Sorry AB, I confess I was teasing you to make a point.
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Originally Posted by Anastasia Beaverhausen
He found out on the show when the borders were closed, yes.
He also found out the fates of both his grandmothers.
Neither of these is a matter of genealogical interest. You are enthusing about the program because Springer is told stuff he didn't know about his grandmothers. I think that's a poor reason for enthusiasm.
VH1 has a series called Rock Docs which usually takes the standard biographical documentary approach to famous musicians, filming the band on tour, that sort of thing. Well, 50 Cent went another way. His episode is called 50 Cent: The Origin of Me and it's his personal search to find out more about his South Carolina heritage. It's really, really good. Who Do You Think You Are? needs to take lessons from this one-off, because this is how you do an hour of television tracing the history of a celebrity.
I'ma spoiler this in case you prefer to watch the show, which is available online, before reading a summary.
Fiddy starts off talks to his living relatives, grandmother (she adopted him after his mother was murdered when he was 12) and great-aunts, about his great-great grandfather. He goes to Edgefield, South Carolina, where his great-aunts still live, to find out more about him and his life in this small town. Thanks to local historians and good old fashioned microfilm and paper census records, death records, draft records, court records, wills and deeds, he's ultimately able to trace his line back to the 1840s, a rare thing for African-Americans whose searches often stop at the 1870 census, the first census in which all black people are recorded.
The Internet is not involved at all. It's refreshing and a real testament to the dedication of small town historians, the depth of their knowledge and generations of careful record-keeping.
There are a couple of excruciating encounters. One is with a Daughter of the Confederacy who's a docent of some kind at a local plantation house and talks a lot of shit, like that there were tons black men fighting for the Confederacy, that the Confederate Battle Flag thus represents them as well, that there were "Mongolian slaves" in Edgefield who were indistinguishable physically from African slaves, and my personal favorite, that the local "redshirts," a Klan-type organization, were defending the plantations from the uncontrolled violence and plundering of the freed slaves. Fiddy is really quite kind to her, but he doesn't just politely swallow the crap. He questions her assertions.
The other is with the descendant of the slaveholder who owned his great4 and great5 grandmothers. The guy is gracious and gives Fiddy a present and everything, but his great-aunt is with him and he can tell she's extremely uncomfortable so they hightail it out of there.
It ends with him visiting the local high school felicitously named, wait for it, Strom Thurmond High School, where he talks to the students in an assembly. It's downright joyous.
To sum up: great show that should be a template for other such programming. I couldn't recommend it more strongly.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s newest genealogy show Finding Your Roots debuts on PBS tonight. DVR warning: it runs from 8:00 - 9:15 PM, so there's a slight overlap with Mad Men on the dismount.
I've been watching a few of the British Who Do You Think You Are? shows and they are so much better than the American version it's hard to believe they're even related. They are packed with information instead of constantly repeated summaries and there isn't a single plug for subscription genealogy sites. The three that I've watched so far don't go back very far, but rather focus on a fairly close circle of relations who are of particular interest to the celebrity.
My favorite so far is Emilia Fox, aka Georgiana Darcy from the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice. Her family history is fascinating and her living great aunts are priceless, especially the blind, half-deaf who was 103 years old when this was filmed.
Proquest and Ancestry worked with the makers of the American version, hence the plugs. I was at a Proquest genealogy focus group at a library conference and mentioned the British and Canadian shows in passing and the rep told me they were involved in making an American one. This was six months to a year before it aired.
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Yes, I mentioned on page one that that was my favorite episode of the US version. Even the best of the American series is far inferior to the UK version, I'm ashamed to say.
My favorite of the Henry Gates "Roots" shows was Kevin Bacon, who is 6 degrees separated from Kevin Bacon. Actually he and Kyra Sedgwick turned out to be 9th cousins.
According to the leaked emails, Gates became embroiled in an exchange with Sony's chief executive about Affleck’s request.
In an email sent to Michael Lynton shortly before the show's second season premiere, last autumn, Gates wrote that an unnamed "megastar" had asked producers to "edit out something about one of his ancestors – the fact that he owned slaves".
He added that "four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners", including the renowned documentary-maker Ken Burns, the man behind famous films including The Civil War.
"We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. What do we do?" Gates wrote.
Lynton asked who else knew about the information in question, advising that "it gets tricky" when editing out material "based on this kind of sensitivity".
Gates replied that the producers of the show, the star's PR agents and PBS knew about the slave-owning ancestor.
"To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman," Gates wrote, apparently before he was due to take a flight.
Lynton wrote back: "It is tricky because it may get out that you made the change and it comes down to editorial integrity. We can talk when you land."
