Paula Deen, Who Do You Think You Are?

This is the review that will get me into trouble, so read it at your own peril.  Feel free to disagree with me, but be warned that I am not publishing abusive comments. 

This is the final episode of Who Do You Think You Are.  Paula Deen is the perfect celebrity end the series because she more than anyone else encapsulates the essence of the show.  Who Do You Think You Are is often a deeply cynical show that masks that cynicism with melodrama, emotion, and a veneer of Americanism.  My distaste for the show goes well beyond the “mistake” from last week’s show.  In this third season, even the most genuine stories seemed a little more fake, a little more over-the-top, and a lot more manipulative in a way that the UK progenitor is not.  Worse, I often felt like I was watching an extended infomercial for Ancestry.com rather than a quality television program.

For her part, Paula Deen masks a deep cynicism with a similar geniality, melodrama, and folksy Americanism.  Her simple persona disguises a much more complicated person.  This is a woman who created a cooking empire out of nothing, but completely manages to hide her business savvy behind a veneer of ignorance and homespun humility.  But don’t be fooled; when Paula Deen faces adversity, she claws her way to the top–and it ain’t pretty.  Two examples.  First, when Deen was attacked by Anthony Bourdain about how unhealthy the food pushes actually is (hypocritical for Bourdain to lament), she turned it into a class war of attrition and following tornado-like levels of blow back, Bourdain felt sheer terror.  Second, is a little bit more complicated, because it is about her diabetes, which is a touchy subject.  I’m not one of those who (like Bourdain) blames Paula Deen for the obesity epidemic in America; she was entirely correct that she is a chef not a doctor.  Nor do I think she was under any obligation to reveal that she suffers from Type 2 Diabetes.  However, I do find it extremely cynical that she revealed she had diabetes solely so that she could be the (well-paid) celebrity spokeswoman on behalf of a diabetes drug.  Perhaps she was doing research about diabetes as she claimed, but more likely it seems like she was trying to find the right pharmaceutical company.

None of this has anything to with this week’s show per se, but the combination of show and celebrity made it hard for me to believe that anything was genuine.

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The show began in Savannah, Georgia where Paula Deen is introduced (naturally) cooking for her family because we need reminding that she is a chef.  And also she loves her family.  Deen lost her parents in her late teens/early twenties, so she never knew much about her family.  Her mother, Corrie Paul Deen (Paula’s name derives from her mother’s maiden name), came from Albany, Georgia, where Deen was also from.  One of Corrie’s sisters still lives there.  That is where Paula began her journey–a visit to her aunt Peggy Ort.  Aunt Peggy told Paula the name of her father (John Larkin Paul) and his father (John Little Paul), and lo and behold she had a photocopy of the latter’s death certificate.  Throughout the season, the opening family scenes have felt staged, but this one is perhaps the most disingenuous.  We all begin our searches by talking to our relatives, but it is beyond belief that Deen’s aunt just happened to have a copy of the death certificate lying around.  She might as well have just said, “Here’s your first clue; enjoy the scavenger hunt.”

John Little Paul’s death certificate told Deen that he was born in Georgia in 1860 and his parents were named W.B. Paul and Eliza (Batts) Paul.  With this document, Paula traveled to the State Archives at Morrow, Georgia to find out more.  Looking at the 1870 Census (Ancestry plug 7 minutes in), she discovered that John Little Paul (was it Little or Liddle?) was living with a John Batts rather than his parents.  My first guess was that this was his grandfather, and of course that was correct.  (Interestingly enough, it also looks like there was a sister who was there with him and a 14-year-old black servant named Margaret Batts who was never mentioned once.)  Because the researcher was able to find W.B. (William B.) and Eliza alive in 1870, he surmises that young John was sent to live with her relatives so that he could go to school, which doesn’t make all that much sense as W.B. and Eliza lived in the same town as John Batts.  A quick trip to the 1850 Census reveals that John Batts was indeed the father of Eliza Batts, which makes him Deen’s 3rd great-grandfather.

Now at this point given that John Batts was listed as a planter and he was wealthy, it was pretty obvious to me that he was a slave owner prior to the Civil War.  But the show does not address that yet.  Rather we learn that John Batts was a judge and a legislator in both houses of the Georgia Legislature just prior to the Civil War and was named a delegate to support John C. Breckinridge who was ardently pro-South (and pro-slavery) in the 1860 election.  You know the election that brought us Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.  In other words, all the evidence pointed to the fact that Batts was ardently pro-slavery and a proponent of secession.  Every once in a while it looked like Deen had a clue about it, but then she went back to playing dumb.  It was not until a researcher showed her an actual document (in this case the 1860 Census) that proved that Batts owned slaves that she finally recognized that her ancestor was less than sterling.  In fact, he owned 35 slaves.

