I missed this episode live on TV, but when the next week had a rerun, it gave me a chance to watch a catch up.

Jerome Bettis, like the previous two episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?, already knew about his father’s side of the family but didn’t know his mother’s side. He also knew that with the research, he’d probably run into a family history of slavery. So what was on his father’s side?

Meet The Whole Family

The episode started with Jerome hanging out with his kids and his wife, but then he went to Detroit to meet up with his mother Gladys, and uncle Abram “Butch” Bougard. They started out by quickly presenting a mystery person who disappeared from the family. Switching to the family chart, it suddenly had photos in it. I don’t recall seeing that before, and it looked nice.

Right To Ancestry, As Usual

My first instinct for records search for a US family is to try the census. So why did he go right for death records and why in Kentucky? Sure he lived there, but if he disappeared, why would they assume he died in the same state? Paducah is close to the borders of a couple other states. And it’s not as if Ancestry has that many death certificates, certainly not for the locations I usually search. They might have an index, but not the records. However, Jerome found a Kentucky death certificate for his great-grandfather, Burnett Bougard, or as it was spelled, Burnell Beaugard. And they were also surprised to find he was still in Paducah… but they were searching specifically in Kentucky.

They were not sure it was for the right person because of the spelling, so that was good, but there was no later comment about if they could verify it. They also made no comment about the fact that he was listed as married. Were they assuming he just ran off? I’ll come back to this later in the episode.

If the record was for the correct person, they showed that his father as Abe and mother as Amanda Gee. It looked like all three were born in Mississippi, but I couldn’t tell for sure for the mother. Back to the family chart, they showed Burnett’s father but ignored his mother from the certificate.

Jerome said, “Since the trail went cold with Burnett’s death…” I really don’t know what to say about this. The trail went cold? What kind of trail do you follow after someone dies? The only thing left is burial or cremation. Did he mean they couldn’t find anything before his death? Well, not everything is online and definitely not everything is on Ancestry. Was that what they meant?

Paducah, McCracken County, Kentucky

Jerome started by meeting Dr. Gerald Smith at the McCracken County Courthouse. Jerome’s voiceover included “where he’s already started doing some research for me”, instead of implying that the person was just waiting for him to show up to begin. That is always my preference. It takes the same amount of time to introduce the expert and state that they’ve been working on the research as it does to imply otherwise.

Gerald had a divorce record for Burnett and Ruby from 26 August 1921. It was interesting that not only did the family surname keep changing spelling, but that Burnett and Ruby were each spelled differently on the same document, as Beaurgard and Beargard. Gerald explained that they focused more on the sound of the name, but if he just abandoned her, then why were the two names spelled differently since they were both probably spoken by her? Then he explained that census takers would deliberately misspell names. I hadn’t heard that before, but how does it even relate to this? We haven’t seen a census record, and we’re not looking at one. In this case, I think maybe one was a typo, since they should have been the same in this case, even if spelled differently than a later generation.

When Jerome read from the divorce petition, it sounded like the marriage was in 1919, but it was just worded awkwardly to me as I soon discovered. A quick flash of the petition and I could see where it said 1906. When they next showed the second page, it was clear that they were married in Illinois in 1906 (though it said “about 10 years ago”; someone’s math was off) and separated in spring of 1919 in Paducah.

Married Or Not?

Another part they missed was that he was listed as married on his death certificate. Was that a mistake or did he remarry? It takes until the very end of the episode to learn that his death was in 1925. It wasn’t much time, but certainly enough for him to remarry. Maybe that was why he abandoned her? They don’t pursue this part of his story. They didn’t look for the marriage record either.

An alternative might have been that she wasn’t granted the divorce, thus he was still married. They never did reveal that. We were looking at a petition, which doesn’t mean the divorce was finalized.

Jerome asked about if there was more to find about the family story of Burnett being a rebel rouser. Gerald had already looked in court records and not found anything, suggesting that Jerome check the newspapers.

As he was leaving, Jerome grabbed his notebook as if he was going to write something. I didn’t mention it before, but he had that in the scene with his mother too. Again, it’s always good to see the celebrity taking enough interest to take their own notes.

Strange Newspaper Source

The next stop was at the McCracken County Public Library where historian Berry Craig was waiting. Accessing the Kentucky newspapers from the Library of Congress, Jerome tried various spellings to find an article in 1897. Though he was only shown trying two spellings, it may take more. This a lesson some people resist: spelling doesn’t matter, especially the older the records. This particular episode showed multiple spellings of the same surname across different sources, which is not so uncommon.

With the search result, the article appeared right on the screen with part of it highlighted, so why did he have to get the microfilm to read it? It’s like they’re deliberately avoiding showing that other web sites have information that Ancestry doesn’t. They don’t want people to know that there are other good sources online? I think that might be going a bit overboard. I really don’t think they’ll lose the business they would otherwise get by helping people know that other sources exist also. This time at least they admitted what web site they searched. The Library of Congress isn’t in competition with them, I suppose. The previous episode search of GenealogyBank was obscured and never named. Also, after reading from the microfilm, they showed a much cleared image of the article. Did that come from the Library of Congress scan?

The article mentioned that Burnett swore a warrant against his boss, a gutsy thing for a black man to do in 1897, but checking a few days forward, they found that the case was dismissed.

Hop, Skip, And A Jump

Jerome immediately wanted to find more about Burnett’s father, Abe. It seemed like an odd jump, but there was probably a lot cut from the episode that actually happened during the scene. Maybe Berry had to suggest that avenue of research. Finding a 1902 article, they jumped ahead to find where Abe sued the railroad. Again, they showed the article on screen different than what the microfilm looked like. They also didn’t show how many searches it took to find him with the spelling Bogard.

At the State Archives in Frankfurt, librarian Jennifer Frazier had some more information. Jerome was shocked to find his great-great-grandfather couldn’t sign his own name. But really, 100 years ago, literacy wasn’t that common among non-slaves either. They discussed some details of the case and read bits of the documents.

I knew a commercial was coming before Jerome read the verdict. Do they really need to do commercial cliffhangers to keep people watching? If you’re already watching the episode, aren’t you interested in the rest of the story anyhow? Maybe I’m just opposed to cliffhangers at all. If I like a show, I’ll watch without it.

After reading that Abe won the case, albeit at a smaller amount than he was asking, Jennifer then sent Jerome back to Paducah to learn even more about it.

Back to Paducah

At the Paducah Railroad Museum, he met historian John E.L. Robertson who knew people who remembered the case and passed on the story. We didn’t really hear much more about it in the episode, but I like to assume that if he went all the way back across the state, there were more details that didn’t make the episode’s final cut.

After seeing a steam engine, the kind of train Abe was hit by, Jerome was still concerned with his signature and wanting to find if Abe was born a slave. Again, he searched on Ancestry for Abe’s death certificate. Wasn’t he just at the State Archive where they would have had that?

