To meet with your ancestors, to find out what made them tick…
Did you get to see the first programme in the BBC’s latest series of Who Do You Think You Are? If you did you were in the company of 6.4 million views, including me.
The celebrity, whose family tree was investigated, was Davin McCall and she certain had some interesting ancestors. There was James Bedborough, who from being a stonemason rose to be a property developer in 1850’s Windsor and mayor. He had, at one time, been King George IV’s Master Mason and responsible for much of Windsor Castle’s redevelopment so that it looks as it does to this day. It was said that he was an ancestor to be proud of for the ambition that had driven him on. Putting aside the sad death of his two sons, seemingly a muddle of a will contributing to their suicides after their father’s death in the middle of an ambitious plan to build Upton Park. Bedborough senior had borrowed heavily to finance the enterprise to the equivalent of £2 million in today’s money, but not sufficient houses had been completed before his demise.
James Bedborough would indeed seem to have been an ancestor that most of us would be pleased to have discovered in our tree, but then the show takes us to France where her mother’s side provided us with another forbear for Ms McCall to be proud of. Not just one then but two heroes in one programme!
The second was called Célestin Hennion, a man of huge principles and integrity. Hennion was Chief of French Police, having risen from being the son of a farm labourer. We saw that he was unafraid of the military establishment taking the stand as a defence witness in a notorious trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army office accused of passing state secrets to the Germans.
Davina McCall was obviously proud and bowled over to have found out about her maternal French ancestor.
“He had all the qualities that you would want your perfect man to have,” she says, “loyalty, courage, integrity, ambition, strength of character, good looking” she said of him. But, to me, the most interesting thing that the star said was that to meet with her ancestors, to find out what made them tick, why they were successful and to realise that she shared DNA with them, that they were part of her family, this she told us was what she found invigorating.
And this, I can completely understand. I too have some ancestors that I fell proud of. The sentiments she expressed about her forbears are what makes family history so interesting, especially when applied to one’s own.
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