It's interesting how little most of US know about our ancestors or about the history of our family. If you 【B1】 to be nobility(贵族), the history of your family is 【B2】 well 【B3】 . But few of us have any such 【B4】 . I first became 【B5】 in my own family history four or five years ago when my mother 【B6】 me some photographs which I had never seen before-- 【B7】 photos of uncles and aunts, great -- uncles and great -- aunts and grandparents, all 【B8】 when they were young. I immediately wanted to try to 【B9】 my family 【B10】 back as 【B11】 as I could, and decided to start 【B12】 the photos. First of all I had to rely completely on my mother's memory for names, the ages of people in the photos, the year the photos 【B13】 have been taken, and so on. Then after that, I wanted her to fill in for me details of 【B14】 members of the family who weren't in the photos. Again, she was able to 【B15】 quite a lot of information. The 【B16】 step was to go and consult (查阅)public records of births, marriages and deaths. 【B17】 , reading such information in old record books might be pretty boring - unless you' re a historian, but it's a very different matter when you' re looking 【B18】 something about your own ancestors. It's fascinating to discover that one of your grandfathers--the one that you thought had 【B19】 his whole life on a farm in the south of England— had 【B20】 gone and lived in the USA for some five years when he was a young man back in the 1890s! 【B1】