WE ALL come from somewhere and we all end up somewhere. It is becoming rare these days for the two places to be the same.

Moving about is common, although some people do live and die within the same area.

Those who haven't travelled far may still be living close to their own history. Some of us scattered our past to the winds, which was all very well at the time but doesn't make tracing your history any easier.

Not that I've been looking. My mother is the one who has her hands in the soil, tugging at the roots to see who she can find. Perhaps it has something to do with being a gardener too.

Funny that I should have been born of a gardener and married one, while still not being sure which part of the plant goes underground. It is the bit with all the little white roots, isn't it?

I've never thought of looking into the family past, what with the present being more than enough to be getting on with. One wife, three children, one cat, two guinea pigs and a guitar seem sufficient to fill a life.

My mother is in her early seventies, which is when these matters come into focus. So she has been following up her family ancestry.

Some of it I knew, of course. Three Cole boys born to two parents, long since divorced. I was there, I recall all that - apart from the being born bit.

There were grandparents, two by two, dead now but alive in the mind. Various branches shoot out, bearing cousins, aunts and uncles. But beyond that, everything goes fuzzy.

Peripatetic may be the word for this life of mine: born in Bristol, raised in Manchester, further matured in London, and now resident in York for longer than any of the other places.

So the roots are chopped about.

Looking at the rudimentary family tree my mother printed off from her computer, it is easy to see why people become so fascinated by what went before.

It doesn't pay to become obsessed, but it is interesting to sense all those people queuing up behind you.

So much goes on in the past for us to end up where we are today. All those people, all those lives. My mother's job hasn't been made easier by the names she has to go on. She was born a Taylor and her mother was a Smith, names to bring on a squint.

Despite such a handicap, she has so far traced her family back to one Thomas Taylor, a general labourer born in Cambridge in 1820, who married Sarah (surname not recorded), who was born in Middlesex in 1832.

They had five children, Arthur, Zephaniah, James, Alice and Emma. Arthur was the eldest and he married Charlotte Dowles, who was born in Bethnal Green in 1861 and became a match-maker (someone who made matches, I guess, and not an arranger of relationships).

They had, or so my detective mother believes, ten children, including Horace James, born in 1903, who was her father and my grandfather.

Tracing the maternal alleys, my mother discovered that her mother, Doris Edith Smith, was born at Braintree in Essex in 1904 to Ellen Shufflebottom, who was herself born at Braintree in 1876. We Cole-Taylor-Smith-Shufflebottoms obviously didn't move around as much in those days.

That concocted surname is missing one other family name. Switching to my father's side, which has not been mapped out for me to crib, there is a Rice too, thanks to my father's mother, Eunice Rice, who married Bill Cole. Hampshire was their stamping ground.

We all have similar stories, similar extended pasts. Here we all are, keeping one step ahead of the neatly lined-up ghosts of our past.

A sense of continuity, of having come from somewhere, is no bad thing. Perhaps it helps make sense of the modern rush, in which we are all too hurried to think about the week before last, let alone who helped push us this far up the tree.

But Shufflebottom, really - did she have to go and find that one out?

Updated: 10:15 Thursday, May 13, 2004