Researching your family tree is a fascinating pastime but it is usually done through the male line. Now author Margaret Ward can show how to discover your female ancestry...

A fascination with tracing her family history led Margaret Ward to embark on a project to find out more about the role women have played throughout history.

Her book The Female Line explores the significance of women in any family's history and how they have coped in peace and war as the linchpin of many family groups.

"I've been doing family history for about 20-odd years and I have always followed the male line.

"I asked my mother to write down her own family history and that brought out stories about my grandmother, who I hardly knew.

"I began to realise it was the women who stayed at home and kept the family together - they knew all the goings-on in the family and they were the ones who kept diaries and records," she said.

Since time began it was our female ancesters who bore the children and raised them. They also cared for the old and the sick, both inside and outside the home, and stored away old newspaper cuttings and photographs.

"In some ways it is exactly the same when you try to trace female relatives as it is the male, you use census returns and parish records.

"But often it is difficult to find out about the work they did as often piecework went unrecorded because it wasn't seen as proper work.

"You have to look around the subject a bit more. These women are part of you and you can try to imagine how they felt," she said.

Margaret advised anyone interested in tracing their female line to begin with their living female relatives.

"Talk to the older women in your family straight away. I have lost my grandmothers and mother now - and I would have loved to be able to ask them more questions," she said.

As well as creating a family tree, Margaret advised writing a narrative with all the details as this can be an interesting document for the whole family to enjoy.

"It's like putting the flesh on the bones - you can use photographs and illustrations - and it brings the whole thing to life," she said.

Living has six copies of Female Line by Countryside Books at £7.95 to give away. Simply send a postcard marked Female Line to Kate Thompson, Daily Echo, Newspaper House, Test Lane, Southampton SO16 9JX.