There are all kinds of reasons you may want to find out personal information about someone. Maybe you’re dating someone new and you want to investigate them to make sure that they’re not hiding anything from you. Or perhaps you’re renting out a room in your home and you want to verify that the person doesn’t have a criminal record.

Several methods exist to find details of a person by name. You can do this by visiting offices housing public records for your area, and you can find information about a person on the internet. Here are the best methods you can use to pull up more details on a person.

Social Media

Social media is an excellent place to start your search because it’s free and easy to use. See if you can look the person up on the most popular social networks, which include:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Snapchat

It’s easiest to look up someone by their name on Facebook and Twitter, whereas it can sometimes be more challenging on Instagram and Twitter, since those networks have user names. Still, you can often find people on those networks with just their names, either by searching on the networks themselves or using a search engine and entering the person’s name combined with the social network.

Social media works well for finding out details about someone’s personal life, and people also sometimes make their contact information readily available on these sites. You may see their job history and the cities they’ve lived. It all depends on how much information they’ve chosen to make public.

People Search & Background Check Websites

To pull up all kinds of personal information on the person right away for a nominal fee, there’s FreeBackgroundCheck.org. Information available on this site includes:

This makes FreeBackgroundCheck.org an effective way to get a comprehensive profiof on the person and even find hidden information that you wouldn’t get through many other methods. Here’s how you can use the site to look someone up using their name:

  1. Go to the Free Background Check home page and make sure the Name tab is selected next to the Find Records Fast heading.
  2. Type the person’s first name and last name into the fields provided. If you have a city and state for them, you can also enter that to make it easier to find the right person.
  3. Click Search.
  4. Find the right person from the list of results and click Access Report.
  5. Select the level of access you want and go through the account creation process.

The person you’re searching for never knows that you ran this check on them. There are also several other search methods available if you have more than just the person’s name, as you can also search by phone number, physical address, email address or license plate number.

Public Records

There is quite a bit of information kept in public records for each city and county. Courts will have records on criminal cases, and county record offices will have property records.

If you need information that is likely in the public record, find out which office should have it, and then either visit the office in person or go online to its website. It’s a good idea to check online first to save yourself some time, but keep in mind that not every office will publish its records online.

Tailor Your Search To the Info You Want

If your goal is to find out as much as possible about a person, then your best bet is to combine every method listed above to perform a thorough search. However, if there’s something specific you’re looking for, it’s better to choose the search method that’s most likely to turn up that information.

For sensitive information or a detailed look at a person’s background, your best bet is Free Background Check. That can work for finding a person’s criminal history, but you can also get more details on criminal cases through courthouses and their websites.

If you’re looking for more about who someone is, what they’ve done in life, and their current and previous relationships, you’ll probably have the most success going on social media, especially if you’re looking up someone who likes to publish all the latest from their life online.

Finally, remember that you can often get better results when you use multiple search methods and use the information you find with one to improve your search with another. You may not be able to find any social profiles by name, but you could find a phone number through Free Background Check, and then use that to pull up a Facebook account.