Once upon a time those of us whose ancestors left the shores of England (to end up in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the former British colonies in Africa) had no hope of tracing their forbears, unless they were prepared to get involved in lengthy and expensive correspondence with professional genealogists, or spend precious vacation time in England doing the rounds of dusty records offices.

But all that has now changed! Thanks to the internet and its wonderful resources (sometimes even free resources) you can now begin to trace your English ancestry as soon as you finish reading this article. Here’s how to get started, in ten easy steps.

1. Harvest family memories

Ask your parents what they remember about their own parents: full names, dates of birth (even the approximate year might help), places of birth, where they lived, date or year of marriage, occupations, just about anything they can remember. Write it down. Better still, if your grandparents are still alive, write down their details, and ask them about their parents. You have eight great-grandparents (the parents of your four grandparents) and you are already starting to find out things about them that you never knew. And if some or all of your grandparents are dead, great aunt Flo and great uncle Fred are the same generation, and you can bet they are more than willing to spend an afternoon reminiscing. Try to find out from them roughly when your English ancestors first arrived in your country, and if possible, what their names were. Take these opportunities to borrow old family photos, no matter how dog-eared, and scan them into your computer.

2. Store your information digitally

Beautifully presented family history books are great for the scrapbooking and calligraphy fraternity, but what you really need is a user-friendly repository for all your bits and pieces right now, starting with a few random scraps of information. Most genealogy software lets you start with information about yourself – your full name, date of birth, &c. You then proceed to add details about your partner (if you have one), your children, your parents and your siblings. Then you can start to branch out, adding your parents’ parents, and so on. In theory you can add partners, children, parents or siblings for each new person in your tree, and so on ad infinitum. Your software will store all the information, work out the complexities of each person’s relationship to every other person, and allow you to print tree charts, box charts and text lists of your genealogy. They are generally very easy to use, and you can add and edit your information as it comes to hand . I use a shareware program called ‘Brother’s Keeper’ which you can download from here