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Who Do You Think You Are?

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Jeff Wrangler:
Tonight I caught the first episode of this new show on NBC. The premise is that the show will trace the ancestry of seven celebrities, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields, Emmet Smith, Spike Lee, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, and, first up, Sarah Jessica Parker.

Parker is East European Jewish on her father's side. Her mother's father's family came from Bavaria and settled in Cincinnati (I seem to remember reading somewhere that a lot of Germans did that in the nineteenth century). Essentially the program traced Parker's ancestors in her mother's mother's line. One ancestor left a pregnant wife in Ohio to join the California Gold Rush, got recorded in the 1850 census for California, and died there in December 1850. The family was then traced back to New England, from Connecticut back to Essex County, Massachusetts, where Parker's tenth great-grandmother was named one of three women in the last arrest warrant issued in the Salem witchcraft hysteria, in November 1692.

I found this all fascinating. This was why I majored in history in college and then did granduate work in the field. History isn't just dates and events, it's people's lives, and I find that fascinating. Many Americans have no clue about their families farther back than their grandparents. I feel fortunate that my dad had an uncle who researched the family, so that I know that my family has been in Pennsylvania since the 1740s.

The next subject is supposed to be Emmet Smith.

Mandy21:
Wow, Jeff, that is so weird.  I don't have cable, so I don't know about the show you're referring to, but I was just digging through some old videotapes (yes, videotapes) cause I was in the mood to watch Sex and the City tonight.  Watching Season 2 now.  SJP always fascinates me, loved her since "Footloose".  Anyway, that's a cool idea for a show.  Maybe you can tell us about the others as they come along?

Jeff Wrangler:
Last week's episode, March 12, was quite moving. The show investigated the roots of the retired football star Emmitt Smith. Interestingly, as with Sarah Jessica Parker, the show ended up following a female line. The family of one of his ancestors, known as Prince Puryear, was found in the state of Alabama in the 1870 U.S. census, the first in which African Americans were counted as free people. The household included Prince's mother, Mariah, age 55, and the family was identified as Mulatto.

Puryear is a rather distinctive surname, and--not exactly a surprise--it turned out to have been the surname of the white family that had owned Mariah and her children before Emancipation. Genealogists traced the Puryear family to Virginia, where the earliest record of Mariah that was said to be found was a deed of 1826, when one Samuel Puryear deeded her--she would have been about 11 years old at the time--to his son Alexander Puryear--along with a horse and a bridle.  :(

I found this episode incredibly moving. Genealogists will tell you that African American genealogy is very difficult because before Emancipation there just aren't the records that white families left behind. Many years ago, the ground-breaking miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley's book about his own family's history, was broadcast during my first semester in college. I subsequently read the book--but only once, and that a long time ago now, so my memories of it are kind of dim--but my memory is that Roots is essentially a novelization. I don't remember how much actual historical research, beyond family legends, Haley put into it, and I don't mean to discredit Haley's work. But for me this one hour on Emmitt Smith's family history was much more meaningful and moving than Roots because the story ended, starkly, with an actual legal record, the deed conveying Mariah from one Puryear to another.

Even more, since in that 1870 census the family was identified as Mulatto, it was clear that the family was not pure-blood African. Also, the Puryears had kept Mariah and her children--nothing was said about the father of her children--together, which was considered remarkable because Alexander Puryear was, as records showed, a slave trader. It was speculated, since the family was Mulatto, that Alexander Puryear kept Mariah and her children because Mariah may have been his half-sister. In other words, Alexander Puryear's father, Samuel Puryear, may also have been Mariah's father, and it was openly speculated that Mariah's birth was not the result of a consensual act.  :(

A few other interesting points. Mariah's oldest daughter was given the same name as Alexander Puryear's wife. Also, while I had been thinking, sadly, that Prince was a name for a horse, not for a human being ("the Artist" notwithstanding), it turned out that Prince Puryear's full name was actually Prince Albert Puryear, and it struck me as weirdly amusing that a slave woman in antebellum Alabama had named her eldest son for Queen Victoria's husband.

Finally, Emmitt Smith had some genetic tests done, and the results showed that genetically, he is 82% African, 11% European (the white Puryears, no doubt), and 7% Native American. The African genes trace back to present-day Benin, in an area of West Africa that was formerly known as the Slave Coast.

Jeff Wrangler:
NBC debuted the second season of this show this past Friday night (Feb. 4). The celebrity whose ancestry was researched was Vanessa Williams. (She grew up in Chappaqua, NY, where the Clintons now have a home. Who knew?) She had one ancestor, a free Black man, who enlisted in the Civil War a week after it was legal for Black men to enlist; he was paid a $300 bounty for enlisting, and he used $200 of it to buy property in Oyster Bay, NY. A photo of him was found in his pension file in the National Archives. She had another ancestor who served in the Tennessee legislature in the post-Civil War, pre-Jim Crow era.

The next subject, this week (Friday, Feb. 11), will be country singer/hunk Tim McGraw. That should also be interesting. It's already widely known that he grew up not knowing that his father was the late baseball player Tug McGraw.

Mandy21:
Jeff, dear God, this actually makes me want to get cable for all I'm missing.

Tim McGraw?????  OH MI GAH.........  Loved him since forever.  Hottest man in country.

Tell me everything, please?

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