Earlier this year, I blogged about a new Canadian genealogy television series, Ancestors in the Attic and described the producer’s call for interesting family mysteries. I submitted a short essay about my fourth great grandfather Stoddart’s missing gravestones that sparked their interest.
I was contacted by the producers and I was thrilled to learn that they were attempting to determine more about the grave markers that were removed from my family’s small private cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. They planned to film their search for the lost Stoddart gravestones and include it in the first season of the series.
Unfortunately, they really didn’t discover anything new about the Stoddarts despite the fact that the film company and research team is based in the Toronto area and had access to the local archives. I suspect we will never learn what really happened to the family markers.
Yesterday, the producer emailed me:
Your segment about the “Lost Stoddart Gravestones” has been launched on our website. Go to:
http://www.history.ca/microsites/AncestorsInTheAttic
and click on VIDEO and then LOST GRAVESTONES.
It was felt that the challenge of resolving this question [of locating the missing grave stones] made the search less than perfect. However we still wanted to show the challenges and inherent dilemmas of genealogy — our compromise was to include the clip online.
I think that broadcasting the five minute segment on the web was a great solution and I am pleased that their efforts yielded something positive. I hope that my fellow Stoddart family researchers enjoy it as much as I did.
Unfortunately, the series will only be shown in Canada (starting this evening!) and there are no plans for it to be broadcast in the lower 48 states at this time.
