People leave footprints behind as they move through life, tracks etched in public records – property bought and sold, blog musings and rap sheets.

Sometimes, their secrets are hiding in plain sight. You can run the name or address of a prospective date, nanny or housekeeper through databases listed below and get a pretty good picture of the trail they’ve created.

Public records aren’t perfect – bear in mind these databases could contain inaccurate information or be missing data.

While you can learn a lot, don’t take any of it as gospel without double-checking.

– Dru Sjordin National Sex Offender Public Registry (www.nsopr.gov): Coordinated by the U.S. Department of Justice, this site allows you to search for information on sex offenders by ZIP code, city, state or name.

– PACER (pacer.psc.uscourts. gov): Provides information on federal criminal, civil, bankruptcy and appeals courts. In some cases, scanned images of court documents are available online. Note that most crimes are prosecuted at the state level, not the federal level.

– Search Systems Premium (premium.searchsystems.net/ index.php): A private backgrounding company that offers a range of regional or nationwide criminal conviction reports for a fee of up to $29. This is a good choice if the person you are investigating lived in other states. You can also search nationwide for bankruptcies, judgments and liens.

– VineLINK (www.vinelink.com): A private company that provides a free search of recently released inmates of jails in all 50 states.

– Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator (www.bop.gov/iloc2/LocateInmate.jsp): Search for all inmates of federal prisons from 1982 to present. Note that most felons convicted of state or local crimes are sentenced to state or county prisons, and are not in this database.

Sources: Linda Montgomery Investigations, Christine Beck, Seattle Times staff