After finding the 1925 death certificate, Jerome assumed that the unknown birth date meant he was a slave, but does it really? While it was likely true he was born into slavery, no birth date just meant that the informant didn’t know the date, not that Abe didn’t know because he was born a slave and they didn’t keep records. But it did have the given names of his parents, Jerry and Liza.

But Jerome still wanted to confirm that they were slaves. Didn’t the other episodes with black families check the census to lead them to that place? Why did they consistently ignore such an obvious document? They are certainly in a time period to check the 1900-1930 censuses, and then skip back to the 1800s.

Searching For Slaves

In Murray, Kentucky, he met with Dr. John Hardin for more proof. At this point, Jerome stated that no last names suggested Abe’s parents were born without surnames, but that’s not true either. There are far too many death certificates that don’t list the parents’ surnames and sometimes their given names. It’s not about whether the person knew when he was born or what his parents’ names were, it was whether someone who outlived him knew. Jerome was making the wrong assumptions, regardless of the reasons and the fact that he turned out to be correct that they were born slaves.

John stated that slaves typically took the names of their owners, so he went to look for the will of Joseph Bogard. John actually called him Beauregard, which apparently Jerome’s ancestors used for a time, but it was not the correct name.

The will book was something we hadn’t seen before, with every page either laminated or within sheet protectors. Old records should be protected that way. Or scanned. Jerome read the will wrong, where he read “my negro boy” when it actually said “my three negro boys”, but it listed Joseph leaving Jerry and Eliza to his wife, Mary. Also, they made the jump from his mother being Liza to assuming it was this Eliza. It’s a reasonable jump and there’s probably not a lot or maybe not any documentation to prove or disprove it, but it’s still an assumption. They just kind of skipped over mentioning it. The will was from 1841, before Abe was born, thus, he wasn’t listed.

Jerome stated that the people being treated as property was despicable. But he already knew his Bettis side. Did that family not go back in American history far enough to be slaves? Yes, it was despicable, but he seems almost surprised to find it.

In the slave dower list, which listed all of the slaves owned by Mary, it listed Jerry, Eliza, and Abram. John said they were listed until 1860 in the dower list but not after, and Mary had died by then. Another court record revealed they were all sold, Jerry and Eliza together, and Abram to someone else at about ten years old. If they were sold, why weren’t they listed as someone else’s slaves? It sounded like a Bogard relative bought Jerry and Eliza. They had the names of who bought them and couldn’t find a record of it in the dower list? Again, no explanation. Seems they should have been able to find them in the same records, just with different owners.

Jerome had trouble imagining being split from his parents at ten years old. He must have stumbled the sentence of imagining being split from his children because half of that sentence was clearly added as a voiceover later.

They Have To Go See Some Land

They drove out to the land where the family had lived before being sold in 1860. Emancipation was five years later, so Jerome wondered if Abram was reunited with his parents, which was a great question. The preview for the next section kind of gave away the answer. Then the voiceover, “it’s a question Dr. Hardin came prepared to answer”. I’m so glad they’re stating things that way now.

Then they finally looked at a census at the end of the episode. I thought one of Ancestry’s biggest draws was supposed to be their census collection? But in this episode, they avoided it for as long as possible.

In 1870, they found Jerry 53, Mary 24, Abram 22, Frances 7, and Elizabeth 1. Where was Eliza? Did he question what happened to her? Did they skip it because they didn’t find it? Also of interest was that Jerry was black and the others listed as mulatto, another detail they skipped over. Relationships were not listed. Was Mary his wife by that time? Frances seemed a little old to be her daughter in modern times, but probably more likely back then. Was Abram listed as mulatto because the others all were even though he was black? Or if they could find more, would they discover that Eliza was mulatto? Again, questions they didn’t answer. They seemed to uncover a lot of new questions at the end here that they didn’t pursue in the episode.

Back To Detroit

While recounting the story to his mother and uncle, we finally learned that Burnett died in 1925. So he and his father both died in the same year? Or did Jerome get those confused. Jerome also stated that there was no disappearance, but instead it was a divorce. But we didn’t learn that. He abandoned Ruby and she divorced him. Was he there to participate in the divorce? Did he abandon her and she knew where he was? Did she just not want him back? I think discounting a disappearance, unless there was a lot more research done that we didn’t see in the episode, was wrong.

Conclusion

I was almost expecting a repeat, since all of the episodes about blacks ends up going back to slavery and often has DNA testing to place their ancestral home in Africa. This time, they skipped the DNA. It worked out for some of the others we’ve seen, did Jerome just not match anyone or did they entirely skip it this time?

They certainly raised a lot more questions than they seemed to answer. Genealogy tends to do that, but they left so much unanswered that I can only wonder about. And write about on this blog.

This is the fifth article in the Who Do You Think You Are? Nitpicker’s Version for Season 3.

1. Martin Sheen
2. Marisa Tomei
3. Blair Underwood
4. Reba McEntire

The URL for this article is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/03/18/wdytya-3×05-nitpickers/.

This season of Who Do You Think You Are? has improved over the previous. It seems they’re going for a little more realism in the episodes, admitting that it is a lot of work and sometimes even showing a record search with no results. Just as the previous episode did, Reba McEntire’s episode did not disappoint in this way.

Typical But Still Lucky

During the introduction, Reba spoke about writing her autobiography, saying that she learned more about her father’s side of the family at the time, but not her mother’s. “I guess I just didn’t ask enough questions.” Most genealogists have this problem, with not remembering everything they were told when younger and not knowing the right questions to ask before the people with the answers are gone from our lives. Reba was lucky because her mother was still alive, so she got a start on her search by visiting the McEntire Ranch in Stringtown, Oklahoma.

She said that she’d like to go back as far back as possible and wanted to know her first ancestor in America. I love how she had to honk at the cows on the way and they kept that in the final cut of the episode.

Her mother, Jackie, had a picture of Reba Brassfield, her own grandmother and Reba’s namesake. Jackie added that all of her kids were named for grandparents. Another picture that Reba hadn’t seen before showed Reba Brassfield with her parents, B.W. and Susie.

To The Web Site

Someone else mentioned this somewhere, but I wonder how much instruction the celebrities are getting before they film. For the ones who seem to do their own research, or at least part of it without obvious guidance, they must be told to go to Ancestry, the sponsor, and there are always useful results. So either they do this more often and the negative result searches aren’t shown on camera, or there is some guidance for them to not waste time with those searches.

Searching for her namesake, Reba Brassfield, she found the 1910 census showing Reba at age six with her widowed mother Susie, older sister, and younger brother. I couldn’t make out the names because of the handwriting. She then went back to the 1900 census to find B.W. Brassfield, Susie’s husband. She found a lot of Brassfields in Mississippi, but not him. Jackie was the one who told Reba to go down to Monroe County and find them.

