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I really enjoyed the Alan Dershowitz / Carole King / Tony Kushner episode about Jewish genealogy; I just saw it on TV the other day. I plan to keep tuning in on a regular basis. I had never watched the first seasion, so will I will seek those older episodes out time to time. Sting will be featured in an upcoming episode.
I enjoyed it tonight with the British Empire but once again, the jumping back and forth is getting to me. I just get settled into one person's life and ancestry when they jump to another person and I have to start all over.
I have British ancestry on both sides, probably 100% on my recent side, so I wasn't too thrilled with the anti British stance the program seemed to take. It was NOT the British people themselves, it was their government that did evil things. Believe me, the average British person didn't enjoy having the land taken away by the higher ups in the Enclosure Acts which eventually forced so many people (at least in the North of England) to slave away in the "Satanic mills."
The main reason my family is in the US and not England is that my gt grandfather, then my grandparents, had to work in the textile mills for a pittance in horrid working conditions.
I could identify with being called a pauper because that's what my gt grandfather was called in the newspaper of the day. This, after he had come up with a great invention which he, of course, did not have the money to patent. So his textile mill employer took his idea, got the patent, and improved their business with it, while he probably got little or nothing. You just could not win.
The air during the Industrial Revolution was so dirty that people couldn't breathe. My gt grandmother died young due to that bad air, but maybe she was also weakened by the early deaths of her two oldest sons, ages 19 and 20. My grandfather became the secondary breadwinner at the age of 13 after his brothers and mother died within two years of each other.
He probably married my grandmother because she was so cheery. But when their own son died, that was the last straw. They waited a little while until he saw his sister married and his father and grandmother were dead, and then they immigrated to the USA where he easily found work in a factory repairing machines that were exactly like the ones he had used in England. Here, he got good pay though. Here, they bought a house and raised the kids--and ALL of them went on to college.
Yeh, tonight's program did strike a chord with me.
Genealogy does make history more interesting but I remember something that happened a few years back. A teacher asked her class to bring in a list of some of their ancestors, maybe even just going back a few generations. Maybe just back to their grandparents or gt grandparents.
It was ruled illegal or politically incorrect or something because there are kids who don't know who their father is or who have some other sort of difficult situation. It would be embarrassing for them. Such a shame but I guess I do understand.
Finding your roots does help with history but only if your roots CAN be found.
I somehow missed this post earlier in this thread, unfortunately given there are a fair number of young people who may not even know who their parent(s) were, I guess that could be quite upsetting, even if the intention of the teacher was quite genuine. On the bright side, widespread DNA testing is helping many of those who have major blanks in their family trees.
I look forward to more episodes (last one I saw was the 3 Jewish guests), but like the others here have previously mentioned, I wish they would focus on the entire story of each person, finish that one's family story, and then move onto the next person, etc. Give roughly about 15 minutes to each guest, one by one, since there are 3 guests per episode.
I'd suggest those who don't know what they mean by poorhouses and industrial mills should go look up the series Call the Midwife. Its from the diary of a nurse who worked in the East End after ww2. Those slums and poorhouses and poverty existed up to and into the war. There is one episode about this older woman who they find and try to help. She went into a poorhouse as a young mother. Never saw her young child again (children were seperated from parents and often never saw them again). She had been taught to sew and when closed was released with a sewing machine. It was heartbreaking. People were destitue after these institutions went away, and even in 1950 they were still caught in the poverty but in the slums instead.
I found it interesting, but the jumping around was worse since it took a while to figure out where he was talking about too. My only ancestors I know of who left mid 1800's were from Ulster, but at least one for politcal reasons. I wonder if they had mills in Ulster.
Overall, I think it was about too big and diverse an area with too little background on where and what world these people came from.
The comment which got me was when he said at least the one ancestor wasn't a convict. It didn't sound like it was in jest, or serious. Considering the people who stole anything of value were hung, the ones they shipped away were mostly trying to survive. Tell us something about this maybe?
