd hours and getting the voice mail whenever you call them on their cell phone.

If this is someone who you have been dating in real life, watch for clues which can warn you about a spouse neatly tucked away at a suburban home. Married partners will be extremely reluctant to talk about their family, home lives or even where they live. Have you ever seen his or her house, or does the person always want to go to your house? Do you even know where he or she lives? In a normal dating relationship, you shouldn't have these constraints, so if you do, there's probably something wrong. Also when you go out, does it always have to be someplace far away like another town or neighborhood, for instance? Or does the person always want to stay in the particular town and never ventures out?  Any of these extreme tendencies should set off an alarm. Then again if your meetings always have to be prearranged and have strict time frames, that's another bad sign. Finally if despite being with this person for some time, you never get to meet his friends and family it is quite a reliable sign that they may be hiding something as important as their marital status.