Who do you think you are?
Kamalamani, July 2009

I can’t remember the last time a television series held my attention like ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ (Currently on BBC1 on Wednesdays at 9pm). I’m curious about the popularity of this series. Each week it follows the ancestry of a contemporary public figure, drawing on people from a wide range of backgrounds, professions and cultures. It researches different family lines, explores the truth of handed down family stories, uncovers whole dimensions of family trees (often previously unknown to the person), brings in aspects of relevant social, economic and political history and often takes surprise twists and turns. The participant in each week’s programme embarks upon a voyage of personal discovery; often a very emotional and unknown journey.

My personal interest in ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is multi-faceted. I have always been fascinated by life and how we live life; by the lives of others; how people live in different cultures and in cultures within cultures. This fascination lead me into working as a counsellor and therapist. In doing this work, I am struck repeatedly by how important it is for some clients to know their place in the world through exploring family rumours, making their peace with relatives (dead or alive) and researching their ancestry. I love history and enjoy seeing how specific aspects of history are so vividly brought to life when seen through the eyes of an individual looking at the lives of their particular ancestors. For the past few years I have been researching my own family history and have been taken aback by the strength of feeling in finding family I never knew I had, visiting the graves of long lost relatives and learning more about my ethnic roots. I am interested in the whole area of tradition and lineage as an ordained Buddhist living in the west, practising a faith which has its roots in Northern India. And, of course, I am interested in ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ as a keen viewer.

So I’ve been reflecting upon the popularity of this series and have arrived at some suggestions as to why this series is so popular.

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is surfing the wave of renewed, enthusiastic interest in ancestry, genealogy, local history and making sense of both our individual and collective place in the world. The series itself seems to be making a very significant contribution to this wave. We have become much more rootless in the west over the past one hundred years. As social and geographical mobility have increased, with people moving around much more for work, our links with extended family and local community have often been fragmented, with the resulting loss of a rich web of relationships and interconnections. Despite the rise in leisure time in the past century, most of us seem to struggle to find the time to be with family. For the younger generations in the current climate, social networking websites (Facebook, Bebo, My Space etc) are likely to continue to provide the ‘virtual’ communities which would once have been day to day personal relationships, experienced in person, in our local vicinity. A whole host of social, economic, political and technological changes have influenced the way we live, work and interact with each other.

In thinking of the ‘olden days’ I wonder whether there is a certain romance in bringing to mind our ancestors, imagining them living in a slower-paced, more community-focused age, where we might perceive that there were fewer pressures. Of course, there may be some truth in some aspects of this, for some families, in some time periods. It can also be easy to idealise the past, remembering the bits that sound appealing, a bit like the way we can remember the happier aspects of our own lives and forget about the sad bits, a function of the human mind.

It can be shocking when this ‘halcyon days’, romantic myth aspect is blown apart, as it has been for some participants on the programme, who discover family tragedies and extreme family difficulties, and are often surprised at the power of their emotional response regarding something that happened in the seemingly dim and distant past, still having a strong effect in the present day. There is also that sense of respect in really seeing and acknowledging the difficulties our ancestors survived. I resonate with this in my own research. I recall feeling sadness for my own family, sitting in the Bristol Record Office here in Bristol, and discovering an ancestor from six generations ago, who lost both her husband and infant son within a week of one another; I imagine victims of something like the Bubonic Plague. This was tragedy on a small-scale, compared to the World Wars or the Holocaust, both of which have been repeatedly featured on the programme. But a tragedy for that family, nonetheless.

So what constellation of factors motivates people, whether well known public figures and celebrities, or you and I, to begin the journey of researching family history? This is an interesting question, and the balance of factors will, of course, be unique to any one individual at any one time. My sense is that for many people family history researching can be quite an unknown, unconscious process as we are first drawn into this personal journey. For others, it seems to be the case that their interest is much more acute from mid-life onwards. Perhaps this is a result of stepping back and getting some perspective on our own lives, and as we do that, our attention and interest is drawn to the previous lives of others. For others, it can be motivated by a significant transition, perhaps a bereavement of a close relative, or a new discovery about our family, such as long-lost relative re-appearing or estranged siblings being reunited.