I want to state here and now that I do not believe Paula Deen is a racist, nor do I think she is pro-slavery.  I believe that she is genuinely upset by the idea that one of her ancestors owned slaves.  I could even grudgingly admit that perhaps she, a many-generation Georgian, could delude herself into believe that nowhere did she have slave-owning ancestors (although I do believe that it is disingenuous that the thought never crossed her mind).  But I could not believe for one instant that little speech she gave about how if she could go back in time she would try her very hardest to convince John Batts to renounce slavery.  Does this woman possess absolutely no sense of history?  John Batts’s entire wealth depended on his exploitation of human labor, and it took a terrible war and hundreds of thousands of deaths to end America’s original sin, which John Batts very eagerly committed.  I don’t think for a moment she really believed that she could talk anyone out of anything, but was rather trying to assuage her own guilt, a guilt that is perhaps understandable, but really undeserved given that she was born over eight decades after the Civil War ended.

Possibly because going farther back on the Batts family tree would not be very interesting to Who Do You Think You Are (the information is there, I checked), Deen focused on how the Civil War impacted Batts’s family.  There is a little voice over about how she wanted to find this out, but I suspect that this is where the research led the show and Deen’s desire to find out about the Batts family was directed by the researchers.

John Batts was too old to fight in the war, but his son William was just the right age, and sure enough William enlisted as part of the Twelfth Georgia Regiment.  Deen was fortunate to come across extremely well-written letters (that sadly Ken Burns did not have enough time to fit in his wonderful documentary) from William to his family.  First a letter to his father in June 1861 posted from Richmond.  William had not seen the front, and he hoped the war to end in two months.  Five months later, in a letter dated November 28, 1861 and written from the battlefront, William had a much more jaundiced view while adjusting to the harsh conditions of the battle (and sounding a bit like a poor little rich boy).  The final letter came from May 1862 from a hospital in Virginia.  William had been injured badly, but not badly enough that he could not return to the battle.  That was the last letter from William.

On August 9, 1862, William’s commanding officer S.G. Pryor wrote to his wife and mentioned that William Batts was killed in combat and buried as a soldier.  Without a coffin.  Pryor referred to him Batts as “Billy” and from that moment on, Deen also referred to him as Billy, as though she were an intimate rather than someone she had just found out about.  And indeed she seemed to feel that he knew him all her life, emoting like a bad actor about the tragic loss of such a young boy.  Her overreaction only increased after reading a letter from Pryor’s wife who wrote about how the Batts family coped, and particularly about John Batts who took the loss very badly.

After the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began, Batts formally requested a pardon from then-President Andrew Johnson, as did all the wealthiest (and most politically active) Southerners.  (This is where we got our second Ancestry plug.  Deen went to Fold3, which had been Footnote.com before the Ancestry juggernaut swallowed it up and turned it into a military records only site.)  Batts swore he freed all his slaves and employed them at a fair and proper wage.  This assertion went unchallenged by Deen and her researcher, but I wonder if it is true.  White Southerners may have been forced to free their slaves, but that did not mean they did not exploit them, all the more after Reconstruction ended Union soldiers were not there to prevent the creation of Jim Crow.

Following the war Batts did okay financially, but he appeared to have been hit hard by the Depression of 1873 that affected the cotton planters.  By 1875 Batts had nothing left, and on May 18, 1878 he shot himself in the head with a pistol.  His family had worried that he might attempt suicide because he had been depressed for some time.  Deen was absolutely shocked, and put on a show that suggested that she was terribly upset by his suicide. She claimed that her heart broke for John Batts and bet that had “Billy” survived, he could have prevented his father from committing suicide.  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Paula Deen, Historical Psychologist.

Now granted John Batts is not my ancestor, but I was far more ambivalent when I learned about his suicide.  Far be it from me to wish death upon anyone, but this man is no hero.  He eagerly exploited the labor other human beings, and he no doubt felt he had the right to mistreat them in any way he saw fit.  As a judge and a legislator he enable, abetted, encouraged, participated in, defended, and protected a system designed to keep men and women enslaved simply because of their color.  He was responsible for the destruction of families, if not on his own plantation than on the ones that he protected in his official capacity.  He helped to create a war that tore his country apart, destroyed his state, and took the lives of so many–including his own son.  And why?  To protect slavery.  Because at its essence, the Civil War is about slavery, full stop.  This whole Lost Cause/states’ rights argument came from the post-Civil War writings of the guilty who wanted to justify their racism by turning themselves into tragic heroes.  Any other explanation is pure hokum.  So no, my heart does not break for John Batts.

