Ancestry

Tracking your family tree with Ancestry.com has been a popular pastime for years, even before the iOS app came along. There’s an innate fascination with discovering your personal history. We humans spend years trying to figure ourselves out – but inevitably, it seems, we largely fail, and we have to look backwards to understand who we truly are.

But how much can you actually learn from an app? It’s normal to feel a level of scepticism here, because – even if the right records can be accurately found – what can you really learn from birth, marriage and death certificates?

Perhaps that’s just me. Perhaps my family didn’t do much beyond being born, dying, and getting married in between. But it was still a fascinating ride searching through my family tree with the Ancestry app, which for the most part exceeded my wary expectations.

You can start your Ancestry journey for free, adding yourself as the starting point of the tree before adding close connections like siblings and parents. Eventually, if you’re lucky enough to still have them in your life, you’ll have to have that awkward text exchange with your mum to find out your grandparents’ birth dates. With each addition, you may find the app raises a ‘potential connection’ to review on the hunt for long-distant relatives. Steadily, your tree will grow.

For the most part, you can fly blind in the Ancestry app without having to sign up or pay a penny. But if you want to take things seriously, you’ll have to spend on a monthly subscription to gain access to further records. The ‘essentials’ pack is currently $25 for US users or £11 if you’re in the UK. No matter where you’re based, you’ll need to opt for a pricier ‘worldwide’ subscription package if it turns out your ancestors came from further afield than your home country.

The benefit of subscribing is accuracy, as you gain access to further records. In my case, that helped me to verify whether my ‘potential relatives’ were actually proud family members or imposters.

As it turns out, my family is almost entirely from Shorditch, the (at the time) incredibly poor and now incredibly trendy area of East London. I don’t know how to take this. If that wasn’t enough, it turns out that my great-great-grandfather was French! On my mother’s side, the trail frustratingly cut short at her parents. Beyond that, it seems they all lived in the Welsh valleys where, apparently, records weren’t kept and your name was simply whistled into the wind upon birth.