Discover your family history

Everyone wonders who their ancestors were. Through the ages, it has been one of the biggest questions you could ask, and answering it is among the most time-consuming pastimes around.

However, computers and the internet have transformed a hobby that was once complex and dull into one that’s easy, fun and fascinating.

Instead of trawling through dusty files in obscure locations, a lot of groundwork can be done quickly and easily with a PC and an internet connection.

Even better, the web has made it easier to get in contact with distant relatives and work with them to build your family tree. We’re going to show you how.

For readers at the beginning of their family journey, those who’ve already begun and even for those who think they’ve gone as far as they can, we’re going to show you how to use an ordinary home PC, a selection of simple websites and an internet connection to reveal more about your roots than you ever thought possible.

In the beginning
First, the basics. Genealogy comes from two Greek words ­ genea, meaning family and logos, meaning knowledge. Like almost everything else, the pastime originally came about because there was money in it.

Specifically genealogy was used alongside heraldry to establish the legitimate ancestry of people who might be trying to claim a disputed inheritance, some land or a title. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t wonder if our family tree might lead us to the doors of Buckingham Palace, but these days most people get into genealogy out of a genuine desire to understand their place in the world more clearly, to find out about the social and economic factors that shaped their family or out of curiosity about specific relatives. Then there are those who came to the UK from overseas and who may have entire family branches still living in other countries.

Originally, anyone interested in family history needed to acquaint themselves with the paper records held in the local library, parish or county records office, the Public Record Office or the Office of National Statistics. Appointments were often required, as was the help of clerks and archivists. Interested parties would often travel the length and breadth of the country, tracking down leads and following false trails.

Software has made it much easier to organise information about an extended family and print it out as an attractive chart, but the greatest revolution has been online, where vast databases of information are now available to the aspiring archivist. They make it possible to consult various records of documents, even when the paper originals are spread all over the country. This makes it possible to play armchair detective and means that the inevitable wild goose chases are more likely to last an hour or two, rather than days.

Don’t forget that many records are prone to errors and misspellings. Lastly, as we’ll see later on, the internet has also encouraged an army of amateur genealogists to go online and work together, sharing information and information sources.

This kind of co-operation with strangers or family members has been helped by Gedcom, which stands for Genealogical Data Communication and is a standard way of saving information so that it can be swapped successfully between genealogy programs and web-based services. In theory this allows two people researching the same family tree to exchange information, but some software makers’ interpretations of Gedcom are more elastic than others and many programs are incompatible. For more guidance on this see the box on this page.