To Aberdeen, Mississippi

At the Evans Memorial Library, in the voiceover, Reba said she wanted to start the search on her own before the genealogist arrived. She searched through a book of obituaries, but still didn’t find B.W. She found some other Brassfields though. I wish she would have stopped to read about the others. They could have been other relatives, and likely were (especially after already seeing the end of the episode). If she found a sibling, B.W. might have been mentioned, as I’ve seen siblings listed often in obituaries.

Again, without finding the record she wanted, she gave up a little bit too quickly for me. First, the census could have been a mess and she just had to search Ancestry differently to find the family. He could have been misspelled in the census or in the transcription. How much did she try to find him spelled only with one S, or IE reversed, or a number of other options? Then, not everyone had an obituary. She thought she had a dead end already and didn’t know what else to do.

Genealogist D. Joshua Taylor arrived to help her out, carrying a scroll in his hand.

“It took a little bit of work. That’s a lie, it took a lot of work.” I think someone’s been reading our comments. :-) I love the stories and I love the discoveries, but sometimes they have to remind the viewers that it’s not as easy as it looks, that it does take a fair amount of work, and that the expert genealogist or historian is not always waiting for you with all the information you need already researched. This is especially true for the next part, which we’ve seen in other episodes, where we suddenly jump back several generations. It takes some time to add that many people.

Unrolling the scroll, Reba was presented with a Brasfield Family Tree. Josh explained that B.W. went by this single S spelling, and that records were usually written by someone else who might spell it differently too. He also mentioned that the family were farmers and probably couldn’t afford an obituary.

Again, they went straight back on the male line of the Brasfield family only. We can hope that they did much more than that behind the scenes and either didn’t find a story worthy of prime time or just focused on that one. The person at the top of the chart, George Brasfield, was born in Wake County, North Carolina about 1765.

It’s interesting that Reba said she wasn’t expecting to go so far back. She was expecting to go one generation back to B.W.’s parents and then she was presented with three back. Did she not watch this show before? It’s very common for them to do this. Especially mentioning that B.W. was a farmer, how much interesting at TV-worthy information could they find for him? But she also mentioned at the beginning that she wanted to find the first person who was in America, so they needed to go back further for that.

Josh pointed out that George was born before the American Revolution and would have grown up during the war. He also said that interesting things were happening in Wake County, suggesting that Reba go there to learn more.

To Raleigh, North Carolina

The chart stated that George was born in Wake County, but it didn’t mention the city. Raleigh is in Wake County, where Reba went to the State Archives, meeting with historian Philip Otterness. Phil mentioned that Raleigh was not there at the time and they decided to carve it out of farmland. A map from 1817 with the plan for the city was examined. Each block of land was labeled for who owned it (I assume it was ownership), and she found George Brasfield. She asked what was on the land and Phil had the land records ready, even though the book was dated 1846-1849. The book was dated after George had died, but talked about the land he had.

She found where it mentioned Brasfield’s Old Tavern and was thrilled to find that her ancestor owned a bar. She had mentioned earlier how she feels comfortable in Ireland and Scotland but not in England. Finding an ancestor with a bar she figured was why she was always comfortable singing in Honky Tonks.

Reba had some great questions in this episode. She wanted to know about her ancestor’s life. Figuring that owning a business meant he had some money, she asked if he owned other properties. Phil then produced the tax records for 1781-1860. The pages in the folders were falling apart; I hope they’ve been scanned. He wasn’t found on the first list she checked; the second she was shown looking at showed that he owned 1615 3/4 acres. They did not explain why he was listed as “Esq”. Reba then asked what the next columns were. “W Poll” showed white adult male individuals, then she had to ask what “B Poll” stood for, which was black men and women between 12 and 52. She seemed a little shocked that he had ten slaves. They didn’t mentioned that the next two columns listed Stud Horses and Taverns, of which George was showing one tavern.

Another thing they skipped over was the next column over, a large space, which said very clearly “Taken by Geo Brasfield Esq”, so he was the person who recorded the information on that part of the document, and he had very nice handwriting. What did esquire mean back then and was it related to the fact that he recorded the tax information? They didn’t go there.

Upon finding he was a slave owner, her first thought was to find out if he was a good slave owner, if he treated them well. Throughout the episode, Reba was very concerned with the individuals and became emotional about their lives, hundreds of years later.

At the end of the scene, we can also see that David Brasfield Jr is listed two names down from George. I couldn’t tell if he owned 100 acres or 1000. This is another case where WDYTYA goes straight back in the research instead of sideways, never checking for siblings. While they might find good information, sometimes there are missing documents and siblings must be researched to fill in the gaps. Another reason to research sideways is to find relatives. You can’t find your cousins if you don’t know who else was related to the family.

Sometimes Slaves, Sometimes Owners

Forty miles north, she visited the Granville County Court House for more information, meeting with historian Harry Watson. It was interesting that during her voiceover about George being a slave owner, they showed her driving past cotton plants.

Harry said that the first place to start was in newspapers. Using GenealogyBank, but mostly cropping the site name out of the picture, she searched for George. They found one article about a runaway slave that George had encountered. From different courthouses, Harry had a folder of papers, showing bills of sale for slaves. She was shocked to find that he sold a three year old on one page. The record of deeds, in a big book, showed a 14 month old slave, but Reba didn’t read enough on air for us to know if she was being bought or sold by George.

Reba was shocked to find her ancestor trading in children. She stepped outside and took some notes in a notebook during a voiceover. I hadn’t seen the notebook before in this episode, or hadn’t noticed it. As I’ve said on previous reviews, I like when we see the celebrity take notes. It shows that they have enough interest to really remember everything, instead of just collecting the copies or the fancy chart drawn for them at the end.

Harry suggested she visit an historian colleague of his, Warren R. Hofstra at the Essex County Courthouse in Tappahannock, Virginia. She was still searching for the first ancestor who arrived in America. Warren pointed out that Brasfield was a rare name, and two generations back was another George. Between the two Georges, on the family chart, was David. So that David Jr. found on the tax record was very possibly the brother of her 1765-born George.

A 1721 land deed showed that George bought 300 acres of land for 1500 pounds of tobacco. Again with good questions, Reba asked where he got his money and if he owned any more land.

In a book of court orders for 1695-1699 in Essex County, they found George listed at nine years old as an indentured servant. She still wanted to know more, asking where his parents were. Back on the computer, they found a list of immigrants in a Google book. They had more interesting spelling in the book, find George Brasfeild, but also that he had  “eleaven yeares” to serve. She commented that they changed the spelling several times, but who’s to say if that’s true? It could have been a typo, messy handwriting not transcribed correctly, or he could have been illiterate and someone else had to spell it for him and got it wrong. She noted the discrepancy in age, but Warren suggested they added an extra year to his labors, saying he was younger on the other document.

