One was when he proved the inheritance of the Earldom of Annandale and Hartfell after it had been unsolved for 190 years. "My client's family petitioned for the peerage in 1795, but it took until 1985 before we had the evidence to prove it." The research involved tracing the second Earl's younger brother, a missing Jacobite exile, across Europe in the 1690s and early 1700s, a trail which began in France and led through archives in Schleswig-Holstein, Copenhagen, Dresden and finally Poland. But the key to this was in 22 trunks of unsorted documents in a country house in Dumfriesshire, where Hugh found a vital clue which started him on the trail.

President Reagan's ancestry was a contrast to aristocratic rebels in Europe, for his was a matter of tracing poor Irish peasants, refugees from the Irish famine of the 1840s, through London, Canada and the American Mid-West. Hugh succeeded where an American organisation had hired a team of 20 researchers and failed. The first break in that research was in a county courthouse in western Illinois, where the clue that others had missed was, as Hugh says, "well worth that long dreary drive across the plains west from Chicago". One clue leads to another and that led to London in 1851 where a (thankfully over-enthusiastic) census enumerator had recorded more about the family than he was supposed to.

It has been said that, like the beer advertisment, Hugh's research reaches the parts that others don't reach. He firmly believes that the key to success in genealogy is not taking short cuts - "that's how you miss vital clues and the lucky breaks".

Everyone has ancestors, and when Lord Home was British Prime Minister his political opponent jibed about his being the 14th Earl and earned the retort "well, you're the 14th Mr Wilson". That triggered a succession of demands from journalists for 14-generation pedigrees of Prime Ministers. Of these Mr Edward Heath's was particularly interesting. The family had lived in poverty for several generations, and fascinating detail of their lives is in the records of the Poor Law guardians, such as the cost of a Heath funeral in 1773 including the price of the coffin and the cost of beer for the mourners! The earliest records were in a church register which had been partly eaten by a rat some 300 years ago, but by luck the rat had not eaten the crucial records of the 13th and 14th generations back.. If that rat had turned left rather than right, we would not have had the records of the 14th Mr Heath. There is always the luck factor in the survival of records.

Hugh also produced the evidence that Al Capone's former jockey was rightfully the 13th Dunbar of Mochrum Baronet (and entitled to a million pound trust fund!), and that a retired Australian postmaster was the 11th Earl of Dunmore. His proof of the succession of the 23rd Lord Borthwick was partly from medieval archives of the Avignon Popes, and partly from a document he found on his hands and knees underneath a billiard table, but for both documents his knowledge of Latin was essential.

But one of his favourite clients is an industrialist who Hugh discovered was descended from a "lady of the town" whose mother had also been a member of that ancient profession. Hugh expected anger when he reported, but the industrialist took it well, roared with laughter and said "I've been called a real bastard in my business dealings - you've proved I come from a long line of them!".