While I do not have television, I sometimes go online and watch shows that I really want to see. I’ve been looking forward to this season of “Who Do You Think You Are” because one of my favorite actresses, Kim Cattrall, has her own episode this season. Kim is a British-born actress who grew up in Canada. She is best known for her work playing the role of sassy, independent Samantha Jones on Sex and the City.
I went online today to watch Kim’s episode of “Who Do You Think You Are” and I’m really glad that I did. In this episode, Kim was able to work through a seventy-year-old family mystery involving her maternal grandfather, who disappeared when her mother was eight years old. Kim traveled to Liverpool and met up with her mother and her mother’s two sisters. The first thing that Kim sees is a picture of her grandfather. The curious thing about the picture is that it is a group family photo, and her grandfather is not actually in the group – he is inside the building in the background, peering out through a window. That is the only picture that anyone in her family has of him, and it certainly adds to the air of mystery, as does the fact that one of Kim’s aunts revealed that he tried to get her to go with him when he left the family home when she was a child. She did not go with him, and she was the last to see him before he left.
The mystery goes even deeper, as Kim was able to locate and meet her grandfather’s two sisters, who were young children at the time that he left Kim’s grandmother and her three daughters. The sisters had neither seen nor heard from him since that day, and they mentioned that it was a dark secret that their mother took great pains to keep quiet. No one was supposed to speak of him; she was so ashamed of her son.
More upsetting news came when Kim opened a package of information that genealogy researchers had located for her. In the package was a marriage certificate – her grandfather had gotten remarried approximately a year after leaving her grandmother. Since he had not divorced his grandmother, that made him a criminal as well. Kim decided to see whether she could find any of his “other” family, in hopes that perhaps they might be able to tell her about who he was or show her pictures of him. She did locate her grandfather’s sister-in-law from his “other” marriage and went to meet her. She was able to talk with her, and was even given some pictures.
Further research revealed that Kim’s grandfather moved his other family to Australia, where they lived until his death. She decided not to pursue any further research, and has found out all that she feels that she needs to know. When Kim met her mother in Canada to share what she found out about her grandfather, it was difficult to share the stories and pictures that she had uncovered. In the end, though, Kim’s efforts brought closure for her mother and her aunts because they had been wondering what had become of their father. It was a very moving and interesting episode, and very illustrative of the types of secrets that can lay dormant in families for years until someone cracks open the books and starts looking for clues.