In the final email of the exchange, Gates seems to indicate that the producers of the show will include the information.
"Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand," he wrote.
However, that part of Affleck's story never aired.
In a statement Gates had the nards to claim that it was an editorial choice to prioritize other stories, not a blatant cave to a Hollywood big shot. The leaked emails make that excuse look fucking ridiculous. You opened the door to censorship and now your brand is shit. Finding Your Roots was already a marked decline in quality from Gates' previous shows -- rushed, superficial, gimmicky -- and now it's been exposed as deceptive by omission too.
I officially hate Ben Affleck for being a cowardly, egotistical bag of crap. If Ken Burns can take the hit of having slave-owning ancestors, than so can that lummox.
I don't get why that would be something you'd run from anyway. A lot of people have ancestors that owned slaves. As long as you're not trying to own any now… what's the big deal?
Right? And if it's not slave-owning ancestors it's some other historical hideousness. Who expects to be descended from an unbroken line of saints? Hell, plenty of saints were horrible people by modern standards.
Some people are just really, really into that sort of thing, like they feel a deep personal connection to their ancestry. So maybe being ashamed of your family's history is coming from the same place as being proud of it.
Ugh. I don't understand. Your family's past affects you, but it doesn't define you. Especially in America, the land of reinvention and moving west.
I have family members who would prefer that I not talk about the family history I discover, too. Although ours is more about how many people ended up in the state asylum or why did this single woman keep having all these babies?
My Great-Grandfather Hutton took a great deal of pride in what he thought was a fact that none of his ancestors owned slaves. My mother started doing genealogy of her and my father's family about 10-12 years before her death. She found that there were in fact more than a few slave owners in her family tree, on the Hutton side.
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In a way, though, we kind of are our ancestors, in that your family's station in life is predictive of your own, and frequently, that station was achieved through exploitation of someone else's family.
There are also those people who don't think that history classes should cover bad things about America, for pretty much the same reason. People want their origin stories to be some kind of morality tale, and if you acknowledge that a lot of your family's (or country's) gains were ill-gotten, that taints your perception of the present.
(There was also one guy in my extended family who was really obsessed with genealogy for a pretty long while and then suddenly lost interest entirely, and would get agitated if anyone brought it up.)
In a way, though, we kind of are our ancestors, in that your family's station in life is predictive of your own, and frequently, that station was achieved through exploitation of someone else's family.
There are also those people who don't think that history classes should cover bad things about America, for pretty much the same reason. People want their origin stories to be some kind of morality tale, and if you acknowledge that a lot of your family's (or country's) gains were ill-gotten, that taints your perception of the present.
(There was also one guy in my extended family who was really obsessed with genealogy for a pretty long while and then suddenly lost interest entirely, and would get agitated if anyone brought it up.)
I don't disagree with you, necessarily. I'm thinking more about personal traits. But I do think it is more complicated than we are/are not our ancestors, and at some point the status of our ancestry ebbs to nothing.
I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not saying that I don't have benefits as a result of my ancestry that come at the expense of other people. I do. I think more of that has to do with outside forces than of who the individuals were--they/I just happened to be [viewed as] white, which had/s privileges. Society conferred those advantages, not the individuals themselves, even if they participated in society.
Many of my family received land as a result of ethnic cleansing, as they settled the frontier of Georgia after the Creeks were removed in the late 1820's. Some of those people owned slaves. The descendants of those settlers are both white and black. I have a hard time arguing that the black descendants of those settlers received benefits despite having the same ancestors.
I don't know if I have a point or am making a point or am being stupid. Screaming children.
Oh, no. I'm not fighting you! I was just thinking over this my own self because you made me think about it. I detach myself from my family history for the most part, too.
I've always been kinda "lol" at the idea of people getting really into their ancestry and being proud or embarrassed by it, so I'm kind of arguing with myself about that.
It is sort of cool, when I think about it, and it's a way that some people connect to history and dig out little everyday stories that would otherwise be lost. I enjoy some of the stories and all, but hadn't thought about how some family history might actually have some significance beyond being amusing, you know?
I'm just kind of woolgathering and trying to figure the significance of why people get emotionally invested in their ancestors' behaviors. I don't think anyone, including you or me, should be ashamed of the privileges our families gained before we were born, any more than we should be inordinately proud of their accomplishments. We're not personally responsible for either.
(There was also one guy in my extended family who was really obsessed with genealogy for a pretty long while and then suddenly lost interest entirely, and would get agitated if anyone brought it up.)
My paternal grandmother traced the family tree back to a gang of thieves, and did the same thing, lost interest in pursuing it any further and wouldn't talk about it.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields