Hello everybody, I'm Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger and on today's vlog I will be discussing
my top 5 genealogy TV shows. Starting out at number 5 - Genealogy Roadshow.
Genealogy Roadshow started in 2013 on PBS and is fairly similar in setup to Antiques
Roadshow. In each episode there are a lot of different people who are attending a
conference in a certain city and they've sent ahead questions about their family
history. Each episode is based around the city and those stories usually have to
deal with that city or region. There are three co-hosts of the show all of whom
who are big names in the genealogy world Joshua Taylor, Kenyata Berry, and Mary
Tedesco. There have only been three seasons of the show and last season
aired in 2016. There haven't been any announcements
about the show being canceled or it being continued but in the summer of
2017 they did put out a call for casting for people who were looking to have
their family stories on the show. Now one nice thing about genealogy roadshow is
it is fairly information packed and there are a lot of guests each episode
each episode you'll usually get three or four really big main stories and then
there are a lot of other smaller stories that they go over, so it really contains
a lot of different information and each story gives a really different view of
that city or region. While we don't know what the future holds for Genealogy
Roadshow, I'm hoping that they do continue. And now coming in at number
four - Relative Race. Now Relative Race was started actually quite recently in 2016
and it airs on Brigham Young University television, so you can actually just go
to BYU TV and watch Relative Race for free. Of all the genealogy shows that
I've seen this is the only one that I know of that is
set up like a competition. Each season features four different teams of two
Team Green, Team Black, Team Red, and Team Blue. Every team has to give up their
smartphones or anything with GPS. They're not allowed GPS and they're then given a
flip phone, paper maps, and a car. Each episode is split up by the days and the
competition has ten days to it so each season is ten episodes long and in each
episode each team is given a name of a city that they must then drive to using
the paper maps and once they get to the city they have to take a selfie in front
of a city location once they take that city self either then given an address
where they're going to find a challenge that they must complete once they
complete the challenge they're then given an address for their relative who
lives in that city they don't know who that relative is going to be and once
they get to that house that's when the time stops. Now in the older seasons when
they got to the house of their relative they would have to take a selfie with
their relative and that would stop their time and I never really liked that
because I thought that's kind of awkward that you're running up to this house
where these people are your relatives and the first thing you got to do is
"quick, quick, let's take a selfie!" it's much better to be like "hi, I'm your
so-and-so" and then the reaction, which I think they figured out eventually
because in the past few seasons it seems that as soon as they get to their
relatives house that's when the time stops. Now Relative Race is quite
interesting because you have a wide variety of genealogy questions that are
done, each contestant does a DNA test so sometimes you have relatives that are
just DNA matches that they don't even know how they're related to each other,
they just know that maybe they share a certain amount of DNA, although it's
never revealed in the show how much of those matches are matching each other.
But then you also get a lot of people where they're finding first cousins,
second cousins, aunts, uncles, and then you also have a lot
people who are adoptees or people who have lost touch with entire sides of
their family, so you get a lot of really emotional connections on the show and
each episode you're getting four different scenarios of people meeting
relatives that they've never met. Now there have been five seasons of Relative
Race, so far four of which that you can watch online and the sixth season will
actually be coming out at the end of this month September 2019. So if you were
really into relative race or if you've never seen it before
you can catch out a whole new season very soon. And now on to number three -
Who Do You Think You Are U.S. Who Do You Think You Are in the US was started in
2010 on NBC. It was based off of the original which aired in the United
Kingdom and each episode it follows a different celebrity as they go through a
journey to learn more about their family each episode often focuses on two or
maybe three big stories within that family and sometimes you'll get an
episode where it's all about one story. There are a lot of different stories
that are told through this series. You get a lot of people where they don't
know much about their recent family so their parents, their grandparents. And
then there's also a lot of people who end up looking into their much more
distant ancestry and then there are celebrities that end up finding a much
more deeper ancestry that they look into such as going into their royal roots one
thing that I really enjoy about who do you think you are is that each celebrity
as they're going through their journey they are going to the locations that
their family were from so it's not just them learning about it but they're going
to the actual land, they're going to the buildings, to the actual streets where
their ancestors lived their lives, where different events happened in their lives.
Now an interesting note about the US version is that it did start out on NBC
but NBC quickly took it out of their schedule and it was then taken up by TLC
and recently they actually switched it back over to NBC so
starting in 2019 or 2020 the next season will actually be airing on NBC. And now
to number two - Who Do You Think You Are United Kingdom. It's the longest-running
genealogy show that I know about that's still going today. It's currently in its
16th season and once this video goes live the last episode of the most recent
season will have just released the most recent episode actually deals with a lot
of Sephardic genealogy and David Mendoza, who works with Bevis Marks and is an
amazing Sephardi genealogist, is actually on the show. I personally enjoyed the UK
version more than the US version and I had a hard time deciding between whether
or not I wanted the Australian version in the list as well but one thing about
the UK version is it seems the way that they present it just has a better flow
to it in my own opinion. And onto the number one genealogy TV show -
Finding Your Roots. Finding your roots started in 2012 on PBS and it's a show that is
hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr and each episode features usually about two or
three different celebrities. The finding your roots series is actually a
continuation of previous programming through PBS which was also done by Henry
Louis Gates Jr that includes the african-american lives in
african-american lives two programs as well as the faces of America programming
now those were set up a little bit differently than how finding your roots
is but you'll find a very similar set up in terms of how they go through the
genealogy and explain it to the guests each episode is structured in the same
way where they first talk about the celebrities childhood and their parents
and grandparents they're really recent family history I'm not usually going to
a couple of different stories about the people that they knew and especially
things that they might not have known about those people from there the
episode usually continues on going back further through history depending on
gasps sometimes it can go back really far and sometimes it'll only be more
recent for the african-american guests and for the Jewish guests where you
often hit that brick wall sometime in the 1800s
most of the funny arutz episodes end where they just discussed the DNA
results but some episodes will feature the DNA heavily throughout the entire
episode so now one of the things that I love the most about finding your roots
is that it seems to be the most information paps of all of the series it
doesn't have a whole lot of fluff they usually go right into the nitty-gritty
about the family history and pulling up documents and I really like the way they
script the show so that as they go along with the information it often goes in a
similar path as to what their actual research did so it's almost as if you're
going along with the research instead of just being told the story of the family
history thank you so much for checking out this video if you enjoyed please be
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