"When my grandmother died I was given an old tin box  full of his  family papers.  It was a treasure trove of letters and diaries, old sepia photos, bills and  a detailed paper trail of two hundred years of colonial existence." Author Barbara Erskine vividly describes a lifetime's interest in Genealogy.

If you are one of the many thousands who tuned into the return of the BBC’s popular family history series ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ last month, you might like to know that you can now trace your own history, free, with Ancestry.co.uk.

Tony Robinson has done his share of time travelling over the years. Now he has turned his attention from digging up the past to digging up ancestors – metaphorically speaking that is. He talks to Tony Watts.