History Detectives - coming soon...!

[Chris Paton]

I bumped into a friend of mine on the train yesterday between Glasgow and Paisley- he works at Lion Television in Glasgow, the company responsible for the forthcoming History Detectives series. Some of you may have seen the American version of the series on PBS, which has been going for a few years now, but basically the show tries to tell the interesting stories from artefacts that people may have at home or in the community, and is a mixture of genealogy, archaeology, forensic pathology, history and more.

My last television job before I decided to take up working in genealogy full time was at Lion, helping to develop the format last year for this British version of the show, and the news is that the series is almost complete and ready to be delivered to the BBC in a couple of weeks time, most likely to transmit late summer/early autumn on BBC2. Having also bumped into a researcher friend of mine recently who is also on the show, I know that there are some good stories lined up, so hopefully it should be a good product, as the team at Lion know their stuff - they were responsible for the hugely successful "Days That Shook the World" series amongst others.

There's no advance material publicity released on it yet, but for a flavour, the American PBS website for the series is at http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/ .

Enjoy!

Chris

[JimM]

Thanks Chris
I’ll look forward to watching the show… let’s hope this time that “Britain” also includes Scotland
I quite like phrase “History Detective”…. It a good description for this hobby (and easier to pronounce than genealogist)

Jim (family history dectective)

[Chris Paton]

For reasons I won't go into, we did at one point try to come up with another title, but nothing could beat its directness - so History Detectives it remained! Neil Oliver is one of the presenters by the way, and he's always keen to get Scotland involved, so hopefully we won't be let down on that score!

Chris

[DavidWW]

Thanks Chris
I’ll look forward to watching the show… let’s hope this time that “Britain” also includes Scotland
I quite like phrase “History Detective”…. It a good description for this hobby (and easier to pronounce than genealogist)

Jim (family history dectective)

It's not just the pronunciation, it's also the spelling , - just listen to the hoops that the presenter has to jump through on the forthcoming second series of Digging Up Your Roots on BBC Radio Scotland (starts 11:00 BST on 1st July and runs for 6 weeks) in terms of the programme's website address

David

[AnnieMack]

Geneo wotsit and Neil Oliver.......oh boy, can't wait

Annie

[melva'sgirl]

I live in Ohio USA and this is one of my favorite shows. They show you step by step how research is done by professionals and how it's all documented. It's fascinating to see how they detect. And they have done some of their research abroad. Just watching the show gives me direction. True, we all can't fly or drive all over to retrieve some article to document our families the way they do on the show, but it gives great clues on how to go about finding the material. I just wish I could see the UK version of the show too. What fun!!!