Just who do you think you are – royalty?

Biographer Jane Ridley on how to trace your family history

Family history research used to be a matter of people in woolly hats and anoraks looking for tombstones.

Today, genealogy is cool. The TV series Who Do You think You Are?, which reveals the forbears of celebrities and their secrets, regularly attracts 6 million viewers.

The boom in family history research is one of the unexpected consequences of the internet revolution. The digitisation of so many records which until recently were inaccessible or unknown has prompted a new and exciting way of engaging with the past.

Family history uses computer skills which appeal to younger people. A new profession of skilled family historians has emerged.

I teach a course in biography at Buckingham University, and many of my students join because they want to research their family history.

Thanks to sites such as Ancestry, the world’s largest genealogy website, you can build your family tree, using birth and death certificates and many other records.

The census enables you to see where your ancestors lived and how many people there were in the house. Passenger lists allow researchers to track long journeys across the world. Documents such as wills yield unexpected secrets. Military records from the First and Second World Wars are also available online.

One of the richest sources for researching family history is old newspapers. The British Newspaper Archive is a massive database of newspapers, local and metropolitan.

Using this resource, it’s possible to excavate people in your family and trace their life history – people who sometimes weren’t even known to exist before. Some of these sources are available from local libraries –the digitised Times, for example, an indispensable resource, is available through your local library.

The family historian dreams of finding a suitcase in the attic packed with old letters. Holograph letters from the Victorian period down to the middle of the last century are one of the greatest sources.

All too often, family letters are thrown out, condemned as clutter when people move house.

There is one golden rule – don’t separate the letters from the envelopes. The envelopes are date-stamped, and if the letters are dated just by the day of the week, as they often are, the chronology can only be established from postmarks.

Don’t forget to visit the places you are researching. Sometimes you might be lucky enough to gain access to the house where your subjects lived. That really does help you to imagine their world. Old photos and albums are also valuable here.

For family history researchers today or in the future, the problem will be the absence of paper documents. People don’t write letters for the post any more, but instead send emails which are ephemeral. In place of the letter, the interview has become a crucial source for family historians. It’s easy to record an interview with an iPhone, but transcribing the interview is a lengthy and rather tedious business. You should do it as soon as you can, when the interview is still fresh in your mind.

Doing the research is one thing; using it to write a narrative or perhaps a book uses quite another set of skills. First, read around the research, and put it into a historical context. Because family history research takes you back to the primary sources, it’s easy to lose sight of the books and journals that are relevant to your subject.

I ask my students to write a bibliography listing the archives and also the secondary sources - the printed material and material on the web. Once they have done this, they write a research proposal, reviewing the literature on the subject, showing where their proposal fits in.

These exercises are designed to make them think hard about the story of their research.

The first step is to put together a chronology. Sometimes this is enough – if you are writing about someone who has never been written about before, the aim might be simply to trace their life story.

But the best family histories use a wide range of books and documents to assemble a coherent narrative of their subject. The advice here is start writing as soon as you have some sense of what the story is about –don’t hide behind your research.

Writing is a way of thinking, and once you start the writing process, you will be surprised how much your idea about the story changes.

One final cautionary note for the family historian. Digging up old quarrels or disinterring buried secrets can have a devastating effect for other members of the family.

It isn’t easy to predict how they will react, but you need to think of all the possibilities.

Sometimes it’s simply not worth risking a family quarrel.

Jane Ridley’s latest book is George V: Never A Dull Moment (Chatto, £30)

Explore your family tree online at www.ancestry.co.uk Father of us all? William the Conqueror