THE JACKPOT IS finding a highwayman or pirate in the family tree, a county archivist once told me, but filling their forebears' names and dates is enough to satisfy, most ancestor-hunters. Family history is one of this country's fastest-growing hobbies, and consequently those once quiet and peaceful backwaters, local archives, county record offices and the Family Records Centre, are so busy that users sometimes have to make bookings weeks in advance. The queues will grow even longer when Julie Myerson's ingenious variation on the theme catches on.

Her book proposal must have been an easy one to sell: the subtitle explains the whole subject in a single line; the author is eminently promotable (she is a journalist and novelist, her partner Jonathan is a television screenwriter and director, they have three children - Chloe, Jacob, Raphael -