It was at his mum’s bedside in intensive care, that Adrian Stone took the first step to tracing his roots. That was 11 years ago. Today he has a family tree including 6,000 people from all over the globe. Here he talks to Helen Tovey about how he pieced together his family – and importantly – how you can do this too.

‘HOW I FOUND 6,000 RELATIONS!’

‘Mum inspired me to think more about our roots. She was a child of the Windrush – coming to Britain in 1957 – and we all knew so well of our Jamaican heritage. Yet as I sat by her bed in hospital, I realised that I didn’t even know my grandparents’ full names.’ This was the moment it came to Adrian that his purpose in life was to bring his family together. That, without care, their shared history would be lost in time. And so he began.

‘There are certain things we know of – such as our Jamaican heritage. But we also know that we have African heritage too,’ explained Adrian. ‘Most people, when researching their Black ancestry, want to connect ethnically – this is a powerful, powerful thing – but prior to DNA this was not possible to even think of. Now with DNA it is – and the main question to answer then is: “How are we related?”.’

Using the records to trace your family

This is where traditional, papertrail research comes in. You might have heard the myths – that there are no records, that they’ve been destroyed in a hurricane, that a birth was never registered, that you can’t trace back before your Windrush grandparents… but records do exist, online and in archives – and it is possible to go further back in time, even to the era of slavery.