Who Do You Think You Are?

Alicat · 13-08-2008 11:50pm #1

New series just started on BBC1 at 9pm on Wednesdays. I have seen the previous series and found it absolutely fascinating. Line-up looks good this season!

I just thought anyone interested in heritage/geneology might enjoy it

I have only found this forum so apologies if this post is not deemed appropriate

HalloweenJack · 18-08-2008 3:09pm

I was just wondering if anyone here was ever actually traced their genealogy.

I've had a lot done on my mother's side going back to the late 18th century. I think my mother's father has been able to trace his family as far back as the 14th century, iirc.

sweet-rasmus · 28-08-2008 10:47am

Yeah, it's a good show. I caugh the first two with Patsy Kensit and Boris Johnson. Last night's show was a bit too depressing; I had to turn it off.

They make it look so easy, but we have to remember that lots of people are paid to do research here.

Noopti · 28-08-2008 10:50am

sweet-rasmus wrote: »

Last night's show was a bit too depressing; I had to turn it off.

That's a shame, especially as he met a relative from Israel which kind of gave it a happy ending.

sweet-rasmus · 28-08-2008 12:00pm

ah good

ejmaztec · 28-08-2008 1:06pm

Anyone catch the "Armstrong & Miller" sketch sending up the programme? I found it hilarious.

FiSe · 28-08-2008 2:27pm

It is very interesting although, it is a show, so nobody from the 'celebs' really do the reaserch...
The frase 'XY from WZ archive found interesting file on...' and 'We have contacted XY who found file...' is a bit of a give away.

Last night with J. Springer, again interesting, but seems to me that he's a caricature of his own show, that cry beside 'Radegast' station monument was, well, how to say it, Jerry Springer-ish?

As well, just out of curiosity, I was wondering what would the original name be, Sprünger ?
Anyway, looking forward to next part. I enjoyed it a lot.

jos28 · 07-09-2008 9:27am

RTE have commissioned a series for the Autumn schedule. 'Celebrities' include Joe Duffy, Charlie Bird and Ardal O'Hanlon. It will be interesting to see how difficult researching in Ireland is compared to the UK. The only on-line records we have is the 1911 census and thats only the Dublin records. It took me months and months to get back to 1832 and now I'm stuck !

anonymous_joe · 07-09-2008 3:33pm

jos28 wrote: »

RTE have commissioned a series for the Autumn schedule. 'Celebrities' include Joe Duffy, Charlie Bird and Ardal O'Hanlon. It will be interesting to see how difficult researching in Ireland is compared to the UK. The only on-line records we have is the 1911 census and thats only the Dublin records. It took me months and months to get back to 1832 and now I'm stuck !

Weren't the vast majority of our records lost in either 1916 or 1921 or the Civil War? One of 'em I think...

Besides, large amounts of our aristocracy left in the 16th to 18th centuries, and that would take a large amount of our genealogical history with it. Just us peasants left. :pac:

sweet-rasmus · 07-09-2008 5:54pm

it was 1921.

i wonder what the RTE show is going to be like. where did you hear about it?

ChocolateSauce · 07-09-2008 6:40pm

My last name is traced to a minor Norman house, so I presume I'm of distant mixed Gallic/Latin/Viking origin. But it means nothing to me, we're all from Africa at the end of the day.

Hagar · 07-09-2008 6:46pm

If that's true how come all our languages originate from India?
Did we march in silence from Africa to India?
Even the wimmins? That's stretching it a bit.

Lizzykins · 07-09-2008 7:22pm

I'm stuck in 1819! Of course all we have to look up is the parish registers and the priests then only recorded the names of those getting married and not their ages or parents names. Likewise with deaths all I've seen are names and dates so how could you ever know if the person you're looking up is the right one? Maddening.

Red Hand · 07-09-2008 9:29pm

Hagar wrote: »

If that's true how come all our languages originate from India?
Did we march in silence from Africa to India?
Even the wimmins? That's stretching it a bit.

