Genealogy Video is Taking Genealogy to a New Level

Our fascination with genealogy and ancestry may be reaching its modern apotheosis with the recent spate of lavish genealogy video shows. Their production values are very high, the discoveries dramatic, and the subjects are all well known, charismatic and accomplished individuals in their own right (a generous sprinkling of TV and film stars among them).

Of course, these current shows are far from the first genealogy videos to grace our television screens. Before "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Faces of America", we had "Roots", "History Detectives" and "African American Lives", to name just a few.

But our obsession with genealogy started well before these recent and undeniably entertaining genealogy videos. The genealogy bug, it turns out, is very ancient. Before people had television they had the bible (and a good thing too, many will intone). Instead of collapsing into the sofa, reaching for the remote and staring at "Who Do You Think You Are", folks took the Good Book out of the cupboard, turned to the pages of 1 Chronicles, and made their own fun reading about genealogy ("And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and Hazarmaveth, and Jerah...").

Many a worthy neophyte must have come to grief (or fell asleep) slogging through that marvelous feat of genealogy. Luckily, the genealogy of Jesus - covered in the gospels of Matthew and Luke - is much shorter (although a little different in each).

What is new in genealogy is not our interest in the subject, but our ability to make the material which we have interesting and accessible. And we can thank the explosion in public genealogy video for that. Because in most families, there is a person who is the genealogy researcher who has the skills, patience and (forgive me) doggedness to track down the branches. And then there are the genealogy appreciators - the audience. These goodly people would never do the genealogy research themselves, but are more than happy to share in its results. But how do you make those results compelling?

Genealogy video? "Pshaw," some of you will be saying. "It took me countless hours to gather all this genealogical material, and it runs to hundreds of pages. it should take them countless hours to read it!" Maybe. But baby needs to crawl before she can walk. You must draw them in to the story first. So genealogy video.

Genealogy video - for folks unable to command their own Hollywood production - is built up using video editing programs that you run on your computer - programs like iMovie (on the Apple Mac) or MovieMaker (PC). More advanced video editing programs include Final Cut Pro and Premier. (The result won't be quite as polished as something which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode like on TV, but with a little practice, home-made genealogy videos are surprisingly good.)

The attraction of these video editing programs for genealogy is that you can include all of your genealogy related material - of whatever kind - in the one place: documents, information (either as captions or narration), photographs, old film, new film (maybe an interview with a family member or maybe you have film of a visit to the ancestral village), audio recordings of folks who have passed - you name it. You can add music and poems; it really is like a kind of three-dimensional digital scrapbook.

As well as some video editing software, you will need a scanner to digitize your documents and photos. And you may want to fix the photos up a tad first using some simple tips for retouching digital photographs. And you will need to digitize and bring any audio and video into the computer if you want to include it in your genealogy video.

Once all that's done, you edit it all together. A word of warning - video editing is a learned skill. It takes a bit of time and patience to get the hang of it. And if your computer is more than, say, 5 years old it will probably lack the processing power to edit video. (Older computers are a common reason many people give up on their own genealogy video - often blaming themselves.) If you really want to make that genealogy video, you may need to (gulp) invest in a new machine.

Once completed, you can post your genealogy video to the web - using YouTube or anyone of endless video hosting services. You can send a link to the cousins across the country or across the world. You can make a copy that fits on the iPod or on one of these newfangled cell phones. Or you can just burn a bunch of DVDs.

So use the inspiration provided by these new bright and shiny genealogy video shows currently playing on TV to think about your own genealogy video. Think about how you could incorporate your own genealogy material into a video of your own. And if you want help putting it all together, there are many documentary professionals who specialize in genealogy video and who would be more than glad to lend a hand or just give you some tips and advice.

To understand the history of your tribe, you don't need to make the kids sit down and plow through 1 Chronicles. You can make a genealogy video every bit as thrilling.