Once upon a time, genealogy was all about sweeping the dust off ancient ledgers of births, deaths and marriages, leafing through death notices in withered newspapers, and scrabbling in search of memorial inscriptions in overgrown cemeteries, writes David Fickling.
These days you can pretty much dig up your family tree from the comfort of a computer chair. The oddly-titled Naomi – the National Archive of Memorial Inscriptions – has become the latest of many searchable internet genealogy databases, and offers users the opportunity to buy a photo of their ancestors' gravestones online.
My surname turned up 13 linked forenames, from William, who died aged two in 1814, through Thirzanna, who died 1883 aged 66, to Ellen, who was 91 when she died in 1996.
A similar memorials project is already nearing completion in Ireland, with nearly 400,000 gravestone inscriptions online.
You can scoot around the internet doing all sorts of speculative searches for people who share your surname.
By all accounts no one ever stood in the way of a Fickling wedding, but my mother's maiden name Laidlaw brought up six Gretna Green marriages on the database at the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies.
The Mormon church keeps extensive family-tree records because of its belief in baptism of the dead, which holds that the ancestors of Mormons can achieve salvation through their descendants.
Their database is the mother of all internet genealogy archives, and "Fickling" turned up 189 matches including people in Bermuda, Malta, and Louisiana.
The Commonwealth war graves commission has a similar database, which showed Ficklings in Gaza, Baghdad, Passchendaele and the Somme's Thiepval memorial.
If you want to save yourself getting out a ruler and pencil and bedsheet-sized piece of paper to put all these ancestors together, you can even buy family tree software to save you the bother.
All this holds out the chance of a lean, new world of genealogy, without all the fustiness of churchyards, libraries and the public record office. I think I prefer the old version.
