A distant relation that connects the families of Prince William and US President George W Bush - as well as Winston Churchill - has been discovered by a firm putting genealogical information online.

The company came across the link between the Royal Family, the Bush dynasty and Britain's most famous war-time prime minister during research to put Victorian censuses and other family history documents online.

Researchers from the firm traced all three families back to Henry Spencer who lived in Badby, Northamptonshire, during the 15th century.

The first census being put online will be the one collected in 1891. Other censuses dating back to the first in 1841 will slowly be added over the next few months.

Ancient ties

The news about the common Northamptonshire beginnings of Prince William, George Bush and Winston Churchill was released by US genealogy site MyFamily.com.

It is not the first time a link has been made between President Bush and Churchill.

President Bush is distantly related to...

In August US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld drew parallels between the latter's "lone voice" on Hitler in the 1930s and modern-day American warnings about Saddam Hussein.

Troy Dunn, vice-president of MyFamily, said the information about the genealogical link was brought to light by researchers preparing records for browsing by subscribers to the US site.

This week MyFamily.com is launching its UK site, called ancestry.co.uk, that will soon host online versions of the Victorian censuses drawn up between 1841 and 1891.

Anyone subscribing to the site will be able to search name records for their ancestors and then look at indexed pages of the census records to find out where their relatives lived, where they came from, their age and what they did for a living.

Mr Dunn said the census will be released county by county with Oxfordshire being first.

As the records are digitised, the names extracted and the pages indexed they will be added to the online database. Eventually the database will contain more than 200 million names.

...Prince William.

"If you tried to do that some other way it would cost you so much in time, transport, buying the documents and getting access to them," he said.

A subscription to ancestry.co.uk costs £29.95 per quarter or £69.95 per year.

High and low resolution versions of each census page are being prepared. The low resolution is for online browsing but the detailed version will be available for downloading and printing out.

State and staff

Included in the Victorian census are records for Buckingham Palace which list Queen Victoria and her consort Albert in attendance as well as numerous members of the Royal household.

The occupations of most people at the Palace are recorded and includes the Earl of Aboyne's title of 'Lord in Waiting' and workers such as Joseph Martin 'cabinet maker'.

By the names of the Queen, Prince Albert and the Princesses Royal there are no entries for occupation; instead a tick has been entered in the box.

Counting the Queen

The ancestry.co.uk website also holds other genealogical records as well as the growing collection of Victorian censuses.

Also online are parish and probate records, civil registers for births, deaths and marriages as well as New York port arrival records.

It will also host a version of the British 1901 census, a version of which was made available online by the Public Records Office in early 2002.

That site was overwhelmed by demand and even now is only operating a test service.

Andre Brummer, a spokesman for ancestry.co.uk, said he was confident that the site would cope with the number of visitors.

"We've done bigger projects than this," he said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Relative history links Royals with Bush