Who do you think you are?

[Deckerd]

I don't know if you have anything similar in the US but over here we have a series called Who do you think you are? where various well-known faces go off and research their ancestry. It makes for very good factual TV. I don't know whether it's the editing or the researchers or the directors just making really good choices of people to focus on.

There have been many stand-out episodes but one that really sticks in my mind is Stephen Fry's search. There was a moment in Vienna where he came across the house where his family had lived before the Second World War. A current resident had put a plaque at the door with the names of the previous residents who had died when they were sent to Riga, including Fry's grandparents. He was so moved when he was thanking the resident for doing this that he actually started crying. It was amazing television.

I think sentimentality and sensationalism ruins factual TV. This series handles emotional moments without any pathos. It's very refreshing in a medium where increasingly any high points of the 'documentary', for want of a better word, are played over and over again until they have been robbed of any power to stir any feeling.

 

[Starkers]

I think there is a US version.

I watch it occasionally, often to my shame its because I like the celeb they're doing. I'm pretty sure they pick the celebs carefully. I remember someone, wish I could remember who, saying he'd been asked to go on it but then they couldn't find anything interesting about his ancestors!

 

[Deckerd]

They've had more famous people. Kim Catrall's was brilliant. Her mum and her mum's sisters were all abandoned with their mother, in abject poverty, by her grandfather. It turned out, after a lot of searching, that he'd moved about 100 miles, got remarried had kids and eventually emigrated to Australia. When the letter arrived from the researcher in London with his second marriage certificate, she looked stunned for a full minute and then said "son of a bitch!"

 

[Spot's Meow]

Yes, there was a US version that finished its first season a few months ago and was fairly successful. I went to a conference of archivists for my job while it was on the air and there was a lot of conflicting opinions on it. On the one hand they were happy that history and geneaological research were being promoted and getting people interested in visiting archives, but on the other hand the show doesn't really give people a true sense of the hard work involved in this research.

Normally you don't have a team of researchers working for you, and the archivist only provides access to the documents and does not do the research for you either. So really if you are a regular person wanting to do this on your own, it will take months and probably years of searching through records, and many of the documents you're looking for will be missing or no longer in existance. Of course some people enjoy the hunt, and they should certainly continue their searching, but for someone who has never done this kind of research before the show does give a false sense of how it will get accomplished.

After the show aired people would often come into the archives I worked at, giving me a name and asking me to find everything on that person. It really does not work like that, not even close, and they were often disappointed to discover that they would have to spend hours finding the right registers or rolls of microfilm on their own.