What do you give to the man who has everything? Everything he wants, anyway. That was the question facing me as my father's 70th birthday approached.

I knew that my sister, an artist, planned to give him one of her paintings. Perhaps I too could give him something I'd made. I'm a writer - I could give him a book.

A book about his life, maybe. But with only two weeks to go that didn't seem realistic. How would I find all the information I needed, let alone write it, in two weeks?

I made a list of all the things I'd like to include. Some family history, events that happened the year Dad was born, information about the places he'd lived, the company he worked for, his hobbies and interests.

Then I put my research assistant, the Internet, to work. First I sent an email to my sister, who lives close to my parents, asking her to clarify a few things with Mum while Dad was out. A few hours later I had her reply sitting on my desk. "Good luck" she said.

My father was born in a small English village. It didn't seem likely that I'd find out much about it, but I entered its name into the search engine at Alta Vista.

Of 15 or so "hits," two were homepages of people from the village. Each had a wealth of information about its history, together with photographs. Even as an experienced Internet user, I was amazed.

I decided to do the right thing and sent emails to both people asking their permission to use the photographs and information from their pages. They responded enthusiastically.

One even offered to put my email on his web page so that other people who knew my father could write to me. I copied what I needed from the two web pages and pasted them into the template I'd designed for Dad's book.

I knew already that 1929, the year my father was born, was the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

From DT's Event Chronology! and Any-Year Today-in-History Page of Scope Systems, I discovered that 1929 was also the year that waxed paper cartons were used for the first time instead of glass bottles, "Popeye the Sailor Man" made his first appearance, the White House got its first telephone, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was established.

It was also the year that Roger Bannister, Audrey Hepburn, Martin Luther King Jr and Yasser Arafat were born. And just three weeks after the stock market crash, Leo Reisman and his orchestra recorded "Happy Days are Here Again!"

The information Mum had given me allowed me to construct a simple family history. Several sites on the Web told me about the meaning of our family name and its history.

Using Dad's full name as a search engine query, I found information about two famous people with the same name. If I'd had the time, I could have spent hours doing more research into our family history through sites such as GENUKI England & Ireland Genealogy, an English site, or one of the many other sites devoted to family history and genealogy. Perhaps one day I will.

Before he married Mum, Dad had been a bell ringer at his local church. Looking up "bell ringing" using a search engine gave me two great sites: Leytonstone Bellringer's Webpage and Glossary of Ringing Terms.

Here I discovered what such wonderful terms as "Treble bob" and a "blue line" meant. I copied and pasted the lot, again checking with the pages' owners that they didn't mind. "Not at all" they said, "that's what they're there for."

Dad also used to run in cross country paper chases known as "hare and hounds". From The Harrier.Net Archive, I found an article written in 1879 which described in florid prose the history of hare and hounds.

In his early twenties, Dad was called up into the army. I couldn't find anything about his corps at The British Army site, although it would have been interesting to browse there for a while.

I finally found the information I wanted on a Malaysian site. The Malaysian army has a unit with the same name, and the site included some history of the British unit. It's a small world out there on the web!

I was less successful in finding anything on the company for which Dad had worked. I sent an email to one company with a similar sounding name which I found through Telephone Directories on the Web.

They replied with some helpful information, but unfortunately the company I was looking for seems to have gone out of business or changed its name.

One of Dad's great loves in life, (apart from Mum), is music. Sadly, the choir he used to sing in also seems to have disappeared, but through Yahoo! Reference: Quotations, I found a wealth of inspiring and humorous quotes about music.

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end" Igor Stravinsky once said. "A harp is a nude piano" wrote a child in a music exam.

Through search engine queries I found information on some of the other places where Dad and Mum have lived over the years. At Lancashire Hotpots I also found copies of some wonderful poems written in Lancashire dialect, which I remembered hearing when I was a child.

In fact, the whole project proved to be a very nostalgic one for me, as I ransacked my memories for things which Dad had said and done during my childhood.

An afternoon spent in the library (yes, I still go there quite often), filled a few gaps which I hadn't been able to fill from the Internet. Now all I needed were some pictures to add interest to the pages of information.

JOD's Old Fashioned Black and White Clipart Collection provided some beautiful old-fashioned pieces, and ClipArt Collection (sadly now defunct) added some more. Many clipart sites offer free clipart which can be saved using File -->Save image on the browser's menu.

After designing a cover page, I printed off all the pages I had gathered and slipped them into one of those binders with clear plastic pages. I had intended just to bind the pages into a book, but I decided that the slip-in pages were better, in case I needed to change anything later.

At the bottom of each page I included the web address or book where I found the information.

Dad was thrilled with "his" book. It took a lot of hard work to produce it on such short notice (I've already started one for Mum's birthday next year) but along the way I learned so much and "met" many helpful and interesting people.