Deen made one final stop, to the land where the Batts plantation once existed.  In a voice over she told the camera that she hoped to find some remnant that the Batts family once lived there (as her car drove alone Batts Road).  Sure enough she found some bricks, and came to the conclusion that it was a kitchen.  What a coincidence that a celebrity chef should find a pile of bricks and believe it to be a remnant of her ancestor’s ancient kitchen.  Where slaves cooked the family’s meals.  Let’s not delude ourselves.

Back in Savannah, Deen met up with her sons, and greeted them as though she had been in another country for months rather than in a different part of the state for a few days.  She tells them that they are “deeply, deeply vested in this beautiful state.”  One of her sons (I don’t know which one) asked her if she would cook them dinner, and she said she would as they walked into the sunset.  Because she’s a celebrity chef.  In case you forgot.

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I feel like I should say something about the demise of this show even though I have already written about it.  But I come to bury Who Do You Think You Are not to praise it.  This show stopped telling history and started selling it like a product.  That approach is something I deeply resent, which is why my reviews, which were intended to be an attempt a literary deconstruction ended up being largely savage diatribes.

Ancestry has hinted that this show will continue in another form.  For my own part, I cannot imagine watching anymore of this show so long as Ancestry is in charge.  Most likely I will not be reviewing them any more either, although I will miss the hits I have gotten on this blog whenever I posted a new review.

So thank you for sticking with me.  Perhaps one day we will get the genealogy show we deserve.  Until then, British and Australian episodes of the show are available on YouTube.  And for any newbies, researching your family tree, your own personal history, is entirely worth it.  It’s a rewarding experience that will give you countless hours of frustration and pleasure.

Rashida Jones, Who Do You Think You Are?

Continuing on the Parks & Recreation theme from last week, this week’s Who Do You Think You Are celebrity is Rashida Jones.

First, a full disclosure:  Even before this week’s episode, I had a soft spot in my heart for Rashida Jones, because she is the only celebrity that I have ever personally met (Rufus Wainwright gave me a hug once, but that was after a concert, so it’s not like we actually met).  Now when I say I met her, I mean that for a couple of hours our paths crossed, and we were in the same room at the same time although we did not actually interact with each other after being introduced.  This was post-Boston Public, but pre-The Office, so Jones wasn’t quite a celebrity yet.  Not being a fan of Boston Public, I did not actually know who she was, although of course I knew about Quincy Jones.  (Quite honestly, I couldn’t remember what she looked like after she left.)

Having said all that, in the brief time we interacted, Rashida Jones was a thoroughly decent human being.  Now that I have actually seen her on television, I am a fan.  And I very much enjoyed this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are.

Rashida Jones’s father is Quincy, but her mother, Peggy Lipton, is an Ashkenazic Jew.  Rashida grew up very much a part of both African-American and American-Jewish cultures.  According to Jones, her father avidly pursued his genealogy years ago, and already shared it with her.  Therefore, it was her mother’s side of the family that required exploring.  And this gets to the heart of why I liked this episode so much; the story she traced is very much like my own.

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The initial focus of the Rashida Jones episode was her maternal grandmother Rita Hettie Rosenberg, who was born in Ireland but came to the United States when she was 12 or 13.  Rita was something of a free-spirit, and when she was old enough she left her family in Nyack, New York for Manhattan where, prior to her marriage to Rashida’s grandfather, she worked as a taxi dancer.  (I was disappointed that despite the constant references to taxi dancing, no one mentioned Sweet Charity.) Rita ditched the surname Rosenberg and went by the name Benson, which Jones and Lipton ascribed to avoiding anti-Semitism.

Jones began her search at the New York Public Library where the show got its contractual Apple and Ancestry plugs out of the way at five minutes in.  At the library, Jones found her grandmother’s passenger list from 1926 when she arrived with her elder sister Pearl.  The ship’s manifest recorded that the girls were going to join their mother Jeanie Rosenberg in New York where she was already living.  Another relative was listed on the manifest, an uncle Elliott Benson, and that surname piqued Jones’s curiosity given that she thought her grandmother made it up.

