Family history has come a long way over the last few years. The BBC television show Who Do You Think You Are? is the most obvious manifestation of a trend that has seen family history move away from being the preserve of old families (who call it genealogy) and into the domain of all classes. It has become a vital adjunct of community history, and we can see it as a logical stage in the development of history from below. Through family history, we can make direct personal connections between ourselves and the past, and we can look at how identifiable individuals were affected by industrialisation, urbanisation, infant mortality, immigration, and so many of the other big themes of social and economic history. I’ve been dipping my toes in my own family history recently, and it’s fascinating to see how, even within the last six generations, I can use my ancestors as ways into such diverse strands of history as agricultural labouring, the workhouse, migration to the cities, warfare, policing, the beer trade (and, not quite coincidentally, the Salvation Army), and the London docks. Family history gives us diversity and depth, and helps us as individuals to see where we have come from.

I’ve been reflecting on how this can help sports history, and can see two clear ways.

First off, family history is a great way of getting to grips with sports history when you are first starting out on it. Starting off with elderly relatives who are still alive, you can find out a lot about what sport was like at given moments in the past; and through their memories, you may be able to pick up on what sport was like for their parents and even grandparents. You may pick up on strong family traditions linked to particular sports or clubs, or find out about someone competing at a high level before modern sporting celebrity cultures. You are also likely to come across artefacts and primary sources, like medals, photographs, scrapbooks and press cuttings. This can immediately personalise sports history. Rather than dealing in abstracts, your grandparents’ experiences can give you an understanding of how sport inter-related with the communities in which it was played. In my case, talking to my grandfathers – both now gone – gave me all sorts of insights about playing and watching sport in east and south London in the 1920s that I could never have got from books. Their memories took me into schools, friendship groups, local clubs, and workplaces; and, in the case of one grandfather, how the offer of a professional contract from a football club was relatively easy to turn down because the game seemed very risky compared with learning a trade. Not only did these anecdotes tell me more about my own family history: they shed light on sport’s social, economic, and cultural past.

Second, the boom in family history has given sports historians greater access to sources that can tell us not just about our families, but about the real people involved in the big trends in sport. The best example is the census. Thanks to the National Archives’ co-operation with Ancestry.co.uk, anyone can now search online the original census accounts that give house-by-house lists of families at ten year intervals between 1841 and 1901. (The current rule is that no personal information is made available until a century after the census, so the 1911 documents will be public in 2012). These documents contain occasional errors, such as slight misspellings of names; but they are absolutely priceless for giving us snapshots of domestic life, family structures, migration, and work. For sports historians, these sources can take us into the biographies of people who made a living from sport, or who were prominent as amateurs. Take a look at these three individuals to see what I mean, where all the information has come straight from the census accounts.

William Penney Brookes, the founder of the Much Wenlock Olympian Games and thus one of the key people in the history of the modern Olympic movement. In 1861, eleven years after he had started the Olympian Games, we see him living very comfortably in Much Wenlock. He lists his ‘rank or profession’ as ‘Magistrate, surgeon, apothecary’, and is living with his mother, his wife, three daughters, two apprentices, two house servants, and a groom. Here is the Victorian rational recreation promoter, a man interested in sport because of his social conscience. He is relatively wealthy, hard working, well-connected locally, and with some spare time to devote to organising sport.

Now look at Lottie Dod in 1891. Aged 19, she is reigning Wimbledon champion. She is living with her widowed mother who lives ‘on her own means’, and with her two brothers and a kitchenmaid. Lottie doesn’t have an occupation. Her neighbours include a teacher and a landscape artist. Here is the Victorian amateur woman, able to find the time to play through inherited money, and a classic part of the culture from which lawn tennis sprung.

Finally, jump to 1901 and look at Billy Meredith, already a prominent footballer playing for Manchester City. He is living in South Manchester, and his trade is given as professional footballer. He is living as a boarder in the home of James Hewitt, a hoistman in a warehouse. His neighbours include a gas engine pattern maker, an iron moulder, and a railway plate maker. Here is the lowly professional of Edwardian Britain, making a living from his game, but nothing like a fortune, and living with the working class people who made up the sport’s following.

It is easy to sniff at family history: but these kind of approaches, which can both personalise your own way into sport and give us greater detail on prominent people in sport’s past, can only benefit the discipline. They can make it more accessible and more real, and give us a flavour of how people in the past fitted their games into their everyday lives.