Who says that our languages originate in India?

Hagar · 07-09-2008 9:40pm

Many sources. Some more believable than others but try this link and see where it leads.

jos28 · 08-09-2008 8:06pm

sweet-rasmus wrote: »

it was 1921.

i wonder what the RTE show is going to be like. where did you hear about it?

I saw a trailer on RTE for the autumn schedule. Should be good.

Irish state records only started in 1864 so as Lizzykins points out we are reliant on parish records prior to that. In my case the parish records have only partially survived but it helps if you have an unusual surname.

sweet-rasmus · 08-09-2008 9:50pm

Saw a billboard up about it today. 9.30pm rte1. Mondays. It doesn't start today anyhow...

ChocolateSauce · 09-09-2008 5:53pm

Hagar wrote: »

If that's true how come all our languages originate from India?
Did we march in silence from Africa to India?
Even the wimmins? That's stretching it a bit.

Don't be stupid or condescending, of course we didn't march in silence from Africa to India.

Assuming for the sake of argument your statement is true (it isn't), the people from India could have come from Africa, and then branched out to other regions.

If we came from Africa then obviously our languages ultimately came from there too. Indo-European languages and our languages being of eastern descent merely refers to the recent evolution.

Hagar · 09-09-2008 6:09pm

I'm neither stupid nor condescending.

Don't we all know that the multitude of languages we speak didn't evolve at all but were visited upon mankind all at once by Holy God as punishment for having the audacity to try to reach Heaven by building the Tower of Babel.

Taking that just a step further since everyone except Noah and his chosen crew were wiped out by the Great Flood anything that happend before that was washed away. So we are all descended from Mt Arrarat which is located in Eastern Turkey on the borders of Iran, Armenia (formerly U.S.S.R.), and Nakchivan. So we are still not African, Asian would be more accurate.

But of course you already knew this as a Church Member.

ChocolateSauce · 09-09-2008 7:42pm

Hagar wrote: »

I'm neither stupid nor condescending.

You sure were acting like it. But I'm willing to give you a second chance. As I write this, I haven't read the rest of your post....

Hagar wrote: »

Don't we all know that the multitude of languages we speak didn't evolve at all but were visited upon mankind all at once by Holy God as punishment for having the audacity to try to reach Heaven by building the Tower of Babel.

Taking that just a step further since everyone except Noah and his chosen crew were wiped out by the Great Flood anything that happend before that was washed away. So we are all descended from Mt Arrarat which is located in Eastern Turkey on the borders of Iran, Armenia (formerly U.S.S.R.), and Nakchivan. So we are still not African, Asian would be more accurate.

You're...serious? No, seriously, sarcasm and irony are hard to interpret via text.

Well we know we came from Africa. We know it. We've found million year old bones of our ancestors, and can trace the DNA back.

Hagar wrote: »

But of course you already knew this as a Church Member.

Ah...about the church. It isn't a theistic church, it's one of earthly (and fleshy) pleasures. The first sacrament is chocolate sauce. :cool:

Hagar · 09-09-2008 8:10pm

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

You sure were acting like it. But I'm willing to give you a second chance.

Jolly civil of you old girl.

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

You're...serious? No, seriously, sarcasm and irony are hard to interpret via text.

Have you looked left at all?

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

Well we know we came from Africa. We know it. We've found million year old bones of our ancestors, and can trace the DNA back.

I'm not from Africa, I'm a Dub. Seriously, you don't know, you think you know. Scientists postulate theories, but going back that far who really knows?

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

Ah...about the church. It isn't a theistic church, it's one of earthly (and fleshy) pleasures. The first sacrament is chocolate sauce. :cool:

At last your talking my language.

ChocolateSauce · 10-09-2008 9:51am

Hagar wrote: »

I'm not from Africa, I'm a Dub. Seriously, you don't know, you think you know. Scientists postulate theories, but going back that far who really knows?

