who do you think you are?

There's a new television show (new to the U.S. - it is based on a show originally from Britain) that I like: Who Do You Think You Are?, about celebrities tracing their family trees. Besides being an interesting look at the ancestors of the celebrities themselves, it really got me thinking about my own family tree. I've never really thought farther back than my grandparents, and truthfully, haven't wondered about their lives growing up as children. Both sets of my grandparents came over from China and settled in the Americas, my father's parents in the Bay Area, and my mother's parents in Costa Rica. I imagine that they all came from rural Chinese villages at that.

I have a slight memory of being at my Auntie Amy's house, and her showing me some of the interesting things that someone (I can't recall who: a cousin or some other relative? maybe someone further related?) had discovered during a trip to China and my paternal grandfather's or grandmother's village over there. Now that the subject has really caught my interest, I'm going to have to follow up on that memory with a visit. The show had a graphic depicting upwards of ten or more generations back into the celebrities' trees; it's mind-boggling that this process could go on and on and on, further and further back to the dawn of mankind. And coming back to the present, how each one of us is the culmination of all those lives!

The reason I am more aware of the show than the one episode I saw last week is because that show and another were featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday. A few of the celebrities appeared, along with clips. The other show besides Who Do You Think You Are? is called Faces of America, broadcast recently on PBS. In it, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells accomplished cellist Yo-Yo Ma that through DNA testing, they found out that he is related to actress Eva Longoria! How mind-blowing is that? So beyond the research that may or may not be possible through written records of ancestry and family relations, it is now possible to analyze genetic code to find out whom is related to whom. Also revealed were how people of Jewish ancestry were related to those of Muslim ancestry. Doesn't that clue us all in to how we're all one and the same?