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.

The End Of Who Do You Think You Are

As I predicted weeks ago, this is indeed the final season of Who Do You Think You Are, at least as currently know it.  NBC has decided not to renew the show.  For the amount of money it no doubt costs, the network got very little return.  And given the sloppiness in research that was glaringly apparent in this past week’s episode, I cannot say I totally disagree with the decision to cancel the show.

On the other hand, Who Do You Think You Are is one of my favorite shows, and when it is done right I get tremendous pleasure from watching it.  I also love watching episodes of the UK version on YouTube, and I really wish I could them on DVD.  I am sad, and I hope that maybe another network will pick up the show, and maybe that will be an improvement in quality and a variety of guests.  If not, there is always YouTube.

Who Do They Think We Are?

In my last review of Who Do You Think You Are, a commentator who was as troubled by the episode as I was posted on my blog that she found a glaring error in the research (thank you, Vivian, I am in your debt).

To recap:  Jason Sudeikis found that his grandfather Stanley (b. 1915) was living in Chicago with his mother Michalina “Emma” (Bielska) Sudeikis and her brother Walter in the 1920 Census.  Stanley’s father, also named Stanley, was nowhere in sight.  But in Connecticut there was a Stanley Sudeikis who lived with his wife Mill and their daughter Lillian.  The conclusion…bigamy.  In 1930, that rapscallion Stanley Sudeikis was living happily with his wife and another daughter still in Connecticut, while Stanley Jr. because of his absent father began a path toward alcoholism and early death.  Stanley Sr., now of Connecticut, was found to be the son of Joseph Sudeikis, who died in a mining accident when Stanley Sr. was but a young boy.

It’s all wrong.  The Connecticut Stanley is not Jason’s great-grandfather.  In the 1930 Census, Stanley Jr. is living with both his parents, Stanley Sr. and Emma.  In other words, the two adult Stanleys are different people.  Moreover, Stanley Sr. of Chicago was living with his family in 1920.  How do we know?  Stanley and Emma had another child in 1921, a daughter Michalina.  For reference, here is Stanley Jr.’s birth certificate.  (Note that his mother was using the name Minnie at the time).  Apparently this daughter did not survive until 1930 because she was not listed on the  1930 Census (which, as we see, doesn’t mean with certainty that she died, but it is entirely probable).

The other glaring problem is that according to the 1930 Census, Stanley Sr. was born in 1896 and immigrated in 1913.  The Joseph Sudeikis who died in the mine died in 1901 and immigrated in 1884.  There is no way that they were father and son.  Jason’s episode was full of mistakes.

So there are two ways to look at this discrepancy, the kind way and the cynical way.  In the kind way, researchers made mistakes and led Jason (and the viewers) down the wrong path.  It’s embarrassing but it happens.  Genealogy often leads us on wrong paths.  For example, people who are not experienced tend to assume that the Ancestry.com hints are gospel.  The truth though is that they are just guesses based on algorithms, and I have rejected at least as many as I have used.

The cynical view though is one that I am praying is not correct.  I said last week that it is an open secret that more celebrities are researched than aired, but I am wondering if the real secret is that the open secret is a lie.  This season in particular I thought that there was some chutzpah is calling the guests “America’s most beloved celebrities” since so many of them are unknown to the population at large.  I also noticed that this season many of the guests had connections to NBC; by my count, 7 are or had been regulars on NBC television shows.  They may be more.  If you go through other seasons you’ll see that many of the other guests also have connections to NBC, not least Executive Producer Lisa Kudrow.  In other words, while promoting Ancestry and Apple, the show is also promoting NBC.

In the cynical way of looking at this faulty research, Jason Sudeikis’s story was not interesting, but he needed to be on Who Do You Think You Are to promote NBC.  Ergo the researchers fudged the facts and fabricated a more television-friendly past.

If the kind hypothesis is correct, then the researchers owe Jason Sudeikis an apology.  If the cynical hypothesis is correct, then the researchers and Sudeikis owe that apology to the viewers.

