An interest in personal origins - the who ares and wherefores of one's ancestors - is a universal one, but arguably it is a preoccupation more developed in the US than over here. Ask any American where they are from, and their answer will often detail not just their home town or state, but also their ethnic roots.
The genealogy trail is a well-trodden one in the US. Well-established Americans talk about ancestors who arrived from eastern Europe or Ireland, while more recent migrants have tales relating to Asian or Hispanic backgrounds.
But one group predates all these and can trace its ancestry to 17th-century England. This is why a range of activities, on both sides of the Atlantic, to commemorate May's 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in Virginia is so significant.
Jamestown Virginia 1607-2007, an Anglo-American committee of museums, tourist authorities and historians (media don David Starkey among them), has adopted the tagline 'birth of a nation' to describe the importance of the colony, or as it was originally called, James Cittie, in honour of English monarch James I.
It was founded on 13 May 1607 when 104 settlers disembarked from the Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Contast, which had left Blackwall in the Thames estuary five months previously.
Brought over by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company given a royal charter in 1606 by James to develop a tract of land along the mid-Atlantic coast, the new settlers were far from the first Europeans to arrive in the New World. (The Icelander Leif Eriksson had reached what was to become Canada in the 11th century; further south, Sir Walter Raleigh had attempted to settle a colony at Roanoke Island in modern-day Virginia between 1585-89; and Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the New World nearly a century before.)
But what was significant about Jamestown was that its founding, on Jamestown Island, 60 miles from Chesapeake Bay, represented the first serious toehold that the English had in the new land.
'Had it not been for the London venture capitalists and the administrators of the Virginia Company, the settlement would not have happened,' says Hazel Forsyth of London's Museum in Docklands and the curator of its current exhibition, Journey to the New World.
'This is the key message that the Docklands exhibition conveys. The rule of law, the right to buy arms and the basis of democracy all have their origin in the English constitution, and the English presence in what became the US has made a profound mark on the country. It is a reason we are so close.'
The first three ships were followed by subsequent supplies of fresh settlers and, adds Forsyth, young brides and conscripted labour, which included vagrant children spirited off the London streets. Yet the Jamestown colony was ill fated.
Although wary relations were established with the local Powhatan Native Americans (one settler, John Rolfe, married the chief's daughter, Pocahontas, and brought her to London), they were not enough to ensure their survival.
At least half the settlers died in the Indian massacre of 1622 (also known as the Jamestown Massacre), and in 1698, the colony was burned to the ground. Lost for centuries, the settlement was first excavated in 1994 by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) and opened later as Historic Jamestowne. It is jointly managed with the National Parks Service.
In a project that began in 2000, the site has been completely redeveloped, with Leicester-based Haley Sharpe Design responsible, from consultation to completion, for the reinterpretation. An investment of $61.3m (£31m) has ensured that Historic Jamestowne is more than an archaeological site.
It features a visitor centre that opened in January, appropriate conservation and topographical interpretation allowing visitors to 'see' across 400 years. One of its main features is the 700 sq metre archaearium, displaying archaeological finds from the site.
'To the eye, the site was a pleasant piece of parkland with a lot of archaeology underneath,' says Nick Stead, a former consultant at Haley Sharpe and the company's project coordinator for Historic Jamestowne. 'That hasn't changed,' he says. 'What has changed are the exhibition facilities and a separate archaeological museum, which sits close to the site. These anchor the historical experience.'
Stead stresses that the new facilities combine to feed research into the Jamestown story. 'Our work there now means that a much more inclusive story is being told at Historic Jamestowne,' he adds. 'It is a story that looks at the origins of English America from three perspectives: Indian, African and English.'
Hazel Forsyth first realised that the US was serious about celebrating the anniversary when the plans of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF) came to her attention in 2005.
In fact, the JYF is one of several bodies benefiting from funds distributed by the Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission, a body created by Congress in 2003 to promote 'the promise of freedom for all Americans and all peoples around the world'.
Set up by the Commonwealth of Virginia and accredited by the American Association of Museums, the JYF links two pivotal sites of American history - the first English colony on the one hand and, at Yorktown, the site where British forces surrendered in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War.
The JYF has organised a rebuild of the Jamestown fort, plus some replica ships from the 1607 expedition. 'I came back fired with enthusiasm and felt we must do something,' says Forsyth. 'The Museum of London was the logical venue.'
