Genealogy on Television: Find my Family

We’ve paid some attention to the Australian Who do you Think You Are program and the Dutch equivalent, but for American audiences who may feel a little left out, a new genealogy series just started on the American ABC.

“Find My Family” is a 6 part series of one-hour shows about people trying to track their lost family members, be it parents or other relatives. Created by the producer of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, it is no surprise the series is full of emotional reunions taking place under, yes, a family tree.

In the first program a woman named Ashley finds her brother and sister. The team helping her manages to find her real last name and cross references it with a baby boy with the same last name born 16 months earlier than her. ln the second program two more cases of lost family are solved, one interesting one seeing Jaime, a single mother of three, meeting her birth mother, June, after a long search in online directories. The team solves the case by checking all of the places mother June lived and finding someone in the neighborhood that knew where she lived and then finding out her new married name. What follows is a teary but touching reunion.

The interesting part is that many of the people on the program have been trying to find their family for years using all sorts of different resources but never managed to find anything. Yet the researchers of the program do.

It shows that even if you’ve been a member of a genealogy site such as ours you can still make interesting findings after years. You just need a fresh pair of eyes to look at your genealogical issues, be it a a genealogist you find though our community pages, a family member you’ve asked to join your site or someone you’ve got a smart match with.

The next Find Your Family programs can be viewed on Monday on ABC-TV at 9 p.m. EST/MST/PST.