In 1939 Rita became an American citizen and officially changed her surname to Benson (again, the show hammered home the theme of anti-Semitism by showing one employment ad after another in which only Christians were acceptable.)  In 1941 Rita married Jones’s grandfather.  Prior to her marriage however, there was a 15 year period of Rita’s life which Jones knew nothing about except that she was a taxi dancer.  At the remains of Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub, Jones was showed an old tabloid from 1933 with a column about a taxi dancer that very likely could have been her grandmother.  It appeared that for Rita, taxi dancing represented her attempts to break into show business, which although failed for her, succeeded for her daughter and granddaughter.

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Jones left New York for Dublin to see if she could find out about the origin of Rita and her family.  Prior to this episode, I had no idea there was a Jewish community in Dublin worth speaking of.  Apparently there was one and there is even an Irish-Jewish museum.  In Dublin, Jones was given her grandmother’s birth certificate.  Rita was the daughter of Hyman Rosenberg and Jeanie Benson, which meant that Benson was definitively a family name for at least another generation before Rita.  Wanting to follow how far back the Benson name went, Jones discovered that her great-grandmother Jeanie was born in Manchester as Ginny (or Jennie) Benson in 1882.  From her great-grandparents’ marriage certificate, Jones discovered the names of Jeanie’s parents: Benjamin and Sophie (Winestein) Benson.  She was also given photos of Benjamin, a Hebrew teacher, who made quite a striking figure with his long white beard and Shabbos clothes.

In the 1911 census, Jones found Benjamin and Sophie, and she learned two very important facts: (1) Benjamin was born in the late 1830′s or so; and (2) he was from Russia.  “Russia” in this context is a very nebulous term that the show only partially explained.  When a Jewish person says that his ancestors came from (pre-Soviet) Russia, what he means is that those ancestors came from the former Russian Empire.  This is an important distinction because the chances are that those ancestors were not from Russia proper–certainly not Moscow or St. Petersburg–but rather the Pale of Settlement, an area which encompassed all or parts of modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Moldova, with a little bit of western Russia thrown in.  With few exceptions, this was the only part of “Russia” that Jews were allowed to live in, and largely because this had been the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where they already had been living.  15 of my 16 great-great-grandparents were from the Pale of Settlement; on my mother’s side this meant modern-day Ukraine, and on my father’s side it meant northern Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.*

While most of the Irish-Jewish community came from a specific area of Lithuania, the Bensons did not.  Using information gleaned from the documents of Benjamin Benson’s sister Pescha, Jones learned that her family actually came from Latvia. Therefore, she set off for Riga.  One of the major questions on Jones’s mind was why her family left Latvia, and the answer to that is, of course, anti-Semitism.  The Russian Empire was bent on physically and spiritually destroying the Jewish community through measures such as conscripting young Jewish into the Russian army, where they would stay for two-and-a-half decades.  (Escaping this fate gave rise to the gruesome crippler phenomenon, of which I previously mentioned.)

Because of the conscription, meticulous records were kept for men, and from those Jones learned (1) the name of Benjamin’s father, her 3rd great-grandfather Schlaume (Solomon); (2) the town in Latvia Benjamin and his family were from, Hazenpoth (now Aizpute) which was in the Courland Gubernia of the Russian Empire;** and (3) the names of Benjamin’s brothers Abraham and Yankel.  She also learns the name of Schlaume’s father, Benjamin Marcus Benson (Jones’s 4th great-grandfather) who was born in 1786 and was possibly the originator of the Benson name.  Surnames for Russian Jews came late, around the early 19th century, and only following an official decree by the Russian Empire.  Prior to that, the surname was the patronymic.  Schlaume would have been known as “Schlaume, the son of Benjamin.”  It’s not much of stretch to see how “son of Benjamin” becomes “Ben(‘s) son,” particularly in the Courland Gubernia which was unique among the gubernias in that the region had strong Prussian/Germanic cultural ties.

In Aizpute, Jones came face to face with a very hard truth, the once-large Jewish community was entirely wiped out during the Holocaust in brutal, executioner fashion in a nearby forest on October 27, 1941.  (I wondered who was responsible for that massacre, the Nazis or the Latvians, who were no innocents during the Holocaust.)  Jones, for the first time, also understood exactly how close the Holocaust actually was to her.  That sudden realization is one that I am deeply familiar with.  As is the belated survivor’s guilt that she began to feel throughout the latter half of the episode.  It’s a remarkably upsetting and humbling feeling to realize that you live while your cousins were killed or prevented from being born.

