Watched most of it, and had the complete opposite reaction. She seemed impatient and not really interested. I kept expecting her to look at her watch and mumble “when is this goddamn thing going to be over”.
I watched this one and enjoyed it. Something that puzzled me was when they were looking for Sarandon’s grandma by searching newspaper obituaries. Did you notice that the obituary they found for Anita Kahn had a different birthdate? The obit listed her birthdate as 1913, but they’d been searching for a woman born in 1907.
So I’m thinking “Dang, they found the wrong woman”. But it turns out they did have the right woman (as evidenced by the photos), so my conclusion is that Anita lied about her age to her new family. I thought that was cool, and I was surprised that they didn’t mention it. It’s more evidence that the woman reinvented herself. 
Susan did mention the discrepancy of birth years- she made a comment something like, “Ah, Anita, you tried to erase the early years where all your secrets were.”
Ah, I missed that – seems like the dog always wants to go out when I’m watching something.
I didn’t get why they followed up on the Anita with the 1913 birthdate instead of the Anita with the 1907 birthdate.
It was okay. It was obvious that all of this work had been done in advance and she was prompted where to look. I really took issue with the notion of just typing in someone’s first name on Ancestry.com to find an ancestor. It would be like typing in “John” on Google and expecting to get coherent results. Also, the gigantic leap of faith to get to the relative’s new last name was just bullshit. “Oh look, there’s somebody named Anita in the phonebook. It MUST be grandma!!”
I’ve done first name searches on the Social Security Death Index before- they work okay so long as you have an exact date of birth (or death) and don’t mind still scrolling through several pages. I’ve done first name searches on ancestry before as well but usually it’s when I’ve limited it to a particular county/census year and the first name is something like Epaphroditus or Talitha Cumi (both actual given names in my family). Agreed though that doing a ‘Hail Mary’ search with Anita is going to bring 53 million hits.
Yeah, I had good luck with “Wawrzyniec” (as long as I confined the search to the USA), but those sorts of opportunities don’t come along often. The program just seems very contrived to me.
I’m okay with the contrivances. It’s only an hour show, and it seems reasonable that we’d mostly see the highlights/results, not the boring legwork.
I got lucky with research on my dad’s side of the family, but then I knew his DOB. Found a distant relation who’d done a ton of research. Yesterday I was looking up stuff for a friend and the third listing on the first Google page was a 128-page PDF giving his family history (with stories and anecdotes) going back to the 1700’s.
I hate your friend. I’ve been looking for information on my great-grandmother’s family for 12 years and only just yesterday found out her birth and death dates, and where she is buried. Forget about her ancestors: it just ain’t happenin’.
But another way to look at it is that someone took away all the fun – there’s nothing left for him to look for.
What happens when you Google your great-grandma’s name and dates? Nothing?
Zero, zip, nada. Her name was a common one: Eunice Jane Evans. I’m pretty positive she came from Illinois and have a source for her marriage date there. The birth/death info is from her tombstone. I’ve attacked this from every angle I can think of, but you know how sometimes you miss the obvious. That’s why women are so much better at this sort of research than men are. Sorry for the hijack.
Everything that’s wrong with this show was synopsized in a 5 second moment on tonight’s show. It’s when Spike Lee is having a pointless meeting with the great-great-granddaughter of his great-great-great-grandfather’s owner and she says “What I’d like for you to know…”
Then the piano music starts.
STOP WITH THE FALSE DRAMA! They should call the production company “Wife of Bathos Productions”.
That said, tonight I was really able to dissect because I lived in that area, knew the historians daughter so well she was once on my speed dial, and worked with Ms. Grier (the woman Spike Lee goes to see). I own a replica of a Griswoldville revolver, wrote an encyclopedia article on that factory for an academic reference work, have been to and had ancestors in Dublin GA and Twiggs County GA where my ancestor was a large slave owner (named Lee- no idea where his father’s family came from) with a marital connection to the Woodalls who owned Lee’s ancestors, so I’m pretty qualified to judge this one.
The research sucks. What really irritates me on every episode is how they act like you have to travel across country to find this stuff out- the only thing he had to leave NYC for was to see the parts of Georgia where his ancestors lived. Google the word Griswoldville and the first link that comes up is about the battle and the second is about the pistol factory.
It’s unreal things they don’t mention. He had an ancestor who was a slave in Twiggs County named Mars. I know from my own research there was a a large black community in Twiggs County called Mars Hill- this isn’t mentioned! No idea if there’s a connection- I’m not sure how old Mars Hill is even- but there’s a black cemetery there that would be an interesting place to look for any graves related to his family- again, not mentioned.
