An ethnographic study of the burgeoning interest in genealogy and family history in the north of England. The study reveals a number of salient aspects of contemporary British life, for example: the role and place of the internet both as a tool facilitating research and a medium in which social relationships are conducted; debates over what constitutes Englishness and who and what gets excluded when the focus is on ‘ancestors’; the ways in which social class is rendered visible in links to past, place and person; and how expertise is constituted through a combination of technical, emotional and embodied skills.