As an avid amateur genealogist, I had anticipated the arrival of this series. The concept is simple: Each episode features a different celebrity on a quest for information about their ancestry. The journey usually begins with immediate family members like parents, aunts, uncles or in some cases grand parents or even elders from one's childhood community, who are still living and can provide information about other family members who had passed away too long ago for the host celebrity to recall. Then all possible archives of communities, schools or places of employment would be searched for more details as well as additional branches of the family tree.
We learn about how people lived, what sort of work they had to do, what difficulties they had to overcome, and how their lives had affected those who were born after them. There are many emotional moments, where the hosting celebrity might even break down sobbing, when confronted with the incredible hardships family members only a few generations back had to endure.
There is plenty of humor in each episode, and plenty of wonderful moments where memories are cherished and pleasantries exchanged. For those reasons alone, this series is a joy to watch. The one detail I would find fault with, is the fact that the genealogy of each family is traced back only to about the middle of the 19th Century. In my own genealogy efforts, family lineages are traced much farther back than merely a century and a half. To learn about the parents of my grandparents would not be a big thrill; I'd want to dig much deeper to the roots, or climb much higher up into a family tree.
The DVD quality is excellent, although there are no unique special features except for biographies for each guest celebrity. "Who Do You Think You Are?" is a series I can highly recommend to people with a curiosity about family history as an entertaining as well as educational experience.
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Oct 27th, 2009