Again Reba was getting very personal about it, wondering where his mother was. Warren noted where many of the other kids on the boat were from, so he sent her to Chester, England to find out more.

Crossing The Ocean

Some episodes immediately jump to other countries, this one took a while longer. At the Cheshire County Records Office, she met with Brett Langston to find more. They started with computerized records, so she searched for his baptism record, where she found Georgius, Thomas, Silentia, and Anna. All but Anna showed Macc for residence, also, they were spelled Brassfield again, with the double S.

“It’s amazing how you can just find somebody.” Yes, Reba, after a lot of people have put a lot of effort into indexing to make it easy. Actually, it is easy to find people, but it’s difficult to find the people in between to connect them all together, because some records are indexed and others are not.

Brett went to get the baptism record, “and a few more things besides”. Well, there were three others listed in the index for baptisms.

He asked her to wear gloves because she was wearing nail polish. That’s one I hadn’t heard of before.

With George’s baptism, she knew that Thomas of Macclesfield was his father. Reba immediately wanted to know when he was born and what was his mother’s name.

The record was from 17 June 1688. With that date, the index made more sense for the column “dated” which contained seven digits, apparently skipping the 1000 in the year. Therefore, George was baptized 17 June 1688, Thomas 17 November 1691, Silentia 12 May 1695, and Anna 9 October 1702. So apparently the indexed Thomas was not his father.

Brett brought out an old parchment to find the marriage for Thomas to Abbigall, and I think it said Binnow for her surname. Reba read the name as Abigail; was it just spelled differently but pronounced the same as our modern spelling? She asked if there was a death record for the parents. A register from 1720 showed Thomas buried 30 June 1720. Another death register for 1696 listed Abigal (with that spelling).

Reba was still perplexed with a father sending his son away at nine or ten years old, saying she couldn’t even send Shelby to summer camp.

Brett sent her to Macclesfield to find out more.

So Many Questions

With all of the great questions she had asked, did she ask about the other Brassfields that had shown up next to her ancestors in the records? What about those other three baptisms? With Abigail’s death in 1696, they obviously weren’t her kids, but did Thomas remarry and have more kids after sending George away or were they cousins to George? After all, the 1691 was Thomas, so was it Thomas Jr.? These are questions that are not answered in the episode.

At Saint Michael’s Church, she met James Horn, an historian of indentured servitude, “who has been working on the Brassfield family”. I prefer that they admit the person has been researching rather than implying the celebrity is there to ask questions and the historian just happens to know everything being asked. James explained that George didn’t have many good options, where indentured servitude was his best chance at a good future, that he would never have been a land owner otherwise. James asked Reba about what happened to George as if he didn’t know, but then went on to tell her that 150 years later in America, there were 100s of Brassfields in America who were all descended from George.

From this, I would conclude that she has a lot of cousins out there, both in America and England. How far did the off-camera research go into the extended family? If it was my own research, I would have gathered all of it and found how it tied back in to my own family if I could.

They stepped outside to see where Thomas and Abigail were buried and they were stepping on gravestones laid out on the ground. That seems like an unusual set-up to me, especially where they zoomed in and showed them wearing down. Walking on them can only make them wear down faster. Reba stepped out into the grassy area where James said her ancestors would have been buried, where she spoke to Thomas and thanked him for sending George to America.

And she finally found somewhere in England where she felt good about being there.

Back At The Ranch

Returning to her family ranch, she shared the story with her mother.

Conclusion

Every time they bring more reality into the show, I love it even more. I know they want to tell the good stories, but pointing out that it took a lot of work to get to the people and the stories, and showing sometimes how records are not always found when you expect them makes it much more realistic. If the purpose is to interest people in doing their own genealogy research, then those people have to understand that it’s not always about flying across the country or around the world and finding someone who gives you all the answers when you arrive. Sometimes it’s hard to find more, but you have to not give up when your first attempt to find information fails. Everyone hits blocks in their research, but they have to understand that everyone does and they should just keep working on it.

This is the fourth article in the Who Do You Think You Are? Nitpicker’s Version for Season 3.

1. Martin Sheen
2. Marisa Tomei
3. Blair Underwood

The URL for this article is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/03/16/wdytya-3×04-nitpickers/.

Sadly, I’ve already fallen behind in reviewing the episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? but I will continue on. In my defense, I didn’t see the latest episode yet, so I’m still only two behind, and now one with this article. ;-)

Blair Underwood’s episode thankfully did not start with that two minute introduction like the first two did. They should have enough content to fill the 42 minute time slot without that every time; there is always more to look at or explain.

Blair already had great information about his Underwood line but wanted to learn more about his mother’s line. His father was an army officer in the 1960s and his grandfather was the second African American police officer in Steuben, Ohio.

At The Parents’ House

His brother, Frank Jr., had been working on the Underwood side for years. His mother, Marilyn, shared what she knew about her own grandmother, so Blair had his starting point. Frank Jr. explained that most families run into brick walls maybe 300 or 500 years back, but as African Americans, their brick wall is 150 years ago. This is something they share with a lot of Ashkenazi Jewish families, except for us, it’s just under 200 years. There just weren’t any records kept before that for many places, and if they were kept, they were not only few and far between, but they pre-dated the adoption of surnames, making it that much more difficult to figure out.

DNA Testing

Blair pulled out an Ancestry.com DNA test, saying he would mail it out right then. His next voiceover started with “while I’m waiting for the results…” As much as we’d like to believe they do the research live on the show, I’m pretty sure he sent in his DNA for testing months before. Not only do they need to get the results back in the hopes of finding something, but then they need to follow up with that research. Please, a little reality.

This episode already reminded me of Emmit Smith’s episode, where he took the DNA test and they found where in Africa he came from.

Blair also specified that the DNA test was for the Underwood side of the family. So did they just do the Y-DNA test? He’s researching his mother’s line in the episode. Did they not care to test the mtDNA or the autosomal, or did they not get useful results so they didn’t mention it?

Didn’t Have To Go Far

Sometimes I wonder if they specifically look for what the celebrity wants to know, or if they suggest which part of the family that person should “research” during their journey to talk about during the interviews. Do they just happen to find interesting stories if they look hard enough for any family?

Blair immediately started with looking for his mother’s grandparents, Harry Royal and Ada Belle White. From his parents’ house in Petersburg, he didn’t have to drive far to get to the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Genealogist Joseph Shumway was waiting for him with information.

They started with the marriage record for Harry and Ada, finding their parents were Ben and Fannie Royall and Thomas and Mary White. One document, one generation, just as it should be. I always find it a little disturbing when they jump back multiple generations without the slightest hint of the how they got there. Did they fill in all the vital records in between or just find thing to help them jump back further? Did they skip past the people that were listed as farmers in every census to find the one that sounded more interesting or did they also research that person in case there was a good story to tell?