Forsyth's portable Docklands exhibition was assembled quickly. She had four weeks to compile a loans list. Given that the logistics of transporting items from the US were too difficult, Journey to the New World makes up in imagination what it lacks in artefacts.
A far-reaching talks programme, with topics ranging from the quality of brides sent out to wed settlers, to the fate of the Virginian indigenous people, supports a show that, to an extent, relies on an 'items such as this' policy.
But it works. Items from England - chamber pots, crockery and hornbooks for rudimentary education - would have travelled to Jamestown, and there is something moving about seeing the type of toys that the children shipped to America might have played with.
The jewel in the crown, however, is a full-scale model of the Discovery moored outside the museum. A gift from the JYF, the 11-metre ship is alarmingly small. The vessel is the travelling component of the exhibition and will tour historically appropriate maritime locations in Kent, East Anglia and possibly Bristol.
Elsewhere in London, the British Museum is weighing into the 400th anniversary with A New World: Britain's First View of America, an exhibition of finely detailed watercolours of landscapes and Native Americans by Elizabethan artist John White.
Many local museums and councils - the majority of the Jamestown settlers came from East Anglia and Kent - are also doing their bit. Kent County Council is going to the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival in Washington DC this summer to highlight cultural links between England and Virginia.
In Suffolk, St Edmundsbury Borough Council has a range of activities organised around the theme of America 400. These culminate in a 'family fun day', complete with military parades courtesy of the United States Army Air Forces, on 6 May in the abbey gardens of Bury St Edmunds. There is also an open day at Otley Hall, the family seat of one notable settler, Bartholomew Gosnold, near Ipswich.
Like its neighbour, Norfolk is also stressing more contemporary links with the US, including the fact that they have both been home to several US airforce bases since the Second World War.
Both counties are using the anniversary as an opportunity to bring out their dead - that is, to remind us of all the famous Americans who originated, or their forebears did, from East Anglia, including Abraham Lincoln's ancestors in Hingham and John Rolfe, he of Pocahontas fame, in Heacham.
There are sound financial reasons for all the flower festivals, pow wows and Pocahontas pageants. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK welcomed 32m international visitors last year - more than one every second. North America accounted for a sizeable 14 per cent of this total.
VisitBritain is focusing strongly on increasing the number of Americans visiting the UK this year. 'Running throughout our Jamestown coverage is a big ancestral tourism element,' says Deirdre Livingstone, the project head of Jamestown 2007 at VisitBritain.
The Begin Your Adventure website, which is being driven by the Kent Tourism Alliance, lists more than 50 events linked to the 400th anniversary, at venues that include Syon House in south-west London, Leeds Castle in Kent, and the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
'We have worked with the UK's National Archives and are also encouraging local councils to unlock their archives,' says Livingstone. 'Rochester is a classic example, as it has the burial record of Pocahontas.'
Museums in Britain and the US are aware that a productive genealogy hunt is dependent on good archives and that record-keeping was often a privilege extended only to populations that fitted into a system of wills, indentures and property deeds.
Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, slaves, fell outside this grid of legal paperwork. There were exceptions, however. Historian Kathleen Brown cites one such example from the Jamestown colony's records in her book Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs.
'Mary, a negro woman' had arrived in Virginia from Angola in 1622, onboard the Margarett and John. Mary married a fellow African and moved to the Eastern Shore, where they bought land and settled. The couple enjoyed, as Brown notes in an essay published on the endlessly informative Virtual Jamestown website, 'a measure of freedom that later African arrivals to the colony would not be permitted'.
Brown's reserve is one that typifies much of the US response to the anniversary. So far, the celebrations have little room for any crass patriotism, even though the Jamestown Commemoration Commission's statement about 'the promise of freedom' has a gung-ho ring that sits uneasily with contemporary events.
In events held last year, Historic Jamestowne, the park jointly administered by the National Parks Service and APVA, took a sober attitude to the anniversary, holding days looking at African arrivals, the Virginian Native Americans and archaeology.
The birth of a nation is something witnessed only in retrospect. The nation that the first English colonists had in mind probably would not have countenanced severance and independence from the mother country.
But if there is a common thread that links events on both sides of the Atlantic, it is that history has roots that extend not just into the past, but towards the future, and that what seems to be a single story can quite happily hold a multiplicity of tales.
Louise Gray is a freelance arts journalist
The genealogy trail is a well-trodden one in the US. Well-established Americans talk about ancestors who arrived from eastern Europe or Ireland, while more recent migrants have tales relating to Asian or Hispanic backgrounds.
But one group predates all these and can trace its ancestry to 17th-century England. This is why a range of activities, on both sides of the Atlantic, to commemorate May's 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in Virginia is so significant.
Jamestown Virginia 1607-2007, an Anglo-American committee of museums, tourist authorities and historians (media don David Starkey among them), has adopted the tagline 'birth of a nation' to describe the importance of the colony, or as it was originally called, James Cittie, in honour of English monarch James I.
It was founded on 13 May 1607 when 104 settlers disembarked from the Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Contast, which had left Blackwall in the Thames estuary five months previously.
Brought over by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company given a royal charter in 1606 by James to develop a tract of land along the mid-Atlantic coast, the new settlers were far from the first Europeans to arrive in the New World. (The Icelander Leif Eriksson had reached what was to become Canada in the 11th century; further south, Sir Walter Raleigh had attempted to settle a colony at Roanoke Island in modern-day Virginia between 1585-89; and Christopher Columbus made four voyages to the New World nearly a century before.)
But what was significant about Jamestown was that its founding, on Jamestown Island, 60 miles from Chesapeake Bay, represented the first serious toehold that the English had in the new land.
'Had it not been for the London venture capitalists and the administrators of the Virginia Company, the settlement would not have happened,' says Hazel Forsyth of London's Museum in Docklands and the curator of its current exhibition, Journey to the New World.
'This is the key message that the Docklands exhibition conveys. The rule of law, the right to buy arms and the basis of democracy all have their origin in the English constitution, and the English presence in what became the US has made a profound mark on the country. It is a reason we are so close.'
The first three ships were followed by subsequent supplies of fresh settlers and, adds Forsyth, young brides and conscripted labour, which included vagrant children spirited off the London streets. Yet the Jamestown colony was ill fated.
Although wary relations were established with the local Powhatan Native Americans (one settler, John Rolfe, married the chief's daughter, Pocahontas, and brought her to London), they were not enough to ensure their survival.
At least half the settlers died in the Indian massacre of 1622 (also known as the Jamestown Massacre), and in 1698, the colony was burned to the ground. Lost for centuries, the settlement was first excavated in 1994 by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) and opened later as Historic Jamestowne. It is jointly managed with the National Parks Service.
In a project that began in 2000, the site has been completely redeveloped, with Leicester-based Haley Sharpe Design responsible, from consultation to completion, for the reinterpretation. An investment of $61.3m (£31m) has ensured that Historic Jamestowne is more than an archaeological site.
It features a visitor centre that opened in January, appropriate conservation and topographical interpretation allowing visitors to 'see' across 400 years. One of its main features is the 700 sq metre archaearium, displaying archaeological finds from the site.
'To the eye, the site was a pleasant piece of parkland with a lot of archaeology underneath,' says Nick Stead, a former consultant at Haley Sharpe and the company's project coordinator for Historic Jamestowne. 'That hasn't changed,' he says. 'What has changed are the exhibition facilities and a separate archaeological museum, which sits close to the site. These anchor the historical experience.'
Stead stresses that the new facilities combine to feed research into the Jamestown story. 'Our work there now means that a much more inclusive story is being told at Historic Jamestowne,' he adds. 'It is a story that looks at the origins of English America from three perspectives: Indian, African and English.'
Hazel Forsyth first realised that the US was serious about celebrating the anniversary when the plans of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF) came to her attention in 2005.
In fact, the JYF is one of several bodies benefiting from funds distributed by the Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission, a body created by Congress in 2003 to promote 'the promise of freedom for all Americans and all peoples around the world'.
Set up by the Commonwealth of Virginia and accredited by the American Association of Museums, the JYF links two pivotal sites of American history - the first English colony on the one hand and, at Yorktown, the site where British forces surrendered in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War.
The JYF has organised a rebuild of the Jamestown fort, plus some replica ships from the 1607 expedition. 'I came back fired with enthusiasm and felt we must do something,' says Forsyth. 'The Museum of London was the logical venue.'
Forsyth's portable Docklands exhibition was assembled quickly. She had four weeks to compile a loans list. Given that the logistics of transporting items from the US were too difficult, Journey to the New World makes up in imagination what it lacks in artefacts.
A far-reaching talks programme, with topics ranging from the quality of brides sent out to wed settlers, to the fate of the Virginian indigenous people, supports a show that, to an extent, relies on an 'items such as this' policy.
But it works. Items from England - chamber pots, crockery and hornbooks for rudimentary education - would have travelled to Jamestown, and there is something moving about seeing the type of toys that the children shipped to America might have played with.
The jewel in the crown, however, is a full-scale model of the Discovery moored outside the museum. A gift from the JYF, the 11-metre ship is alarmingly small. The vessel is the travelling component of the exhibition and will tour historically appropriate maritime locations in Kent, East Anglia and possibly Bristol.
Elsewhere in London, the British Museum is weighing into the 400th anniversary with A New World: Britain's First View of America, an exhibition of finely detailed watercolours of landscapes and Native Americans by Elizabethan artist John White.
Many local museums and councils - the majority of the Jamestown settlers came from East Anglia and Kent - are also doing their bit. Kent County Council is going to the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival in Washington DC this summer to highlight cultural links between England and Virginia.
In Suffolk, St Edmundsbury Borough Council has a range of activities organised around the theme of America 400. These culminate in a 'family fun day', complete with military parades courtesy of the United States Army Air Forces, on 6 May in the abbey gardens of Bury St Edmunds. There is also an open day at Otley Hall, the family seat of one notable settler, Bartholomew Gosnold, near Ipswich.
Like its neighbour, Norfolk is also stressing more contemporary links with the US, including the fact that they have both been home to several US airforce bases since the Second World War.
Both counties are using the anniversary as an opportunity to bring out their dead - that is, to remind us of all the famous Americans who originated, or their forebears did, from East Anglia, including Abraham Lincoln's ancestors in Hingham and John Rolfe, he of Pocahontas fame, in Heacham.
There are sound financial reasons for all the flower festivals, pow wows and Pocahontas pageants. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK welcomed 32m international visitors last year - more than one every second. North America accounted for a sizeable 14 per cent of this total.
VisitBritain is focusing strongly on increasing the number of Americans visiting the UK this year. 'Running throughout our Jamestown coverage is a big ancestral tourism element,' says Deirdre Livingstone, the project head of Jamestown 2007 at VisitBritain.
The Begin Your Adventure website, which is being driven by the Kent Tourism Alliance, lists more than 50 events linked to the 400th anniversary, at venues that include Syon House in south-west London, Leeds Castle in Kent, and the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
'We have worked with the UK's National Archives and are also encouraging local councils to unlock their archives,' says Livingstone. 'Rochester is a classic example, as it has the burial record of Pocahontas.'
Museums in Britain and the US are aware that a productive genealogy hunt is dependent on good archives and that record-keeping was often a privilege extended only to populations that fitted into a system of wills, indentures and property deeds.
Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, slaves, fell outside this grid of legal paperwork. There were exceptions, however. Historian Kathleen Brown cites one such example from the Jamestown colony's records in her book Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs.
'Mary, a negro woman' had arrived in Virginia from Angola in 1622, onboard the Margarett and John. Mary married a fellow African and moved to the Eastern Shore, where they bought land and settled. The couple enjoyed, as Brown notes in an essay published on the endlessly informative Virtual Jamestown website, 'a measure of freedom that later African arrivals to the colony would not be permitted'.
Brown's reserve is one that typifies much of the US response to the anniversary. So far, the celebrations have little room for any crass patriotism, even though the Jamestown Commemoration Commission's statement about 'the promise of freedom' has a gung-ho ring that sits uneasily with contemporary events.
In events held last year, Historic Jamestowne, the park jointly administered by the National Parks Service and APVA, took a sober attitude to the anniversary, holding days looking at African arrivals, the Virginian Native Americans and archaeology.
The birth of a nation is something witnessed only in retrospect. The nation that the first English colonists had in mind probably would not have countenanced severance and independence from the mother country.
But if there is a common thread that links events on both sides of the Atlantic, it is that history has roots that extend not just into the past, but towards the future, and that what seems to be a single story can quite happily hold a multiplicity of tales.
Louise Gray is a freelance arts journalist