One of the genealogists says “It’s possible he joined the Union Army”, which made me think "too bad there’s not a simple way to find out…some kind of Civil War soldier and sailor database operated by the government in which you can type in Griswold and see inst… oh wait, there is! I typed in Griswold- initial W (there was no Wilson) and Union and there are many, and while I’m not going to plow through it they should have for the show, crossreferencing the units with known black units.
They did the same thing with Spike Lee’s ancestor and Sam Griswold that they did in the episode with Emmitt Smith which is a crazy leap of faith: they assume that because she was listed as a mulatto her master was a father. This is simply impossible to know from given information; could he have been? Sure. So could every other white man, so could every other mulatto slave for that matter.
Mulatto meant ‘light skinned’ slave. They did not all have white fathers- some had white grandfathers that made them lighter, some were the children of other mulattoes. As to who fathered mulatto children with black women the possibilities are open to anybody who came in contact with them- the master, his sons or male relatives, the overseer, a man who hired them (as with Griswold many slaves leased their slaves to or from others), and for all you know from this research she was purchased by Griswold. DON’T JUST DECIDE THAT SAM WAS HER FATHER, that’s sloppy history, but then you wouldn’t get that interview with Ms. Grier I assume. (She’s a very sweet lady incidentally, pretty much “what you see is what you get” from that interview.)
Also there are all sorts of things they could have spent time on other than the maudlin “Slavery was bad” thing and recapping what you just heard 3 minutes ago before the commercial. For example, there are databases of Georgia wills- this along with estate inventories are the best place to find mentions by name of slaves- did you people (on the show) check? I googled up about 2 Mars mentioned by name as a “Negro boy” and “Negro man” respectively in Georgia wills before opening this thread- took me literally a minute.
And agree with Spike Lee- he should slap himself with a wet spaghetti noodle for not doing an interview on film with his grandma. She lived to be 100 and didn’t think to interview her on the family history even after you went on African-American Lives? Get outta heah…
That said, had its moments. Thoughts?
Bump for the new series.
Did anybody see the Vanessa Williams episode last night? It’s available on NBC.com and Hulu if not.
Very interesting episode. I was really surprised that her g-g-grandfather was married to a white woman in the 1860s- I didn’t realize it was legal even in NY.
A renewed irritation at the melodramatic music and the implication you have to travel to D.C. or other places to get these records- they’re available all over the place online.
But it’d be boring to watch someone sitting at their computer. I like meeting the archivists and historians, and I really like visiting the cemeteries.
I went “Well duh” when Williams saw the dates on great-grandpa’s headstone: “1861 to 1865 – that must have been the Civil War.” I suppose it was for the benefit of any morons watching but the way she said it sounded like she wasn’t sure. It was also disappointing that she didn’t seem to know much about Reconstruction – she seemed surprised that there were African-American legislators in the 1880’s. But that was probably just a cue for a history lesson for the audience.
I would have liked to know more about Louisa, the white woman g-g-pa married.
Who else are they doing this season? I think I saw Gwyneth Paltrow?
True, and you reach a point where you really want and need to go see these places to get a sense of the place. But I wish they’d at least tell the TV audience that most of the skeletal info anyway (military units and other government records) are online and you don’t have to be rich to find them.
I’m not sure what order it will be in, but Lionel Ritchie, Rosie O’Donnell (prepare for waterworks and maudlin camera mugging galore on that one no matter what they find- “My great-grandfather was a liquor store employee… and that’s why to this day I want to sell booze to people… and now I know who I am!!!”), Tim McGraw, Kim Cattrall and Ashley Judd.
They haven’t done anybody with Confederate and or slaveowning ancestors yet to my knowledge. I hope they portray that one objectively without feeling the need to apologize or (God forbid) have the person break down in tears in shame that their ancestor owned humans (kind of the way Sarah Jessica Parker [del]pretended[/del]seemed to be on the verge of hysteria at learning one of her ancestors may have been an accuser in the witch trials). They also need to do somebody with provable Native American ancestry (preferably without the person tearfully acting like the Trail of Tears and other Indian removals is news to them).
I don’t know that Tim McGraw is Scots-Irish but it’s my guess he is, so I hope they discuss what that means since many Americans aren’t familiar and use the term incorrectly to mean anybody of Scottish or Irish ancestry. Lionel Ritchie had a fairly well to do branch of his family in Montgomery, AL (the patriarch, a prominent minister, died in recent years) so his should be easier than most to do, plus his grandfather was a professor at Tuskegee and would have been there during pre-Civil Rights era and at the time of G.W. Carver so that’s probably an interesting story.