Joseph then shared the marriage record for Ben Royal and Fanny Early. The spelling differences listed here are just as they were in the documents. Slight changes like these are easy to find, but genealogists have to learn to keep an open mind about variations. There are multiple reasons for spelling variations. I didn’t like how they kept referring to him as Benjamin when all the records they showed listed him as Ben. Did they have that name in something they didn’t show? Sometimes the shortened version of the name is the one a person is actually given.

They didn’t show it in the episode, but apparently that marriage record showed Fanny’s parents, Sonny and Maria, but didn’t mention Ben’s parents. Also, I’m not sure why they were suddenly showing the wife’s name before the husband’s in their chart.

Teaching Real Genealogy

At that point, Joseph explained that he’d done some looking around and found more about Sonny Early. So here we had the genealogist guiding the research, instead of making it seem like Blair did all the work himself.

The 1900 Census listed Sauney Early. Blair read across to some of the other columns to know more, something beginners often don’t do. Joseph pointed out the top of the page, the location of the census, at Central State Hospital. Blair knew it was a mental hospital.

We don’t know if he asked the question live; it could have been a voiceover added later, but Blair asked about looking at earlier censuses. I thought it was great how Joseph explained in this episode about the records, that the census was taken every ten years but that 1890 was lost in a fire. Thus, they went back to 1880, finding Sawney was a farm laborer. What they didn’t mention was that he was living with his wife Maria, daughter Fannie, and mother Malinda. They like to skip back generations, and right there they ignored one. In 1870, they found him as a blacksmith, with Maria and Alexander. Relationships weren’t listed, but the age was right for a possible son.

Joseph then explained again that the next logical step would be to search 1860, except that slaves were not listed, and having not found Sawney suggested that he wasn’t free. I always like when they use the correct words, that evidence or lack of evidence suggests things or that certain things are possibilities, rather than stating something as a fact no matter how likely it was if still unproven.

They call this “the wall” in African American genealogy. Blair mentioned that he knew ahead of time that he would hit this wall of slavery. Again, analogous to Jewish genealogy, first we hit the Holocaust (and sometimes its lack of records), then we hit the beginning of record keeping and surnames not much sooner.

Timelines

The timeline was constructed by voiceover while Blair was driving to his next destination, wondering about the decline of the mental status of his ancestor, Sawney, from blacksmith, to farm laborer, and finally to the mental hospital.

In Lynchburg at the Jones Memorial Library, historian Dr. Dan Fountain guided Blair to look at newspapers on microfilm. Blair seemed to enjoy one article which called Sawney a “pestiferous darkey”. The next article described him as a “religious enthusiast or lunatic”. A third article from the New York Times was already printed for Blair, though it was news from Lynchburg. If it made the NYT, wasn’t it big enough to be in the local paper? And what made them even think to look in the NYT? In each article, it mentioned that Sawney was shot, and the third said he was killed, but Blair knew that that had to be incorrect since he was in the census after that time. So again they taught that not every piece of evidence is correct. One last printed article about the last incident, and they then headed out to see the geography where the incidents took place. A map revealed where Sawney lived and a deposition gave him a reason for killing his neighbor’s cow. Suddenly, he had a purpose for his actions and they didn’t seem quite as crazy.

In the end, they didn’t find out why he ended up in the hospital. Wasn’t that the intention of that line of research? Or did they find out and it didn’t make the episode? They just kind of abandoned the story.

Shifting Focus

Focus shifted to Ada Belle White’s family. Back in Lynchburg to see Joseph Shumway again, a death certificate for her mother, Mary, added her father’s name, Delaware Scott. Back to Ancestry and the census, they went to the 1860 census. Blair was worried they’d hit the wall again, but found his ancestor listed. Blair recalled that a slave would not be listed in the 1860 census, but he noticed that he was a land owner. Looking at the other names in the household, noticing an older woman named Judith, they realized that she was probably, then possibly, his mother. Since the census didn’t define the relationships, that was the correct conclusion.

At The Library of Virginia, Blair met historian Dr. Eva Sheppard Wolf. She had a register of free negros, explaining that it had even more information than was found in the census. The first record verified that Judith was his mother and that he was born free. Because he was born free, Blair asked and Eva answered that it was “a foregone conclusion” because the status came from the mother. Interesting, in that Jewish status also comes from the mother.

Free Blacks Going Way Back

Blair was surprised to hear that there were so many free slaves at the time, and Eva explained lots of information about free slaves, how they could become free, and the laws of the time.

I like how on one record, she asked, “Do you want to try to read that?” Sometimes it amazes me that the celebrities can read the old documents so easily. Maybe they’re clearer in person, or maybe we just don’t see them given a transcription. The document pointed out that Judy married Samuel Scott. Blair was amazed that there were free Blacks in Virginia in the 1790s, calling it “a monumental discovery”.

Switching to the chart, they added on Judy’s maiden name and her mother’s name, but they never showed in the episode where that information came from. Clearly, they had more documents that made the editing room floor, but they included it in the family chart anyhow.

Back To Lynchburg

For more on the Scott family, they had to go back to Lynchburg. Eva brought Blair to the Court Street Baptist Church where they looked first at land deeds. Were these records kept in the church? It seems like an unusual place to find land deeds. Tax records showed Samuel Scott had two slaves in 1838. Back to the 1840 census, which listed only the head of household, it showed he had one slave over the age of 55. It was fascinating to me to learn so much about free Blacks, and the laws about how they had to leave Virginia, and that free Blacks would own their relatives so they could stay together.

I was actually surprised that Blair didn’t come up with that idea, because it was my first thought while watching. Why else would anyone own slaves that old and especially without owning younger ones?

Then he finally hit the wall. There were no records that told how they became free. I did recall that in one census, Blair noted that the family was listed as mulatto. Remembering previous episodes of WDYTYA, I wondered if maybe they had the “usual” story that the illegitimate child of the slave owner was freed.

DNA Results

According to the voiceover, his DNA results were just in. I’m pretty sure they were in a while before filming began. Why can’t they make more honest voiceovers? Dr. Ken Chahine from Ancestry met with Blair, explaining about the DNA tests a little. Having the normal range of 26% European, again nobody mentioned that census listing earlier where Blair noticed the family was listed as mulatto. After finding the general area of Africa that his DNA matched to, they found one person who apparently was a 10th cousin, born in Cameroon.

Now, I can only wonder how they figured they had a 10th cousin. First of all, what DNA test did they do? At the beginning, we knew that the DNA was to test the Underwood side, so they likely did the Y-DNA. Maybe I’m forgetting something, but how could they possibly be so accurate? I certainly haven’t looked at the DNA results on Ancestry, but is there anywhere that says the relationship given is just an estimate? That was not shown in the episode. I don’t think they could possibly guarantee an exact result so far back.

