For a niche hobby, we’re steadily amassing quite a number of television programs!  From the Who Do You Think You Are? series here and in the UK, to the variety of Henry Louis Gates mini-series on PBS, we’re certainly doing a lot better than, say, stamp collecting.   Combining the host-driven approach of Gates’ series, the everyman approach of WDYTYA UK, and the format of Antiques Roadshow, Genealogy Roadshow introduces us to a number of average Americans looking to discover what’s less-than-average about their family history and entertain the rest of us along the way.

The descendants of the little boy and old man in the warm photo on the monitor behind them meet for the first time.

This week’s episode was filmed in an antebellum mansion-turned-museum in Nashville, TN, and included segments featuring a young man awaiting his DNA results, a young woman who never knew her father, and families with rumored ancestry.  The segments rose and fell on the strength of the family story they presented.  The short DNA segment fell flat because we learned nothing about the young man nor what his results confirmed or refuted about what he had previously believed about himself.  But the African-American woman who learned that an ancestor born in 1890 was probably the son of the Governor of Tennessee and the young woman who learned the whole history of her absentee father’s family packed the kind of emotional wallop we’ve come to expect.  The story about the governor’s illegitimate, black son dramatically concluded with a surprising smoking gun, and the sense of validation of his descendant was palpable.  And I’m sure plenty of us watching remotely were tearing up along with the on-camera audience as the young woman viewed surfing pictures of her father that looked like her own, and even met her first cousin.

Well-known genealogists D. Joshua Taylor and Kenyatta Berry were alternately compassionate and erudite, guiding each of their segments with a steady hand.  The use of tablets connected to large screen to zoom into records and around trees worked quite well, though I found it a strange decision that their paper scripts were so conspicuous.  That, plus the heavily staged nature of the segments, felt a bit stifling to their natural energy and inhibited the rapport they and their guests could establish with each other.  And while I appreciated the absence of WDYTYA-style promotions for particular genealogy websites, the almost-total absence of the work that went into making these discoveries for the guests shortchanges the average viewer.

However, right on the Department of Genealogical Realism is that not everyone heard what they want to hear.  Guests were told they were not related to Davy Crockett, George Washington, Jimmy Carter, the Pointer sisters, and numerous others, though descendants of Jesse James and the feuding Hatfield family confirmed their descent (though maybe it would have better had they not!).

Overall, I liked the style of the show, especially its pacing and the diversity of stories it fit into the hour.

Next week:  onto Detroit!

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Isn’t it nice when the genealogy gods deliver? On the season finale of Who Do You Think You Are? Jim Parsons wanted a connection back to France and an artistic ancestor… and boy, did he get both!

As with many episodes, we on the other side of history can see the celebrities’ ancestors marching straight towards calamitous historical events that they had no idea they were about to encounter.  (I’ve reflected how my own descendants will perceive my life, having moved to NYC a year before 9/11.)  In this episode we learned about how Jim’s 6x great-grandfather, Louis François, became closer and closer to the King of France in the years leading up to the French Revolution, but it was hard to enjoy his success knowing that that association, once such a distinction, proved fatal for so many.  And indeed, four of Louis François’ colleagues were guillotined and twenty-five more imprisoned… but somehow Louis François emerged unscathed.

The historian suggests that it was because of Louis François’ deep connection to the Enlightenment.  And indeed, his architectural style and choice of friends (and houseguests!) reflected his radical thinking there.  But while preparing this week’s recap (which you can read above), it didn’t take long to discover that there were some key facts of Louis François’ life not included in the episode that perhaps better explain how he remained safe.

The episode suggests that Louis François had an unbroken rise, but it turns out that that is not the case.  In the early 1770s he was accused of malpractice!  As a result of this disgrace, he loses both his current job at Orléans and his post at Versailles.  That is why he living in Paris, not Versailles, at the time he hosted Abbé Reynal, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams.  It wasn’t until just before the Revolution that his career turned back around.  The new king, Louis XVI, took the charges against Louis François to be slander and finally elevated him to the first class of architects in the Royal Academy in 1787, though it does not appear that Louis François ever returned to Versailles or undertook another royal commission.  So, when the French Revolution came around in 1789, though Louis François was a first class member of the Royal Academy of Architecture, he had spent most of the preceding two decades not in association with royalty at all.  I suspect that so some degree his career-ending disgrace ended up saving his life.