In Aizpute, there was no evidence that the Bensons were killed, but back in Riga, Jones got the bad news.  Her family had left Aizpute for Riga and, as required by Latvian law, they got passports.  Using those passports Jones saw for the first time, photos of Jette Benson and Abram David Benson, desendants of Schlaume Benson’s brothers.  But those passports also told a sad story; these cousins were also killed on 27 Oct 1941 in the forest of Rumbula.  In Rumbula there is a memorial to these Jews.  At the end of the episode Jones and her mother made a pilgrimage to the monument in Rumbula to memorialize their lost family.  Jones says that it is important to remember them, a sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with.  If we do not remember, no one will remember for us.

This episode touched something very personal in me.  In a way Rashida Jones was telling my story, although I think there is more documentation in Latvia than in Ukraine where my known relatives who perished in the Holocaust lived.  It was a very moving episode, and a hard one to sit through.  But it is also one I will watch again.

Next week: Jason Sudeikis.

Footnotes:

* The remaining great-great-grandmother came from Galicia, which means either present-day southern Poland or western Ukraine.  Galicia was at that time a part of the Austrian Empire.

** Gubernias were the largest administrative districts of the Russian Empire, sort of akin to the states of the United States.  Often we genealogists are told by relatives that our family came from (for example) “Grodno Gubernia” when we ask about our town of origin.  This is about as helpful as being told “California” when the answer we want to know is San Diego (or Bakersfield).

Blair Underwood, Who Do You Think You Are?

We are all the products of a past in which we played no part.  Because of who our ancestors were and what they did, we exist at this time and this place.  Our physical assets and flaws, our personality quirks, our inborn genetic inheritance–our very existences –are determined by millions of people since time immemorial.  No matter how long our traceable lineage may be–whether it ends with our grandparents or stretches back 100 generations–we will only discover the tiniest fraction of our ancestors.  Yet, despite the fact that we will never know them, they are all a part of us, hidden in our DNA; in both the physical and metaphysical sense, they are the essence of us.  Who do you think you are?  You are the sum of your ancestors.

Is it any wonder that we want to think the very best of the people who made us?  That we can feel so intimately involved with their stories even if a minute before we never knew they existed?  Unlike the relatives we grew up with and whom we learn to see as fully formed human beings with both flaws and virtues, our ancestors are mythic figures.  Unless history tells us unequivocally they were evil (e.g., Josef Stalin), it is very easy to shield ourselves from what reality shows.

Looking for the bright side in the face of stark reality was an unintended theme in tonight’s fascinating episode of Who Do You Think You Are.  I am generally unfamiliar with Blair Underwood’s work, save for his brief appearances on Sex and the City (making this season the third with a Sex and the City connection, although Underwood’s connection is tenuous and Kim Cattrall’s episode was filmed for the British series).  Nevertheless, the episode itself was riveting; the best thus far of the season.

When faced with disturbing evidence of his maternal great-great-great-grandfather Sawney Early (demeaningly labeled a “pestiferous darkey” by one newspaper account), Underwood whitewashed the history.  In the 1900 Census, Early resided in a mental hospital for black patients.  Tracing him back through the 1880 and 1870 Censuses (the loss in a fire of the 1890 Census is the great tragedy of American genealogy), Underwood discovered that Early, once a highly skilled blacksmith became a farm laborer.  Digging further, Underwood uncovered news articles about Early’s quarrels with neighbors over cattle and timber which ended violently; between the two incidents, Early was shot four times (including once in the face).  He survived.

Not that Early was an innocent.  He was belligerent, possibly delusional, and prone to violence.  The show’s researcher told Underwood that Early, who was most likely a slave prior to the Civil War, may have been a conjuror, which from the description sounded akin to a shaman or a witch doctor.  Underwood eagerly accepted this explanation and extrapolated that Early (like Underwood) was a performer of sorts; a strong man who thought he could survive anything–and with good reason.

And there is good reason for this interpretation.  The shadow of racism looms large over the story of Sawney Early.  Early, a former slave, depended on the land to survive.  White neighbors moved in next to him and one neighbor’s cattle threatened Early’s crops and by extension Early’s family’s survival.  When he, a black former slave, took action, the law was clearly not on his side (a possible reason Early ended up imprisoned in a mental hospital).  Underwood saw Early’s actions as heroic.

But I also had a different take.  Early’s behavior sounded less like heroism and more like schizophrenia.  Mental illness and mystical, magical, quasi-religious behavior and not mutually exclusive, especially in an era when such illnesses were little understood.  Given that Early ended his days in a mental hospital, schizophrenia or a related mental illness seems an equally plausible option for his behavior–one that (tellingly) neither the show nor Underwood suggested.  Because Underwood so desperately wanted his ancestor to be a hero, the model of the strong black man who Underwood is himself, he failed to explore less heroic explanations.

