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.

Jason Sukeikis, Who Do You Think You Are?

Who Do You Think You Are aired its penultimate episode: Jason Sudeikis researched his paternal line trying to determine why his forefathers abandoned their families.

Before I begin writing, I have a confession to make: this episode left me rather cold.  Now much of the season has been lackluster, but unlike the lesser episodes which I railed against, there was nothing particularly egregious about this episode.  No attempts to retell history by reframing an unflattering ancestor as a hero, no dubious DNA test results, no use of bigotry as the answer for every question.  There was nothing wrong with this episode per se, it was more about gestalt.

It is something of an open secret that Who Do You Think You Are researches more celebrities than are actually filmed.  Celebrities whose stories are not interesting are handed their research before the cameras roll and are wished good luck.  There are some very infamous stories from Britain about potential guests were who considered and then rejected because the show could not make it interesting.  It’s sad but understandable; to keep a show going it must be interesting to viewers.  It also must be fresh, something that makes the story totally new or at least an old theme retold in a different way.

The vanished parent is a very familiar trope in Who Do You Think You Are, which is very sad from a  societal point of view.  It is also most likely where the most pressing genealogical questions are asked.  Nevertheless, this theme also starts to get perhaps too familiar over time.  Kim Cattrall chased down her grandfather, Susan Sarandon her grandmother.  Jerome Bettis his grandfather’s father.  There are others.  (Over in the UK, Alan Cummings also chased down a grandparent who left his family which led him to Southeast Asia.)  Both Cattrall and Sarandon discovered that their absent grandparents were also bigamists.  Both absenteeism and bigamy are also part of Jason Sudeikis’s family story.  To Jason Sudeikis this is (naturally) shocking, but this is now something I have now seen several times over so the drama has faded somewhat.  (And with the decreased time to tell a story, the overabundance of commercials, and the Ancestry and Apple plugs, Who Do You Think You Are is a bit like The Simpsons of the past decade or so–retreating into the familiar while losing its freshness.)

This show could have used some better editing.  When I watch each episode, I write down names and dates to keep things straight, but this episode got the better of me.  I wasn’t sure who was alive when and who immigrated when.  This is an editing room problem rather than a research problem (I hope), but it makes the research look slapdash.  I went on Ancestry to try to clear my confusion.  It did not help.  It also didn’t help that there were so many Lithuania names, which are very difficult to transcribe to my ears.*  Clearly I wasn’t the only one.  Sudeikis’s ancestor named his mother “Mary Gash” on a marriage certificate when her real name was Marianne (Lithuanian name that I couldn’t catch).

Sudeikis’s traces his father’s line, which I suppose is appropriate given that his mother’s family is probably familiar territory to him.  Sudeikis’s maternal uncle is George Wendt (Norm Peterson of Cheers).  According to Wikipedia, his maternal great-grandfather was Tom Howard, a famous photographer.  But Sudeikis knew nothing about his paternal grandfather Stanley Sudekis because Stanley died when Dan Sudeikis (Jason’s father) was very young.  Dan Sudeikis had no memory of his father whatsoever and was raised by his mother Edna.  All Edna ever said about Stanley was that he was six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall, weighed 195 pounds, and died after falling on a sidewalk outside of a Chicago church.  So Sudeikis began his search in Chicago.

In Chicago, Sudeikis got Stanley’s death certificate, but the informant was not Edna.  It was an Anna Pukel who lived at the same address as Stanley.  Stanley did indeed die outside a church by slipping on a sidewalk and fracturing his skull.  There was a coroner’s inquest, and it turned out that Anna Pukel was Stanley’s cousin.  Stanley did not actually live with her; it appears that he was a homeless drunk who abandoned his family (which Sudeikis also learned from decree for separate maintenances–which is not a divorce–that his grandmother filed against Stanley), refused to work, and slept on park benches.  Sudeikis’s grandmother refused to appear at the inquest, saying that she hadn’t seen him in three years.  Stanley’s uncle also wanted nothing to do with him.  Alcohol was also probably involved in Stanley’s fatal fall (figuratively and literally).  And it also appeared that Stanley never ever met his son Dan.  All in all, not the kind of discovery that one would generally want to find.

Sudeikis wanted to learn how to feel sorry for Stanley, which he eventually did.  Now it’s important to recognize that Sudeikis was showing empathy rather than the hero worshiping of false idols that went on earlier in the season (most notably by Martin Sheen, Blair Underwood, and Jerome Bettis).  The reason he was able to feel empathy is because he learned that Stanley’s father (also Stanley) abandoned his wife Michaelina “Emma” (Bielskis) Sudeikis and young son in Chicago to start a whole other family in Bridgeport, Connecticut.**  Whereas Stanley Sr.’s bigamous second family thrived, his first family suffered.  (I would note that the genealogist who brought the bigamy to Sudeikis’s attention looked positively shocked at the discovery.  I wonder if this was legitimate or just acting.)  Stanley Sr. in turn also his father Joseph at an early age.  Joseph Sudeikis, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a miner in Mahanoy, Pennsylvania at a time when mining was even more dangerous than it is now.  He probably lived in a company town in which he had virtually no job security and his labor was exploited by his robber baron overlord.  And he tolerated it all so that he could provide a better life for his family.  Joseph died in a mining explosion on November 9, 1901, leaving a wife and many children including young Stanley Sr.  In Sudeikis’s mind, this is where the absentee father began, a cycle that his own father broke.

Sudeikis went home to tell his father all that he learned.  The family discussion did not appear too painful, although it is not one that I would have wanted to have to give.  The Sudeikis family took it very well.

Footnote:

* One thing that was not discussed was what exactly Lithuania is.  I mean, yes it’s a country, but at the time when Jason  Sudeikis’s ancestors came to the United States, what we know of today as Lithuania was actually a part of Russia.  Yet, as you can tell from the names, language, and the self-identification, the Lithuanian people saw themselves as a discrete and separate nation.  I know this is a story about immigration and vanished fathers, but a little Lithuanian heritage lesson might have been nice.

** This is where the show leaves me so frustrated.  In 1920, Stanley Sudeikis Sr. is married to Amelia “Mill”(Trakitis)  and has a daughter named Lillian who was a newborn.  In 1930, he has a 9-year-old daughter Julia.  While Jason Sudeikis noticed Julia, he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that there was another daughter who evidently died very young.

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).

Edie Falco, Who Do You Think You Are?

“These people actually existed.  It makes it much more real, and it’s hard not to feel emotional about it.”