You're from Dublin, but go back about 25,000 years and you'll find your ancestors in Africa. Scientists don't make large claims without large evidence.

You'll also find everyone was black. White skin is a recent adaption to cold climates.

jmayo · 10-09-2008 11:41am

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

You're from Dublin, but go back about 25,000 years and you'll find your ancestors in Africa. Scientists don't make large claims without large evidence.

You'll also find everyone was black. White skin is a recent adaption to cold climates.

Why, did people develop pale skin for camouflage in the snow or was it jsut because we in northern northern hemisphere didn't see the sun for years at a time

sweet-rasmus · 13-09-2008 11:33am

jos28 wrote: »

I saw a trailer on RTE for the autumn schedule. Should be good.

Irish state records only started in 1864 so as Lizzykins points out we are reliant on parish records prior to that. In my case the parish records have only partially survived but it helps if you have an unusual surname.

starts this monday, the 15th.

Clare Bear · 13-09-2008 11:37am

It always has me hooked, just really interested in tracing back. Wish it was as easy to do it here as it is in the UK.

ejmaztec · 13-09-2008 2:14pm

Was I hallucinating when I thought I saw Dana in the programme trailer? :eek:

Snickers Man · 13-09-2008 4:29pm

I think the difficulty with Irish records is that there were no centralised records before the mid 19th century and then all the 19th century censuses were destroyed in the Troubles of the 1920s. So the only birth records going back to that time are church ones.

There was an interesting story in the Phoenix this month of the problems being encountered by the National Library in its attempt to collect, digitise and centralise church records so that genealogy searches back to the 19th century and even earlier can be facilitated. Some dioceses are refusing to hand over the records en masse. The Phoenix speculates that this is largely because of the Mormon factor.

Apparently, and this was confirmed to me by a professional genealogist, Mormons are the great unsung unpaid workhorses of the genealogy industry. If you need masses of photocopying or digitising or other such work which is hugely labour intensive, the people to call are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and they will do it all for free. How great is that?

Of course they have their own agenda. They believe in baptising not just their own living church members but retrospectively all of their ancestors as well. So they are very keen to get their hands on genealogy data. Many state bodies around the world are only too pleased to co-operate with the Mormons because it's a cheap way of getting your old paper-based data into computers. But of course, their very peculiar agenda is resented by people who take this sort of thing seriously.

Like Catholic Bishops. Several bishops in Ireland are resisting the drive to digitisation.

The professional genealogist also told me that the church has more prosaic reasons for wanting to restrict universal access to registration forms. It would seem that the gossiping of our ancestors was every bit as "tabloid" as our own generations and many birth records contain derogatory ad lib comments, usually written in Latin, alleging such tittle tattle that the name of the father on the birth cert is not that of the natural father of the child etc etc

All good clean fun.

ejmaztec · 13-09-2008 5:28pm

Snickers Man wrote: »

I think the difficulty with Irish records is that there were no centralised records before the mid 19th century and then all the 19th century censuses were destroyed in the Troubles of the 1920s. So the only birth records going back to that time are church ones.

There was an interesting story in the Phoenix this month of the problems being encountered by the National Library in its attempt to collect, digitise and centralise church records so that genealogy searches back to the 19th century and even earlier can be facilitated. Some dioceses are refusing to hand over the records en masse. The Phoenix speculates that this is largely because of the Mormon factor.

Apparently, and this was confirmed to me by a professional genealogist, Mormons are the great unsung unpaid workhorses of the genealogy industry. If you need masses of photocopying or digitising or other such work which is hugely labour intensive, the people to call are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and they will do it all for free. How great is that?

Of course they have their own agenda. They believe in baptising not just their own living church members but retrospectively all of their ancestors as well. So they are very keen to get their hands on genealogy data. Many state bodies around the world are only too pleased to co-operate with the Mormons because it's a cheap way of getting your old paper-based data into computers. But of course, their very peculiar agenda is resented by people who take this sort of thing seriously.

