ONE of my friends was horrified at first, to find that a particular branch of his father's family tree had various agricultural workers on it who, in the middle of the 19th century, had had to sign the marriage register with an "X".

This wasn't so surprising, though, at a time when the masses were uneducated because there were no state schools and even very young children worked long hours in the fields.

The same guy found out that, along one branch of his mother's family, there was a pretty close family connection to the great poet Robbie Burns.

We all love to think we have a few distinguished characters like him back there in the mists of time, but when it comes to rattling the family cupboards you have to be prepared to find everything from renegades and convicts to bishops and kings.

In the upcoming fifth series of the staggeringly successful BBC2 series Who Do You Think You Are? actress Patsy Kensit, broadcaster Esther Rantzen, former model Jodie Kidd, designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Boris Johnson MP and TV presenter Jerry Springer explore mysteries in their family's past and uncover aristocratic titles, political scandals, victims of Nazism and more than one black sheep.

Okay, these celebrities don't actually do much (if any) of the research themselves. Often there's some relative who has handily collated old photographs and certificates.

A TV researcher then gets in touch with archivists and family history websites, so by the time the celebrity shows up for a few days' filming, the story has already been mapped out. The hook that pulls in about six million viewers a week is the well-known face, but the attraction here is, as much as anything, that we suspect the yarns unfolding are only as interesting as those that could be found in any of our families, should we bother to look.

Television makes it all look so easy – and to be fair, for today's family historian the toil has been taken out of the process of dragging the past into the present thanks to the wonder of the Web. At the touch of a button, census returns, civil registration records, military lists and much more can be accessed.

A journey back a couple of centuries that used to take years of painstaking inquiries can now be the work of only a few days or weeks. Electronic archives and the widespread ownership of home computers means more people of different ages are doing family research, whereas it often used to be a hobby older folk got into once retired.

The internet has made genealogy the fastest growing hobby in the world, and there are thousands of websites dedicated either to family history in general, families in particular areas (20 family history sites covering Yorkshire alone), or even particular surnames.

Each year new records are put online, with recent additions including lists of slaves, convicts deported to Australia and, just this week, details of 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey in London between 1674 and 1913.

On a rainy Friday afternoon in April, the family and local history room at Leeds Central Library is a picture of purposeful quietude, as about 20 people whose age ranges possibly from late 20s to somewhere in the late 80s study computer screens, microfiches of old newspapers, trade directories of the city going back to 1832 and a host of other documents and books.

Maps of Leeds dating back to 1532 are also available, as are family estate papers, voters' lists, parish registers, prints and photographs, census returns and business archives, all part of a collection of 180,000 items that can be used to research family and local history relating to Leeds and Yorkshire.

Manager Michele Lefevre and her staff offer a monthly beginners' class for those who wish to embark on family history research, and they're never short of takers. Staff also deal with email inquiries from far and near.

The department has two computers offering free access to resources including the National Archive Service at Kew and and to the website of ancestry.com and the Mormon Church's international genealogical index.

"I think programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? have stirred more people of different kinds to get involved in researching their family, but it has always been popular," says Ms Lefevre. "We have many many regulars here, and we're on first name terms with quite a few.

"They often get quite excited about a discovery. We hear lots of tales every day, some of them from family historians who travel around the world to see documents."

One such visitor recently was a Maori man, who'd arrived from New Zealand to look up details of a Yorkshire branch of his family. He went away having found out in the directory of Arms and Pedigrees that his Old World forebears were gentry of some substance centuries ago in Yorkshire.

Michele also recalls the story of an elderly woman from Canada who turned up accompanied by her great-niece. She had been born and lived in Leeds until her marriage to a Canadian soldier during the Second World War and emigration.

"This was her first visit back to Leeds in all that time. She wanted to revisit the places of her youth one last time and to do some family research. She asked if we had in our collection a photo of the street where she had grown up, long since demolished.

"We found a single photo. When the lady looked at it, her eyes began to fill. Standing in the doorway of one of the houses was her mother, and playing in the street was a young boy – her brother who had been killed in the war. The great-niece began to cry along with her great-auntie, which in turn reduced the soft-hearted librarian to a
blubbering wreck!"

Nothing beats the thrill of handling original documents, but the beauty of some family history websites is that they provide a forum for researchers around the globe to pool information. They are invaluable, but in Michele Lefevre's opinion, they need to run alongside the expertise, experience and huge caches of resources offered by libraries.

Alan Stewart, author of a new and comprehensive book called Grow Your Own Family Tree – The easy guide to researching family history, began his search for his family past more than quarter of a century ago, when his son was born.

As a child in Scotland, Alan had been fascinated by a family Bible passed down from father to son for generations, in the front of which were listed dates of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms.

When he started his research, Alan found that Bible was an invaluable starting point. Over subsequent decades he traced back to the late 1700s on most lines, and to 1690 with Brodies (his mother's side) in Traquair. On his Stewart line, he has got back to about 1780 on the Isle of Skye.

He left his job in IT and became a full-time writer on genealogy, penning columns in specialist magazines and national newspapers as well as writing his first book on Scottish family history.

His new book offers the complete "how to" of starting your research, listing all the accessible records and websites available and offering ways around common problems researchers encounter, including the difficulties of tracing migrating relatives.

"One of the thrills of family history is that you can't help also finding out a lot of social history,too – where and how people lived, their education, social class, job, what they died of, even political events of the time can come into it. And, of course, it's a job you'll never finish."

While the internet has widened access to genealogy, Stewart finds tracing his family has broadened his knowledge of the British Isles immensely, as he has shutdown the computer to spend almost every holiday chasing the shadow of some ancestor.

"We travel to places where someone in our family lived. Recently it was North Yorkshire. The internet is fantastic, but it's going to places that helps to bring your ancestors back to life in your imagination."

One glorious use of the internet is in contacting living relatives, says Stewart. Through the website Genes Reunited he was found by a second cousin twice-removed, who lives in East Yorkshire. "I was surprised and delighted, and thought he looked rather like me..."


Grow Your Family Tree by Alan Stewart is published by Penguin, £16.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or visit www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. P&P costs £2.75.