Ken explained that Blair and Eric clearly shared a relative on the paternal line around 1600 or 1700. So, then there was about a 100 year range of when they shared a common ancestor, but somehow they also narrowed that down to a 10th cousin?

Back To Africa

Blair was thrilled to find out he was going to Cameroon. Had he seen the earlier episode where Emmit went to Africa and he was hoping for a similar result? Blair took his father and they met their very distant cousins.

It was interesting that Eric was asked in 2005 to take a DNA test because African Americans were wanting to trace their ancestry by DNA. Was Ancestry collecting DNA samples even before they offered the service? I don’t remember hearing about their tests until very recently. Or maybe the samples were shared between companies?

Conclusion

I thought this was a great episode. Of course, there were things I still think they could improve, but it seems like they’re reading all the blogs and critiques and making the episodes better. Or maybe they are just watching their own episodes and realizing the same improvements the rest of us see.

Putting more reality into the episodes is good. As much as these shows are for entertainment and to get people interested in doing their genealogy, without a little reality, people would give up very quickly when they didn’t get the same kind of results. Instead of implying that the researcher (aka, the celebrity) will know where to look and be able to find everything on their own detracts from the work the professionals have done. I like to see the celebrity sort of leading the research and asking their own questions, but it’s also good when they meet a pro and, instead of asking if they can find something, the pro just says “I found some things for you.”

I like to see the genealogy lessons that were in this episode, even though they didn’t point out each one. There was the lesson of checking the census and searching back every ten years, 1890 being burned, and 1860 not listing slaves. There were plenty of possiblies and probablies and other such words where there should have been. And when they found the newspaper article stating Sawney had died, when they already knew he hadn’t, showed that not every document is always correct.

The DNA test bothered me a little. Certainly my own DNA testing has recently colored my distaste for those. While the test is scientific and some results are good, the way they determine relationships between people still needs a lot of work. However, when they narrowed down his ancestral location, showing several places on the map, that was more believable to me. And I can believe that they found a very distant cousin, it was defining the distance of the relationship that I know could not be possible.

This is the third article in the Who Do You Think You Are? Nitpicker’s Version for Season 3.

1. Martin Sheen
2. Marisa Tomei

The URL for this article is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/03/09/wdytya-3×03-nitpickers/.

Mostly ignoring Twitter for an hour, I finally got to watch Marisa Tomei’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? I preferred watching the week before with the company of other genealogists at RootsTech, and also because it was devoid of spoilers online. I didn’t ignore Twitter as much as I should have.

For the first episode, I expect the extra long introduction to all the celebrities and sound bites about what they’re going to find, but was it necessary to include the two minute introduction for the second episode? Don’t they have a lot of family history to uncover?

Starting In Brooklyn

Marisa said that her father built up a large tree for his side of the family, but I guess nobody worked on her mother’s side before. Parents Gary and Addie, and brother Adam met her and shared some family photos. The big mystery of the family was Marisa’s great-grandfather, Leopoldo Bianchi, who was murdered in 1910. Family lore said that he probably cheated on his wife, but they weren’t completely sure.

This episode jumped quickly to Ancestry.com, where Addie had put the family tree data into their web site. Why did she do that? Probably because there wasn’t a single bit of information on the site relevant to the episode. Is it really necessary to use the site in every episode? They insert a bit of genealogy reality, how about the reality that not everything is online and not everything is on Ancestry? They get enough commercials in between.

The family clearly knew quite a bit about their ancestors and the towns where they came from. And what kind of computer was she using? It looked like a convertible laptop.

Marisa then had a talk alone with her brother. While they took the time to show more about how close the siblings were, was that scene really necessary? They didn’t really say any more about the family history and there was no great sharing scene at the end between them. It felt like they were filling time because they didn’t have enough content for the episode. I find that hard to believe.

Off To Italy

The second episode of the season and it almost immediately flew off to Europe once the story was established, just like the previous episode. We must have more America-centered episodes coming later. Marisa headed to Italy, to Cecina in Tuscany, where Leopoldo lived. She also wanted to know about Leopoldo’s wife and her family.

She began her search at the Cecina Municipal Cemetery archives, meeting with a guide, Fabio De Segni. Fabio was speaking English, but they had captions for him. He stayed with Marisa for quite a while in this episode. The cemetery caretaker, Loris Gagliardi, was waiting for them.

Allowing her to “do the research” herself, Marisa asked for information about Leopoldo’s death in 1910. When it wasn’t found, Loris suggested looking in 1911, finding a record. The scene seemed a little confusing, obviously editing whatever attempt at searching in 1910 yielded, then cutting straight to finding the 1911 record, which was most likely waiting for Marisa and the cameras to arrive. However, I did like that it showed good genealogy methodology, to begin looking in the year when you think the event happened, then to check surrounding years if it isn’t found. Not every family story is going to have a perfect memory. Even some documents won’t always have the correct information and a wider berth must be given to the search.

Fabio helped with the translation of the document, then handed her a translation of the entire document. She was most shocked to read that he died of an illness, but also that he was transported to Cecina, because she thought he had been killed there.

I also noticed in the scene that she had a notebook. I didn’t see her writing in it at any time during the episode, but it’s likely she was keeping some notes. It’s always good to see the celebrities taking enough interesting in recording the information for themselves.

Marisa took a walk alone out to the gravesite of Leopoldo and his wife, Adelaide.

Travel By Boat

Knowing where different family members came from, they headed to Elba, a small island 12 miles off the coast, where Adelaide Canovaro was from.

They went to the Parish Church of Rio nell’Elba to find some records on Adelaide’s family. Father Leonardo Biancalania, the parish priest, arrived with a stack of large books. While they captioned some of Marisa’s English while in the church, they did not caption his Italian at all. Kind of an oversight there.

Apparently, Father Leonardo told Marisa that the books were all the Canovaro family, according to what she said. Maybe what he actually told her was that he found the Canovaro family in each of the books. Marisa and Fabio next flipped through baptism registries. Closing the first book after finding Adelaide’s record, they went on to the next in 1855 for Arturo. Switching to the chart view, they traced straight back ten generations to Alesandro Canovaro born in 1641.

A Long Line Of Only Children?

What about all of those men’s siblings, wives, other children? There must have been at least dozens of other people they could have found in those records. Every wife brought a different surname into her ancestry and every sibling brought more cousins to her family. Are people not interested enough in finding their more distant living relatives to search sideways? And of course, one rule of genealogy is to search the siblings because sometimes you can find information on them but not your ancestors, so the only way to learn more and go back further is to research sideways. Knowing there are good genealogists behind the research in the show, I can only assume that they did branch out to each sibling and each spouse, also looking for more interesting stories for the episode. I know that some people really just want to know one line of their family and would be thrilled to find them back to 1641, but I want to know all of my family lines going back.

