Blair Underwood's Ancestry

I think this is my favorite episode so far. It provided a fascinating glimpse into the details of free black life in Virginia before the Civil War. Blair's g-g-g-g-grandfather bought slaves who were his family members to take care of them and let them live as free people, to make sure that they could remain in Virginia. (What a convoluted and nonsensical situation caused by the legislature at the time.)

Blair's history is the history of this country, and it's wonderful to discover in the context of this show. Too bad he cannot find out how is relatives became free, but knowing they were was wonderful.

Blair had his DNA analyzed and results show a lot more detail than I would have thought. The lab was  able to tell him they found a relative in Cameroon, and then he met him, a tenth cousin, his father, and the village.

These episodes are on On Demand, and I think I have to watch this one again.

[I wonder who looked through all those documents to find the information on his family, and if they were paid for their efforts. :) How do you find a tenth cousin and get to meet him without a network's resources behind you?]

Who do you think you are???

There is no episode of our favorite show being shown this Friday the 17th.  It was bumped by the NAACP Image Awards : a salute to the arts, held in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles honoring George Lucas. It might be interesting.

How "Who do you think you are" picks it's celebrities

With the tiny url supplied by fellow blogger Dick Eastman via Leslie, I found the article and have posted it below for all of you:

With NBC’s celebrity genealogy show “Who Do You Think You Are?” beginning its third season Friday, stars of stage and screen are beating a path to the show’s producers seeking help in solving family mysteries.

But a lot of the show’s research into celebrity family trees doesn’t make it on the air. Sometimes researchers either hit a dead end or the stories they uncover don’t make for compelling TV.

“There certainly are quite a lot of A-listers who we’ve had to go back to and say, ‘Look, we’re really sorry, but we’ve spent four months and there’s just nothing,’” said executive producer Al Edgington. With other celebrities, researchers only need one or two months to dig up some amazing stories, he says.

The popularity of the show has been a boon for Ancestry.com (ACOM), the online family history service that provides research services and sponsors the show. It sees a noticeable bump in subscribers whenever the show airs.

“Who Do You Think You Are?” saw its ratings rise last year, during its second season, says executive producer Jennifer O’Connell.

Celebrities featured this season include Martin Sheen, Marisa Tomei, Blair Underwood, Reba McEntire, Rob Lowe, Helen Hunt, Rita Wilson, Edie Falco, Rashida Jones, Jerome Bettis, Jason Sudeikis and Paula Deen.

“We really try to have a good cross-section of types” of celebrities, O’Connell said. “We love actors, musicians and athletes. We’d love to get a politician to do the show.”

Her dream subject would be former President Bill Clinton.

“We’re in a lucky position with the show, because many of the celebrities we do the show with approach us,” she said. “They’ve seen the show and they’re interested to find out more about their families.”

Since the U.S. is a country of immigrants, there are lots of great stories to tell, Edgington says.

“Most people who emigrate from one country to another do so because of great hardship,” he said. “People don’t just leave their castles and their villages to come to America. Back in the day, they left because of famine or pestilence or genocide, all the terrible things in history for why people move.”

It tends to be easier to dig up good family records for celebrities who come from wealthier ancestors. Many Americans descended from poor farmers who emigrated from Ireland and Italy, so records can be scant, he says.

“We have an amazing team of researchers who pore through documents and censuses and death records, you name it,” Edgington said. “For every celebrity who is interested we will find everything we possibly can.”

One of the hardest aspects of the show is coordinating with a celebrity’s schedule. Shooting the show requires a commitment of travel and time for celebrities. For instance, actor Martin Sheen had to go with a film crew from Los Angeles to Ireland and Spain and back home in eight days.

“Sometimes we might find a great story in research but we might have to wait another season until a schedule opens up,” O’Connell said. “It’s a big commitment for celebrities. We’re asking them to travel the world and we don’t even tell them where they’re going before we go. Every step of the way is a surprise. So, once in a while we have to tell a celebrity, ‘You’re going to need to get a round of immunizations.’”

The producers typically know the subject’s family history before it’s revealed to them.

For the celebrities involved, the show is “a treasure hunt,” she says.

