There is a story hidden in the past of each of us (as we know here on Family History UK). It is usually one which reveals how closely connected we are to each other. As Who Do You Think You Are? shows, there is no better antidote to snobbery and racism than genealogy.

The second series of the welcome BBC1 series of Who do you think you are last week showed the actress Jane Horrocks, who found that she was related to the man who founded one of the richest cotton mills in 19th century Lancashire. Some of her other ancestors worked in the same mills - but at some of the dirtiest and poorest-paid jobs around. Jane also discovered a brother (to here great grandmother - Sarah) who had apparently emigrated to Australia in 1910. He later sent an opal gem to the other side of the world as a gift to his niece on her 21st birthday.

This second series features the following genealogy celebrities:

• Jeremy Paxman
• Sheila Hancock
• Stephen Fry
• Julian Clary
• Jane Horrocks
• Gurinder Chadha
  

The book	Heroes & Villains	Family Tree Maker

Missing pages of the 1861 Census

So, you can't find your ancestor in the census?

This may be because some pages and even whole enumeration books are missing from the originals in the National Archives. Some were lost or stolen over the decades, and for some areas - particularly in Monmouthshire, Pembrokeshire and Camarthenshire - the books were withheld, and only statistical information returned. Missing parts are usually from the start or finish of the books, as they were roughly handled, but other pages - including the ones that covered Buckingham Palace and much of Belgravia - were at some point removed by an unscrupulous souvenir hunter, before the originals were microfilmed.

News from 1837online

The 62-year-old star of ITV's Blind Date travelled to north-east Wales to trace her family on her mother's side.

She was told how her grandfather Joseph Blythen had walked from Wrexham to Liverpool in 1895 in search of work.

Cilla Black Coming Home will be on BBC One Wales on St David's Day, 1 March.

Where does your SURNAME come from?

Everyone's got a surname, but now a new website which maps names against areas of the country where they are most common helps shed light on where our families come from. Until now it's been hard to know what a surname says about someone. But a website has been launched that maps more than 25,000 surnames across Britain, highlighting areas of concentration. Anyone can tap in their name and with the click of a mouse glimpse a profile of how others who share their name are distributed around the country.

Many thousands of years ago, in pre-history, England was part of mainland Europe, connected by a land bridge that has subsequently been covered in water and become the English Channel.

It is hard to say exactly when man first came to the lands that were to become the British Isles, but it can be said with certainty that Paleolithic tribes were flourishing there by 8000 BC.