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).

Rob Lowe, Who Do You Think You Are?

You may have noticed that I did not write about Rob Lowe’s episode until well after its initial airing.  I apologize for that.  Because of my work schedule, I was not able to catch the first half of the show last Friday, and the half that I did see was not all that interesting to me, so I had to force myself to sit down in front of Hulu to catch up.  Lowe spent the entire episode chasing after his 5th great-grandfather John Christopher East (né Johann Christoph Oeste).  Episodes that focus on the solitary ancestors are often the most gripping of the entire series; think about Rita Wilson or Susan Sarandon.  The inherent problem with this kind of episode though is that if the ancestor’s story is not gripping, the whole episode is flat and irredeemably dull.  In other words, high risk, high reward.  Wilson and Sarandon had a personal connection to their (respective) father and grandmother, even if in Sarandon’s case she never met her grandmother.  In contrast, Rob Lowe had no knowledge of or connection with his 5th great-grandfather.  He could have been researching anyone, and the distance really came through.

It was also a problem that the entire episode felt like it was shaped fit the search for Lowe’s solitary ancestor despite the pretense he knew nothing about his mother’s family.  First Lowe eliminates his father’s side of the family.  Then he goes on and on about hoping to find a patriot in the family (yes, The West Wing was referenced).  Even his meeting with his brother Chad seemed stilted and awkward as though designed to find the one story that Rob Lowe would be chasing.  It’s not exactly a well-kept secret that all the research is done months in advance, but it really felt like Lowe knew who and what he would be searching for and acted accordingly.  On the bright side, it was good to see Rob and Chad together; I thought they were estranged.

Rob and Chad found the wedding picture of their great-grandparents, Oran Hepler and Bessie May East, and then find a news article from early 1900′s Ohio about a reunion of the descendants of Christopher East.  After an overt Ancestry* plug (and a somewhat more subtle Apple one) about six and quarter minutes into the episode, the Lowe brothers discover a John Christopher East who the Daughters of the American Revolution were looking into as a possible Revolutionary War patriot.  So, off Rob Lowe went to Washington, DC to the DAR’s library.

A word about the DAR.  Without a doubt they have one of the finest collections that a genealogist could hope for, particularly if you have deep American roots.  (As I do not, I am uncertain that the DAR’s collection would do me much good.)  The DAR strikes me as an organization devoted to elitism–in order to be a member, you must have the right ancestry and be able to recite it as though you Homer composing The Iliad.  By default, the right ancestry by-and-large means WASPs, perhaps not entirely but undoubtedly predominantly.  This WASPishness is all the more pronounced because of the DAR’s terrible, foolish, racist blunder in 1939, which it will never live down no matter how hard it tries.  This is because the DAR’s blunder gave us one of the iconic moments in American music (and racial) history.

I am not claiming that the DAR is still a racist, pro-segregation organization, nor do I claim that in 2012 they would refuse to book Marian Anderson (were she still alive) in Constitution Hall.  Nevertheless, the fact remains that by excluding all but a few from their organization, they have created an ersatz Roman patrician class–the ancient founders who have more inherent worth than the rest of us undeserving plebeians.  This gives lie to the pretense (delusion?) that America is a society without a class structure.

At the DAR library, Lowe was given a family tree that showed how his great-grandmother Bessie May was related to John Christopher East.  He also learned that the DAR closed the application on East because there was no proof he fought in the Revolutionary War.  Apparently they had confused East with someone of a similar name.  Lowe did find a tax list from Newtown, Pennsylvania that listed East.  To further pursue the truth, Lowe’s then went to the Library of Congress, although he first stopped by the Lincoln Memorial for meaningless filler shots despite the fact that the Lincoln Memorial is in the opposite direction from the Library of Congress (not that it is that far away when traveling by car).

