If you plan on playing a relative or descendant of one of your characters from beta keep in mind how many generations have past.

If your human you will be 4 - 5 generations from your current characters.

How did I arrive at this number?

If you have a child now, in 20 - 30 years they will have children and so forth... so every 25 years is a new generation of human adventurers (look out world) so 100 / 25 = 4 thats 4 generations right there. So 4 -5 is a good number for humans.

The same will be true for Halfings

Gnomes will be roughly the same, though you may be the 2nd - 3rd generation gnome though you will likely be a little older. Your great great great grandpa may still be alive but very old and almost dead.

With Dwarves and Elves you may be a direct descendant of a character you played. Or even play the same character depending on how old the dwarf was. Elves are of course immortal so you could play the same character.

for more age info on the races see the main website at http://arcanapw.googlepages.com/home
then click on races on the left hand side.