Find My Past Tv Series

Many people wonder if they are related to someone who might have been lucky enough, or brave enough, to contribute to a major historical event.
In Find My Past, a new genealogy series on the UK's leading factual channel Yesterday, ordinary members of the public will get to find out just that.

Presented by TV presenter Chris Hollins, each week Find My Past, will take three people on a journey to discover how they are related to someone from a major historical event. The programme will follow each of them as they uncover who their ancestor is and the part they played in history, before uniting them to discover how they are linked.

The famous events that will feature in the series are The Battle of Britain, Mutiny on the Bounty, Jack the Ripper, Dunkirk, D Day, The Titanic, The Battle of the Somme, The Tay Bridge Disaster, A Victorian Royal Scandal and Emily Davison - the suffragette who threw herself under the King's Horse.

Tune in every Thursday at 9pm on Yesterday (Freeview channel 12, Sky 537, Virgin Media 203)

This episode will be looking into the actions and events of Operation Dynamo. The Dunkirk evacuation, commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, code-named Operation Dynamo, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 26 May and the early hours of 3 June 1940. Around 700 of the 850 boats hastily sent to rescue our troops were just small merchant fishing boats.
In this episode we will meet 3 people whose ancestors all played a part in the evacuation.

In the early hours of 15 April 1912, RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. It was the worst shipwreck the world had known. More than 1500 people lost their lives - many died from drowning but more from hypothermia. The scale of the tragedy shocked the world.
In this film we tell the stories of three survivors whose fates overlapped on the night of 14/15 April 1912: a passenger, a steward and a wireless operator. Their survival was guaranteed by chance, their own actions, choices made by those around them and by the role of LIFEBOAT 14 – the only one to go back for survivors left in the water.

This episode will focus on 3 people, all of whom have ancestors who served in the Second World War.

The mutiny on the Bounty was a mutiny that occurred aboard the British Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty on 28 April 1789. Fletcher Christian and his mutineers set Lieutenant William Bligh and crew loyal to him afloat in a small boat so that they could settle on Pitcairn Island (Tahiti).
Bligh and his crew of 18 made an epic and eventful journey in the small boat to Timor in the Dutch East Indies. Bligh then returned to England and reported the mutiny.
This episode will see descendants of Fletcher Christian and William Bligh learning all they can about their ancestors.

At 2200 on 5 June just over 200 British men boarded 6 plywood gliders at Tarrant Rushton airfield. They were to spearhead the D Day invasion by stealth. Cast off from their bomb-laden Halifax tugs over the channel, their 'coup de main' task was to glide behind enemy lines, land on the outskirts of Caen, capture two key bridges and hold them until relieved by paratroopers, other gliderborne troops and seaborne commandoes.
In this episode we follow the descendants of three members of the 'Coup de Main' mission - a glider pilot, a soldier and a medic, as they learn about the three men whose unit was the first to go into action on 6 June 1944: D-Day.

This episode follows three people whose ancestor's lives were all effected by the murders carried out by Jack the Ripper.
We meet descendants of Catherine Eddowes, 4th victim of Jack the ripper, PC George Hutt who worked for the City Police, and Henry William Massingham, deputy of the Star Newspaper in 1888.

In this episode we explore just one case of the 300 British Soldiers executed by their own side for cowardice or desertion.
Focusing on the descendants of a soldier who was executed for cowardice, the arresting officer, and the man who was responsible for signing the death warrants of hundreds of soldiers who were 'shot at dawn'. This episode will no doubt be emotive and controversial.

In 1913 Emily Wilding Davison famously threw herself under the King's Horse during the Epsom Derby. In this episode we meet descendants of Emily as well as the great grandson of Herbert Jones, the jockey riding the King's Horse in the Derby.
We also follow the great granddaughter of a Senior Politician, who had to cope and deal with the upsurge in militancy caused by the suffragette movement.

On 28th December 1879, the centre section of the Tay Rail Bridge collapsed during a violent storm taking with it a train that was travelling on its single track. All 75 people on board were killed.
This episode focuses on descendants of two people killed during the disaster, Chairman of the inquiry into the disaster, and the Chief Engineer in charge of the building of the bridge.

In 1870, Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Warwickshire Baronet, cause huge scandal by divorcing his young wife. Harriet confessed shortly after the birth of their first child that she had been unfaithful and implicated men including the Prince of Wales. As a result, the Prince of Wales was the first and so far only member of the Royal Family ever to take the witness stand in court. In this episode we meet descendants of all parties involved in the scandal.