Before online access to court records was available these types of checks had to be done manually. A request was made of each courthouse to do a search of their criminal records archives for the person in question. When you consider that there are 99 counties in the state of Iowa you would need to make 99 different requests if you wanted to cover the entire state. When you add in state and federal courthouses the number of requests gets even larger.
You will also need to take into account that many people move between states and may have criminal records that cross state lines. This makes it important to be able to look beyond just one state when doing a background check. While finding Iowa court records online can be what you need for your intended purposes you may be missing an important part of the background check puzzle if you limit yourself by staying inside state lines.
To do this you need to use one of the big online court records search websites. They provide comprehensive searches not only in the state of you choice but also nationwide. In many cases these sites will also provide data outside of the United States, with the most likely choice being Canada and the United Kingdom.
If you do decide to join a criminal records website there are a couple of things you need to be aware of. First make sure they charge a one time fee that is 100% refundable. You don’t want to spend your money only to find out they don’t have the information they are looking for. You also don’t want to end up at a site that charges by the month or even worse by the search. At the reputable sites a one time nominal fee will give you unlimited criminal record searches for the length of your membership.
