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| Harriet's ancestor, Marie Carandini; National Library of Australia / Wikimedia Commons |
Last Thursday’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured actress Harriet Walter, whose family are undeniably posh.
Much of this episode featured on the exploits of an Italian ancestor — the son of a noble family, who had the grandest of educations, but was drawn to ballet and the stage.
Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? wrapped up the current series with actress and comedian Diane Morgan.
Diane is possibly most well-known for mocking TV history programmes by playing hapless historian Philomena Cunk - which is somewhat ironically fitting for this programme.
Diane's personality is what carries this episode forward - there was a genuine element of wondering what she would say next, with a gladness that we were coming along for the ride.
Her family's stories, though, are equally compelling.
And it turned out that her father's ancestor, German Charlie was, (spoiler alert!) actually a German man known as Charlie - which Diane seemed more genuinely surprised at than I would have guessed.
There are also poignant moments relating to a lost love, killed on the battlefields of World War One.
The stand-out feature of the episode though, is Diane's Scottish ancestor Isabella - who had something of a reputation in her community.
It took a large amount of strength and obstinance, though, for a 19th Century woman to take a man to court over child support payments - often known as maintenance or affiliation
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It's often surprising to people that there was a mechanism in place to provide child support for unmarried mothers - it somehow doesn't chime with our modern view of Victorian society.
Making the father pay for the child, though, made it less likely that these children would become a 'burden' on the parish or poor law union (i.e. the state and the taxpayer) - which many saw as a win.
A lot of women were reluctant, however, to come forward and stand before a court - and often to have the details of their love lives cross-examined and then reported in the local press - due to the stigma attached to being an unmarried mother or 'ruined' woman.
To take several different men to court, then, as Isabella did, would have taken some serious gumption on her part!
All in all, this was a highly-entertaining episode to end the series with; let's hope we won't have to wait too long for the next one!
Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.
Series 21 of Who Do You Think You Are? brought down the curtain with reality TV star Gemma Collins.
This was a solid episode, but after Olly Murs' cracker the episode before, it felt a little anti-climactic.
Still, it probably didn't feel that way to Gemma - and that's what matters!
Gemma's episode featured some difficult discussions surrounding foster care and mental health.
Mostly these were done well - explaining that our modern understanding of schizophrenia is a lot different to the understanding of the condition in the 1950s.
Sadly, a lot of 'normal' teenage behaviour, i.e. rebelliousness, skipping school, back-talking, - especially pertaining to teenage girls - was caught up in the pathology of the day. This lead to a lot of people becoming institutionalised with no medical need.
I think the episode missed, though, that along with those who were unfairly and wrongly entangled in the system, were people who were genuinely unwell.
Was Gemma's biological grandmother one of them? It's not clear - we don't have her medical notes, and the only first-hand accounts we have are from people who were children at the time, and unaware of their aunt being a patient at mental health hospitals.
It's impossible to tell whether or not Gemma's grandmother was treated fairly or unfairly without having more information - but that ambiguity wasn't really, in my opinion, made clear enough to Gemma.
She seemed to come away with the conclusion that her grandmother had been one of those who were institutionalised for normal, frowned-upon, behaviour - which is entirely possible.
The circumstantial evidence of her teenage pregnancy and the known attitudes of some of the medical leaders at the institutions she was a patient at, strengthen that possibility.
But it's also entirely possible that her grandmother was extremely unwell. Because that also would have resulted in her becoming a patient at those same hospitals.
We sadly can't know - with the information presented - what the reality of the case might be, and it would have been better, in my opinion, to make that more clear.
Other parts of the episode included the criminality and poverty of London at the turn of the 20th Century, and Gemma's roots in Essex.
The latter was probably one of the less surprising features, but the remoteness and uniqueness of the Essex island Gemma's family came from was interesting enough.
Again, this was a solid episode, but probably would have been better off in a different place in the running order.
Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.
Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured celebrity dancer Kevin Clifton, known to everyone as 'Kevin from Grimsby.'
And while Kevin is, indeed, from Grimsby, his family history takes him much further away.
This episode featured one side of Kevin's family - his paternal line, whose history is mostly based in Canada.
And it's here that things get very interesting.
But also difficult - history is often uncomfortable, and this was something an emotional Kevin found out.
He lamented that it was 'always the men' in this ancestral line who inflicted the most pain and suffering on the women of his family, and had to grapple with being the descendant of both the men who caused the pain and the women who suffered from it.
A case of divorce in his family's past was covered in the newspapers - divorce being something highly unusual both at the time and in that particular area.
The press coverage was... revealing - with the husband taking a pre-emptive strategy, including denying - prior to any allegations being made - that he chased his wife with an axe and threatened to kill her. It's a very telling thing to try to get out in front of.
