Stars dig up surprises with their ancestors

Another good genealogy article by Jim Gilchrist, at Scotsman.com (The Scotsman) about how popular genealogy is becoming, especially in the celebrity world.

Excerpt from the article

As the internet makes family history research one of the fastest growing hobbies in the world, tourism and genealogy agencies alike have been quick to recruit a sometimes unlikely sounding legion of celebrities to promote genealogy tourism, helping them delve into their Scottish ancestry with sometimes unexpected results.

Thus you had Ayrshire-born supermodel Kirsty Hume and her actor husband Donovan Leitch (clad in full Highland dress) turning up for the New York launch of VisitScotland’s genealogy site, www.ancestralscotland.com, where they were joined by other Scottish or Scotophilic celebs. Among them was Twin Peaks and Sex and the City star Kyle MacLachlan – a man so possessed by his Scottish roots that he changed his name from a “Mc” to a “Mac” prefix because he felt it was more authentic, while his website bears the MacLachlan clan motto, Fortis et Fidus – “strong and faithful”. He has visited his clan heartland in Argyll, saying that it was “magical to return to my homeland”. “

It worries me slightly, what with the allure of how easy and available genealogy information is, that people will blindly accept genealogy information they find online, when those of us who have examined a lot of information online, have found it lacking, both in accuracy, and in source information.

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