Knowing your family history

Searching for family links and looking at your family tree has come on leaps and bounds from the days when we drew a flow chart on a piece of coloured card at school and wrote down all the relatives we knew. Nowadays there are professional services and research tools available to enable people to search their family history and find out where they come from.

The backing of celebrities doing this along with programmes such as Who do you think you are, really helps highlight the ease and interest surrounding tracing your family.

You may be interested in where you originate from. Perhaps your surname does not match where the rest of your family seem to come from, so finding out where your ancestors were born can shed some light.

Some people have unanswered questions too about where they come from. If you do not have a large family at present then there may be no relatives around to inform you of any family history.

At Kin we can also help heir hunters who may have reason to believe they are a beneficiary to an old estate or some unknown assets which have not been claimed. A lot of people do not even realise that they are a lost heir - a lost beneficiary to goods or money - and late relatives would want these to be kept within the family.

It does not always have to be past relatives which we take an interest in. A great thing about tracing family is that you might find a whole new lot of living relatives who you did not know you had.

Finding new family members which are still alive is a wonderful feeling. Despite never meeting there is a unique bond between you and the excitement and interest of finding out about others lives is fascinating.