I am sure that most of us have dusty old books tucked away in our attics, cupboards or garages that once belonged to our parents, grandparents or distant relatives. What we might not realise, however, is just how useful these books can be when carrying out genealogical research. Not only can these inscriptions provide us with the names and addresses of unknown ancestors, but they can also offer personal information not found elsewhere about their daily lives and hobbies.

When reading names on a census return, it is easy to forget that, just like us, these people lived, loved, laughed, cried, learnt, grew. Book inscriptions bring us back in touch with their human side, reminding us of the person they once were. They are also one of the few records that capture the actual handwriting of our ancestors and allow us to view events from their own perspective. Reading an inscription is an emotional experience, as the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of our ancestor’s handwriting personalise the book and imbue it with an immediacy that transcends the temporal void between them and us.

Family Bibles are a particularly valuable genealogical tool. If you are lucky enough to have one in your possession, then much of your groundwork has already been laid for you. Considered ‘the life blood of families’, Bibles were used to record births, deaths and marriages, as well as other significant life events, such as a child’s illness or a son going off to war. As civil registration was not introduced until 1837 (in England and Wales) and only became compulsory in 1874, Bibles are a useful way to trace your family roots without having to trawl through parish records.

Birthday books, daily scripture books, autograph books and confession books are all equally essential genealogical devices. Popularised in the mid-nineteenth century, these gift books combined blank spaces for personalisation and signatures with printed content based on advice manuals and instructional articles. As with Bibles, owners of birthday books and daily scripture books regularly appropriated them to document deaths, marriages, funerals, christenings, new jobs, moving house and world events. Confession books and autograph books, on the other hand, shed light on ancestors’ wit, humour and irony as owners, and their family and friends, answered pre-written questions on their personality, tastes and interests (e.g. What is your idea of happiness/misery? What are your favourite qualities in a man/woman?).

If you can find none of these books amongst your family heirlooms, fear not. While they might require a little more effort, standard book inscriptions also carry a lot of meaningful information.

The most basic form of inscription is the ownership inscription which, as the name suggests, consists of the owner’s name and may also be accompanied by their address and date of inscription. Discovering this information can be essential when starting out on the journey into your family history. Gift inscriptions – books inscribed as presents from one person to another – are also important because they can show links and relationships between people that may be harder to discern from more official records, such as friendships or comradeships.

Like with Bibles and gift books, it is often the accompanying quirks that can help make your ancestor come to life as a person. Sketches, poetry, correspondence, newspaper clippings, diary entries, marginalia and even curses to protect books from theft are just some of the extraordinary marks that can be found frequently. Peculiar to books from the late nineteenth century, however, is the in memorial inscription, which marked the informal bequest of a book by the dying to a family member. This inscription emerged in Britain following the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and became a key aspect of the Victorian cult of mourning. There are very few things more moving than reading a dying mother’s final words or the heartache of an orphaned child. Inscriptions like these allow us to sense the inscriber’s feelings when writing. No official ‘vital records’ can provide such personalised tales.

Prize inscriptions or prize stickers are another common inscription type that you are likely to come across, particularly if you have British ancestors, because the practice of awarding books as prizes was extensive in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The widespread distribution of prize books grew as a direct consequence of the 1870 Education Act (the first piece of formal legislation on education in England and Wales), which saw the awarding of books as a new measurement of competency. Soon, schools, Sunday schools and clubs across Britain and its empire began gifting religious books to children in recognition of good behaviour or attendance.

Books containing prize stickers (pre-printed decorative designs) are a real treasure trove for genealogists because they feature comprehensive details of the awardee, their address and the specific school, Sunday school or club that they attended. This, in turn, can supply information on their religious denomination and help focus local archive searches of school and Sunday school records. It can also give a taste of the broad range of leisure activities that children had at their disposal, again offering a good starting point when looking for specific archival records.

While prize books were awarded to all children and many adults, the working classes were particularly targeted because educators believed that they needed to be provided with ‘healthy’ role models. For this reason, prize inscriptions and stickers present a unique way to track down poor children who lived in slums, workhouses or orphanages, providing an alternative view on their social lives to that represented by a name on a Poor Law register.

Another novel way to trace your ancestors is through bookplates – small, decorative labels used to denote book ownership. Although the first recorded use of a bookplate in Britain was in 1574, it was not until the nineteenth century that they became popularised as a result of the Victorian obsession with social status and commodity culture.

Traditionally, bookplates were used only by the upper classes who commissioned artists to custom-design ciphers, rebuses or armorials with heraldic symbols relating to their lineage. These armorials can be identified fairly easily using heraldic dictionaries. They can also be cross-referenced with the College of Arms database to check whether the owner’s claim was genuine. False armorials became a growing problem in the late nineteenth century when stationers began to advertise bookplate designs for a much cheaper price than private commissions. The middle classes immediately flocked to stationers and, naturally, more concerned with profit than authenticity, the stationers did not check whether these customers were actually entitled to a coat of arms.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, pictorial bookplates had become popularised amongst the middle and upper classes (they were never affordable to the working classes until mass production began) due to their ability to showcase images that reflected anything from an owner’s favourite sport or literary/historical character to their religious/political beliefs or job title. Pictorials could also be used to display self-portraits of owners dressed in their finest or show off new furniture or artwork in their study. Therefore, they are a whimsical, multimodal way of discovering the person behind your ancestor’s name.

If you have a particular interest in the experiences of your ancestors during World War One, late Victorian and early Edwardian inscriptions can be important resources. Some capture a period of innocence before the relentless intrusion of the Great War, while others reveal surprising links between the book, its owner and life on the front line. These inscriptions also present new ways to explain the war to young people, which is particularly important now that the conflict only exists outside of human memory.

In the box, I present the tale of one individual who played a key role in Britain’s war effort and girls’ education. Her story would not have been known to me had I not discovered her inscription in a book at Bookbarn International, Britain’s largest secondhand bookshop.