~Edie Falco

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Because I watched this episode at my parents’ house, and because they, unlike me, have a digital video recorder, I had the advantage of watching this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are without having to pay any attention to the commercials.  Apparently, to compensate for my ability to skip over advertisements, both Ancestry.com and Apple upped the ante with in-show product placements.  There was the Ancestry plug (7 minutes in), the other screenshots of Ancestry, and an iPad that Edie Falco carried around with her.  Had I bothered with commercials I wonder if I would have seen an ad informing the public that the 1940 census was at Ancestry, while the government site crashed.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again; this show would work far better on a network like the BBC or PBS.  I think it would be more fun if it were on non-commercial television too.  PBS does have its own genealogy show, Finding Your Roots.  Finding Your Roots is a better show for introducing genealogical research, but it’s like broccoli; good for you, but no fun.  At its heart though, Finding Your Roots is yet another Skip Gates vanity project.  Who Do You Think You Are may be the candy of the genealogical world, it may be nonsensical, it may be frustrating to the point where I scream at my television, but at least I want to watch it again (usually).  A non-commercial network would make what it generally an enjoyable show a great one.  (And Finding Your Roots is also big on the product placement, particularly with 23andMe, a DNA testing company that I am extremely suspicious of.)

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Edie Falco is a wonderful actress.  Ever since I saw her Carmela Soprano, I have loved her.  Nevertheless, the episode itself was not the most thrilling of the season.  It’s hard to say that because if anyone on this show understands the lure of genealogy it is Falco.  Her statement that I quoted above and her question regarding whether family tree research is merely about bloodlines or about something more (her children are adopted), it shows that she cares and that she gets it.  Nevertheless, there was something about this episode that felt slightly off.  Like there was a major story that got bypassed somehow.

In the beginning of the episode, Falco, the child of divorced parents, noted that she did not know her mother’s family well and had very little contact with her extended relatives while growing up.  Her mother however, had a beautiful handmade family tree that detailed her own mother’s (Ruth Megrath) family tree.  Ruth Megrath was the daughter of George and Florence Megrath, and on the tree was an interesting tidbit: Megrath was the maiden name of George’s mother.  His father’s name was Brown, and George’s mother left Mr. Brown and, with George, emigrated to the United States (from Wales).  Falco wanted to know why George’s mother left his father.

The first place that Falco went to was the New York Public Library where she looked at the 1920 US census.  (One wonders why she needed to go to New York just to look at the census, since all she did was use Ancestry’s collection.)  There she discovered that George was born not in Wales, but in Wisconsin.  Additionally, his mother was born in the United States and his father in England.  Falco was surprised that her family tree was wrong and set off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to discover the rest of the story.

At this point, I want to advise all amateur genealogists.  If you go on to Ancestry, there is a good possibility that you will find some unsourced tree that goes back multiple generations, possibly centuries.  You will think, “Hallelujah, the work has all been done!  Look at how many ancestors I can trace.”  Caveat emptor.  Ancestry trees are notoriously unreliable.  Unless you do the work yourself or can validate the source material of another’s tree, take nothing as truth.  It is entirely possible that someone somewhere made a mistake (or twenty), like the one that belonged to Edie Falco’s mother.

In Wisconsin, Falco went to the All Saints Episcopal Church where she found the baptismal record of her great-grandfather George Megrath, who was originally George Brown.  George’s mother was Mary Megrath Brown and his father was Charles Childs Brown.  Charles Brown was present at the baptism.

Falco found in old city directories that Charles was an apprentice at a local paper.  But Brown was not in Wisconsin for long.  In 1885, seven years after George’s birth, he was in Little Falls, Minnesota (listed as C.C. Brown).  A little further research revealed to Falco that Brown started the first paper in the nearby town of Royalton, Minnesota.  He did not stay in the area for long; Brown moved out to Duluth where he died.  An article was presented to Falco from Duluth from 1892 which said that George Megrath (now living in Albany) had died in a streetcar accident.  Like with her relative’s family tree, Falco knew that this news article was incorrect.

Looking into the Albany connection, Falco found an article about a Sister Kathryn (Catherine) Brown (Episcopal not Catholic) who died intestate in 1902 in nearby Troy, New York.  (My ears perked up.  I have great affinity for Troy.)  This was Charles’s mother, and because Charles had already died, George Megrath showed up to claim her estate.  From this information, Falco learned that George was actually the eldest of Charles Brown’s children.  Charles and Mary divorced in 1878 when George was two, and Charles remarried (and divorced) two more times and had three more children.  The researcher who informed Falco about Charles’s later life said that as a newspaper man, Charles was probably an alcoholic and also probably very difficult to live with.  (Thankfully, there was no attempts to whitewash him.  Falco accepted that he was human and flawed.)

Falco turned her attention to Sister Kathryn Brown (her 3rd great-grandmother), and from the 1900 Census, she learned that Kathryn was born at sea to English parents.  That Kathryn was born at sea interested Falco.  Rather than go to Troy, Falco went to London where Charles was born.  In London, Falco found a record of Charles’s birth; he was born to Kathryn Kindley (and William Brown, who was not mentioned in the episode, but I saw the birth certificate).  Looking for Kathryn in the 1841 UK census, Falco found that Kathryn (Kate) was living with an older woman named Childs who was probably her grandmother.  Kate’s parents were not listed.  She also learned that Kate was born in Cornwall, specifically Penzance.  And yes, Edie Falco made the appropriate Gilbert & Sullivan reference.  (This is probably where the Wales story came from; both Wales and Cornwall are peninsulas in the West of England, both have a Celtic connection, and both the Welsh and the Cornish have very thick and distinct accents.)

In Penzance, Falco discovered that Kate Kindley was the daughter of Ralph and Dorothy Childs Kindly.  Ralph was a master mariner (a sea captain), which was a good job, but it kept him at sea for long stretches at a time.  From an 1833 newspaper article, Falco learned that Dorothy Kindley died; her daughter was two.

The next researcher that Falco met took her on a ship to explain to her all about the life of a master mariner, and he suggested that Dorothy was probably used to being on a ship.  The researcher showed Falco the documents he found, one a copy of Lloyd’s List from which he was able to determine that Kate was probably born on the Lord Cochrane which was en route to New Orleans.  He also showed Falco letters of administration from the New York Surrogate’s Court from October 1840, which showed that on July 20 of that year, en route from the Coast of Africa to New York, Ralph Kindley died from a fever.  He was probably buried at sea.

And thus the episode ends with Edie Falco aboard a ship sailing on the middle of the ocean.

Next time is Rob Lowe although that won’t be for a few weeks.

[Edit:  If you are interested in the Child/Kindley family history that was researched in this episode, this site is an incredibly thorough and detailed.]

Rita Wilson, Who Do You Think You Are?

