Who Do You Think You Are?
From Monday 12 October, 9pm BBC One and BBC iPlayer
Well, this is an unexpected but very welcome surprise. Earlier this year, with the coronavirus pandemic playing havoc with filming schedules, there were fears that we wouldn’t see any new episodes of WDYTYA? until 2021. Instead, just as we went to press, it was announced that the first four shows of Series 17 will air this autumn.
The series kicks off with Jodie Whittaker, star of Doctor Who and Broadchurch, who has romantic ideas about how her paternal grandmother, Greta, came to have the middle name of Verdun, famed as the site of the longest battle of the First World War. Except, as so often happens with WDYTYA?, the story Jodie finds isn’t quite what she expects. However, the tale of Greta’s halfbrother captures the actor’s imagination as she learns about his service on the Western Front.
On her mother’s side of the family, Jodie traces the life of her great great grandfather who became the owner of a coal mine after starting out as a child labourer. It’s a story to inspire pride, yet there are troubling elements too as Jodie’s research reaches back to industrial unrest in the 1920s.
In the following episode, comedian and children’s novelist David Walliams meets a great great grandfather who, after becoming blind, made a career as a travelling entertainer. He also uncovers a tragic story dating from the First World War.
Then, Liz Carr, actor, comedian and disability-rights activist, finds herself conducting the kind of research associated with her
Silent Witness character as she looks at an ancestor’s role in an attempted murder. As someone with “an armchair genealogist” mother, she describes appearing on the show as “a wonderfully surreal experience” and adds, “My mum has dragged us around graveyards in search of our ancestors, but to no avail. So I’m hoping this will now all stop – probably not, knowing my mum!”
The last of these first four episodes stars Ruth Jones, actor and co-creator of the hit comedy Gavin and Stacey. Her grandfather, she learns, was an important figure in a
Medical Aid Society in South Wales (see our article on page 72). She also researches well-travelled mariners. “I’ve probably been guilty of assuming people from bygone generations were stuffy, two-dimensional and a bit dull,” she says. “But my trip on Who Do You Think You Are? has proved the opposite to be true.”
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1901 Census
John Walter was born out of wedlock in 1894, the son of Elizabeth Clements. Elizabeth married in 1897, but we found John Walter living with his maternal grandmother Sophia Smith in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in 1901, rather than with Elizabeth. Census returns are available on all of the major genealogical websites. Members of co.uk can view John Walter’s census entry at bit.ly/anc-1901-johnwalter-clements.