Who do you think you are?

THE SIGN next to the lift in the General Register Office (GRO) in Dublin says it all: “Due to an unprecedented increase in customers accessing the genealogy services it may be necessary to close the office at times.”

It seems we are all obsessed with our past, and more particularly with our family histories. The General Register Office, based in the same complex of buildings as the headquarters for the National Lottery, is full of noise, and in one of the other buildings where people try to trace their family line, it’s a similar story.

When I visited the National Archives off Kevin St in Dublin, there wasn’t much of a queue, but that’s the thing. According to Helen Kelly, genealogy expert here, there never used to be queues at all. Now, thanks to television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? and RTÉ’s recent Genealogy Roadshow, digging around files and records has never been so popular.