Where there's a will, there's usually a way

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A quest to unlock the secrets of our ancestors

It was on a cold winter's day when I was 12 that I discovered genealogy. I was gazing at the photographs on the wall of my grandmother's house. Who was the girl in the frock? Why was my paternal grandmother Mrs Barrett rather than Mrs Blundell? Out came a Bible with a family tree, and I was hooked.

When I first became serious about tracing my ancestors, it was a solitary occupation. The main tools were a trowel and brush for tidying up gravestones, and the main skills related to deciphering very old documents. Today, introductory genealogy texts devote whole sections to the internet. There you can find all kinds of records, but the net has encouraged something particularly useful: a fellowship. People discover information and put it on their own websites, sharing details of wills discovered and long-lost ledgers found.

I am struck that census records rank second only in importance to wills. You can't beat a good will. One, on a female line, gave five 16th and 17th generations on the turn of a page. But after a good will comes the census return. And unlike either a will or a birth/marriage/ death certificate it is not a snapshot. Rather, it is more like a frame in a film. For, studying successive census returns, one sees a family changing: first a young one, then 10 years later mum and dad with a bunch of teenagers, then another decade later the teens are all gone and grandma has moved in!

I would have given up without the census records. My grandfather, James Gilbert Blundell, married late and died soon after. Little information was passed down. When I found in a parish register that his father, James Rimmer Blundell, had married a Mary Blundell, I assumed the vicar had made a mistake. Clearly, she was Mary Blundell after the wedding when he was filling in the register and I thought he'd had too much wine before doing the paperwork.

Census records led me to the truth. They were both Blundells, second cousins. It was complicated by the fact that their fathers, first cousins, were both called Miles and both of them had used the same Christian names for their boys, James and John. So I had this slew of Miles Blundells, John Blundells and James Blundells, all small farmers within two miles of Birkdale Common in Lancashire. Then their children married each other.

Without censuses I would have stopped with great-grandpa James Rimmer Blundell. Instead, the records got me by this block and on to the trail of five more generations (Miles to John to Miles to John to Miles) back to the 17th century on the main male line and further on some female lines. Now, if only there had been a census in 1691 my hunch that my first Miles, my six times great grandpa, was the son of Gilbert and Alice could be proved – or disproved – and I'd be away again.

John Blundell is father of Miles and James Blundell and general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs