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Tracing a family tree is totally addictive, and I should know.

It’s a bit like becoming a detective. As clues pop up, you dig even deeper.

As the birth, death or marriage certificate you ordered pops through your letterbox, there’s that satisfying eureka moment when it confirms what you always suspected... you are indeed a fourth generation descendant of family of Northumberland molecatchers.

That’s pretty much what happened to me after I caught the "Who Do You Think You Are?" bug.

But as I discovered, tracing your roots backwards in time is pretty straightforward compared to doing it the other way round.

For this Inside Out film I tried to track down the living descendants of the old mariners who’d been recorded on long-forgotten wax cylinders.

It was no mean task.

Living history

When you look back in time a birth certificate reveals who the parents were and where they lived.

But looking forward you have to guess how many children they might have had or where in the country they moved to - the odds of success are very different.

Undaunted I spent three months chasing the living relatives of Sunderland seafarer Edward Robinson (1834-1932).

There were copious notes about him made by James Madison Carpenter, the American academic who recorded him singing shanties in the sailor’s almshouse Trafalgar Square.

I felt I got to know Edward quite well as I rummaged through archives and the city library.

He married Margaret Wood in 1862 and they had three children.

Complicated family tree

Following the whereabouts of sailors is difficult as they often do not appear in the Census returns in which everyone in Britain is listed along with their address every 10 years.

Knowing the names of the rest of the family who remained in Sunderland was a real help.

Clues - Sunderland almshouses at Traflagar Square.

The records at Trafalgar Square proved Edward moved into the almshouses the 9th November 1908 along with his wife Margaret.

But hold on, I had in my possession Margaret’s death certificate from 19 years previous.

This unlocked a new side to Edward... by the time he retired he was onto wife number three.

Not only that, when he’d met his second wife, their respective youngest children also married one-another.

This family tree was becoming really complicated!

Family clues

Newspaper articles, obituaries, electoral rolls, old phone directories, last wills and testaments all revealed individual little clues.

But there was one thing I wasn’t prepared for...

The family line I followed came to an abrupt halt at a Sunderland graveside.

All three Robinson grandchildren had died with no children of their own. The last passed away just eight years ago.

As you will see from the family tree, the two other family lines simply vanished from the record books.

Emigration, and two world wars could account for the sudden disappearance, but maybe you might know what happened?

For me it was back to square one.

Lucky break

Another of Carpenter’s sound archive contributors was called Mark Page who also lived in the Sunderland almshouses about the same time as Edward Robinson.

There were virtually no notes on him, but as chance would have it, I struck lucky and managed to find living relatives in just a few weeks.

Turning back time - Mark Page.

With the family’s help we traced other cousins and my plan to play the old songs to the singers’ descendants was back on track.

I loved it, but don’t ask me to do it again.

Meantime there are hundreds more of Carpenter’s recordings in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

They too must all be longing to sing to the loved ones they never lived long enough to know.