DNA Journey (ITV TV Program)
2nd Oct 2022
Back in April (2022) I received a private message on ancestry.co.uk from a tv casting company. They were looking for DNA relatives of celebrities for the ITV program "DNA Journey" and I was a DNA matched cousin of a celebrity in an upcoming program. We had several conversations and myself and members of my own family were considered for a part in the program where we would get to meet our "celebrity cousin".From the questions that were asked it became apparent that the link was through the Crumpler surname which is pretty prominent in my fathers side of my tree.
The TV company also had an interest in the village of East Coker which is near Yeovil in Somerset.
We didn't appear in the program, and were never told who our famous cousin was, but this fired up a lot of family interest so I set about seeing if I could figure out myself who was our famous cousin.
I already had the Crumpler surname and the East Coker location as clues so my next task was to find out who was due to appear in the next series. The list was as follows:
Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan
Alison Steadman and Larry Lamb
Joel Dommett and Tom Allen
Alison Hammond and Kate Garraway
Quite an impressive list of suspects and I'd be absolutely delighted to have a connection with any of them, but we really wanted to find out so on with the search.
1st step was to build a quick and rather rough family tree for each person on the list, some parts of this were quite simple, some took a bit of digging, and some parts of trees were nigh on impossible!
At the same time I was working on these trees I expanded the Crumpler lines in my own tree, I now have 104 Crumplers in my ancestry.com tree and eventually I found a few of them who lived in East Coker.
The celebrities trees were wandering off in all directions. Rob Becketts tree had a few potential leads but they turned out to be unrelated and then a lucky hit on the tree of Joel Dommett. His Great Grandfather (his fathers mothers father) Fred Dening married Ethel Mary Crumpler who was born, and died in ......... East Coker!
A quick check back to my own tree and yes, there were Fred & Ethel, already in my tree. So it was a pretty simple task to add Joel to my own family tree.
I guess once the program airs it would have been easier to figure out, but the challenge was to do it myself.
It turns out that Joel Dommett is my 4th cousinMission Accomplished!
21 October 2022
After watching the program when it aired this evening it was great to see that the family tree they presented was the same as my own. The Crumpler line that we share focused on Jesse Crumpler (1872-1939) who was already in my tree but turns out to be quite an important person in our family history. Armed with this new information I shall update his profile and add some of the history of this remarkable man who came up with a few revolutionary ideas during his lifetime.