Who Do You Think You Are? - Vicky McClure

 

Who Do You Think You Are? series 21 kicked off last Thursday with British actress Vicky McClure.

A lot of this episode focussed on relatively recent history - Vicky's grandparents and great-grandparents.

Often there are holes in our family stories that affect our understanding of even close family members, and Vicky was keen to know more about the things that made her grandmothers who they were.

First we turned to her paternal grandmother.

The mystery here was in her grandmother's parentage, and the circumstances which led to her being raised in a less-than-ideal environment by someone who wasn't her biological mother.

Poverty and infidelity created a circumstance where the way to save the marriage was to give up the child. And, as was pointed out repeatedly, the ability to vet the child's new parents at the time was almost non-existent. An impossible situation.

Afterwards, the episode shifted focus to Vicky's maternal family, and her PoW great-grandfather.

Life as a coal miner was sadly book-ended by his assignment to a Japanese PoW mine in Taiwan, where he would become the first of the prisoners to lose his life amidst the atrocious conditions.

As Vicky points out, little is known by the general public about this aspect of history.

Partly this is because it's a recent, horrible, part of history - it's uncomfortable and often disturbing to know what happened to these men, and Vicky understandably felt nervous.

I think this episode dealt well with this aspect of family history - the things that we find out aren't always pleasant, but that doesn't mean they're not important.

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