ONE of the biggest studies of inherited wealth in Britain, to be published this week, reveals that one in five of the population can trace their ancestry back to a family much grander and richer than themselves.

While half of those who used a new computer system to research their family tree back as far as 500 years found that they were upwardly mobile, at least 20% discovered that their ancestors had made (and then lost) a great fortune.

Genealogy sites have become some of the most popular on the internet, and an analysis of the family trees drawn up by more than 1,000 people who used Genes Reunited, an offshoot of the Friends Reunited website, to trace their ancestors has provided a unique study of social mobility dating back to Tudor times and beyond.

“It is a representative sample of people living in this country and shows the change in the workings of British society down the ages and also the workings of families, which don’t really change,” said Anthony Adolph, the genealogist who led the project.

“People make bad decisions, they squabble, they take disastrous legal action, or they are just plain lazy.”

Tracing family trees used to be the preserve of the upper middle classes, but the advent of vast computer databases has allowed everyone to have a go.

Tracey O’Connor, 44, who was born in a Leicester council house and has worked at a local Sainsbury’s supermarket for most of her adult life, is one of those who have discovered they are members of the “new poor”.

“I’ve always thought I came from a solidly working-class family but I was amazed to discover we’re descended from the owners of West Indies sugar plantations and East Anglian estates, as well as surgeons, army officers and magistrates,” she said. “They lost all their money and were in the workhouse by the 1880s, but I can’t find out why.

“I don’t feel envious, but I do think now I could have done better myself. I went to a grammar school but I left before I even took O-levels.”

Adolph, who has traced his own family’s genes back to 200BC, believes O’Connor’s ancestors probably lost their fortune when British farm incomes were destroyed by the import of cheap cotton from India, which led to plummeting wool prices, and cheap grain from America.

For others, however, the loss of vast fortunes is harder to explain. The Walker family of Rotherham were modest farmers in the 18th century who had a steam forge in their yard. They grew fabulously rich at the start of the industrial revolution by supplying mass- produced nails and, later, cannons for the Napoleonic wars 200 years ago and the American war of independence.

Within a few decades the fortune had mysteriously vanished. Adolph believes this was the result of complacency, which social historians have observed to be the downfall of many children born into wealthy families. “There is this repeated pattern of one generation making the fortune, the next building upon it and the third losing it,” he said.

Sian Ahlers, 50, a descendant of the Walker family, has however remained firmly among the bourgeoisie. Her forebears came from a branch of the family that produced army officers and adventurers, and ran successful farms in Kenya when it was part of the British empire.

She was a secretary but abandoned work at 25 when she married her Swedish husband Peter, a successful Lloyd’s insurance broker and a member of a modern social class that barely existed in earlier centuries.

“We really don’t know what happened to the original fortune,” she said. “One of (the family) was a friend of Beau Brummell, the Regency roué. Perhaps he gambled it away.”

For many of the new breed of amateur genealogists, the discovery of a forebear who played a major role in history is reward enough. Sheila Wray, a retired translator, discovered that she is related to Sir Christopher Wray, who signed the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.

Lynn Sharpe, an Essex civil servant, was delighted to discover the vicar father of Admiral Nelson had conducted the marriage of her direct ancestors five generations ago. Sharpe, who has been in contact with many distant cousins through the website, was dismayed to discover a number of her ancestors had also perished in the workhouse.

“It is tragic to find out what happened to some of them, but I was thrilled to discover the link with Nelson,” she said.

Genes Reunited, which has been running for just three years, already has 3m members and access to details of more than 39m individuals, providing a unique insight into the historical forces that have contributed to changing family fortunes over the centuries.

The earliest records accessible through the internet relate to Tudor times and a rising generation of 16th century yuppies.

It is likely, however, that the fortunes they made from provisioning the forces in the wars of the roses did not last for long.

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