They had a rough idea about their background but didn't know enough to start putting all the pieces together.
What she eventually did was hire a private investigator, I thought this was a bit extreme and asked how much this would cost.
My friend would not disclose the actual amount of money she had paid, she just said, "it cost more than I wanted to pay".
Now I love anything like this and decided that I might try and create my own family history without spending a great deal of money.
While her private investigator had a good weeks head start on me, I still believed that I could piece together some of my family tree before she got her results back.
I surfed the internet for three days looking for a starting point and was sadly disappointed with my results, not only was I getting frustrated but a lot of the searches I did were blind shots in the dark.
I talked to a few members of my family about the whole family origin and anything else which I thought may be helpful but I still didn't have a lot to go on.
I then came across a vital piece of information which was the turning point for my search, obituary searches Once I had a little bit of information I could start to piece the rest together from databases which were strictly aimed at death records, now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of services on the internet which cover obituary searches and some of them are very good, but I only found one which was concise enough with all of the information I needed to put together the details I required.
The service I used even gave the last know address of the deceased members of my family.
With all this information at hand I produced a pretty comprehensive overview of my family history, when I showed this to my friend she was not too happy.
She had been charged a lot of money for the information she had, the trouble was, it was the same printouts of information which I had for my family which meant that the Private investigator had used the same as I had done.