Posted by museum curator Laurel Fritzsch
NBC and PBS have taken a risk that people are interested in family history. NBC’s new show “Who Do You Think You Are?” traces the family histories of TV and film celebrities. The show is similar to PBS’s “Faces of America” which also traces the family histories of famous Americans. The major difference between these shows is that NBC and PBS attract different audiences. PBS’s audience base tends to be predisposed to enjoy history programs, whereas NBC’s audience base is not. By taking advantage of people’s interest in celebrity news and gossip, NBC hopes that viewers with a desire for more details of celebrities’ lives will be attracted to the show.
This is great! Airing a show about family history on NBC exposes a wider variety of people to how interesting history can be. Those viewers could become interested in pursing their own family history and maybe even watch other history based reality shows.
On the other hand, these shows often don’t depict the leg work involved in digging up family history. There is no one magic document with all the information in it, and everything you want to know isn’t contained within ancestry.com. But isn’t putting together a story from all the scraps of evidence you find what makes researching family history interesting? Following each lead; from census to marriage record to military record, etc. allows you to experience the thrill of the chase, and occasionally the frustrations.
TV shows about family history may veil the hard work involved but I think the benefits outweigh any concerns. I don’t know if NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” is successful, but I hope that more networks will follow their lead and take the chance that the majority of people in the U.S. are interested in well presented history. If they do, we’ll start to see more history based reality shows on network TV.
While the Kansas Historical Society’s online archive Kansas Memory does not host genealogical sources for the most part (like census and vital records), it does include great sources for fleshing out your family history. County plat maps show the names of landholders, town plats, and patron directories. Business and residential directories include information on local residents, businesses, clubs, and organizations. Photographs offer visual documentation of many Kansas towns and rural communities. Also, see the KSHS (Kansas Historical Society) genealogy page for more information on tracing your Kansas ancestors.
What do you think? Will the “People Magazine” crowd watch these types of shows? Could history based reality TV shows on networks lead to an increased national interest in history and heritage? Leave a comment here or on our facebook page.