After they finished with the stack of books, Marisa wondered why they left, or why Adelaide left the island, or was she the one who had “broken the whole lineage” and left the island. I guess she wasn’t thinking of the dozens or hundreds of other people that descended from that same person from 1641. Was the island full of his descendents or did some of the others leave? This is the trouble with WDYTYA going straight back. Even the celebrities don’t realize how many more relatives they could have just gained knowing ten generations of ancestors in a single line.

Pictures of the car driving during her voiceover suggested it was the only car in the city; there was not another one to be seen.

Fabio suggested checking the Elba Historical Municipal Archive, so they met with historian Dr. Gloria Peria. Again, Gloria spoke in Italian and there were no captions. Fabio translated for Marisa, but they could have captioned the Italian. First, they looked at the marriage certificate for Leopoldo Bianchi and Maria Canovaro, with the name Adelaide in parentheses. Marisa did say earlier that Leopoldo’s first name was actually Francisco, so neither went by their given first names.

Timelines

The next document was another variation of the marriage certificate, which also showed an immigration date, that they moved to Cecina six years after they were married, seven months before he died. Marisa began to piece together the timeline. This is another example of a tool used in genealogy, but she probably didn’t even realize it. Sometimes when putting together a story, or trying to break through a brick wall, if you gather the information into a timeline, you may find that you’ve overlooked something.

An article in the local newspaper in 1911 reported that Leopoldo was killed by Terzilio Lazzereschi in Castiglioncello. They never showed her being given a translation, but considering all the later translations she was given, I think they gave her one and it hit the cutting room floor. The article confirmed that Leopoldo was shot and it wasn’t an illness as the cemetery record stated, which she never believed.

Back To The Mainland

Going to Castiglioncello, Marisa said that Fabio stayed in Elba to look for more information. They make it sound like the research wasn’t done in advance of the filming and he had to find something new. Do they ever find something new while the celebrity is filming? Has any celebrity ever asked a question that they didn’t previously research and they rushed to find it? Or was it just a bad segue, leaving a way to bring him back into the episode later?

In the voiceover, Marisa mentioned that Gloria suggested who she should meet with next, so the experts are guiding the celebrities to the next step. How much is really done in person, we can’t tell from the episode. The voiceovers could have been added months later.

Let’s Meet In A Cafe

The first season had a lot of meetings in coffee shops and restaurants, as if no one had offices and libraries or archives weren’t good enough. There was a significant restaurant meeting for Steve Buscemi also. Steven Hughes, a local expert, met with her in the same cafe where the altercation took place 100 years earlier that ended with the death of her great-grandfather.

Reading another newspaper article about the incident, I loved hearing her frustration at “reasons that are still unknown”. I think every genealogist knows feeling that at some point.

Adding the interview where Marisa told the story about her cousin screaming out “murder in the family” in a dream when they visited the city before just made it all the more unusual.

Almost To The Trial

Heading north to Lucca, where Lazzereschi was indicted, she wanted to know more details of the trial. Meeting with Dr. Francesco Tamburini, he had more documents from the court records. Finding that he was acquitted of shooting someone in the back of the head, I thought it was funny that Francesco compared the lawyers to OJ’s “Dream Team”. She read that he was finally found guilty of carrying a weapon and served only 38 days.

The commercial break cliffhanger sounded like they were about to learn that he would finally be punished for something. It was a letdown, to find he was just insistent about getting his money back. He then disappeared from the records.

Fabio Is Back

Marisa met with Fabio again, at another cafe. He revealed that an 83 year old relative of Marisa’s, Rosetta Vanucci, the daughter of Leopoldo’s sister who remembered Adelaide, was not well enough to meet with her, but sent a letter. Rosetta’s letter filled in the details of how Adelaide remarried and how Marisa’s grandfather ended up in America. I imagine that they had planned to have her come on screen, just as some other episodes have had a surprise distant cousin for the celebrity to meet, but it just didn’t work out.

In this scene, we could see Marisa’s notebook was labeled June 2011, so we appear to have a filming date.

Back Home To Share The Story

Back in New York, Marisa shared the details she learned with her mother. At the beginning, it seemed like there was going to be something more about sharing with her brother, but he was not seen again.

Marisa was surprised to see the relief from her mother upon learning that Leopoldo was not killed because of something he did wrong.

“It’s the things we carry with us from our family’s legacy, our family’s history, even the secrets, that we don’t know that we’re carrying.” – Marisa

“I think all of this absorbs into us and influences our behavior in some mystical way, some spiritual way, affects the generations even to come.” – Addie

Commercials

This particular episode was one that did not involve using Ancestry at all and so it was forced into the beginning by placing the Bianchi family tree on the site. I know that Ancestry is the sponsor, and that certainly shows in the commercials, but can’t they give it a rest for even one episode? They also had to forcibly insert it into Kim Cattrall’s episode, which was actually filmed by the BBC. They did have multiple commercials, which also perpetuate myths, that I am going to nitpick this time too.

The first commercial I noted was where a woman says she was the family detective. She wasn’t. All she did was click on a leaf on the web site. That is not detective work. It’s not even genealogy research. If she had found the record herself, that would be the detective work.

In another commercial, a man said his ancestor was born on the boat on the way to America. Finding the census showing that he was born in Poland proves nothing. The census is one of the most used genealogy records as well as one of the most likely to be incorrect. By finding that record, he didn’t disprove a family story. Just as this exact episode showed us. If they had stopped at the cemetery where the record said he died from an illness, then there would have been no episode. Ancestry, stop teaching bad research in your commercials while your TV show is actually teaching good techniques.

Conclusion

This episode reminded me a little about Kim Cattrall’s episode, where she basically just researched a single person in her ancestry. So it was a little surprising that I didn’t see anyone complain about that. Once we’ve finished name collecting, we like to switch to story collecting, so stopping and spending a lot of time researching one person isn’t unusual. I suppose one reason “the crowd” preferred this episode is because there were lots of documents involved including newspaper articles and court records, whereas Kim’s episode was more about finding people who knew him. I liked both.

“And now I have much more of a connection to him. I can feel his presence. He’s alive in my heart and in my mind’s eye and in my family again.”

That is exactly what genealogy is good for. Just because someone is no longer alive doesn’t mean that they weren’t important. By researching them, we remember them again, even if we never got to know them personally.

This is the second article in the Who Do You Think You Are? Nitpicker’s Version for Season 3.

1.  Martin Sheen

The URL for this article is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/02/24/wdytya-3×02-nitpickers/.

Season three of Who Do You Think You Are? began during RootsTech 2012. While I watched with a big crowd last year, this year I was the bridge between a group who wanted to watch and play the drinking game and someone who knew which hotel bar to use for it. Watching at the Peery Hotel bar was one of the highlights of the conference. I had to re-watch the show in its entirety to catch the whole thing, but it was worth it.