When the guest list was announced, I raised an eyebrow in curiosity when I saw that Rita Wilson was one of the celebrity guests.  I know that Wilson is an actress and has appeared on stage and screen, but because of her marriage to Tom Hanks, she is eternally overshadowed by her husband’s fame.  The conceit of Who Do You Think You Are is that the guests are “some of America’s most beloved celebrities,” and I am not sure that Rita Wilson really qualifies for that title.

Having said that, this past week I was extremely excited about her episode.  The promotional teaser looked amazing, and Wilson, being of Greek/Ottoman/Bulgarian heritage (her birth name is Margarita Ibrahimoff), brings a new geographic sphere to the show.  This episode was unique in the Who Do You Think You Are canon, because the search was entirely unlike any other in the show’s run.  I have written before about the two types of episodes in this series: the general “trace the family tree” episode and the specific “follow one ancestor” episode.  Both types of episodes have their benefits, but the common theme that both share is that the celebrity knows almost nothing about that family or the individual in question.  Wilson however knew the man whose history she was researching; it was her beloved and recently-deceased father, Allan.  Because she knew him well and loved him so much, each fact she learned about him was not about discovering a picture of him but rather reconciling the one she already had with facts he never told her.  Is it any wonder that she was emotional throughout her entire journey?*

Allan Wilson was born Hassan Halilov Ibrahimoff in Oraion, Xanthi, Greece.  Wilson found the name of his birth town on her parents’ marriage certificate which she located online.  (This was this week’s Ancestry plug.  One might ask why Wilson’s mother didn’t have it, but I suspect it had more to do with getting the plug in as all the research in this week’s episode is outside the scope of Ancestry’s holdings.)  I looked for the certificate, but I could not find it online; it’s a bait and switch that Ancestry did with the Martin Sheen episode too.  I did find the information from Rita Wilson’s birth certificate though which lists her first name as “Margarit.”

When Hassan Halilov was born, Oraio was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, and, as you can probably tell from the name, the ibrahimoffs were a Muslim family–another first for the show.  In Oraio that Wilson began her journey.  A guide took her to the house where her father was born, a home that now used as a storage house, and is otherwise vacant.  Wilson wanted to know why her father moved to Bulgaria, and her guide introduced her to her father’s cousins.  Truth be told, I could not understand what exactly they were trying to tell Wilson; it seemed a bit contradictory.  The cousins did show her a picture of her grandfather Halil Ibrahimoff, and told her that he was a funny man.  Wilson learned that her grandfather moved his family to Smolyan, Bulgaria, a town near the Greek border.

In Smolyan, Wilson learned from an archivist that the Ibrahimoff family moved to Smolyan somewhere between 1927 and 1934 (when Wilson’s father was between 7 and 14).  Wilson also learned that her father was drafted into the Bulgarian artillery in 1941 at the age of 20 because Xanthi, the province where he was born, was, in 1941, a part of Bulgaria (all persons born in Xanthi were retroactively considered Bulgarian, including Wilson’s father.)  It also meant that he fought for the Axis alongside the Nazis and Italian Fascist regime.  Wilson’s father however, was dismissed shortly into his service and sentenced to over three-and-a-half years in prison because of petty theft; he took 28 siphon bottles and five levs, an incredibly small sum. The army wanted to make an example by punishing the petty crimes disproportionately harsh.  Wilson’s father had told Wilson that he had been imprisoned in a labor camp when he was young, and Wilson wondered if labor camp was a euphemism for prison.

Wilson’s father was paroled after just over two years and he returned to Smolyan briefly but then moved out to Plodiv, and it was there that Wilson got the shock of her life–her father had been married before and had a child.  The marriage, to a woman named Alice Markayan, took place on October 26, 1945, 11 years to the day before Wilson’s birth.  The son of that marriage, Emil Hassanov was born on December 26, 1945.  Three days later Alice died.  Four months after that, Emil followed.

Is it any wonder that Allan Wilson never spoke about his past?  There was already so much pain, and more to come.  I imagine Bulgaria was a nightmare from which he could not wake up.  But 66 years after Emil died, his younger half-sister finally discovers his existence.  I was reminded of something similar in my family.  My great-grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1911.  He married my great-grandmother in 1919 and their first child was born nine months afterwards.  When I found my great-grandfather’s World War I draft card, I got a similar shock to what Wilson found.  My great-grandfather was asked is he had any dependents, and he answered that he had an 8-year-old child in Russia.  This is the only time I, my mother, or my uncles ever heard about this child, and he never mentioned the child again on any records.  I think this is something that he also kept from his own children.  It is possible that the draft card was mistaken, but between the Nazis and an archives fire in Ukraine, I am not sure I will know the truth.

There was a five year gap between the death of Alice and Emil and Wilson’s father’s marriage to her mother Dorothy.  Wilson traveled to Sofia where she discovered that her father told her the truth about the labor camp, a Soviet-style gulag with harsh conditions and the constant specter of murder.  Wilson was shown her father’s secret file, something that no doubt would only have been possible following the fall of the Bulgarian Communist regime.  Like in other Communist countries, most notably East Germany, the authorities got neighbors and friends to spy on suspect targets, and Wilson’s father was one of those suspected.  He was arrested for trying to flee to Turkey, declared a traitor, and sentenced to two different mining camps.

Although the punishment for trying to escape was death, Wilson’s father did manage to flee in the night, and on May 4, 1949, he landed in the United States.  In 1973, 26 years after the escape, he was declared an enemy of the state.  Had he ever returned to Bulgaria, he would have been rearrested.

After learning the truth about her father’s life, Wilson gets one final shock, her father’s older half-brother Fairhat was still alive (at age 96) and residing in Smolyan.  The family reunion between Wilson and her uncle was a tearjerker, for them and for me.  It turned out that Fairhat was sent to the same labor camp as his brother, but Fairhat could not escape because he had a wife and two children.  After Wilson’s father escaped, Fairhat was interrogated and beaten.  He was however, eventually released.

In 1950, Hassan Halilov sent Fairhat and their father a beautiful letter from the United States about his progress, how happy he was there, and his hope for the future.  This appears to be the last communication that he ever had with his family, and Fairhat kept the letter in case one of his brother’s children even found him.  Her brother was flown out to Bulgaria to meet his uncle and the show ended with the two Wilson siblings in tears to the (incredibly out of place) stains of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” as sung by Rita Wilson.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

What an episode!  It was almost something out of fiction.  After a patchy start, the show has finally found its ground, and the last two weeks demonstrated spectacular quality.  I hope that Edie Falco’s story is equally as interesting.

There have been some complaints about how the celebrities have stopped pretending to do the work, and that is true to an extent, but that is not a fair criticism of Rita Wilson’s episode.  It all happened in Greece and Bulgaria and in languages that Wilson did not speak.  Hiring experts is the only way that she could have learned about her father’s early life.

