As one of the country's leading footballers, Frank Lampard can expect to become a multi-millionaire from weekly wages, sponsorship and endorsements.

Yet this lifestyle that most people can only dream of masks a remarkable rise in the fortunes of his family, whose origins lie in humble surroundings in the East End of London.

Frank James Lampard was born in 1978 in Romford, the son of Frank Richard George Lampard and Patricia Ann Harris. Frank senior was a professional footballer as well, playing for his beloved local team, West Ham United, in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Although West Ham enjoyed some success in this period, winning the FA Cup in 1975 and 1980, wages for even the top players were only a fraction of today's rates and the ranks of the top clubs often consisted of locally recruited lads, with a smattering of 'exotic' signings from Scotland, Ireland or Wales.

This is the world in which Frank Lampard made his living, and his background was firmly rooted in the local area. His marriage certificate shows that, despite his occupation as 'professional footballer', he was still living in the area near where he was born in Barking (certainly no 'Beckingham Palace'), and that his father - also Frank Lampard - had earned a living as a scrap metal dealer, and general dealer, in East Ham.

You can trace the Lampard family in the East End of London back to at least the mid nineteenth century, where they appear in a variety of occupations, although the main trade passed down through the family appears to have been blacksmith.

There is also a connection with the docks. Frank Lampard junior's great-grandfather, Arthur Henry Lampard, worked as a merchant seaman before the Second World War, at a time when Britain no longer ruled the waves but still employed thousands of men in the merchant navy.

Arthur Henry had been brought up in Victoria Dock Road, Canning Town, and had been born in Custom House; his father, Henry Lampard, was at one time in the 1880s employed as a dock labourer and lived in Woolwich.