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Underwood’s quest led him to discover another maternal great-great-great-grandfather Delaware Scott.  Unlike Early, Scott appears up in the 1860 Census, indicating that he was free.  Not only was Scott free, it turned out his parents Samuel and Judith Scott were also free.  Judith, the daughter of Amy Humbles, was (like her son) born free in 1792.

That Samuel and Judith Scott were free in the 1790′s was extremely important.  A law passed in Virginia in 1806 allowed for slave owners to free their slaves, but all subsequently freed slaves had to leave the state lest they be sold back into slavery.  Only those free blacks who could prove they were free before the law’s passage were allowed to stay.  The Scotts were able to provide such evidence, and in 1815, Samuel Scott bought a 200-acre property.  By the late 1830′s, he even owned two slaves.

Because the early censuses never named slaves, it is difficult or, in most cases, impossible to know more about their identities.  It’s the impenetrable wall, and given how recent 1860 is, it makes the idea of an ended search all the more frustrating.  The fact that Underwood was able to trace his family as far back to his 5th great-grandmother Amy Humbles is practically a miracle (and I am jealous; the farthest back I can trace any of my lines is to 4th great-grandparents).

The absence of personal information about Samuel Scott’s slaves however did mean an absence of information.  In the 1840 Census, Samuel Scott owned one slave, a man who was over 55-years-old.  The other slave had died either that year or the previous one.  In all likelihood, those slaves were Samuel Scott’s parents whom he brought to live with him rather than work for him.  What initially seemed like a perpetuation of cruelty in fact turned out to be filial piety.  Had Samuel Scott’s parents been freed, they would have had to leave Virginia (as it was after 1806); an elderly couple who had been slaves most, if not all, of their lives would have had no chance of survival.  By keeping them as his nominal slaves, Samuel Scott ensured their security.

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Up until now, all of Underwood’s research had been about his mother’s line.  Prior to the show, Underwood’s brother had actually done genealogical research on their father’s side.  Where the show aided Underwood’s paternal search was with his deep ancestry.  Where did Underwood’s family really come from?  More specifically, where in Africa?

Who Do You Think You Are has used DNA testing before; Emmitt Smith also went to Africa on his search.  Ancestry.com, the show’s sponsor, has been trying to gain a foothold in the genetic genealogy business, but has thus far lacked the name and the impact of genetic genealogy-specific companies such as Family Tree DNA and 23andMe.  Ancestry is trying to rectify that, and the final segment of tonight’s episode was a far more effective product placement than the blatant Ancestry plug that came halfway through the episode.

Underwood discovered that he is 26% Caucasian (mainly French, Swiss, and German) and 74% African (primarily from the Bamoun, Brong, Yoruba, and Igbo tribes).  Apparently that is a pretty standard ratio for African-Americans.  I admit those pie charts always make me a little bit skeptical; it’s just too neat.  Underwood discovered a genetic match with a man named Eric Sonjowoh who lives in Cameroon and is apparently a 10th cousin.  The “or so” that should have been attached to that relationship prediction, was not shown.

Thus Blair Underwood and his father went to Cameroon.  The show made a big deal about “going home” yet it is unclear to me that this was home.  Yes, 27% of his DNA matched the Bamoun people of Cameroon, but 47% matched people who are from tribes found primarily in Nigeria and Ghana.  There are likely thousands of genetic matches for Blair Underwood all over Western Africa (and also probably in Cape Verde, Brazil, the West Indies, and other places where the slave trade was rampant), what made Cameroon “home” was that a distantly-related Cameroonian kindly donated his DNA to Ancestry’s registry.

I got that sense that Eric Sonjowoh was a little uncomfortable by the whole experience.  Perhaps it was the cameras.  I can’t related what was in his head, but his body language suggested unease at meeting his new “family” who, for their part, treated him like a long-lost cousin.  There was a celebration with unexplained rituals, and then Underwood father and son went home.

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I am no expert at genetic genealogy.  If you are interested, I would suggest going to one of the websites of one of the companies I mentioned above or better yet, The Genetic Genealogist.  Having tested my DNA, I have been underwhelmed thus far with the results.  It is expensive and overly technical, especially for the novice.  Moreover, the cheaper tests tell you almost nothing, which means to get any kind of definitive information you have to keep spending.  In fairness though, genetic genealogy is a relatively new frontier bound to be full of fits and starts.  As it gets more popular, as more people get tested, and as more companies get involved, I imagine that there will be more benefit.