I have yet to see the new PBS genealogy show, the newest Henry Louis Gates project, but I will get on that as soon as I can.  I’m curious to see how the two compare.  I cannot imagine that Skip Gates’s show pack’s anywhere near the emotional punch of tonight’s Who Do You Think You Are, but I hope to be mistaken.

Footnote:

* This episode may be the likeliest to make me cry.  Part of that is the emotional content, but in large part it is because of how much it parallels my own family research.  I mention above about my great-grandfather’s possible child, but there is another story that struck me.  In a deleted scene available on the website, Wilson discovers the Oraion birth registry (of males) which has the births of her father, his older brothers (including Fairhat, who we meet during the course of the episode) and her great-grandfather.  Missing from the registry is her grandfather Halil, although the researcher who showed Wilson the book identified someone he thought was Halil, an entry that is listed as “the one whose finger is cut,” meaning he was probably missing a finger.  My great-great-grandfather Abraham, of whom I have written before, was missing his right index finger like Halil.  I never realized his finger was missing until I stared a few old pictures of him for very long periods of time.  I wonder if the missing finger was accidental or deliberate.  In Czarist Russia, Jews who were not allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement were nevertheless conscripted into the army and navy, which was a form of cultural murder and worse, a very real possibility of actual death.  To avoid that fate, there arose men called cripplers, hired thugs who mutilated Jewish boys to ensure that they would be unfit to serve.  I wonder if that was what happened to Abraham.

Helen Hunt, Who Do You Think You Are?

After the Jerome Bettis disaster from two weeks ago,* I had nearly given up on this show.  I was prepared to watch only the bootlegged UK and Australian episodes on YouTube.  I’m glad I didn’t.  If the last episode was the worst in the show’s run, this week’s episode starring Helen Hunt is one of the best.  It was so good that even the commercial breaks and two (two!) Ancestry plugs did not feel like such a big deal.

When I first saw that Helen Hunt was going to be on Who Do You Think You Are, my first thought was, “What ever happened to her?”  After the end of Mad About You and her Oscar for As Good As It Gets, she kind of vanished from the public eye.  (Fun fact:  Executive Producer Lisa Kudrow’s hit show Friends was a quasi-spin-off of Mad About You.  On Friends, Kudrow’s ditzy Phoebe Buffay had a twin sister Ursula who was also played by Kudrow.  Ursula first appeared on Mad About You.)  Her episode however, knocked my socks off.

Before I delve into the content of the episode, it is important to explain why I liked this episode so much.  The reason this episode was so good is that it focused on the history rather than on Helen Hunt.  In most episodes this season, we got one, maybe two, historical interludes to give us a sense of time and place for the story.  In this episode we got six, which is more like a British episode than an American one.  It completely makes the difference, and the story becomes far more compelling.

The episode also avoided making facile associations between Hunt and her ancestors, which is a pleasant change from most of this season.  In previous episodes, the celebrity spoke about an aspect of his or her life and sure enough, the ancestor in question had that quality (although it was often a stretch.)  This week however we were not subjected to (for example) Helen Hunt talking about how important feminism was to her prior to her journey and then discovering that her ancestor was an early feminist.  Instead, the revelations happen organically, and we feel like we are learning about the stories of interesting people from the past rather than HELEN HUNT’S ANCESTORS.

Finally, everything was documented through pictures, censuses, vital records, directories, election rolls, and newspaper articles–all very important tools in the genealogist’s toolkit.  Mercifully there was absence of speculation about what their lives must have been like or what their personalities probably were by both Hunt and the historians.  No gimmicks, no DNA tests, not secondhand recollections from decades later.  Just the facts.  The facts really do speak for themselves.

The episode started in Los Angeles with Hunt and her father.  Hunt’s paternal grandmother, Helen Roberts Hunt, was killed by a drunk driver when Hunt’s father was a little boy, and so he knew very little.  Helen Roberts was of German-Jewish descent (Yekkes), and her mother was named Florence Roberts, although the family name was originally Rothenberg.  Hunt knew little beyond that.

From a personal point of view, learning about a German-Jewish family was a novel experience.  My family is entirely made up of Eastern European Jews who arrived during the migration wave that spanned from around 1880 through 1920.  In contrast, German Jews such as Hunt’s family immigrated significantly earlier (Hunt’s great-great-grandfather William Scholle immigrated from Bavaria to New York in 1845).  By the time the Eastern European Jews started arriving, the German Jews already had deep roots, and quite a few of them were very wealthy–perhaps most famously the Gratz family.

Having said that, the importance of the German Jews in the United States has been largely overlooked.  So much of modern American culture and the Jews who helped shape it was rooted in the Eastern Europe migration, it is easy to forget that Jews had a presence in the United States from the very beginnings of the colonial era (especially the Sephardic Jews).  It is therefore good to see stories about Jewish families from places other than Eastern Europe.  It gives a tiny bit more diversity to a show that use a bit more diversifying.

Hunt learned that her great-grandmother lived in a hotel in Pasadena, and that there was some money in the family.  By looking at the 1900 Census, she learned that  her great-grandmother Florence and her husband Gustav lived in the Upper West Side of New York City with their children, including Helen.  They also had four servants who lived with them (none with last names, apparently).  Gustave died in 1900, and Florence moved her children out to California, the state of her birth.  In the 1910 Census, the Rothenberg family is living in a hotel in Pasadena, although without servants.  By 1920, Florence changed her name to Roberts.

If I had one quibble with this episode, this is it.  The episode implies that Jews who changed their surnames did so because of anti-Semitism in the United States which predated but was inflamed by a quota system that limited the number of immigrants, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe.  Yes, many Jews did change their name in the attempt to avoid anti-Semitism.  But that was not the only reason.  A lot of Jews wanted to fit in with American society so they adopted less “ethnic” names for more English sounding ones.  Nor was this a specifically Jewish phenomenon (remember Martin Sheen?).  In my family I can think of quite a few instances where people changed their first or last names (or both) to fit in, not because they were afraid of anti-Semitism, but because they wanted to be more American.  I bet you a know of a few Jews who changed their names for reasons other than anti-Semitism too.  Maybe Nathan Birnbaum?  Melvin Kaminsky?  How about Issur Danielovitch?

Racial and religious persecution is a fall back option for Who Do You Think You Are to explain things when there is a lack of evidence.  It’s incredibly lazy and misleading.  Maybe Florence Rothenberg became Florence Roberts because of anti-Semitism, but it’s also likely that she (or one of her sons) changed her last name because she wanted to fit in with her peers in upper-class Pasadena.

