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Genealogy is among the fastest-growing leisure pursuits in the U.K. Indeed, the urge to uncover the truth about our ancestors has proved so compelling that, when the 1901 census first went online, the website crashed after a million people logged on within hours of its launch.

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.

People like to trace their ancestry.

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

My family, although they're very large on both my parents' sides, they don't know much about their family tree. Occasionally, they try to dig, but they can't get very far, and it's baffling. In Dublin, it seems that so many public records were wiped out; it's proven to be very difficult, so I know very little.

My dad has done a bit of research on our family tree, and we can trace it quite far back. My dad believes he has traced us back to being a great-great-great-great-great-great cousin of Wellington.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.

My ancestors come from a part of southern China where most villages can trace their roots back at least a thousand years or even more. However, as a typical American, I have lived in four cities and moved at least seven times.