I bring this up because the show, despite the massive product placement, was actually very skimpy on the details of the testing.  If you are interested in the specifics of how Underwood was tested, start your search here.  It appears that Underwood used Ancestry’s new autosomal DNA test (autosomes are chromosomes that do not determine gender), which Ancestry has not yet released.  Given that Underwood tested himself rather than his father, it is odd that he used an autosomal test; unlike the Y-Chromosome which is inherited only through the father’s direct male line, autosomal DNA is inherited from both parents.  In other words, how did Ancestry distinguish Underwood’s mother’s DNA from his father’s?  Moreover, I was under the impression that beyond 3rd cousins or so it is very difficult to determine relationships using autosomal DNA testing.  Perhaps Ancestry has perfected its testing above what other companies can do, but I got the sense that much vital information was left out for the sake of a sales pitch and a happy ending.  Caveat emptor.

I love Who Do You Think You Are, and the past two weeks have been really strong episodes.  However, this season, and tonight’s episode in particular, have really underscored the reality that we are actually watching a 45-minute advertisement.  As such, harsh truths are smoothed over.  People are not always good, even if they are our ancestors.  DNA tests alone do not establish that a certain city thousands of miles away is home.  Who Do You Think You Are wildly succeeds as intelligent, feel-good television but as good history it leaves much to be desired.  History is often ambiguous, and I wished Ancestry and NBC trusted the show’s audience enough to let them confront that ambiguity.

Marisa Tomei, Who Do You Think You Are?

Able was I, ere I saw Elba

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On Who Do You Think You Are, there are two basic kinds of episodes; for the sake of ease let’s call them the general and the specific.  In the general episode, the celebrity in question knows practically nothing about his or her family, and the episode centers around getting as much information as possible (a la Brooke Shields).  In the specific episode (Kim Cattrall’s being the quintessential example), the celebrity usually has some knowledge about his or her genealogy and tries to unravel a family mystery or prove (or disprove) a story.  To some extent, each episode by necessity is a mixture of the general and the specific, but usually they skew one way–sometimes heavily so.

This week’s episode leaned specific.  Marisa Tomei went to Italy to solve the mystery surrounding the death of her maternal great-grandfather Francesco Leopoldo Bianchi who died when her own grandfather–Leopoldo’s son–was a toddler.  The family legend was that he was murdered for being a philanderer and a reprobate.  Tomei also wanted to learn about the family of her maternal great-grandmother Adelaide Canovaro who was from the island of Elba.

A full confession before I recap the episode: I am a big fan of Marisa Tomei and have been since her days playing of Maggie Lauten on “A Different World.”  In as much as one puts faith in the Oscars–and longtime readers know that I hate awards shows–Tomei absolutely deserved hers.  Every scene in “My Cousin Vinny” with Mona Lisa Vito is worth watching solely because of Tomei.  The fact that her deserved Oscar win became something of punchline only underscores Hollywood’s hypocrisy; on one hand the Hollywood press moan and wail that comedy is never taken seriously by the Academy, but then when a truly gifted comedienne wins for a luminous comedic performance, they trash her–all the more so because she bested four (admittedly brilliant) British actresses.  The reaction to Tomei’s win spoke volumes about the secret distaste Hollywood has for comedy and the insecurity about American actors (not named Meryl Streep) when compared to British actors.  Coincidentally, this season of Who Do You Think You Are features Helen Hunt, who also won on Oscar for a comedic role by besting four brilliant British actresses and whose accomplishment was also subsequently trashed.

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The season premier featuring Martin Sheen was something of a dip in form for Who Do You Think You Are, but this week the show was back up to full strength.  Unlike previous celebrities who went to Italy, Tomei seemed at home there rather than a visitor.  I think it was because of the language.  I could not figure out Tomei’s level of fluency, but if she did not speak or understand Italian, she faked it very well–possibly with the help of the camera crew.

