Who's your great great great great great great granddaddy?!! (Who Do You Think You Are? - Dan Waddell)

Member Name: pmcds

Product:	Who Do You Think You Are? - Dan Waddell
Date:	26/08/09 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to read, well constructed, concise, covers it all

Disadvantages: None really

Dan Waddell's 'Who Do You Think You Are?' is the literary accompaniment to the BBC TV series with the same name. The TV series' main focus is on tracing the ancestry of various celebrities, taking one a week and following them as they research their history, often with startling results.

What this book does is take the main focus away from the celebs and act as a guide to us if we should try to research our ancestry. The technical term for the process is genealogy, and as soon as you open the book, you will see that genealogy is a complex and time consuming thing to enter into, but made clear and simple to understand by this well constructed book.

It takes you through the various stages of the process, as it can often be a bit of a minefield to try and work out where to start. Waddell sets out immediately by reassuring us that it is 'not simply an endless trawl through fusty files; it is a quest that can lead to the most astonishing revelations.' It is also becoming one fo the most popular things to research on the internet.

The book starts off with an intro from Waddel before giving us the first brief snippet of one of the celebrities' quests to find out about their family history. This first one is Bill Oddie, and is just a few pages on his search. Indeed, the book is interspersed with the 10 celebs who took part in the series back in 2004, including Jeremy Clarkson, Ian Hislop and Moira Stuart. While it is ideal that the book gives us an insight into how to research our own family history, it is still nice to see the celebs' journies and how they went about it. It gives us specific examples to look at.

The next chapter, 'Hatch, Match and Dispatch', explains how birth, marriage and death certificates can be essential as a starting points. The Family Records Centre can help immensely with this, and I have to say that reading this really made me want to start researching my family history. I had watched a few of the episodes, and while it was interesting watching the celebs find their ancestry, it didn't really inspire me to do so myself.

However, the book really does make for interesting reading, and is quite inspiring. While these certificates only usually date back to the middle of the 10th Century, it is a huge starting block and can often lead to further revelations and new paths being opened as you search. The censuses are also a good point, and Waddell gives a no fuss guideline on how to use these to good effect, whilst explaining them in careful detail as well.

After reading about Amanda Redman's search, Waddell then approaches pre-19th Century, which he says will get more difficult, as records were not kept for many things, and it will require more dedication and patience. The next chapter, 'Moving Here', deals with the possibility of your ancestry having its roots elsewhere in the world, and how to go about researching this daunting task. It then deals with military involvement, explaining that enrolement was in large parts compulsory and that this is another way to search.

The book's final chapter gives a bit more generalised history of the British Isles over the past couple of centuries, explaining how it changed and how we might find out about the conditions and jobs our ancestors may have done. Waddell manages to put himself in the position of the curious descendant very well, answering many of the questions I had, and making the whole thing very easy to follow. The book may be very well constructed and easy to read, but it doesn't necessarily follow that your search or quest to find out who your forefathers were is going to be easy. The book goes some way to helping with the searching, but the hard ground work still needs to be done, and Waddell makes it clear that this is the case.

Overall, it is a fascinating read, even if you aren't likely to do the actual searching. I like the setup and the way the celebs' searches are interspersed between the various chapters. The book is well worth getting, if genealogy is something you are interested in. It is nice and simple in terms of layout and wording, without long descriptive and boring passages. It's a no frills 'this is what you do' guideline book to finding out about your ancestry, and is well worth having if you're looking for a starting point.

The book retailed at £12.99 when I bought it a few years ago. I imagine it would be cheaper to get a copy now, though, although a brand new copy would still be around the same price mark.

Summary: Dan Waddell's accompaniment to the BBC TV series 'Who Do You Think You Are?'