“We don’t know if we have a fourth season yet. But because the research is so time-consuming … right now we are researching and in touch with a handful of celebrities who are interested,” O’Connell said. “Hopefully people will watch, the network will be happy with the ratings, and we will have a bit of a head start with some celebrities we’ve been working on” for next season.

Posting your essay!

Leslie, you can make anyone you want an administrator, but every member of the blog can post, comment, whatever. Only admins can create admins, delete any post they want, change the template, whatever.

I think a blog can have an unlimited number of administrators. There used to be a limit to how many authors you could have on a blog, but since they changed this site, I have no idea if that is still true.

To post: once you've become a member and created your profile, you should see an orange B on the upper left of the browser screen. When you click that, you are taken to the "Dashboard" and a list of the blogs you belong to if you have more than one.

Next to the name of this blog, you will see a couple of icons, including a pen for a new post, a page to go to a list of the current posts, an arrow which gives you a lot of options and a View Blog button.

I hope this helps.

(I would be happy to tell everyone about the blog next week, with full knowledge that I am not an expert. I usually click everything and learn from my mistakes. What exactly do you want me to tell everyone?)

How can people contribute to the blog?

Hi Catherine!  Got a few questions...  Some people have asked how they can post  something that's not a comment to another posting.  In other words, they want to be able to start a new topic or thread and post about something interesting that they found.  Are you and I the only people that can start a new subject?  Or can other people do that as well?  I can't see it, because I'm one of the administrators - so I can't see if they are having difficulty or what it is... 

Maybe you could do a short talk next Thursday to let everyone know how the blog works and who can post what...pretty please?

Also, how many administrators can this blog have?  You see where I'm going with this... maybe the committee can have privileges too?  Let me know...

Les

Hi everyone.  Hope this weekend was a good one for you!

Dick Eastman posted this URL -     http://tinyurl.com/78y8xvl

Its about how the celebrities are picked to do "Who Do You Think You Are?, the show. 

Surprisingly, sometimes, there is no compelling or exciting ancestry - so they just scrap the potential guest! WOW...

Anyway, check it out.

Les

Who do you think you are?

The second episode is on tonight at 7. Don't miss it!

Martin Sheen

Last Friday night I watched my first episode of "Who do you think you are," and I enjoyed the discoveries that President Bartlett, uh, Martin Sheen made in his travels.  He is very lucky to be able to travel all over the world if necessary to find out who his ancestors were, and even luckier they were not criminals. (HA!)  The irony in discovering that one distant grandmother and a distant grandfather were adversaries, and that their ancestors married and were his grandparents or great grandparents or something, was fascinating.  I know they had to shorten the process to fit all the information and the landscape into an hour, but I wish there had been more detail on how his ancestry was found, and who found it for him.

In my own sporadic research I have discovered that both sides of my mother's family seem to have started out in North Carolina, and moved to Kentucky over the years. My maternal grandparents met in Detroit, were married in Indiana, and brought up their family in Chicago (I thought it was only recently that people started moving all over the country throughout their lifetimes).

Even so, I cannot find anything about my father's family. Both grandparents came over from Italy "on the boat," and my aunts and uncles had differing versions of when, with whom, where they got married, etc. The one detail I do have is that my family came from a town near Naples called Saviano. My aunt corresponded with relatives there for awhile, but when they started asking for money, she stopped - or so I'm told.

When I visited Ellis Island in 1999, I found my grandfather's name on the memorial wall there. My brother had purchased the privilege, and had included my grandmother's name, but her name was not printed there. It also turns out that he did not come through Ellis Island, but Philadelphia.  I cannot find a single mention of my grandmother online that isn't associated with her marriage to my grandfather or the birth of many, many children - more than we knew about.

I bought a book at Ellis Island that told you how to research Italian ancestry - there were books about doing the same thing in other countries, too. There were lots of forms in Italian that you could send, and I'm gong to find that book in my storage room and send it to every church in Saviano, and see what happens!

My First Post

Hi, everyone:

This blog has been created so everyone can stay in touch between meetings. I thought the round table at the January club meeting was excellent, and at the time, I had the ridiculous notion that we should meet more often - not that I had the time, but just the wish!

So, with Leslie's permission, I began this blog, and I hope everyone becomes a member and posts every day, and comments on each other's posts.  We will all learn a lot and help each other, too. 

What do you think?