RESEARCHING your family tree has never been so easy. Most of the information you need is just two clicks away. But, says June, it wasn’t always like that.

“I started in 1982 before computers and everything,” she says.

“I’d always been interested in family history, my grandmother, who died aged 100 in 1977, was always talking about her past and life as a child.

“She’d seen the beginning of electricity, the telephone, you name it.”

June’s quest began, as many do, trying to pin down a family myth.

“My grandmother was a Herbert and said we were related to Lord Carnarvon so when I found my great-grandfather’s marriage certificate and realised he couldn’t write and his father was a labourer, I felt I’d discovered something.”

Nowadays we have outfits like Ancestry.com and Genes Reunited and the census online to inspire and assist the amateur genealogist. But none of this existed in June’s genealogical infancy.

“It was so long ago that Dorset Record Office still had the original registers out’ for you to look at,” she says. “Then it went to microfilm and now it’s online.”

Her earliest gem was discovering where the family fondness for naming children Lance originated from.

“I discovered that Henry Cleall had married a Charlotte Lance and Lance became a family name for six generations,” she says. “When I found that in a parish register I was over the moon.”

This was just a family joy but June’s ceaseless ferreting turned up something much more significant.

She learned of a family member, James White, whose daughter, Annie, was her paternal grandmother.

“The short story is that he was running goods – smuggling – with others off Worbarrow Bay but was caught in January 1834 and put in Dorchester prison.”

He was originally sentenced to be hanged, but, says June, “it was later commuted to a year’s hard labour.”

She went to the newspapers to try and find a report of his trial but found nothing, quite possibly because, at the time this was going on, they were also trying the Tolpuddle Martyrs. “It turned out the trial was the same day as his, so he would have been in prison with the Martyrs,” she says.

James eventually served his sentence and went to work as a labourer to try and feed his six children. He died, two years later, crushed to death in a clay-pit. He was just 37 years old.

June is an enthusiastic member of Dorset Family History Society which helps people from across the globe.

“We don’t just have access to Dorset Records we have access to all over,” she says. “You don’t have to be from Dorset or even have family in Dorset to join us.”

Certainly the office is a hive of industry, as researchers go about tracing their own and others family trees, as part of a paid-for service which they run.

“We also run courses and workshops to get people started,” says June, who believes anyone serious about tracing their tree should pay the modest £12 yearly fee.

“I love the way you just find out things along the way, like the fact that the corporation of Poole paid for a street party with beef and fireworks to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic wars,” she says.

She is an octogenarian now but confesses to a ‘terrible compulsion to just keep going’.

“After 30 years I still find things on my line; it’s really why you never stop.”