Place! Did you get excited when one of the obits gave an address – corner of something and something – ? I did. The house probably wouldn’t be there, but I’d want to check it out anyway.
Oh yes. I found info on my dad’s family – all the way back to the late 1700’s – just by googling his name. Someone had done a lot of research and it was all there, and it was free.
Hmmm. Not too enticing, except for Ritchie. It’d be nice if they’d throw in a non-celebrity once in awhile.
The original Brit version is not so melodramatic. I’ve seen several seasons and enjoy it. I may start watching the American version.
I know that skin tone is a sensitive issue to many black people, but it’s interesting to me that Vanessa Williams has no known exclusively white ancestors since before the Civil War (at least not that they mentioned) but is light skinned because her parents and grandparents were.
I thought they did an amazing job of restraint when she mentioned the notion she’d tarnished the Miss America pageant by being black, and it’s truly sickening how much racism there was at the time (I remember that at the time you’d have thought they’d chosen Moms Mabley as Miss America the way some people talked about it, calling it “affirmative action” and “White liberal guilt” and all), but Honey, as much as I love you as an actress and singer, your ancestry has nothing to do with the way you tarnished the Miss America pageant:D Of course I’m sure she’s addressed that until she just doesn’t feel like mentioning it one more time, especially now that she has almost grown kids. (It would have to be horrifying to know that there are graphic nude photos of your mom- with another woman no less- and if her own descendants ever do genealogy research they’re gonna find something that blows away a tin-type.)
The lady at the Tennessee capitol seemed extremely helpful and knowledgable. People like that are great when you’re doing research; I have a tendency to get the ones who act like it’s a painful duty to assist somebody (and I’m not one of these genealogists who wants to bore you to death with family stories, I just ask flat out “Do you have _____ newspaper from 1903?” or “Any suggestions for where I might find old photos of ______?”).
I wouldn’t bother. Once you’re used to the original, with people reacting in sensible ways, without all the time-wasting building of non-existent tension, drama creation and incessant recaps of things you can remember for yourself because it only happened a few seconds ago and you’re not actually an idiot, you won’t stand the American version. I watched a few of the last series, and it nearly drove me insane.
I would LOVE to have control of this show because it could be great. I’d incorporate living history places (almost every region has one), give some search tips anyone can do from home each week (and invite others to share their own- I’ve come up with quite a few just from hit and miss googling), and talk about historical things that are of interest to many people. On this ep for example I’d cut the visit to her uncle and family and the recaps and talk more about interracial marriages in 19th century New York, or the lives of the educated blacks in post-Reconstruction Memphis love to know more about that.
I was reminded the other day while talking about Black History Month that most people, black and white, seem to think the south went straight from slavery to Jim Crow or that the KKK was a fact-of-life for all of that time, both erroneous. There was a window after the Civil War when blacks had access to education and political enfranchisement and could and did vote blacks into office, and things were not as stupidly segregated as they would become much later. It wasn’t even immediately upon Reconstruction’s end that it changed- in Montgomery, AL for example streetcars (forerunners to the more famous buses) weren’t racially segregated until the late 1890s after Plessy v. Ferguson. It wasn’t a great-time-to-be-black and not all things were equal to put it mildly, but old people in the 1940s or so could probably remember a more just time than their grandchildren were growing up in.
As for the Klan, it had pretty much ceased to exist by the end of Reconstruction; Nathan Forrest had denounced it, U.S. Grant had pretty much scared the shit out of its leaders, and by the time Hayes became president it had largely ceased to exist. This isn’t to say racial crimes didn’t happen- in fact they escalated after the KKK was disbanded- but they moved underground. The KKK as a major power was far more a product of Birth of a Nation; there’s a chapter in Freakonomics that goes into some detail about its rebirth, the social effects, and the fact (also apparently not known to many, white or black) that the KKK was a pyramid scheme- some Klan leaders grew rich or at least earned a considerable amount of money from recruiting and sell robes and such.
I’d like to see a bit more “deep genealogy” as well- DNA testing and what not. For example, it’d be interesting to test the Y chromosome DNA of Vanessa Williams’ brother to find out (due to their families biracial heritage) if their distant male line ancestors were black or white, and same for the mitochondrial line. I’d also do a detailed web page for each person profiled with links to relevant articles. Anyway, obviously you wouldn’t have time to go into great detail, but to at least mention these would make it more educational and of more interest to more people.