An e-mail from my mom, the ardent genealogist, delivered unexpected but welcome news. "My dear little Yankee daughter," she wrote recently, "I found a New England ancestor for you." Lacking the time to pursue her discovery, she proffered the names of this man and his wife and encouraged me to dig deeper.

The internet's impact on family history research has been nothing short of revolutionary. Through modern technology, we can trace our kinship with people for whom indoor plumbing and central heating were unimaginable innovations.

The Google search engine told me within seconds that this settler wasn't just a New England ancestor but also a New Hampshire one.

Here was validation, I felt, for my long-cherished yet mystifying certainty that I was fated to live in New Hampshire, and truly belonged here. When Thomas Chase left his native England sometime before 1640, he sailed directly to these shores and landed in Hampton. I love him for that choice.

Seldom have I received a more welcome gift, one that keeps on giving. The history of the Seacoast settlement - old news to local history experts - is suddenly a passion of mine. I want to identify the precise location of Thomas's 27 "akeres of salt marsh" and his tracts of fresh meadow and upland. I yearn to tread, if possible, common land where his oxen, "cowes" and "young beestes" grazed.

And I rejoice that through this immigrant Englishman I'm related (however remotely) to other New Hampshire families. His neighbors'names were already familiar to me; their sons and grandsons moved west to settle this town in which I live.

I was raised in the firm belief that I was a Southerner through and through, for many generations. My known ancestors had left their various countries of origin - England, Scotland, Ireland, France - and sailed for Virginia, well to the south of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The one anomaly was the Welshman who in 1830 sailed to New Brunswick but, for reasons best known to himself, decided he belonged down in Georgia. He was my family's most "recent" immigrant.

Not a few members of the growing genealogy cult seem to believe the ancestor's achievements reflect directly on the descendant. Pride in one's lineage is unobjectionable except when it manifests itself in pretension and boasting. Prominent forbears always get top billing when people talk about their heritage.

For some - myself included - the notorious ones hold a greater fascination. My family tree includes a convicted felon, transported from England for poaching a deer on an earl's estate in the 18th century. He's probably my favorite ancestor, after Thomas Chase.

For me, the historian, genealogy isn't about bragging rights. It's about making connections with history. I get a charge from learning about blood relatives who lived during times of great change or advancement. I honor those who undertook a long and uncertain voyage to a strange land, forged a new civilization out of wilderness with their bare hands and populated it. And then moved on.

People who came to America, and those who continue to come, are more focused on the future than the past. They are motivated to build a better life in a new place, for themselves and their descendants.

This was demonstrably true of my newly discovered ancestors. Isaac Chase, son of Thomas, migrated from New Hampshire to Martha's Vineyard and over time acquired a vast chunk of the island. He and his wife lie side by side in Crossways Cemetery, and I look forward to paying my respects the next time I'm in Vineyard Haven.

Their daughter Mary and her husband, as adventurous as they were ambitious, left New England for a distant inlet on the North Carolina coast. Here my pedigree abruptly shifts from North to South, from a male line of descent to seven successive generations of females.

That long sequence of mothers and daughters, with names unusual or ordinary - Mary, Thankful, Rebecca, Sarah, Phereaby, Mary Ann, Georgia Ann -concludes with the birth of my great-grandfather. After him, more women: my grandmother who died last month aged 97, my genealogist mother and me, the Southern Yankee.

On marrying into an old New England family, I became a scholar of their rich and interesting past. The well-documented Porters landed in Massachusetts Bay only a few years before Thomas Chase docked in Hampton.

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