Hobby solves past puzzles

Barbara Windsor is the latest person to feature in the TV family history series, Who Do You Think You Are, which starts with a new series tonight. It is a fast-growing hobby, as Mark Andrews found out.

Hilary Gittos’s great-grandfather was a bit of a lad. He held a top post at the Bank of England, but was sacked for his wild living and ran off with the maid, bringing up five children in abject poverty.

That was the story her uncle told her many years ago, and led the retired bank worker from Wolverhampton on a 30-year quest to find out what really happened in her family history.

Thanks largely to the TV series Who Do You Think You Are?, which returns tonight, genealogy is becoming an increasingly popular hobby. More than 1,000 people turned out for the West Midland Family History fair at Wolverhampton’s Dunstall Park racecourse in April.

In tonight’s show, former Carry On star Barbara Windsor traces her family tree back through history and finds she is related to the painter John Constable. Other stars taking part in the series include the actor Robert Lindsay, TV cook Nigella Lawson and Dr Who David Tennant.

The internet has played a major role in the growth of the hobby, with one website alone - www.ancestry.co.uk - receiving more than three million visitors every month. The site, which offers access to 500 million UK records, will be providing free access to the complete 1901 census for the duration of the series.

But there was no such luxury when Hilary started her journey into the past back in the 1960s. “I used to come out of work and get on the train to Birmingham,” she says.

When her daughter Joy was older, she also took up the hobby, and she is now in the process of writing a book on her family’s colourful history.

“We used to go down to London to see the Mourmon records - they are brilliant,” says Hilary. “We’d get a little flat in Notting Hill and take all the records we could to sort out there.”

“It turns out my great-grandfather Walter Petit - he was my grandmother’s father - was high up in the Bank of England in the 1870s,” says Hilary.

“He was suspended from the bank for his notorious behaviour outside the bank, which would probably have been his drinking and women.

“He ran off with the maid to Manchester. My old uncle told me he went back five years later and asked for his job back, and I said ‘you’re talking rubbish, you don’t go back to the Bank of England for your job back’.

“But it turned out it was true. He had five children, they were all very happy, a very jolly family, but they were very poor.

“If I had been him, I would have given up the maid and kept the money.”

Joy is fascinated how jobs in the world of money seem to run through the family. “I work as a financial record-keeper - next week I start work in the same building in Birmingham as the Bank of England - and most of my family have worked as record-keepers or book-keepers, long before we started researching the family.”

So far, Hilary and Joy have traced their ancestry back to 1724, and Hilary says it can be addictive.

“When I started I had two children and I was going to work, and you have got to be careful not to become a fanatic.”

Chris Brown of Wolverhampton’s Archives and Local Studies service says there has been a definite growth in the hobby in recent years, and there is never any problem filling courses in the subject.

“We try to do a bit of social history with the course, looking at old photographs of Wolverhampton so we can understand how they lived, or looking at old newspaper cuttings.

“It is mainly older people, for a lot it is a case of them looking back on their lives and they have seen the adverts or they have seen it on TV,” she says.

“They want to find out where they come from. They all say they wish they had spoken to their parents about it, but you never do when you’re young.”

Chris believes they are very often surprised to find where their ancestors came from. “A lot of people are under quite a lot of misconceptions about where they are from,” she says.

“They’re often quite surprised they come from a different part of the country, or their ancestors married people from a different part of the country.”

Chris has started tracing her own family’s history, and has so far got back as far as 1851. But not everyone’s background is as colourful as the Gittos’s.

“They’re all dead boring,” says Chris. “None of them emigrated, none of them went to prison.

“It would have been nice to have had some skeleton in the cupboard, to add a bit of spice.”