While criminal background checks can trigger legal requirements in the scope of hiring someone, renting property or selling a home, or for lending, the process can also be used to better understand the folks who are close to a person. There's nothing wrong with making sure you know folks close to you, especially when trust is placed in those persons due to family or relationships. Examples include: Parents – The time when a parent's troubles affected their children directly simply by sharing the same last name are long gone, but that doesn't mean a parent's background can't influence a child's life path simply by association. By knowing your parents' history better, a person can anticipate when someone might jump to conclusions about a later generation and shut down those misconceptions before they cause a problem with a job, education, an opportunity or a social position. Relationship Partners – Before ever getting married to someone, it's a real good idea to know the person's background. Relationship partners can come with a lot of baggage, and people think they know each other extremely well after being with each other for months or a year. That said, everybody has stuff they would prefer stays in a closet, and sometimes they don't want to share it before getting married. However, people should know who their new life partner is ahead of time, and a criminal background check is a smart move before getting married. Yourself – In a world of computers and extensive databases, mistakes happen. At some point, records don't get created on their own when first established. Someone has to manually enter the information. Try entering data into a spreadsheet 1,000 times in a day and see if it gets entered perfectly. Chances are, a mistake or two has happened along the way. Running a criminal background check on yourself is a good way to find out if any mistakes are sitting out there in public records land. By simply associating the wrong name, or wrong number with an entry, a person can go from a simple car ticket to a felony in the blink of an eye. Now imagine what that mistaken record can do to a hiring application that also relies on a background check. Be proactive – find the mistakes first.