“Hi, Katie. Mark went to pick up cigarettes four years ago and he never returned. I remember you mentioned that you saw him walking with another woman... Do you know what I mean, by any chance? And I also met someone special, so… I I really want to get divorced from my missing husband. I was wondering if I can get divorced without knowing his address?”
If your spouse is missing and you have no idea where to find them you can serve your divorce papers by publication in the local newspaper, or by posting the divorce paper at a family courthouse board.
Before you can start with publication or posting, you must make a diligent effort to locate your missing spouse before asking a court to grant a default divorce. The court will grant an order for publication or posting only if the other methods of service are not possible and sufficient attempts have been made to locate your missing spouse.
In order to get the court to grant your application for Order for Publication or posting, you need to do the following things:
- Find the last known address of your spouse, or ask his friends, family, current or past employers, or any unions, to find out where your spouse might live.
- Research your spouse's name on Google or any other internet search engine. There are internet services you can use to locate people at a very small fee. If the last known address is a mental or penal institution, ask the person in charge of the institution to current address information, and then contact that address.
- You will have to submit a written summary of your efforts to the court listing names of the people you asked, and their relationship to your spouse, and the dates and results of your inquiries.
- If your spouse owned a house, call the tax assessor's office in the county of your spouse's last known address, and ask where your spouse may live.
- Finally, follow on any leads, on any other leads you can think of, including trade association or licenses, as in sheet agencies, that may have information.
Make sure that you keep a clean and accurate record of information you collected, so that you are able to show the court that you can't find your spouse and that you're entitled to a default divorce. Once you have done a diligent search of spouse that has not been successful to locate him or her, now you're going to be able to file an application for an order for publication of posting. In California, this is form FL-980.
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