Who Do You Think You Are - S03 Episode 6 - Adrian Dunbar

This well known format combines history, factual and entertainment. Drawing on interesting aspects such as memory, the series seeks to use family genealogy to explore history. It invokes ideas around memory to help create its narrative structures, as Kerwin Klein writes in ‘On the emergence of memory in historical discourse’, Representations - ‘[W]e sometimes use memory as a synonym for history to soften our prose, to humanize it, and make it more accessible. Memory simply sounds less distant, and perhaps for that reason, it often serves to help draw general readers into a sense of the relevance of history for their own lives’ (2000, p. 129).

In this episode Adrian Dunbar goes in search of a deeper understanding and knowledge of his ancestry. He explores the family memory by meeting relatives, historians and archivists. The episode aims to uncover and create narratives around unknown aspects of often well known history. It uses narrative techniques common to popular entertainment to uncover, document, and examine history and heritage. In this episode Professor Olwyn Purdue and Professor Ferghal McGarry help Adrian Dunbar understand how his family history interlinks and intertwines with the major historical events and how the fabric and history of Northern Irish society contributed to these stories.