I have found a TV show to watch that I find quite fascinating. It's called "Who do you think you are?". It has just finished it's run on NBC & hopefully will come back next year. Like a lot of shows it's based on a british show of the same title.
What this show does is take a semi-famous person & look for ancestors. It has a link to the Ancestry.com website(which the celebrity is seen looking at at least once per episode). Obviously a TV show with a celebrity is going to find stuff out faster & easier than you or me could but it's still fun to watch.
I've been on the website once & since I didn't want to register & pay since I didn't know how much I could find out anyway I only did a cursory search. This only took me back a couple of generations but you could find out stuff. This is what technology does. There are now more ways to preserve & collect this kind of information. Technology haters don't understand this. Technology allows us to preserve records that would be lost otherwise. Every episode shows someone looking through microfiche files of pre-20th century documents.
Yes there are a lot of documents preserved by other methods but stuff several hundreds of years old still needs some kind of tech to preserve the item so it doesn't just disintigrate because of age. For instance in most episodes the celebrity is shown some hand written document that was an official record-a death certificate, a book that listed the ancestors name, maybe an army census. Ashley Judd was shown a series of papers from an ancestor's Kentucky regiment showing that he was captured by the Confederate Army twice. Tim McGraw was shown a diary with handwriting that showed that an ancestor of his hosted a 16 year old dinner guest named George Washington! Without tech these items would be long gone.
My family has nothing like that, but that's because both sides emigrated here only 100 years ago. Still it's an interesting field. I have cousins who have visited my grandmother's home island off of Sicily. I don't have the money to do that, so maybe a website is the best I can do.
What this show does is take a semi-famous person & look for ancestors. It has a link to the Ancestry.com website(which the celebrity is seen looking at at least once per episode). Obviously a TV show with a celebrity is going to find stuff out faster & easier than you or me could but it's still fun to watch.
I've been on the website once & since I didn't want to register & pay since I didn't know how much I could find out anyway I only did a cursory search. This only took me back a couple of generations but you could find out stuff. This is what technology does. There are now more ways to preserve & collect this kind of information. Technology haters don't understand this. Technology allows us to preserve records that would be lost otherwise. Every episode shows someone looking through microfiche files of pre-20th century documents.
Yes there are a lot of documents preserved by other methods but stuff several hundreds of years old still needs some kind of tech to preserve the item so it doesn't just disintigrate because of age. For instance in most episodes the celebrity is shown some hand written document that was an official record-a death certificate, a book that listed the ancestors name, maybe an army census. Ashley Judd was shown a series of papers from an ancestor's Kentucky regiment showing that he was captured by the Confederate Army twice. Tim McGraw was shown a diary with handwriting that showed that an ancestor of his hosted a 16 year old dinner guest named George Washington! Without tech these items would be long gone.
My family has nothing like that, but that's because both sides emigrated here only 100 years ago. Still it's an interesting field. I have cousins who have visited my grandmother's home island off of Sicily. I don't have the money to do that, so maybe a website is the best I can do.
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