From Florence’s 1949 death certificate, Hunt discovered that Florence’s father was named William Scholle (formerly Wolf Scholy of Bavaria).  Scholle immigrated to New York City and worked with his brother Abraham, but during the California Gold Rush, he moved out west to San Francisco.  Still in business with Abraham and their younger brother Jacob, William Scholle became very wealthy (apparently his personal wealth was somewhere between 3 and 10 million dollars); by 1870 he and his family had three live-in servants.  Scholle rubbed elbows with Levi Strauss (another quibble, given the significance of Levi Strauss, and given that his name appeared multiple times in Scholle’s story, one would think that at least one historian would have explained who Strauss was), and they were both a part of a consortium that bought the Nevada National Bank which then merged with Wells Fargo.  Given the financial crisis of 2008 and how much I hate Wells Fargo for unrelated reasons, I wonder if I should be impressed or carry a grudge against Scholle and company.  Therefore, before she became the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, Florence was a part of the San Francisco elite.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Closing the book on the Scholle/Rothenberg/Roberts family, Hunt turned her attention to her father’s paternal great-grandfather George Hunt who was from Portland, Maine.  George was a businessman who imported sugar from the Caribbean in exchange for wood from Maine forests.  Like Scholle, George Hunt too was very successful, but the real story came from his 1896 obituary which introduced Helen Hunt to her great-great-grandmother, George’s wife Augusta Merrill Barstow Hunt.

Augusta was a leader of her community, and deeply involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  Hearing that Augusta was in the WCTU made Hunt uneasy but immediately I thought, “Augusta was an early feminist and probably a suffragette.”  Prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which ensured women the right to vote, women were nevertheless very active in social and civil rights causes, including abolitionism, temperance, the settlement house movement, and pacifism.  In their minds, and for good reason, temperance was a women’s rights movement as alcohol often led to the brutal treatment of women and children and the decay of the family.  (There was a dark side to temperance; the movement was bound up in anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly those from Ireland and Germany.  The WCTU itself was very much a club for Protestant women, and no doubt some of its most prominent members had lineages that the Daughters of the American Revolution would envy.)

Hunt, not knowing anything about temperance except for the circus act that was Carrie Nation and the failed experiment of Prohibition was a little embarrassed, although a WCTU historian explained the truth to her, and introduced her to exactly how important Augusta was to both temperance and to the suffrage movement in Maine.  (Helen Hunt noted the bitter irony that Augusta’s granddaughter-in-law would eventually be killed by a drunk driver.)

As it turned out, Augusta was instrumental in getting a suffrage law on the Maine ballot for a referendum in 1917, which failed miserably before an all-male voting populace.  (I was reminded about how Maine voters also rejected same-sex marriage in a referendum.)  Despite that failure, Augusta was behind every pro-woman reform of her day, including day care and female prison matrons.

In the end Augusta’s work was not in vain.  She lived to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, and according to a profile of her in a newspaper from Portland, she was given the honor of being the first woman to cast a ballot in a Maine election.  It was both a stunning and moving find, and Helen Hunt seemed overwhelmed by it.

At the end of the episode, Hunt visited the grave of George and Augusta Hunt and took a charcoal rubbing of their monument for her daughter.  Charcoal rubbing is somewhat controversial and there are people who claim it damages the headstone/monument, although I confess that I made one for an ancestor whose grave was otherwise impossible to read.  It was however, an extremely poignant moment, and wisely, that was where the show ended.

Next week, Rita Wilson.

Footnotes:

As bad as this episode was, I have to shamefacedly offer a correction.  A few days after the episode aired, I found a newspaper article that indicated that Bettis’s ancestor lost his court case on appeal, and I blasted the show in a separate blog post for dishonesty.  It turns out, I was wrong in the chronology, and Bettis’s ancestor did win his court case with as far as I can tell no appeal from the railroad defendant.  I took down the blog post, but I want to set the record straight.  Mea culpa.  I’m sorry.  It does excuse how bad the Bettis episode was, but if I demand honesty, I should be honest too.

Jerome Bettis, Who Do You Think You Are?

This third season of Who Do You Think You Are has not been doing particularly well in the ratings.  Because of this, and because of a slower subscriber growth expectation, Ancestry.com’s stock has slumped.  For those reasons, this will probably be the last season of Who Do You Think You Are.  If the rest of the season is like this week’s episode, all I can say is “good riddance.”

At the outset, let me say that I have nothing against Jerome Bettis.  Not being a fan of the NFL, I had actually never heard of him until this season’s celebrities were announced.  I take great pains to point out that this review is not personal against Bettis, because in the past I have gotten personal before, and got a very nasty response from a reader.

This week’s episode was awful, maybe the worst of the show’s entire run.  In the previous two seasons, there have been definite valleys among the peaks, but overall the series was very strong.  This season not so much.  The show began with an awful episode (Martin Sheen), and the next three, although better in quality, also had major flaws.  Who Do You Think You Are, which has always been a vehicle for Ancestry, is abandoned storytelling for the sake of sales.  It’s Ancestry’s right to do so, but it certainly affects my enjoyment of the program.

The problem with tonight’s episode was that it reinforced almost all of the show’s other flaws: the Ancestry plugs, the unsubtle hints about what is to come, the importance of story at the price of history, too many commercials and too much filler, and the baseless assumptions made by the celebrities to whitewash ancestors with less than stellar qualities.  In the world of Who Do You Think You Are, only owning slaves makes you less than heroic; lesser sins however, do not disqualify shady figures from Ancestry canonization.  Over and over again we learn about ancestors who abandon their families, and over and over again it is excused away.  Only Kim Cattrall was honest enough to call out her grandfather as a reprobate, but that episode was filmed for the British series.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Jerome Bettis knew about his father’s family (his father died a few years prior), but knew virtually nothing about his mother’s family, the Bougards.  He began his journey in Detroit where he spoke to his mother Gladys and her brother Abram (“Butch”).  Bettis learned that his grandfather Abram Bougard was the son of Burnett and Ruby Bougard, and that Burnett was a troublemaker who disappeared when Abram the elder was all of six-years-old.  Abram never spoke about his father.

Using Ancestry (PLUG!), Bettis found Burnett’s death certificate, learned that he died in Paducah, Kentucky and found out that Burnett’s father was named Abe.  Coincidentally, I looked up on the certificate online, and found out Burnett’s mother’s maiden name too (Amanda Gee), but she was never mentioned on the show, ignored to the point that her name was not even shown on Bettis’s family tree.

In Paducah, Bettis learned that there was a divorce between Burnett and Ruby, which seemed to relieve him and would later relieve his mother and uncle.  I’m not exactly sure why; if anything the divorce record (between “Ruby Beaurgard” and “Burnett Beargard”) indicates exactly what a heel Burnett was.  The reason for the divorce was abandonment.  What I wondered, and what was never addressed is whether Burnett was even at his divorce.  After a certain period of time, an abandoned spouse can simply go into court and just get the divorce.  Given that Ruby brought witnesses with her to affirm that she was abandoned (one witness testified that Burnett told Ruby he was leaving and she could keep the house), I am pretty sure that is what happened.  Ruby was able to divorce Burnett because he up and left; Burnett did not divorce her.

