The answer to that question is - only if you are lucky! The only book that can give you such help is the one that contains all the hard work of another member of your family who has already done all the difficult digging, and put it all together into a book for relatives to get the benefit of it. A copy will be sure to be held by the nearest large library, or local history department, so ask them what family histories they hold with your surname(s).

You will probably not be in it, or your parents, etc., depending on how long ago the research was done. Check the date of publication. But you may find among the genealogical tables, or index of persons, your grandfather or great-grandfather, leaving you only with the job of bring the information up to date, except... except that you now have other lines going back from your mother, your grandmother, and so on, which are not covered by the book. So there will be plenty to keep you busy.

I must warn you, though. NEVER expect much from any book which has a title like "The world book of (your surname)", or "Three centuries of (your surname)", no matter what the title starts with (Halbert's or Debrett's or anything similar). All are basically useless for researching your own family lines. These books advertised by direct mail are basically printouts from telephone directories, prefaced by pages of generalised information about family research, garbled and/or inaccurate history of your surname (many surnames have several different origins depending on the area or country they come from), and some kind of heraldic device, most of which is simply either untrue, inapplicable in your country, or only applies to a specific noble family/individual and not to any other person or family of the same surname.

Published mostly in Ohio, USA, these books have been instructed several times by the US government to stop their misleading advertising through the mail, and one injunction told them to state "No direct genealogical connection to your family or ancestry is implied or intended". However, as this only applies in the USA, you in the UK or elsewhere may not get this warning. So beware!

If you want books that will help you, consult the family history societies for the area or country of interest. Most of them either publish or sell useful publications which can speed up your search - Monumental inscriptions (the text on gravestones), source guides to an area, indexes to specialist journals or census records, reprints of old documents previously unobtainable, directories, village histories, and so on. You may also find the the local library sells local history publications that will also help with background - the local industries, parish memoirs, local lads who became famous, etc.

Buying local publications can allow you to build up your own research sources, so that when another link appears to a new family line, you can look up that churchyard book, or something on the local parish that points you immediately in the right direction. So find out what's new in your family's place of origin, and get reading.

You should also check out the genealogical indices (indexes) in another section of the KinHelp site. Something there may be just what you need to take you further.