Stephen Aron on Working with Sarah Jessica Parker — and on the New Interest in Genealogy
Stephen Aron, executive director of the Autry’s Institute for the Study of the American West, said this week he was “astounded” at the ratings for the premiere of NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” in which Aron worked with Sarah Jessica Parker to find out more about her ancestry.
Sarah Jessica Parker worked with The Autry's Stephen Aron to find out about her ancestors
The show was the second most-watched in that hour, with 6.85 million viewers, according to TV by the Numbers. “It either means that more people are into genealogy than I thought or more people are into Sarah Jessica Parker than I thought,” Aron joked.
But the show, along with PBS’s “Faces of America,” with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., has tapped into a new American fascination with genealogy, Aron said. Oprah did a segment on it on her show and has an excerpted a guide to tracing your family roots with genealogist Megan Smolenyak. Suddenly, everyone wants to know more about genealogy. Smolenyak recently told Marketplace.org’s Kai Ryssdal that subscriptions for the biggest genealogy site, Ancestry.com, soared 17 percent in the last quarter.
Stephen Aron, executive director of The Autry's Institute for the Study of the American West
Aron thinks all this interest in where we came from may have something to do with a general feeling of dislocation in American society, caused by huge and rapid changes, like the current economic recession or the sudden omnipresence of the Internet.
“People are feeling particularly uprooted right now, so they become interested in finding their roots,” Aron said. “I’ve done a lot of consulting for shows on the History Channel and other cable channels, but I never had my e-mail so flooded with messages from people wanting to know more about their own genealogy.”
Aron said there was another period in American history when this happened: the late 19th Century. “That’s when we saw the emergence of historical societies,” Aron said. “At that moment, many people, primarily society’s elites, became really fascinated with history and origins.”
Aron said Sarah Jessica Parker was “wonderful to work with.” His first impression was that she was “really tiny and really friendly.”
Their encounter resulted in about five hours of film, and Parker seemed really engaged with what she was finding out. “You could see that she was genuinely moved by the information and was being changed by it,” Aron said. “That’s what we hope the Autry is all about: not just dusty stuff in cases, but artifacts that challenge and change the way people look at who they are.”
Catch another look at the episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” on Hulu.
It really was a fascinating program and it’s great to see the Autry connecting to contemporary interests and issues on TV!
I know who I am
I wanted to see the program but missed it. For some reason we don’t have a program guide with our cable and I did not know it was on. I’ll look it up on line and see if it will be aired again.
I am one of the lucky few. In writing a biography on my g-grandfather, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith I had the pleasure of working in the opposite direction. “Soapy” treated his criminal empire like a business, saving nearly all his letters and documents. I had literally thousands of artifacts in my personal and family collections to go through before I needed to use a service like Ancestry.com. Odd that after researching and writing for over 25 years, I am barely knowledgeable about normal genealogical practices.
Jeff Smith
Alias Soapy Smith: The Life and Death of a Scoundrel
Criminal empire? Wow, sounds interesting. What have you found rewarding about researching your own roots? Do you think these services like Ancestry and GeneaNet are tapping into a new national trend?