But, because this is American television, Burnett had to be redeemed.  Redemption came in a newspaper article from 1897 which detailed how Burnett pressed charged against his supervisor for an assault and battery that took place at his job.  Because Burnett was a black man and his boss was white, bringing this charge in the Jim Crow South (where lynching was the norm) was extremely dangerous. Even the newspaper reflected this climate of hatred; the 21-year-old Burnett pejoratively as both “boy” and as a “darkey.”  Unsurprisingly, the charges were dismissed.

Then we got a narration about Reconstruction.  As I said in my last recap, slavery is America’s original sin.  The oppression of Jim Crow is almost its equal, and Kentucky has its own pernicious, racist legacy from which it cannot escape.  But Kentucky was different from most of the South, because Kentucky never left the United States.  Four slave states–Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware–stayed in the Union and did not defect during the Civil War.  Kentucky slave owners kept their slaves throughout the War, the Emancipation Proclamation never applied to Kentucky, and because Kentucky was in the Union, it was never militarily occupied during Reconstruction like former Confederate states were.  Although the narration did not explicitly say that Kentucky was occupied, it was implied.  Since Bettis’s entire story happened in Kentucky, it would have been nice if someone had made this distinction.  If anything, blacks in Kentucky suffered more during Reconstruction than their counterparts in the former Confederate states because there was no Union army to protect them.

Bettis, seeing this court case, decides that Burnett is brave and harps on and on about his bravery.  Here’s the problem for me though  Bettis knows exactly two things about his great-grandfather’s life: (1) he abandoned his wife and children; and (2) he pressed charges against his employer, and those charges were dismissed.  I can only speak for myself, but in my eyes Fact #2 does not negate Fact #1.  Burnett was not brave; he was irresponsible.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Like with the Brassfields last week, spelling is an issue again here; we see Bougard, Bogard, Beaugard, Beauregard, and a few other variations.  One of the historians attributes it to the racism of the census takers.  No doubt there is truth to that, but spelling on the federal census, and on pretty much every legal document before Social Security, is notoriously bad regardless of race.  No one should watch this episode and think that just because your family was white your family records are free of spelling errors or that your family name is spelled wrong just because your family was black.

Who Do You Think You Are is less a show about genealogy and more of a family history scavenger hunt.  Find a clue in Place A and you are sent to Place B.  Find a clue in Place B and you are sent to Place C.  Bettis learned in Paducah that his great-great-grandfather Abe Bougard filed a lawsuit against the Illinois Central Railroad for $2,000 for injuries he sustained while walking on a track.  Wanting to know more about this, Abe went to Frankfort, Kentucky to learn about this lawsuit.

In Frankfort, Bettis was shown the documents related to the case.  First he learned that Illinois Central did not like to lose cases, and with its team of lawyers, fought cases all the way to the Supreme Court.  Then he discovered that Abe’s lawyers were famous for representing the poor against big companies and probably did so pro bono (or perhaps for a percentage of the settlement, which is how plaintiffs’ attorneys make their money).  Finally he saw that Abe could not sign his name; there was only an “x” around which said “his mark”.  Bettis seemed so upset by that, and interpreted it as a sign that Abe was probably born a slave.  It is a fair assumption (and, as it turned out, correct), but illiteracy was common at that time period regardless of race.  For example, my 3rd great-grandfather died without a will, and his wife Mina, my 3rd great-grandmother, filed papers of administration.  Mina, an Eastern European immigrant, also could not sign her name, and there was an “x” with “her mark” around it in place of a signature.  There is plenty to be sad about in genealogy, but in my estimation illiteracy ranks very low on that list.

The show built up this court case as a battle between the good guy against the evil corporation, which I have reservations about given how only limited information about the case was revealed.  The librarian who showed Bettis the records invoked the specter of racism; Abe’s case would have been heard by an all-white jury of landowning men.  And just as he was about to read aloud the verdict, the show cut to commercials for what seemed to be the twentieth time.  It was a cheap move, and I knew right then and there that Abe won his case.  But the show’s director and editor should be ashamed of themselves.  Cutting to commercials at that moment was a soap opera-like way to extend out what was really minimal drama.

When we came back from commercial, we learned that yes, Abe did win, although less than the $2,000.  This made Bettis very happy because it appeared to him to show that Abe was a man of integrity.  I will grant that it was a big deal for Abe, a poor black man in Kentucky, to win that case, but I will not concede that winning a court case is a sign of integrity.  Perhaps I have spent too much time around lawyers (I am one myself), but the ideal of a court case and the reality of it are two entirely different things altogether.  Abe may have been an upstanding man of unimpeachable integrity, but winning a court case, even against a railroad, even in Kentucky, even at that time period, is not proof positive.  The jury is an idiosyncratic institution; who knows why it decided as it did.

The librarian in Frankfort told Bettis that if he wanted to hear the story of the court case, he would have to go to Paducah.  A historian in Paducah who worked on the railroad remembered that when he began working there some of the older workers who were in their 70′s talked about this case.  I have to say, I find that highly dubious and very convenient as it allowed Bettis to again posit that Abe was a man of integrity.  Then this historian showed Bettis an engine like the one that injured his great-great-grandfather.  It was big and heavy.  It is amazing that it hit Abe, and he still survived.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Bettis wanted to know for certain about whether Abe was born a slave.  Again he turned to Ancestry to find Abe’s death certificate (it’s there, I looked), and he found out that Abe was born while slavery still existed and his parents’ names were Jerry and Liza.  Yes, it turned out that Abe was indeed born into slavery.  Jerry and Liza (Eliza) were slaves of a Joseph Bogard, and that was how Abe got his surname.  In Bogard’s 1841 will, he left all his property including his slaves to his wife Mary.  Using dower lists, Bettis was able to trace Jerry, Eliza, and Abe through 1860 when Mary died and her property was divided.  Abe was sold for $1363 and separate from his parents.  He was about 10.  I wondered however, given that Jerry and Eliza were purchased by a man named Bogard, and Abe was purchased by a man named Hand, if these two men were brothers-in-law and they were dividing Mary Bogard’s estate as her heirs.  Not germane to the story necessarily, but it was something I was curious about given what happened next.

