Anthony Adolph is a professional genealogist, broadcaster and writer. As a freelance professional genealogist, he provides a complete range of services from one-off searches to full scale projects to trace family trees in Britain and abroad, and investigates all aspects of surname origins, heraldry, house histories and much more besides.

Anthony is author of Tracing your Family History, published by Collins and nominated Runner Up in the Family History Book of the Year 2004-2005 competition run by Ancestors, the magazine of Britain's National Archives. A full revised and up-to-date edition was published in July 2008. His second book, Tracing your Home's History, was published by Collins in 2006, accompanied by a feature article by Anthony in the Sunday Times on 27 August 2006. His third book is Full of Soup and Gold, the biography of Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans (1605-1684). Builder of Jermyn Street and St James's, Westminster, Jermyn was the greatest and hitherto virtually unknown power behind the throne in Stuart England and possibly the true father of Charles II. This book was shortlisted for the 2002 Biographer’s Club Prize and was published in December 2006. The Literary Review described the book as "... a passionately committed and scholarly study of one of the Stuarts’ more illustrious henchmen, complete with detailed notes on sources that have never previously been brought together...". His book Tracing Your Irish Family History (Collins), published on 1 October 2007, which was described in November 2007's Who Do You Think You Are Magazine as "a rare achievement" and "enthralling". His next book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History (Collins) will be published in November 2008. A book introducing genealogy to children is due to be publsihed in 2009.

Anthony has been resident genealogist and co-presenter of Channel 4’s ground-breaking family history series Extraordinary Ancestors (2000); Living TV's Antiques Ghostshow (2003), Radio 4's Meet The Descendants (2003 and 2004), as featured on Pick of the Week and BBC1's Gene Detectives (2007), in which he featured, alongside Melanie Sykes, as "the Gene Detective". Other recent projects include Discovery Channel's Ancestor Hunters and My Famous Family on UK TV History, which he researched and in which he appeared with Bill Oddie. He researched and presented the family trees of Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton for ITV's This Morning and has researched the ancestry of most of the presenters of GMTV including Lorraine Kelly. Anthony speaks regularly on TV and radio about family history and through the Your Family Story section of this website, he puts people with interesting family tales in touch with TV and radio producers and journalists.

Anthony has written 13 biographical articles for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He writes on all aspects of history and family and home history for a wide variety of publications from The Sunday Times to Your family Tree, covering subjects as diverse as Keralese ancestry, Tudor research, Suffolk landscape artist Perry Nursey and interviews with people as diverse as the British Ambassador in Armenia, Garter King of Arms and the editor of Burke's Peerage. He also researches and writes about the ancestry of celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Orlando Bloom, Ronnie Corbet and J.K. Rowling.

He also undertakes research for books and television programmes. Recent commissions include research on Jeremy Clarkson's family for Who Do You Think You Are?; Channel 4’s Forbidden Fruit, research for Piers Paul Read’s recent biography of Alec Guinness, and investigating the ancestry of Eddie Izzard for Discovery Channel’s Mongrel Nation.

Anthony is resident genealogist for www.GenesReunited.co.uk, giving monthly live web-casts on the site.

Born in 1967, Anthony was educated at St George’s College, Weybridge, Durham University and the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Canterbury. He continued to lecture there and worked for twelve years as a researcher and latterly Research Director for The Institute's supporting firm of professional genealogists. He served from 1990 to 1998 as Hon. Secretary of English Record Collections. He become a freelance professional genealogist, writer and broadcaster at the start of 2003.

Through his paternal grandfather’s mother, Angela Havers, Anthony is a direct descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Vicar-General to Henry VIII. Brought up in the Spanish Netherlands where a system of parish registers existed, Cromwell used the Reformation to introduce similar record keeping to England and Wales, thus laying the foundations for modern English genealogy. If Anthony’s maternal grandmother’s Irish Denning family were originally O’Dugenans, as seems likely, then he is also of blood of the bards and ollamhs (court poets) of Gaelic Connacht, who included Magnus O’Duigenan, the chief compiler of the Book of Ballymote in about 1415, and Peregrine O’ Duigenan (d. 1664), one of the eponymous writers of the Annals of the Four Masters, who between them recorded vast quantities of ancient Irish oral tradition. His blood is thus a favourable conjunction of written record, and oral tradition, and it is by combining both that the best pedigrees can be worked out.

I grew up knowing a bit about my recent... heritage, but now I know about the ancient links and it’s something I hold dear - Hugh Grant, film star (For the full text of Anthony Adolph's discoveries about Hugh Grant's family tree, see www.sundaymail.co.uk)