Friends of the family?

Q My ancestor, Charles Hayes, was born on 6 October 1700 in Harrow on the Hill to Charles Hayes and Ann Ewster. He attended University College Cambridge and, described as “one of the Gentlemen of the

What would we do without census returns? How could we even begin to research our 19th and early 20th-century English and Welsh and indeed Scottish ancestry without access to that remarkable resource?

In this age of algorithms and ‘artificial intelligence’, when the major commercial genealogical websites are all trying to persuade us that the best way to trace our family trees is to follow their hi

As regular readers of this column will know, unusual anomalies in birth, marriage, and death records are far from uncommon. What they do offer, however, is the opportunity to dig a little deeper into

Last autumn we decided to move house. We have lived in our present house since 1988, and have loved living here. It is a tall Victorian terraced house near Preston city centre and only 10 minutes’ wal

What began as a simple attempt to trace my paternal grandfather online has unfolded into a web of lost marriages, mysterious deaths and unexpected headlines,” says Mike Medland. Born in 1949 in India