I wonder why they picked Martin Sheen first. This episode had a very long introduction to the season, so was Martin Sheen’s episode already the shortest or did they have to cut it more?

The voiceovers talk about Martin discovering information about two ancestors, but neither was an ancestor. The first two people researched were his uncles. Kind of a lax definition of “ancestor”.

Family Visit

“Ramon Estevez”, aka Martin Sheen, stopped in to see son, Emilio. They didn’t discuss genealogy, except that Emilio was carrying on a family tradition of having a vineyard, and the bottle he held featured a picture taken by Martin in Spain. They never again mention how the vineyard is a family tradition during the course of the show. Having a vineyard in my own family history, that would have been interesting to me.

Right To Ireland

After a lengthy introduction from Martin about his activism, he went right to Ancestry.com and found a death record for his uncle, Michael Phelan, his mother’s sister. He immediately crossed the ocean to Dublin, Ireland, visiting the military archives, to learn about Michael’s possible involvement in the civil war.

Explaining the history is especially helpful for Americans who know nothing of Irish history and the civil war that began in 1922. It’s sad the amount of history I didn’t learn in public school. Some genealogists study history in college, but I was still in computer programming back then. Even if I went back to learn history, I’d focus on Eastern Europe anyway and still need these bits to have any clue.

Martin thought his uncle was supporting the opposite side during the civil war, but he admitted that he really didn’t know. They showed a picture of Michael, but only a deleted scene revealed where the picture came from: a cousin of his. (I believe it was Michael’s daughter.)

At The Pearse Centre, he met with Dr. Edward Madigan to consult about the number of times Michael was imprisoned, according to a letter in his military file, and his commitment to his cause of Ireland’s freedom.

Prison #1 – Kilmainham Jail

Visiting one of the many prisons where Michael spent some time, Dr. William Murphy pointed out that Michael was held “as far as we know” in a certain cell. Sounds like their records weren’t kept well, or weren’t complete. They didn’t explain why it was a “best guess”. If they weren’t completely sure, how did they guess at all?

On To Spain – Family Visit #2

Headed to his father’s side of the family in Spain, he visited his sister, Carmen, in Madrid. She brought out a few old family photos.

Explaining the family tree by the chart, they jump over to their father’s youngest brother, Matias. Another thing they didn’t explain is the surnames, how they are all listed as “Estevez Martinez”. The children used both the father’s then then mother’s surnames. Was this common only in Spain or elsewhere too?

It turned out that Matias was involved in the civil war in Spain, so this gave us another civil war history lesson, with Spain’s civil war beginning in 1936.

Civil War #2

At Biblioteca Nacional de España, Martin met with historian Dr. Alejandro Quiroga. At the very beginning of the civil war, Matias faced a military tribunal, where he was sentenced to life in prison. Another book showed a list of prisoners in alphabetical and numerical order. There were two Estévez Martinezes: Constante and Matias. Looking back at the family tree chart, there was no Constante shown in the list of Matias’s siblings. I hope they looked into who that was, or are those two names very common? (I think Martinez probably is.) Martin asked and Alex confirmed that 611 was his prison number. How did they manage to number everyone alphabetically? I think the question and answer were misunderstood or something got spliced oddly in editing.

A third book revealed that Matias was sentenced in September 1936, to be released in 1966, and was released in 1940.

Martin took a train to Pamplona to see the second prison where Matias served, but they didn’t mention why he didn’t visit the first. Was it out of the way? Not very interesting? No longer standing?

He met with Dr. Julius Ruiz, a Spanish civil war historian, at Los Fuertes de San Cristóbal for a tour.

To Tui, Galicia, Spain

They didn’t explain why Martin was suddenly in Tui, but he met with genealogist Matthew Hovious at the Archivo Histórico Diocesano with his father’s birth certificate, sent to him by Carmen. I couldn’t see clearly if his father was born in Tui, but obviously more research had been done there, thus forwarding the story.

Matthew read the names of both parents, then the maternal grandmother; the grandfather was unknown. They were able to trace back a few more generations but did they ever find the name of Dolores’s father? Of course, when drawing these charts, they often just show the minimum amount of information, so there is that possibility.

However, they did show her name as Dolores Martinez, and her mother as Carmen Martinez, whereas so many others in the charts had two surnames. So maybe they didn’t find her father’s name, and perhaps there were two generations of unknown or unspecified fathers. And then finally, at the top of the chart, each person again only had one surname. So were they skipping listing the names or was that not the custom to use both parents’ names at different times in history?

They did point out that Paula’s marriage record stated that she was the natural daughter of Don Diego Francisco Suarez and Maria Gonzalez, which specified that her parents were not married, as opposed to listing her as the legitimate daughter if they were. This part they explained clearly, but they had more to say about it. The show likes to skip those smaller details if it doesn’t specifically relate to the rest of the story.

“Whoops.”

Another record from the 1740s showed that Diego was married to another woman, Manuela de Alfaya. They found that Diego and Maria had six children together. In 1777, at the first confirmation ceremony after Diego’s death, Maria had all of her children confirmed.

Martin asked how Diego became a Don, but again, what that title meant was not explained. I realize they don’t have time to explain everything, but if it leads to the next part of the story, I think it could use up a few seconds. Not everyone knows what that means and it was highlighted.

Convergence

In La Coruña, at Archivo Del Reino, historian Edward Behrend-Martínez shared the only document they found about Don Diego Suarez, where Diego prosecuted a young woman, Antonia Pereira, for having an abortion.

A fancy scroll was unrolled with the family chart. Martin read first on the side of his grandmother, then he went slowly, one name after another on his grandfather’s side, until he reached the name Antonia Pereira. They must have filled out the entire family tree to find that connection. I can only wonder if the same researcher found that connection and how elated they could have been to find such a convergence of history.

Sharing With The Family

Meeting Martin in Parderrubias, sister Carmen and son Ramon learned the story details. I thought they had mentioned that town name earlier, but I couldn’t easily find it. I think it was mentioned while he was in Tui.

Conclusion

“If you’d written a novel with all these truths in it, they’d say ‘Ah, it’s a bit over the top.’ It actually happened.”

I thought this was a good episode. Instead of being completely guided, each historian and genealogist telling him what to do next, only a few did and often guided by Martin’s questions. Some previous episodes felt like the celebrity had to be told every step to take, but this did not, even though Martin needed guidance and translations in Spain.

With both parents immigrants to America, he immediately crossed the ocean, skipping over his parents to their brothers, then going back farther on the Spanish side. He mentioned that his mother died when he was 11; did they not find much about her? Obviously the show has to be focused where the interesting stories are, but I would have found a vineyard to be interesting enough to mention. Is it just me?

And I’ve finished with time to spare before the next episode. My Twitter feed is already running with spoilers from the Eastern and Central time zones.