There was no big moralizing in this episode, but then there was nothing which went past academic and scholerly to the host to moralize about. I'd like this to be two or three episodes with a few more details like what a poor house was and how they ran. I'll bet most people today don't have a clue.
The workhouses were deplorable. I have a dear 5th cousin in the UK (found though genealogy) whose grandmother lived in the USA with her English mother. The American father was cruel and abusive so somehow mother and daughter ran away and got back to England. There is no record of their re-entry into England.
But once in England there was no help for them and they ended up in the workhouse. The young girl was pretty but had to work like a slave for food and board. Somehow she did get out and got married.
In England the masses were worked practically to death and suffered near starvation. Children worked in the mills, long hours tending machines that were too big for them and doing work that was too heavy for them. Many children were hurt and maimed but no one cared. Somehow the British government and the powers that be allowed this to happen. Multitudes of poor people sacrificing their lives for the benefit of the few very rich. It took a long time for reforms to be made.
I agree that the jumping around from guest to guest and back again is very distracting. It's impossible to take the emotional journey with each guest which is what the intent is.
One very important and often unknown historical fact that was highlighted last night in Sally Field's family history is that there really was a great deal of American in-fighting between Patriots and Loyalists, and some of it, as Sally's family experienced, was brutal. I have some Loyalists in my tree who were forced out of Massachusetts (financially they were ruined, but fortunately not physically harmed). For all the negativity about the British Empire, there was the positive that Loyalists were given substantial amounts of land in Canada (Nova Scotia for my ancestors). Britain could have ignored the plight of Loyalists or could have only offered small tidbits of land to say "thank you for your loyalty, so come up to Canada to help build the Empire".
I really liked last night's episode, but I wish it could have been two hours. We just got a "taste" of a few stories then whoosh, they moved on. Yes, the jumping around is very annoying, especially when all 3 guests have ancestors with similar themes. The show is only 45 minutes, so I agree with the other poster who said they should just give 15 solid minutes to each guest and stop the jumping around.
I'm frustrated by the DNA tests they use. The people just get "European," but nothing about WHERE in Europe they came from. Sting was told he had Scandinavian ("Viking") roots, but it wasn't very clear. How come if someone has African roots, they can tell what region of Africa, and they can tell the difference between "South Asian" and "Southeast Asian," but not different parts of Europe? My test with Ancestry DNA gave me LOTS of info about my roots in all different areas within Europe. Maybe that's why the recurring attitude on the show is that "European" equals "boring." If someone is given a pie chart with 100% European, of course that will be "boring." They never look at all the slices in that pie.
I really liked last night's episode, but I wish it could have been two hours. We just got a "taste" of a few stories then whoosh, they moved on. Yes, the jumping around is very annoying, especially when all 3 guests have ancestors with similar themes. The show is only 45 minutes, so I agree with the other poster who said they should just give 15 solid minutes to each guest and stop the jumping around.
I'm frustrated by the DNA tests they use. The people just get "European," but nothing about WHERE in Europe they came from. Sting was told he had Scandinavian ("Viking") roots, but it wasn't very clear. How come if someone has African roots, they can tell what region of Africa, and they can tell the difference between "South Asian" and "Southeast Asian," but not different parts of Europe? My test with Ancestry DNA gave me LOTS of info about my roots in all different areas within Europe. Maybe that's why the recurring attitude on the show is that "European" equals "boring." If someone is given a pie chart with 100% European, of course that will be "boring." They never look at all the slices in that pie.
But in all fairness, Europe is a tiny continent compared to Africa.
My theory on the Europe=boring is that it is politically incorrect to be European. It's more "in" to be Native American, African, or any other minority, probably because it used to be "in" to be European and now there is a reaction against it.
I wouldn't exactly call Europe "tiny" even though Africa might have more square miles. Besides, most Americans have European ancestry, but we identify the region of Europe ("I'm Scandinavian") or the nationality ("I'm German"); we don't just say "I'm European." Again, if we can get our "European" ancestry broken down by region/country from Ancestry DNA, Family Tree DNA, etc, why can't the guests on the show?
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