What I'm doing instead of packing

Have you seen that show "Who Do You Think You Are?" on NBC? I am RIVETED. I love it. It's a sort of random assortment of celebrities, and each week one of them researches their family history. Whether I like the celebrity or not, the show itself is fascinating. I'm a geek. Whatever.

First the celebrity starts with their own family and gets a few names. Usually no farther back than a great-grandparent. Then they head off to whatever location they know for those names. They have the help of genealogists and historians. That's what I think makes the show so interesting. They incorporate historical reference (geek. I already said that.). It's one thing to look down a line of names, but it's so much more interesting when there's an expert who can explain what those things meant at the time. For example, Emmit Smith got a name of an ancestor, but the historian was able to tell him that her last name indicated that although she was a slave, she was the daughter of the slave trader.

One thing that's amazed me watching the show, is how few generations most people have been able to go back on their own. I come from a long line of genealogy nuts. So I've already got a lot of that information, and I'm really thankful for that. I already know that I could be a legit Daughter of the American Revolution twice over. I know I'm a descendant of Lucy Stone, the first woman in the United States to keep her surname after marriage and the woman credited with getting Susan B. Anthony involved in the women's movement. We have a diary of an ancestor from the civil war. I've got a binder of family tree information with people as far back as at least the 1600s (I can't verify because it's packed - good for me!).

The other thing that makes it fun to watch, is the celebrity gets to visit the places involved. Lisa Kudrow traveled to Belarus to see the place where her great-grandmother was killed by Nazis. I've always been kind of a history nerd, and you can see how much of an impact it has on them to visit the locations. It becomes less of a story and more real. There's something to walking the literal paths your ancestors walked.

It's definitely made me want to escape my real life of needing to work and pack, and dive into some sort of family history journey. I wonder if I'll still find it as interesting when I'm not supposed to be doing other things.