The abuse that was admitted to in court was bad enough, but considered acceptable at the time - it hopefully stands as a testament to social progress that admitting, in a court of law, that you had given your wife black eyes is no longer seen as a reasonable thing, and would now affect the divorce proceedings.
The main 'thread' of the episode, though, was the story - passed down through generations - of an Indigenous woman named Matooskie.
While it's not uncommon for families - especially in the US and Canada - to acquire a myth of Native heritage somewhere along the way, a specific name is much less so.
Matooskie, it turns out, was a First Nations (Canadian Indigenous) woman, who Kevin-from-Grimsby is directly descended from.
A well-documented and somewhat iconic individual amongst First Nations historians, her story is even more interesting than my brief description of this episode (hopefully) makes it sound.
To me, though, what is truly important is not only that the story was passed down through the family, but that her Native name - Matooskie - is the one that was remembered by her descendants, rather than her Christian/European name of Nancy.
It shows that regardless of her descriptions in church records as 'a half-breed woman' or her callous treatment by her Scottish husband, she retained her culture and her identity - enough to pass it down through the centuries.
Ready to start your own family history journey? I offer a range of professional genealogy services, check out my website for more details.
Presenter and comedian Matt Lucas' episode of Who Do You Think You Are? was focussed on the experiences of his Jewish family during the terrible events of the Holocaust.
Specifically, he wanted to know about his Jewish grandmother's experiences in pre-war Berlin, and what had become of her extended family afterwards.
Recent history can sometimes be the most devastating, affecting, as it does, people we knew and loved.
Like many, Matt Lucas' relatives sought safety in a place that they thought would be safe - Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
Sadly, The Netherlands did not remain safe for long - despite being a neutral country, Germany invaded and occupied the country from 10th May 1940.
This meant that Dutch Jewish communities were also persecuted and murdered in the Holocaust. The safety of Amsterdam was no longer safe.
A big surprise came when Matt found that one of his family members had known, and lived with, Anne Frank and her family before they went into hiding - and in fact Anne had mentioned him in her diary.
It's another example of just how personal the past becomes through the lens of family history.
Actress Anna Maxwell Martin's episode also featured difficult events in the lives of her grandparents.
Following her Irish paternal family, her uncle explained a little more to her about how difficult it was for their grandparents when one of their three sons died of Leukaemia.
It was also interesting that her uncle's view, as the older brother, was a little more measured than the experiences of Anna's father, who was younger when their brother died and felt more of a coldness in their collective childhoods than Anna's uncle did.
Turning to her maternal Scottish family, Anna looked into the family of her grandfather, Maxwell - whose name she took as part of her stage name.
Maxwell's upbringing was harder and more cruel than Anna had imagined. As a five-year-old child, after the death of his mother, Maxwell had been sent to an orphanage - where he was separated from his sisters, due to a policy of splitting boys and girls.
His father - Anna's great-grandfather - was still alive at the time, which led Anna on a journey of finding out why he had not been able to care for his younger children.
What followed was a tale of drunkenness and severe domestic abuse - for which Maxwell's father went to prison several times.
He was obviously returning to his wife when released from prison, as many of their large family of children were born after his first recorded offence.
Which may explain why, despite having died in her 40s, the picture of Maxwell's mother looks like an elderly lady. Her life was not an easy one.
One of the more difficult things about family history is that we can't change the past.
We can only try to understand and honour what our family members have been through.
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| Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Florence Chandler was a girl from Alabama, young and naïve. She married James Maybrick, a cotton trader, and together they lived in Liverpool. James was almost twenty years her senior. This was a fashionable marriage - American high-society girls marrying into 'old world' money. It was a marriage that soon ran into trouble - within a few years there were arguments and the spectre of divorce (attainable, though expensive, difficult to obtain, and socially shameful.) Florence's husband, a drug addict with a fascination for all things tonic and medicinal, was having an affair, was acting somewhat irrationally, and on at least one occasion had hit his wife (something that was socially and legally acceptable so long as the 'punishment' the husband dealt out was in proportion to the alleged misdoing by his wife.)
Arsenic was commonly found in almost everything in the Victorian period - food, medicine, cooking utensils, wallpaper, clothes; it wasn't as if it was difficult to purchase or find in the average house. In the Maybrick's home for example, amongst the sources of arsenic found was a packet of the stuff designed specifically, according to the label, for poisoning cats. It was in a great deal of James' medicines (along with some other, equally tasty ingredients,) and when he became ill the doctors prescribed a series of medicines and tonics, any of which could have reacted with one another, and included such substances as nitro-glycerine and cocaine.
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| Image courtesy of dan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
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| Image courtesy of sattva/FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
