Aug 27, 2010 Filed Under: News & Rumors,Who Do You Think You Are? Comments (1)

Ancestry.com is extending its relationship with NBC for a second season of the TV series “Who Do You Think You Are?” that features celebrities discovering their family history.

The Provo company has signed a new contract with NBC that calls for it to sponsor the program and to provide marketing and research. In return, the program serves as a marketing tool for the company’s website-based business that sells access to records and other tools to uncover family histories.

The first season of the series that debuted in March featured the stories of seven celebrities including actress Sarah Jessica Parker, NFL great Emmitt Smith and filmmaker Spike Lee. Also featured was actress Lisa Kudrow, who helps produce the show and who convinced NBC to create the program in the United States after seeing the British version.

CEO Tim Sullivan said the company was looking to do something similar this next season as it did in the last in which its website was shown as a celebrity was researching her or his family history.

“It was not something that felt out of place, and it very effectively moved the story along,” said Sullivan.

In its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said an increase in subscribers to the website was “primarily as a result of increased interest in Ancestry.com stemming from NBC’s release of the U.S. version of the television show “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Sullivan said beyond the bump in subscribers, the company views the TV series as “something that could, over the long term, really change the basic level of awareness” about family history research.

Ancestry.com’s shares finished the day Thursday at $18.80, or down 81 cents. The company’s 52-week high was $21.35.

Source

It must be nice to be able to uncover family history/heritage.

I can’t even go back in my family history to find my biological father. Why? Simply because I was adopted. The only record of me on Ancestry.com is a one line entry on the California Birth Index. It then appears that I cease to exist. My birth name belongs to a ghost now. My descendants will not be able to trace back our family tree past me. It stops with me. My branch was severed from the family tree.

Sealed/amended birth certificates are modern-day sales receipts for adoptive parents that assure them that our (adoptees) family histories, nationalities and cultures are irrelevant. We are legally transformed into living “blank canvasses or slates” during the adoption process and then have new identities painted onto us. We are issued fake (amended) birth certificates with new names and new parents listed on them.

It is 2010. I want the truthful documentation of my birth unsealed NOW. Ownership of human beings did not cease to exist when slavery was abolished. People are still treated like chattel in the “land of the free”.

This injustice and blatant discrimination against fellow human beings continues in the “land of the free” because the non-adopted majority has refused to take a stand against it.

Lisa…I hear you are now a executive producer of this show? If that is the case, I challenge you and the show to try to uncover an adopted person’s family tree with sealed birth records and document the struggle/harassment an adopted person endures trying to get this information.