Tomei’s first stop was Cecina, where her great-grandfather Leopoldo was born.  She found his grave (as well as Adelaide’s, who was buried with him) and learned his date of death, but nothing about any murder.  Quite the contrary in fact; Leopoldo’s family claimed that he died of illness.  A disappointed but relieved Tomei set off to Elba, the island of her great-grandmother’s birth and of Napoleon’s first exile.  In Elba, she discovered her great-grandmother’s ancestry, which extended back to Tomei’s eighth great-grandfather.  Also in Elba she learned from a newspaper report that the illness story was hokum; her great-grandfather was murdered by gunshot.  Leopoldo was killed because of a business relationship that went sour: the man who managed the Bianchi family’s kiln business fired Leopoldo’s brother for disloyalty thereby impugning the family’s honor.  Vendetta!  In true Italian style, this resulted in the manager killing Leopoldo in cold blood.  Because he was wealthy, the murderer bought his own justice (top-quality attorneys and an acquittal), and then disappeared forever.  One wonders if he disappeared or “disappeared,” but that was never addressed.  Tomei then received a letter from her grandfather’s cousin who filled Tomei in about Adelaide’s life following Leopoldo’s murder.  Adelaide remarried a decent man who help raise her sons, and even assisted Tomei’s grandfather’s in escaping to the United States.  Tomei then returned home to share the news with her relieved mother than Leopoldo was a decent man and not a scoundrel.

Last week, I compared the NBC show to the BBC original and hypothesized that any quality gap was probably due to the time constraints of commercial television.  (Again, Ancestry.com’s in-show plug for itself was completely not subtle.)  While this week’s story was arresting, the missing time again took a toll.  Continuity was not a problem, but the extra time could have allowed for Tomei to reflect more.  For example, why did the Bianchi family claimed that Leopoldo died of illness when that was clearly not the case?  Likewise, it seemed odd to me that neither Tomei nor her mother knew about Adelaide’s second husband despite the fact that (1) he raised Tomei’s grandfather; (2) was a good man; and (3) helped Tomei’s grandfather immigrate.  Maybe this would have been addressed had there been more time, but this is NBC not PBS, HBO, or the BBC.

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One of the great things about Who Do You Think You Are is that it represents a different and more personal way to look at history.  Reading a history book or watching a Ken Burns documentary can be great, but that is not all there is.  Any number of sources can tell you that the Irish Potato Famine was massive in scope, scale, and toll, but learning about the fate of a family that fled Ireland because of the Famine gives a personal, dare I saw human, context to the tragedy.  It brings it closer to your own understanding when you realize it is your family who suffered.

This episode was oddly different though because it was so focused on the personal history that there was never any attempt to fit that story into the larger historical picture.  Again, I wonder if this had to do with the missing 15-20 of commercial time.  One can argue that perhaps Leopoldo’s story was too personal for a larger context approach, but it was jarring to realize that narrator Mocean Melvin’s only historical explanation was a reminder that Napoleon was exiled to Elba.

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What I appreciate most about Who Do You Think You Are is the way we as the audience watch the journey.  It’s what for me makes the show superior to “Faces of America,” Henry Louis Gates’s show from PBS.  On that show, the guests were handed their personal history by Gates, who did all the traveling himself.  On Who Do You Think You Are, the celebrities make the trip and hear the story for themselves firsthand, even if often they are just handed the research.

This is the only real complaint genealogists have about Who Do You Think You Are; it gives a false sense of how difficult genealogy is.  Tomei went to Elba and had ten generations or so of her family’s genealogy handed to her.  For those of us who do not have the show’s budget or team of researchers, it takes months or even years to trace generation by generation.  I’m not complaining exactly (maybe a little professional jealousy), but to the viewer who has not done genealogy before and is thinking of starting after watching the show, you have to know that this kind of information simply doesn’t get handed to you.

As I understand it, once a celebrity gets involved with the show, they hear nothing more for months as a team of professional genealogists, researchers, and historians (including for this week’s episode, an “Italian Duel Expert”) finds as much as can be found.  Money is no object, language is no barrier.  All that matters is that the story be interesting, and nothing interesting (by television standards) is found, then the celebrity is given the research, and no episode is made.  That is something that very hard for me to contemplate.  Coming from tailors, junk dealers, and the occasional pulpit-less rabbi, it is very hard to me to imagine that anyone’s story is uninteresting.

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I want to conclude this review by saying that this week’s show was extremely personal for me.  I have no family from Italy, and I am in no way related to Tomei, but her mother came to a realization tonight, a realization that I think she hesitated with and couldn’t say out loud because the implications: we are all where we are because somewhere along the line some horrible tragedy happened to an ancestor that changed his or her descendants’ destinies.  Because Leopoldo was killed, his wife remarried and his sons were raised by a different man, which led to Tomei’s grandfather’s immigration.  I too have something like that, which I wrote about before, and I thought about my own great-grandmother’s life while watching Tomei and her mother reflected.

That is though what Who Do You Think You Are does at its best; it makes you realize how much we owe to the inevitable force of history.  Even the most seemingly unrelated events, the murder of a solitary man over 100 years ago on another continent, can create an Oscar winner.