Posts Tagged ‘WDYTYA’

by Sherry Stocking Kline
24 April 2010

Until “Who Do You Think You Are?” began, Friday nights used to be marathon channel surfing nights while we tried to find something worth watching!

Three Generations Who Love WDYTYA!

Now, Friday nights are a hurry up, get everything done, cats and dogs fed, supper out of the way (or picnic in front of the television!) while we all gather around, three generations ranging from age 35 to age 98, to watch while someone searches into their family’s past to learn their family story.

I Loved it That Her Son Joined Her for The Research!

I particularly enjoyed watching Susan Sarandon’s story last night. She was an admitted family history researcher who seemed to be pretty familiar with microfilm viewers and library research, and I thought that it was a nice touch that her son joined her for part of the research.  (Don’t we just love it anytime our children are interested in our family history?)

For those who say they’d like to see more realism in how long it takes to research, you can’t do that in an hour, but last night we did get to see several different records and methods that Susan used to access to the information, and learn ‘the rest of the story’ as Paul Harvey used to say.

Her Grandmother’s story was heartbreaking…

Susan’s grandmother’s story was heartbreaking with its hardships, and to be so close in distance to a grandmother she would have loved to know must have made for some “wish I could have done this sooner” thoughts on the part of Sarandon.

I thought it was wonderful that she could forgive her grandmother the choices that she made, and enjoyed how she wove the story together in a way that made it very understandable why her grandmother had made those choices, touching on her grandmother’s hardships:  loss of her mother when she was so young, a pregnancy when she was just a child, a marriage she probably didn’t really want to a man she may not even have liked, and two little babies by the time she was fifteen.

There was a haunted quality to her eyes…

I thought in her later years’ photograph there was a ‘haunted’ quality to her grandmother’s eyes as she held the little baby, as if she was remembering her own babies and wondering where they were, and if she had grandchildren of her own.