(Sources:  The Architecture of the French Enlighments by Allan Braham, Wikipedia)

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Ten years after nearly hanging for stealing deer from the lord of the nearby manor, Tricia’s ancestor would suffer Indians stealing animals from his own land.  Ah, when the ironies of genealogy encounter the opportunities of the New World!

In further ironies, who here thinks that the former imprisoned servant became a slave owner?  Ding, ding, ding!  In the 1820 census, he is listed as owning a whopping 22 slaves.  Yes, he had clearly left his impoverished past well and truly behind.

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Last night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? started with a Puritan who fought against the king of England and took us all the way back to Charlemagne, one of the most powerful kings of Europe ever. What a journey in forty generations and one episode.

Like so many of us, Cindy began with no inkling of where her family came from beyond her great-grandparents… but  on her first day of research she got back 10 generations to the ancestor who came from England in the 1630s!

No, it isn’t really this easy, and this episode is one of those where the behind-the-scenes if almost more interesting than what made it on air.  One thousand hours of research went into the one-hour episode we saw last night.  Scores of researchers examined scores of documents in archives across the world to lead Cindy precisely from the 1880 U.S. census to the Trowbridge genealogy book in Boston to old court records in New Haven… not to mention across the pond to the UK where even cooler documents and historic locations awaited.

What went into the making of this episode is what we as family historians must do:  find the most compelling narrative(s) of all the different threads of discovery we make.  With all one thousand hours of research, there must’ve been countless directions in which this episode could have gone; a family in America that long must have been present at all the major moments in our nation’s history.  I might have focused in on the children Thomas left behind in New Haven when he went back to England, and how such a notable New England family came to thrive from such sad beginnings.  But of all the research, the journey that stood out as not only most notable, but also most personally engaging was Thomas Trowbridge’s — a Puritan who fled to the colonies for religious freedom, sacrificed his family to fight the king who oppressed them & their people, and ultimately seems to have been a brave and honorable man.

Our trees are filled with so many great people with great life stories… which ones should you focus on passing down to your family?

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Cholera epidemic.  Mexican War.  War of 1812.  Chris O’Donnell has an amazing family legacy of service to this country!

Michael Hait, one of the genealogists on this episode, joined me in the live after-show hosted by the In-Depth Genealogist. This was really fortunate for me, because I had a ton of questions after this episode ended, especially:

• What family circumstances compelled George McNeir to leave the Sea Fencibles and return to his family?
• With eight generations before Michael McEnnis and many since, surely there are many more generations of heroes in this family?
• At what point did Chris figure out that War of 1812 + Bombardment of Ft. McHenry = The Star-Spangled Banner?

During the show and afterwards he revealed that there was much more to Chris’ family than made the cut, as you would expect from a family in this country for fourteen generations.  Indeed, ancestors served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.  And yes, there was much more to George McEnnis court case.  He hadn’t paid rent in two years — that was clear.  But the warehouse he was renting was shared with a merchant who imported cloth from the British West Indies… and obviously you aren’t importing cloth from British anywhere when you’re at war with the British.  So the circumstances surrounding George’s poverty were more complicated than the small glimpse we got of the court case — these records were actually quite numerous (more luck for Chris!).  It was this court case, which lasted two years, and its effect, as well as the family’s general poverty, that led to George’s decision to leave the military.

And finally, I was glad to hear that Chris was a lot sharper than the episode made him seem and was one step ahead of the researchers all the way.  He and his niece couldn’t help but research in parallel with the show, and evidently every time Michael was about to drag an important connection between the evidence and history for Chris, Chris took the words right out of his mouth!

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Wouldn’t you want your ancestor to be described that way?  Last night on Who Do You Think You Are?, Zooey Deschanel had the pleasure of reading those words about her amazing four times great-grandmother, an impassioned abolitionist.

This episode had it all — ancestors you can genuinely root for, a celebrity guest emotionally engaged in the story, amazing primary source documents, and history you were never taught in high school.  And for me, it all unfolded in a town closely tied to my own family in the present day.  How did I never know history was made by such brave people in a place I’ve so often visited?!

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