My day at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show

I visited the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show on Saturday 26 February and had a very enjoyable time there.

At the show I bought various books and CDs, and took a Y-DNA test at the FamilyTreeDNA stand (administered by their President and CEO Bennett Greenspan himself!). I wonder if the test results will prove that I’m a real Stewart (originating in Brittany), or will I have Norse ancestry or maybe something completely different? English?

I spoke to Penny Law (editor of Family History Monthly), Laura Berry (editor of Your Family History) and Sarah Williams (editor of Who Do You Think You Are?) about possible future contributions to their magazines. Unfortunately, neither Helen Tovey nor Karen Clare (editor and assistant editor of Family Tree) were at the show on Saturday – Helen had attended on Friday and Karen was expected on Sunday! (I also had a word with Andrew Illes, Business Manager of Phillimore and Co., which I hope will have a useful result.)

Fellow blogger Chris Paton, who originally hails from Northern Ireland, but now lives in Scotland, was a the show, so I had a chat with him. I had bought Chris’s very new book Tracing Your Family History on the Internet, so I got him to sign it. Chris was helping at Bob and Liz Blatchford’s stand, where I purchased the latest edition (number 13) of their Family and Local History Handbook, packed with goodies as usual (with which they were giving away the CD with editions 1-10). Another of my show purchases was Irish Church Records, edited by James G. Ryan, which looks very interesting.

For my wife Linda (who didn’t come to the show, as she doesn’t like crowds – and there were thousands at the show!), I bought a large and heavy (1,236 pages) Catalogue of the Gloucestershire Collection, published by Gloucester Public Library in 1928. Of course, that was my first purchase of the day and I had to lug it around for the rest of the time! Linda is half Welsh, so as the National Library of Wales was exhibiting at the show, I had a look at the books they had, and bought her Tracing Family History in Wales: How to Read the Inscriptions on Welsh Gravestones.

New at the show was version 1.10 of the British 19th Century Surname Atlas. I’ve been making a lot of use of the first edition over the years, so I’m looking forward to trying out the new edition, which I blogged about recently. From the Eneclann stand, I acquired a CD of The Scotch-Irish by Charles A. Hanna, which I hope will help me to determine when my Roxborough/Roxburgh ancesters are likely to have arrrived in County Derry/Londonderry.

To see pictures of the show, why not take at look at the recent blog postings of Chris Paton and Dick Eastman (who came over from the US). In between chatting to people and buying (too many) things, I also had a very nice lunch at Pizza Express. I shared a table with two very nice ladies – Jill and Gabriella – and ate far too much. I had a healthy but very large salad, but followed it with tira-mi-su (also very large).

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