Bettis asked if Abe ever saw his parents again, and as it turns out, he did.  In the 1870 Census, Abe was living with Jerry.  The show spent virtually no time on this discovery, but I looked it up for myself, and I think it is one of the most interesting documents of the Bettis family history.  Abe (here Abram) was indeed living with Jerry.  Eliza was not there, but there were also three other Beaugards (the spelling in 1870) living with them: Mary who was 24 (two years older than Abe), Frances who was seven and Elizabeth who was one.  More interesting is that while Jerry is listed in the census as black, the four other Beaugards–who presumably were his children–were all listed as mulatto.  Again, presuming that these are his children (the 1870 census does not list relationships), that would indicate that Eliza was also of mixed race.  And given that the youngest child was one-year-old, and that at her birth Eliza would have been around 47, there is a strong possibility that Eliza died in childbirth or just afterwards.

Some of this is speculation, but it is no more speculation than assuming a man has integrity because he pressed charges or won a court case.  The story this episode told was manufactured and in some cases blatantly deceptive.  I suppose there are only so many ways to tell a story about slavery and have still be of interest to television viewers.  Nevertheless, this story did not let the facts speak for themselves.  It was so coated in speculation and legend, that I think the show made a mistake by producing this episode, which is something I have never thought before.

Next week appears to be either Helen Hunt or Rita Wilson.  NBC wasn’t telling in the previews.

Reba McEntire, Who Do You Think You Are?

Every family has its black sheep, its scoundrels, and its horse thieves.  Sometimes they provide the most colorful stories that regale us through the generations, but more likely than not they do things that we are deeply ashamed of even if we never knew them.

In my own family, my grandmother’s grandfather Abraham was an awful human being.  His two granddaughters’ husbands referred to him as “Black Bart” because they thought of him as a villain in old Western movie.  Abraham was an abusive lout who drank too much, beat his children, and openly hated his grandchildren.  My great-great-grandmother Bessie was by accounts a sweet and much-loved woman, Abraham’s opposite in every way.  For her reward she was afflicted with multiple sclerosis while she still had a young child to care for.  As her health declined, Abraham found a mistress and had an illegitimate child with her.  I have a picture of Abraham, his mistress, and this child.  (I have not tried to track down this child; it is the one branch I have no interest in.)  About a month after Bessie died, Abraham married his mistress, scandalizing his family who thought he should have had the decency to at least wait until the mourning period ended.  Abraham eventually died alone in a nursing home in Atlantic City.  No one in his family even visited him once.  Ironically though, he is buried next to Bessie and by three of their children.

I bring up the story of Black Bart to illustrate that we all have sinners in our family, although some sins are worse than others.  As lousy a human being as Abraham was, his misdeeds were nothing compared to those who eagerly partook in America’s Original Sin: slavery.  Tonight on Who Do You Think You Are, Reba McEntire had to confront the fact that one of her ancestors was a slave owner and worse, a slave trader.  For perhaps first time, Who Do You Think You Are could not whitewash a celebrity’s ancestor.  To be fair, other celebrities had slave owner ancestors, but those celebrities were African-American; they had no feeling for or connection with their slaver-owner ancestor whom they saw (with good reason) as a rapist.  For Reba McEntire it was different because she could not dodge the connection.  Her 4th great-grandfather George Brasfield (or Brassfield, Brasfeild, or Braisfield depending on which document was used) was an eager participant in the slave trade.  Unlike Spike Lee or Lionel Ritchie (also descendants of slave owners), McEntire could not treat Brasfield as a brutal other.  We live to imagine our ancestors as virtuous people, and it is a hard blow when we learn how truly awful they were.

Because McEntire knew her father’s genealogy, she wanted to learn about the family of her maternal grandmother for whom she was named: Reba Estelle Brassfield Smith.  She also wanted to learn when her first family members came to the United States.

As a prefatory note, it is clear that the show is no longer trying to maintain the illusion of spontaneity.  The very first scene between McEntire and her mother featured the most blatant Ancestry.com plug of the season.  Then McEntire’s mother told her daughter she was going to have to go to Monroe County, Mississippi when they could not find Reba Brassfield Smith’s father in the 1900 Census.  The conceit of the show is that it is like a treasure hunt and the celebrity follows clue after clue, but usually the first journey begins with a little more subtlety.  The meeting between McEntire and her mother line was practically scripted by the show’s producers.

As per her mother’s advice, McEntire did indeed go to Monroe County (the Stars and Bars on Mississippi’s state flag were featured rather prominently).  At a local library she did the bare minimum research that she could have done by searching unsuccessfully for the obituary of her great-grandfather B.W. Brassfield.  Of course, she looked in a bound volume of obituaries that were in alphabetical order.  Then McEntire met a genealogist who gave her a seven generation family tree of the Brassfield/Brasfield family dating back to pre-Revolutionary War North Carolina.  He said it was difficult to track down information on B.W. Brassfield, and no doubt it was, but that scene illustrates the main complaint of genealogists who watch this show.  Genealogy is blood, sweat, and tears, thousands of hours of research over many years, but here the celebrity was handed a comprehensive family tree without having to do anything.  Why bother having her look for an obituary that wasn’t there if the work was already done?  (And worse of all, the show did not say a word about how the work was done.)

The earliest ancestor on McEntire’s family tree was George Brasfield, McEntire’s 4th great-grandfather who came from Wake County, North Carolina.  In Raleigh, McEntire discovered that Brasfield owned a tavern and over 1600 acres of land.  He also owned 10 slaves.  McEntire was clearly appalled by this, and looking for a bright light, she asked if Brasfield treated his slaves kindly.  Here I was afraid that Who Do You Think You Are would do its typical whitewash, but no, there was no way to make this callous man sympathetic.  Not only did he own slaves he traded slaves, included young children and babies.  McEntire looked sick and deeply ashamed.  It’s not her sin, but it is understandable (even if perhaps slightly irrational) that she feels a kind of guilt by association.

Turning her attention toward her other goal, finding out how her Brasfield ancestors came to the United States, McEntire went to Virginia where she discovered George’s grandfather, also named George.  McEntire learned that he bought 300 acres of land in exchange for a lot of tobacco.  More importantly, she discovered that he came to the Americas as nine-year-old indentured servant.  (A quick confession: I knew about indentured servants from history class, and I knew that they were treated no better than slaves although indentured servants had the hope of a better future.  What I did not know is that they started so young.  It is one of those horrifying and inconvenient truths that our history teachers don’t tell us.)  Reba, wondering how his mother could let him go so far, followed George’s path to his origin in Macclesfield, England.  Ironically, at the beginning of the show, McEntire admitted she never felt comfortable in England, unlike Scotland and Ireland where she felt at home.  In Macclesfield, she found out that George’s mother Abigail died in 1696 and his father Thomas put young George into indentured servitude two years later probably because this was the only way for him to have a better life.  Reba, rather movingly, made her peace with Thomas’s actions and ended her journey.

