A Family History Of... – Details, episodes & analysis

Ordinary lives told through extraordinary moments.

Findmypast's genealogist and research specialist Jen Baldwin is joined by guests to unravel remarkable family tales uncovered in the archives.

Each month, one moment in history is explored through a single true family story, unfolding several interconnected episodes. Human, empathetic, and driven by real stories, A Family History Of.. reveals how defining British and Irish moments shaped, and were shaped by, the people who lived them.

Historian Lucy Worsley joins host and genealogist Jen Baldwin to discover how two world wars shaped one woman’s life – and the generations that followed.​

Edna Bourne takes her first breath in Birmingham, 1911, as Europe braces for war. With her father working to feed the munitions machine and her mother navigating rationing queues and civic duty, Edna's earliest memories are shaped by a city under pressure.

Join Jen and Lucy - Edna's granddaughter - as they uncover the archival clues that reveal the bigger picture. What did childhood look like for a girl growing up in Britain’s industrial heart, as it transformed into a wartime powerhouse?

Host and Researcher: Jen Baldwin

Guest: Lucy Worsley

Editor: CM87Edits

Script Editors: Niall Cullen, Daisy Goddard, Madeleine Gilbert, and Ellie Ayton

Producers: Madeleine Gilbert and Ellie Ayton

Designer: Michael McCosh

Executive Producers: Helen Kaye and Steve James

Lucy Worsley returns to discover her grandmother's dramatic Second World War secrets...

By 1939, Edna Bourne is a young working woman in a Britain preparing for war once again. Her days in a Birmingham boot shop unfold against air‑raid drills, rationing, and uncertainty. But behind the everyday routines lie private complexities: a whirlwind marriage, a pregnancy under the pressures of wartime morality, and a truth hidden in the marriage register that carries legal and emotional weight.

Join host and genealogist Jen Baldwin and her guest, historian Lucy Worsley, as they bring the records to life, revealing how women navigated respectability, secrecy and survival in a world where war upended everything.

Host and Researcher: Jen Baldwin

Guest: Lucy Worsley

Editor: CM87Edits

Script Editors: Niall Cullen, Daisy Goddard, Madeleine Gilbert, and Ellie Ayton

Producers: Madeleine Gilbert and Ellie Ayton

Designer: Michael McCosh

Executive Producers: Helen Kaye and Steve James

Lucy Worsley returns to discover the next part of her grandmother's story - during the Birmingham Blitz.

In 1942, Edna Bourne becomes a mother during the Birmingham Blitz. Amid blackouts, bombing raids and disrupted maternity care, she endures grief with little space to rest or speak of it. Through death registers, wartime diaries and Mass Observation accounts, genealogist Jen Baldwin and her guest, historian Lucy Worsley, explore the burdens carried by mothers on the home front.

Host and Researcher: Jen Baldwin

Guest: Lucy Worsley

Editor: CM87Edits

Script Editors: Niall Cullen, Daisy Goddard, Madeleine Gilbert, and Ellie Ayton

Producers: Madeleine Gilbert and Ellie Ayton

Designer: Michael McCosh

Executive Producers: Helen Kaye and Steve James

Why do women rarely appear in WW2 records?

Many wartime women left no diaries or letters, only the sparse traces of addresses, occupations, and brief entries in civil records.

In this bonus episode, host and expert genealogist Jen Baldwin explores how those small clues — a line in the 1939 Register, a registrar‑office marriage, a maternity home address — can reveal the pressures shaping a woman’s life during war. By placing each detail within the world she lived in, Jen shows how context helps us hear stories that were never written down. What might you discover when you read the women in your family, not just for what’s recorded, but for what the records quietly imply?

Host and Researcher: Jen Baldwin​

Editor: CM87Edits​

Script Editors: Niall Cullen, Daisy Goddard, Madeleine Gilbert, and Ellie Ayton​

Producers: Madeleine Gilbert and Ellie Ayton​

Designer: Michael McCosh​

Executive Producers: Helen Kaye and Steve James

One family faces famine, fear and exile — and forges a future that spanned oceans. 

The Great Famine cast a long shadow across Ireland, hollowing out towns, devastating families, and driving thousands to the brink. It’s a familiar tale, but one not often told. Follow the story of Archibald MacKenzie, a man whose life veered from riot to imprisonment, and then across the sea to smoke and furnaces. Across three episodes, host and genealogist Jen Baldwin — Archibald’s descendant — and Irish genealogy expert Fiona Fitzsimons piece together a life shaped by fear, migration and endurance. Through parish records, newspapers, court entries and census lines, they explore how hunger, displacement and survival reshaped one family — and how those pressures echoed through the generations that followed. 

Part 1 drops on 31 March - follow and subscribe so you never miss an episode.