Long story short, East was in the Revolutionary War, except that he was a Hessian.  Moreover, he was captured by George Washington’s army at the Battle of Trenton, which Lowe did not know much about, but having grown up in the Philadelphia area, I was quite familiar with.  Lowe then went off to visit historical Trenton, and I was disappointed that the Lower Trenton Bridge with its “Trenton Makes The World Takes” sign was not featured.  As a side note, I find Trenton to be a terrifying city although perhaps not yet at Camden levels of sheer horror.  To contradict all my fears, Trenton’s historical area seemed quite lovely.  (As a side note, this map… true.)  On the other hand, Lowe didn’t have to go to Trenton’s train station.

Lowe followed Christopher East’s (Christoph Oeste) path to Newtown, Pennsylvania, a town I know well given that I grew up in that general area.  There he learned that George Washington showed mercy and (via act of the Continental Congress)permitted  the captured Hessians to assimilate in the United States should they defect from the British army.  They were also allowed to go home instead should they choose that path.  Although I learned about the Hessians growing up, I must admit, I never once thought about what they did after the Battle of Trenton.  I guess if pressed, I would have assumed that they went back to the area of what would later become Germany that they were from.  And I would have been mostly right, as 85% of them did return. But not East/Oeste  (Should Oeste have an umlaut over the O instead of an e afterwards?  I am unfamiliar with the finer points of German spelling.)  Oeste stayed and Lowe went to Germany to find out why.  In Germany Lowe learned that Oeste was the youngest of eight children, and therefore had little choice but to join the Hessians to improve his prospects.

Then came the twist.   Because Oeste paid some kind of tax to raise money for the war effort, the DAR accepted him as a patriot, and therefore Lowe was able to joint the Sons of the American Revolution.  Which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it, and despite (or perhaps because of) my railing earlier about the DAR and its elitism, I am highly suspicious of why they accepted Lowe.  My guess is that it is one of three things: (1) they need the membership dues; (2) they want to be able to say that Rob Lowe is a member; or (3) it would look really bad on television if the DAR/SAR kept Lowe out despite the fact that Oeste’s patriot credentials are really rather sketchy.  Technically, Lowe is a descendant of an American Revolution soldier, but a soldier who fought for the wrong side.

In a season of peaks and valleys, this episode is definitely nearer to the bottom.  I apologize to all the descendants of John Christopher East; I have nothing against your ancestor, whose story is no doubt fascinating.  But Who Do You Think You Are did him no justice with an episode that was listless and overly scripted (and allowed me too much time to pontificate on class and the DAR).  I just wanted the episode to end.  This one will not be savored on repeat viewing.

Next week, Lowe’s Parks & Recreations co-star, Rashida Jones, and it seems to be a Holocaust episode.

Footnotes:

* For those not in the know, Ancestry just bought Archives.com, a site that had been around for a while, but only recently tried to make a serious dent in the online genealogy market.  Archives (not to be confused with Archives.org or Archives.gov) was the site that the government chose to partner with for hosting the 1940 Census online.  Ancestry has been steadily gobbling up all competitors, most famously Footnote.com (now Fold3), to the point where it seems like it is the only major American player left in the market other than the LDS Church’s (free) site FamilySearch.com.  In fact, other than FamilySearch, there are really only three major players in the market: Ancestry, the British company brightsolid (which owns findmypast.com and has yet to become a player in the American market), and MyHeritage (which is Israeli, and which is also only starting to break in).  I am quite fearful that Ancestry is going to create a monopoly, and I am wondering if perhaps it would be for the best if federal regulators put a stop to its acquisition of Archives.  Not that they will.

If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be True

I’m famous!  Well, sort of.  Actually, not really.  But this blog is now officially a source for Wikipedia.  Apparently, some kind soul used my humble post about Rita Wilson’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are as a source for Wilson’s Wikipedia entry. In case it gets taken down, I have proof that it was once there.

 

As Rita Wilson goes, so goes Helen Hunt.

 

 

So whoever you are anonymous Wikipedia editor, I thank you.  And may it take several days before the Wiki Powers-That-Be realize that I am probably not a good authoritative source.

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.)

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

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.