This episode of Who Do You Think You Are mixed the genuine and the staged rather clumsily.  On one hand, McEntire’s emotions were entirely genuine: helpless disgust she felt when she learned about her slave owner ancestor, anger that Thomas Brassfield put his son into indentured servitude, sorrow about the death of Abigail Brassfield, and finally forgiveness and understanding for why Thomas did what he did.

On the other hand, this episode seemed even more staged than the others.  The truth about Who Do You Think You Are is that the real genealogical work had been done for months if not years before the show is recorded.  The celebrity does no work whatsoever although occasionally you get scenes of some research, like Rosie O’Donnell or Susan Sarandon searching through microfilm.  The celebrities just go to the designated place where they are told about their ancestors.  Despite how unreal this is, usually this artifice is handled well. Not so this time.  Perhaps the best illustration of how the producers showed their hands was when McEntire used a database to find church records in Macclesfield and found the correct records by using a variant spelling of her family name (in this case “Brasfeild”) that had never been used before.  Lo and behold she was absolutely correct!  It’s obvious that McEntire was told what to type.  I don’t mind the artifice, and I am willing to suspend my disbelief.  I do however, mind the clumsiness.  It ruins the illusion.

Next week’s show is Jerome Bettis, whom I had never heard of before, but that is my issue not his.  Until then, happy trails to you, dear reader.

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.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

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.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

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.

Songs To Make You Cry

I recently had the very good fortune to see the Israeli singer Yasmin Levy in concert.  Levy is a singer/songwriter of Ladino songs.  Ladino, for those who don’t know, is the Yiddish of Sephardic Jewry.  Like Yiddish, Ladino is heavily influenced by other languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.  Yiddish, spoken by the descendants of German-Jewish exiles who settled in Eastern Europe, is a variation of High Middle German heavily influenced by Slavic languages.  Ladino, spoken by the descendants of the Spanish Jews who were expelled in 1492 and who settled to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, is a variation of Old Spanish heavily influenced by various Mediterranean and Balkan languages.

Like Yiddish, the future of Ladino is precarious; the number of Ladino speakers may not even be 100,000, and they are old.  The loss of Ladino is heartbreaking and tragic.  There is a modern revival of sorts, although nothing on the scale of Yiddish.  I have no definitive insight on to why so few seem to care about the future of Ladino, but I do have some theories.  (1)  The descendants of Ladino-speakers are more likely to live in Israel where the ultimate mother-tongue, Hebrew, has won out over all other Jewish languages.  (2)  In contrast, many Yiddish-speakers went to the United States and their descendants (like me) see Yiddish as the mother-tongue rather than Hebrew.  Because there is not the same stigma associated with non-Hebrew Jewish languages in the United States (and in part because there was at one point such a vibrant Yiddish culture in the United States), younger Jews feel no stigma about studying Yiddish culture.  This is great for Yiddish because most American Jews are of Ashkenazic descent, but not so great for Ladino, as Sephardic Jews in the United States are much fewer in number.  (Sephardic Jews communities may be fewer, but they have also existed in the United States for far longer than Ashkenazic ones.)  (3)  Various ultra-Orthodox groups, both in and out of Israel, will only use Yiddish at home (even if they speak the local language when dealing with the outside world).  This even goes for Hebrew, which they consider too holy for daily use.  Sephardic Jews, even the fanatically religious Sephardim, have no qualms with speaking Hebrew as a daily language.  (4)  Although the Nazis did destroy Sephardic communities in the Balkans and Greece, the Holocaust predominantly affected Ashkenazic Jews and virtually annihilated an entire culture.  For that reason, perhaps there is more of a sense of urgency to protect Yiddish.  (5) The Yiddish world is much smaller than the Ladino world in terms of both physical and cultural distance.  Yiddish speakers from say Hungary and Lithuania could communicate with one another far more easily than Ladino speakers from (for example) Algeria and Turkey.  There is not one Ladino language to save per se but many different dialects that are near unintelligible.

The Ladino music tradition is quite beautiful.  The folk songs are absolutely stunning.  The language itself is also quite melodious, a far cry from the German-drenched guttural tonality of Yiddish (which, don’t get me wrong, I have deep affection for).  Ladino songs are heart-wrenching and full of pathos.  Or, at least they can be.  The songs that Yasmin Levy sings certainly are.

Yasmin Levy is making a name for herself not just by singing Ladino songs, but also for trying to modernize Ladino, mostly by fusing it with Flamenco.  Therefore, despite the sometimes overwhelming sadness of her music, there is also a Flamenco-like energy which also appears in her presentation.  At time she sings like a Flamenco singer and hold herself the way they do.  Nevertheless, that is not always the case.  There are times when she stands so still she seems more like a fadista, as though she were standing on a mountain top singing headlong into the winds of fate.  It’s a tremendous emotional effect.  I speak no Ladino, yet there were times when I felt moved almost to the point of tears.

The closest I came to crying during her concert was when she sang the song “Una Pastora” (A Shepherdess).  Here is a video of her singing the song the way she does on her album Sentir:

The translation to the song’s lyrics (found here on another version of the song) are as follows:

A shepherdess I loved
A beautiful child.
Still so young I adored her,
More than her I loved no other.
One day when we were
Sitting in the garden
I said to her: “For you, my flower
I will die of love”
In her arms she hugged me
Lovingly she kissed me
She answered me sweetly:
“You are too young for love”
I grew up and looked for her
She took another and I lost her
She has forgotten me,
But I shall always love.

Sad, right?  But on this night, the lyrics and the melody were only a part of the sadness, and not the main part.

The male voice you heard in the video is a recording of Levy’s father Yitzhak Levy, a cantor and composer.  Yitzhak Levy was also something of the Alan Lomax of the Ladino world.  He recorded and wrote down as many Ladino folk songs as he could in an attempt to preserve the heritage.  He died when his daughter Yasmin was only a year old, and she has no memory of him.  Yasmin Levy had always wanted to do a duet with her father (a la Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole), and “Una Pastora” is the song she chose.

Although it seems odd to talk about stagecraft in a concert such as this, the way that she staged the song was designed to wring the maximum amount of pathos.  The center of the stage was lit by the spotlight and she stepped back so that the illuminated area was empty.  Alone on stage (her band, which had been with her all night, left), the recording of her father singing began and she remained motionless with her head down.  Whenever she sang, she stepped into the spotlight, and when she finished, she stepped back out until the end when they sang together.  There were tears in my eyes, and the man next broke down and cried.

Yasmin Levy is a true talent.  She reminds me a bit of the late Ofra Haza, although her voice does not have the same timbre.  Just as Ofra Haza brought Yemenite Jewish music into a spotlight that it didn’t have but so richly deserved.  I hope that Yasmin Levy can do the same for Ladino music.  Ladino is so beautiful; it would be devastating for it to just fade away.