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David Craig, president of the Menston branch of the Church of the Latterday Saints, and Sister J Hughes.

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Rebecca Juhasz probably has less need than most to go to a family history event.

The American, who lives in Ilkley, claims to trace her lineage back to Adam and Eve - and she showed off a chart which she says demonstrates her pedigree during a visit to a family history exhibition at the Mormon Church in Menston.

Mrs Juhasz was one of hundreds of visitors to go along to the three day event, which was part of a UK tour organised by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

With a pedigree that looked hard to beat, she was able to bring the information to the exhibition thanks to years of groundwork put in by her grandfather - plus a little help from the Bible.

Originally a Campbell, Mrs Juhasz says she can trace her family back through the nobility and to links with the Scottish kings.

Proudly displaying her chart, she said: "Not many people have one of these. My grandfather did all of this and he has got it back to 982. Grandpa did a lot of work when he was younger. His wife died young so that is what he did."

And her grandfather struck lucky when he traced his lineage back to the nobility - enabling him to take advantage of carefully recorded aristocratic family trees.

"I hear that when you hit a Lord or Sir then it gets easier," said Mrs Juhasz.

Rebecaa Juhasz

Hers was not the only story at the event connected to Scottish royalty - although no-one else was claiming biblical links.

Exhibition organiser Annette Hull, who was jointly staging the event with her husband Don, has a family tradition boasting regal connections. A Steward by birth, she says: "We have a legend that we are related to the Scottish royal family."

But it's a legend she hasn't managed to confirm and she happily admits the surname is far from uncommon.

Her husband can trace his family back to Scotland, but they appear to be from more humble origins, having fled from Ireland during the potato famine.

The couple, who are both retired, had never been involved in anything like this before, but they left their home in California to bring the exhibition to Europe after being asked to do so by their church.

"It is our mission and we are here for two years in the UK," Sister Hull said.

With a whole host of advice and information and links to the Mormon church's own extensive records, the exhibition is believed to be the only one of its kind in the world.

Sister Hull said: "The idea behind it is to give individuals an opportunity to get started searching their ancestry. My husband is an orthodontist and I was a real estate agent so it is new to us, but it is an absolute joy to take round."

Family history is taken very seriously by Mormons who are encouraged to identify their ancestors and arrange for baptism and other ordinances to be performed for them by proxy. But they stress that this is something people in the spirit world can chose to accept or not.

"We believe that the family can be an eternal unit, that we don't just separate and go our separate ways when we die. Consequently we need to put ourselves together as a family," said Sister Hull.

She said people all over the world helped add to the church's billions of names on records which it keeps in Utah in granite vaults, which are bomb proofed and protected against nuclear blast.

The church is happy to share this information with others and its records are widely regarded as a useful source of information by family history groups.

With the public's almost insatiable appetite for family history - genealogy is the number one hobby in America and number two in the UK - the tour is proving a huge success. More than 350 people, in addition to church members, visited the Menston event.

While the research can be fascinating, it can also throw up some unwelcome results, such as one enthusiastic amateur genealogist the organisers have heard about who traced his family back to sheep rustlers who were hung.

But other discoveries are more welcome, such as a woman who discovered the computer specialist helping her at one of the events was actually her cousin.

And family researchers can sometimes make a huge difference to the lives of those they are trying to help.

Janet Dunne, who was helping out at the family event, taught family research at Leeds University and then worked as a freelance researcher. She said: "I had one man who came to me about 20 years ago and said I hear you can find anyone's family history unless they were found under a gooseberry bush. He laughed and said well I was'."

As a result of the research he found his mother had died when he was a young boy, but he discovered he had four sisters who were still alive and a father who was in a nursing home.

"He said not only have I found my family history, but I feel like I belong. He said having no family had affected him all his life. He grew up in Barnardo's and suddenly he had a family and felt like he had developed a sense of identity. It made him a different person. It was a quest for family, but it turned into a whole new life for him," said Mrs Dunne.

"In all of us there is this desire to know who we are and why we came to be here, but he got more than roots, he got a real live family. It was wonderful really."

But other searches are simply funny rather than moving: "I had a lady give me a lot of in-depth information of how she was trying to find her grandfather's records and couldn't. We spent a lot of time on it, but couldn't find what she was looking for. In the end she said never mind, I'll ask him when he comes to dinner on Saturday'."

This illustrates perfectly one of the first rules of research into this field.

"You do need to identify what you have access to already," stressed Mrs Dunne.

For those of us in the North of England, there is a good chance we'll be looking towards Ireland, with around 60 per cent of people in Yorkshire and Lancashire being of Irish descent.

"It resolves an awful lot of prejudice because we are all foreigners. We are all immigrants if you look at it that way," said Mrs Dunne.

Anyone looking for Welsh ancestors could face a difficult time. The ancient patronymic naming system meant a child would take the father's forename as a surname, with the result that the family's name would change from generation to generation. But Scottish traditions - where a first-born son would be named after his father's father and a first-born daughter after her mother's mother - are extremely useful to genealogists. And it's a tradition which was often adopted in the North of England.

But Mrs Dunne warned of a number of pitfalls and stressed the importance of checking information against birth certificates and marriage certificates to avoid following the wrong trail.

She said the 1881 census, which had been transcribed using the expertise of family history societies and with strict controls on accuracy, was the most correct. But the 1891 census, which was transcribed by convicts, was less so. She also stressed the importance of checking information given online against the original records, as transcription mistakes were possible. Researchers should be aware that ages given in a census might also not be totally reliable.

"I have a great grandmother I traced from 1841 to 1871 and she only aged 15 years," she said. "A lovely quote is that the only thing you know for certain in family history is who your mother was," she laughed.

1:47pm Thursday 13th March 2008

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