Ohio

Search by business name, registration number, agent name or incorporator. Filings come back as scanned images you can open, which is more than most states hand over for free.

The agent search is the one worth learning. Running a person as a statutory agent returns every entity they front, and in Ohio that regularly surfaces companies your subject never mentioned. The incorporator search does the same for whoever set the entity up.

Ohio doesn’t require LLCs to file annual reports, so an entity can sit registered for years with stale address information. Treat the date on each document as the date that address was true, not today.

Search by debtor name, secured party name or financing statement number, and the filing images are free to view.

A UCC-1 names the debtor, the secured party and the collateral. The secured party is very often a bank, which makes this one of the few free routes to where a business banks. Search the secured party side too — running a lender backwards gives you every Ohio business it has financed.

One lookup covering most Ohio professional and occupational boards — medical, nursing, counseling, cosmetology, the construction trades and more. Search by name or license number.

A license record confirms a legal name, a status, an issue date and usually a city. Disciplinary action shows here too, and a dated suspension is often a good explanation for a sudden change in someone’s circumstances.

Ohio has no statewide property search. Each county auditor runs its own, and nearly all of them are free and searchable by owner name — which is the part that matters, because name-searchable property records are not universal.

The auditor holds ownership, sale history, transfer date and assessed value. The county recorder is a different office and holds the deeds and mortgages themselves. Auditor to identify, recorder for the document.

Ohio auditors also publish the owner-occupancy credit flag. That credit on a property is the county’s own record that the owner claims to live in it.

There is no statewide case search in Ohio. All 88 counties are listed below.

Remember the second tier. The county link gets you the Court of Common Pleas; misdemeanors, evictions and small claims live in a municipal court with entirely separate records.

Appellate and Supreme Court dockets are centralized and free, which is a useful back door: if a case was appealed, the appellate docket names the parties, the trial court and the case number below it.

Ohio has no public, name-based statewide criminal record search. BCI runs background checks by comparing fingerprints against its database, submitted electronically through WebCheck or a card scan.

That makes it a consent-and-fingerprint process, not a lookup. The employers required by statute to check — schools, day cares, health care facilities — use it. You can’t run it on a third party.

So the real route to an Ohio criminal history is the courts, county by county: Common Pleas for felonies, the municipal court for misdemeanors.

Ohio birth and death records are handled both by the state office and by local health districts, and either can issue a copy.

Ohio is comparatively open on death records, which is useful when you’re confirming whether a subject or a debtor is deceased before spending any more time on the file. The Ohio History Connection also hosts a free searchable death index for older records — worth checking first, because it costs nothing.

Free name search of money the state is holding. For a locate it’s worth running for two reasons that have nothing to do with the money.

First, a reported item names the holder — the bank, insurer or employer that had the funds. That’s an institution the person had a relationship with. Second, holders report a last known address, which gives you an address the reporting company believed was current.

Full statewide registration data, downloadable by county, free, no application. Name, address, party affiliation and election-by-election voting history.

These are large files. If you only need one person, most county boards of elections run a quick lookup on their own site that answers it in seconds.