21 November 2016

BBC on The Family Tree

Thanks to Anonymous who posted at comment on the library item about the BBC program The Family Tree. It's worth a listen.
"Mike Williams asks why so many people are obsessed with discovering their family origins and also learns new things about his own ancestors along the way.
Genealogy is a growing phenomenon driven by the digitization of old paper records, websites offering to DNA test your saliva for $100 and TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are which explore celebrities family histories.
But what does spending hours, weeks and – in some cases – years trying to discover names or dates that might reveal the identity of someone related to us hundreds of years ago say about us? And what are we really looking for?
Mike talks to Else Churchill at the Society of Genealogists in London, Nathan Lents, professor of molecular biology at John Jay College in New York and Catherine Nash, Professor of Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London."
On a first listening the program leaves me with the impression that the US people interviewed had more trouble with the perception of incompatibility of genealogical and cultural ancestry than those in the UK.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting ~ thank you John for posting this. I live in the UK and obviously missed it.