��������pk10

People's burgeoning interest in who they are and where they come from is being exploited in a new campaign by Ancestry.co.uk, which claims to be the UK's leading family history site.

The spot features characters from history transported into modern surroundings – a First World War soldier finds himself in a junkyard and an 18th Century clergyman turns up in a launderette.

Meanwhile an Afro-Caribbean woman encounters the past members of her family who first emigrated to Britain.

Ancestry.co.uk, which was launched in 2001, offers members up to 820 million family history records drawn from censuses, birth, marriage and death records, passenger lists, phone books and military and parish records.