Hacker Cinema
Who Do You Think You Are?
2010 · TV series · documentary · 42 min episodes · 12 seasons
Created by Alex Graham
From roots in the Deep South to the slums of New Jersey, "Who Do You Think You Are?" follows the journeys of some of the most well-known names in American popular culture. Watch as celebrities discover unknown details about themselves and their families while researching their ancestry with the help of historians and genealogical experts.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Notwithstanding battles, a napoleonic era British Royal Navy Man-o-war with ~750 sailors would expect to lose something like 1 man a fortnight to accidents and disease for the duration of the voyage. To make up the numbers they would press-gang fishermen wherever they happened to be around the globe. As a result the Royal Navy was surprisingly multi racial in that era.
The BBC had a series called ‘who do you think you are’ where they analysed people’s DNA and some of the best episodes were right wing figures finding out they were 25% polynesian or whatever, I always wondered if this was partly due to the press-gang on-the-hoof practices of the Navy.
A fascination with patrilineal descent continues to this day, despite the best intentions of TV shows like "who do you think you are". In striving to follow matrilineal stories, so much is hidden once you go back 150 years. Not (of course) in all cultures, but in many.
I find it remarkable at times, just how much IS preserved. The whole "shakspears second-best bed" story, is an example of the limits of what we know sometimes, yet we know Anne Hathaway had a cottage because land ownership in the UK is based on a linear sequence of title documents (back in some cases to 1066) -Had the more modern "Torrens title" model in Australia been extant, we might not know these things because its book of truth concerns itself with the proven current land ownership much more than with "how it got there"
I’m a former investor in the company. Many comments here focus on the DNA business, but the company treats it as more as lead gen, a “cheap” way to get new customers in and later to subscribe to their family tree product that prints cash. The DNA business is breakeven but that’s a lot cheaper than funding TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are - which was their old marketing tool.
Funny anecdotes: - they own findagrave.com which is exactly what it sounds like - they paid $50mm at one point to the Mormon church to effectively shut down their only competitor (family search.org). They also offered ancestry.com membership for free to every Mormon as well. The agreement handed over Mormon church’s records making Ancestry’s database broader. - they sometimes call themselves a “Social Network for dead people” because you can opt to make your family tree public, allowing you to see connections/overlaps between your ancestors and others.
"Who Do You Think You Are" had an episode with Cindy Crawford where she found out she was a direct descendant of Charlemagne, and they made a big deal out of it (https://youtu.be/iA_UYcGDhYw?t=307).
I had the pleasure of being next to some of the engineers from Ancestry.com in the queue for the WWDC keynote this year - it was really interesting to hear about a business that you don't think is that big, but is actually massive. They said Europe was also a very big market for them (I know genealogy is quite popular in the UK at least - the TV show that the article cites, 'Who Do You Think You Are', was originally a BBC show first), so being acquired by a European private equity firm makes some sense.