Whatever our initial motivation, whether driven by conscious or unconscious forces, this personal quest seems to end up throwing light upon our related place in the world and why we are here: our purpose. Through understanding more fully the place and position of our ancestors in the world, what they did, and our relationship to them, we seem to gain some understanding of our own place in the world, what went before, and where we fit (and perhaps where we don’t fit) into the jigsaw puzzle of our families. In turn, we can also start to review the legacy of actions and events that we might be passing onto future generations of our own, present day families. We have seen these moments of ‘relatedness’ in some of the participants of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Many cathartic moments have been captured on film, as people become reunited with estranged relatives - healing past rifts; discovering new cousins, understanding more fully a family story or breakdown in communication which has effected their lives. Even more strikingly, participants often come face to face with the difficulties, and in some cases, tragedies, of their ancestors. In this moment of catharsis (and often, high emotion) it is a unique opportunity for some sort of healing to take place - at least on a personal level - as the memory of the ancestor is honoured.

I remember a moment like this myself, literally stumbling upon the grave of my great grandmother and great grandfather, from whom my grandmother had become estranged, following the death of her husband (their son) in the Second World War. I was taken aback by the emotion I experienced on that rain sodden, windswept, Dorset hillside. It felt as though I was somehow ‘making amends’ for a sad misunderstanding which had resulted in my father never having known his family roots. In finding their grave (which called for an awful lot of detective work and searching endless graveyards) I was able to pay my respects in person.

Researching family history brings surprises, and for many of the people featured on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ this sense of stepping into the unknown is a vital part of the mix. What intrigues me is that so many of us have these nagging thoughts, odd comments (“you’re just like your granddad”) half-remembered family stories and question marks about great aunt so and so, which lead us into this exploration. This has been a re-occurring theme on the programme. We have heard questions such as, “why do I feel so at home in Ireland?” “Why do I feel such a strong connection with the sea?” “Why do I do the job I do? Is it in my genes?” Many of us have similar questions, particularly via family stories, which sometimes have a grain of truth in them.

One of our family stories was that my great great grandmother was called a ‘Spanish princess’, because she insisted on wearing a mantilla (a lacy scarf, which covers the head and shoulders). In fact, it transpires that the mantilla-wearing ‘princess’ was my luso-Portuguese great grand mother who married into a British colonial family in British India. Even though interracial marriages were common (and were encouraged during colonial times in India) the racism, and snobbery of the colonial times meant that my grandmother (and her parents), hailing from a very ‘proper’, established British family, elevated the status of my great great grandmother, making her origins more socially palatable. The strange thing is that hearing the truth of this story made total sense to me, on a visceral level, and it was a relief to put the record straight and to reclaim that line of my heritage.

Inextricably linked to this sense of relatedness in the world is the importance of a sense of place and geographical location, which has been a feature of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ In the past, people tended to move around less frequently. Sometimes programme participants track significant moves that their ancestors have made for work, marriage, and immigration (forced or voluntary). In understanding our ancestors, their profession, trade, vocations and where they were doing their work and bringing up their families, we can get a stronger sense of the historical traces of our own pathway through life. We also get a greater understanding of the role they played in huge historical events such as the industrial revolution and the World Wars. The programme beautifully weaves in information about different industries in different historical periods, illuminating the living and working conditions of the ancestors of the person being researched.

You often hear the programme participants making links and connections between the lives of their ancestors and their own lives, feeling, quite tangibly at times, that blood link. There can be a tendency, perhaps naturally, to want to think the best of our ancestors, to paint a positive picture of them from piecing together snapshots of their lives from whatever historical records can be found. There can be the opposite tendency, too, a desire to find a villain, or someone at least a little bit colourful or memorable to spice up our lives and history. Perhaps this reflects our own tendencies and preferences, whether we are focused on living a happy, healthy life or wish to make our presence felt through being remarkable in some way.

So thanks to all those involved with the making of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ including all of the participants to date and all those who are researched in the future. The programme is a great and potent mix. It touches themes from the past and present, highlights the personal stories of our ancestors and the contexts in which they lived, showing history in the making. May the series run and run!


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