Ever wanted to know a little more about yourself than you already do? I did so I put my name in a search engine and started an online background check of my past. It didn't take long before I was navigating through websites and I found out where and when I was born, where I had gone to school (did that seem like an age ago!) and surprisingly some of my previous employment history.

I also found out that I had no criminal background worth mentioning (always good to know) and that my credit rating was ok. I found this quite satisfying and decided that online background searching was not only fun, but it could also be very rewarding!

Now that I'd a little background checking under my belt it occurred to me that it might be fun if I did some online background checks on my friends. So, I chose a few good friends and wanted to discover the following in my online search...

Their date and place of birth The name of their parents Whether or not they had any children

Pretty basic stuff I know but I knew the answers already so I could at least verify the online background check results.

It didn't take me long to collate all the information I needed plus a few juicy bits that I hadn't known beforehand. For example, one had played semi-professional sport after graduating and yet anothers credit rating wasn't very good, I wont be lending them $50's in a hurry!

Using the information I'd collated from my online background checks I created family trees for four good friends and when we next met with each of them I presented them with my gift and told them a few things about them they had not told me previously, I didn't include the credit history though. They were amazed and delighted and couldn't believe how I'd managed to obtain this information for free online.

So, what can we learn from my first attempts at online background checks? Well, two things, first, in today's world it is hard, if not impossible, to hide your past and present, and secondly there's a lot of information about us out there. Perhaps we should all check this every once in a while and make sure that the information is correct by doing a simple free online background check on ourselves!