Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 31 on 16/02/2007.

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Finding your roots

Genealogy has grown into big business, but how easy is it to track your ancestry and find out about your relatives? Dominic Roskrow reports in part one of our guide

Have you ever noticed that the more globalised and homogenised our world becomes the more we seek out the small and local? Or that the easier it is to communicate across the planet and dig in to its furthest corners, the greater our desire to find our roots and know ourselves?

Perhaps these trends are linked merely by the metaphysical: easy access to the internet makes the research in to such things that much easier. Cheap plane travel gives us the wherewithal to go and explore our heritage and culture for ourselves.

But it could be that there is something more spiritual going on, too. Could it be that the ubiquity of everything from Coca- Cola to Apple technology, and the unrelenting march of global capitalism, have subconsciously perturbed us and have awoken a deep-buried homing instinct so that we feel the need to seek out who we are and where we come from?

And of course such instincts become all the stronger if we are geographically removed from ancestors and that separation has been fired by tragedy and heartbreak.

A journey in to our past can be an exciting one, and an intriguing one too, as we set out to find out more about the people who once upon a time helped to shape the people we have become. But there can be surprises, too, not all of them welcome. In the recent British television series Who Do You Think You Are? celebrities were invited to trace their ancestry for the cameras. Most found themselves embroiled in a history that was not so ancient as they had t.....

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By Dominic Roskrow

Section : Scotland Genealogy

Page number : 46