Book excerpt: Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors' gives a fascinating insight into everyday life in the Liverpool area over the past four centuries. Aimed primarily at the family and social historian, Mike Royden's highly readable guide introduces readers to the wealth of material available on the citys history and its people. In a series of short, information-packed chapters he describes, in vivid detail, the rise of Liverpool through shipping, manufacturing and trade from the original fishing village to the cosmopolitan metropolis of the present day. Throughout he concentrates on the lives of the local people on their experience as Liverpool developed around them. He looks at their living conditions, at poverty and the laboring poor, at health and the ravages of disease, at the influence of religion and migration, at education and the traumatic experience of war. He shows how the lives of Liverpudlians changed over the centuries and how this is reflected in the records that have survived. His useful book is a valuable tool for anyone researching the history of the city or the life of an individual ancestor.