When the public record office placed the 1901 census online at the beginning of this month, they had catered for 1.2m hits a day. The site received 1.2m hits an hour. The system naturally collapsed, and the multitudes eager to glimpse their forebears in the year of Queen Victoria' s death were disappointed.
The main motives people have for researching their family histories are few. It is reflexly assumed that many hope to find themselves related to aristocracy or fame; and doubtless that is a common motive. A few, yet more optimistically, might hope to trace a link to a deceased plutocrat whose estate, swollen in value over the years, lies waiting in chancery to be claimed. Unlikelihood makes that a minority interest. But surely the chief motive is frank and worthy curiosity about people who are in effect part of oneself - who they were, what they were like, what they did, and why. History cannot be an abstraction when it becomes personal. To see a picture of one's great-grandmother as a girl, to handle a grandfather's medals, to visit places built, farmed or owned by forebears, makes the past palpable and vivid; and it suggests continuities and larger perspectives.
The good news for the curious is that almost everyone whose great-grandparents were born in these islands is almost certainly related to almost everyone else in these islands. Accordingly, we all have aristocratic relations, and can all claim to be connected to William the Conqueror. More to the point, all humanity can claim relationship with a single female - an ur-great-grandmother - who lived a long time ago at a crucial branching-point in the evolutionary history of our species. And vastly longer before her existed the single common ancestor of all presently living things, who (or which) was thus the ultimate founder of our line - a protoplasmal primordial blob. So all animals are of one ancient family, and all humans, more intimately still, are cousins.
These considerations are not, however, the point for amateur genealogists. They would like to know about a particular set of people whose connection to them is not merely genetic but such that, at a certain point, it blends with documents and memories, and begins to provide explanations for family circumstances. The curiosity is a good one, because it is a practical application of the spirit of historical enquiry - and seeing into the past is a necessity for seeing the present and future more clearly.
Unworthy interest in ancestry involves taking pride in being descended from some great figure, as if his or her achievements magically shed lustre on oneself. Curiously, most of the most ancient aristocratic families owe their first rise to rapine and robbery, and yet their descendants preen themselves on belonging to "older" families than those whose founders were ennobled for service to the state, or to learning or the arts. Puffing oneself on forebears is as absurd as the eastern tradition of retrospectively ennobling the ancestors of a current dignitary.
In other traditions, interest in ancestors is not a question of snobbery, but rests on the belief that they actively influence the present, benevolently or malignly, and therefore need tending. The belief is culturally and historically widespread. Mexico has its exotic Days of the Dead, involving processions and lavish picnics in the cemetery. China has its Qing Ming festival, when family graves are swept, garlanded, and loaded with food - roast pork being a favourite with ghosts. Japan has Obon, when descendants hang paper lanterns in the local cemetery, painted with family insignia to guide ancestral spirits back to the family tomb, wreathed in incense. Households in ancient Rome each had an ancestor shrine - although by historical times they had become little more than good-luck devices, like horseshoes today.
If family history and respect for ancestors has a practical value, it lies in making us think about how we ourselves can be good ancestors - in respect of protecting the environment for future people, and not leaving scars that might prompt future conflicts or wars between them.