Like Catholic Bishops. Several bishops in Ireland are resisting the drive to digitisation.

The professional genealogist also told me that the church has more prosaic reasons for wanting to restrict universal access to registration forms. It would seem that the gossiping of our ancestors was every bit as "tabloid" as our own generations and many birth records contain derogatory ad lib comments, usually written in Latin, alleging such tittle tattle that the name of the father on the birth cert is not that of the natural father of the child etc etc

All good clean fun.

The Bishop of Kerry, being one of these people holding up my own research.

I understood from a genealogist that the Mormons already had the required information, this having been collected a few years ago, when a crowd of them descended upon various places with their laptops. I don't know how much info they collected, but they are supposed to be a good source.

Howevever, when I tried their website, I didn't find any information relative to my search, and can only assume that, if they did have a lot of details, the bulk of them must be offline.

Given the lack of records, I'm always amazed that American presidents, or potential presidents, have Irish genealogists tracing their family back three or four hundred (or more) years, when most of us have a problem finding anything beyond the 19th century.

A UCD professor told me several years ago that the Clinton one was "fudged" because they couldn't find a missing link, or two. Whether this is true or not, I don't know.

Another problem with old records is supposed to be down to that old religious stuff, where Catholics were supposed to be treated like livestock, so records weren't all that important.

Affable · 13-09-2008 8:08pm

sweet-rasmus wrote: »

Yeah, it's a good show. I caugh the first two with Patsy Kensit and Boris Johnson. Last night's show was a bit too depressing; I had to turn it off.

They make it look so easy, but we have to remember that lots of people are paid to do research here.

It depends heavily on the person. Esther Rantzen's one was boring as hell but the Patsy Kensit one was quite moving.

LordSutch · 14-09-2008 2:44pm

Regarding the RTE version of 'Who do you think you are' it will be interesting to see how 'Irish' the celebs are (whatever 'Irish' means).

I read in the RTE guide that Newsman Charlie traces his roots back to Portsmouth, Linda Martin goes back to Italy, with Pamela Flood being the only one who keeps her family tree here in Ireland ......

I have always been curious as to where we all came from, and can our origins be traced back according to our Family Surnames? So recently I made a list of about fifteen surnames from the Office, from Friends, & from Family, I then entered them into some of the various 'on-line' (Surname Heraldry) websites to see what would happen, and apparently nearly all the fifteen are of Norman, Scandenavian, German, English, Welsh or Scottish origin!

Does'nt proove anything really - but interesting & a bit of fun to me none the less, as I presumed that nearly all the surnames would be of Irish origin!!! - Not so.

ejmaztec · 14-09-2008 4:09pm

Camelot wrote: »

Regarding the RTE version of 'Who do you think you are' it will be interesting to see how 'Irish' the celebs are (whatever 'Irish' means).

I read in the RTE guide that Newsman Charlie traces his roots back to Portsmouth, Linda Martin goes back to Italy, with Pamela Flood being the only one who keeps her family tree here in Ireland ......

I have always been curious as to where we all came from, and can our origins be traced back according to our Family Surnames? So recently I made a list of about fifteen surnames from the Office, from Friends, & from Family, I then entered them into some of the various 'on-line' (Surname Heraldry) websites to see what would happen, and apparently nearly all the fifteen are of Norman, Scandenavian, German, English, Welsh or Scottish origin!

Does'nt proove anything really - but interesting & a bit of fun to me none the less, as I presumed that nearly all the surnames would be of Irish origin!!! - Not so.

I suppose that it wouldn't be very interesting if they could only tell the celebrities who their parents were.

My maternal grandfather, having the rare name of John Kelly, died in 1946, and no-one, not even his immediate family, knows where the hell he came from.

Who Do You Think You Are?

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