{"id":29705,"date":"2023-12-11T09:57:14","date_gmt":"2023-12-11T08:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/738a276d-8aa6-40ee-8a88-8a17abafe242"},"modified":"2023-12-11T10:34:28","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T09:34:28","slug":"shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/rss_feed\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Shirley Ballas on Who Do You Think You Are?<\/em>: Everything you need to know"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>
By Rich Marshall\n <\/p>
Published: Monday, 11 December 2023 at 08:57 AM<\/p>
\n\n
\u201cWhat do I know about my family ancestry?\u201d says ballroom champion and Strictly Come Dancing<\/em> head judge Shirley Ballas at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?<\/em><\/a> \u201cNot a lot.\u201d Nevertheless, she knows enough about two family stories to want to find out more. Did her great grandmother, Clara, abandon her family to go to live in the US? And does Shirley have black ancestry?<\/p>
She begins by tracing the life of her maternal great grandmother, Clara. The version of Clara\u2019s life that\u2019s been passed down is of a party girl whose husband George, Shirley\u2019s great grandfather, died of a broken heart. The truth is more complex. In fact, George moved out of the family home before Clara left for the US and he died of cancer. In his will<\/a>, he left everything to his mother, who raised the couple\u2019s children.<\/p>
Sadly, Clara\u2019s move to the US didn\u2019t offer a bright new beginning. She divorced her second husband because he was violent and died in 1947 after spending 17 years in hospital, the result of progressive dementia caused by syphilis. It\u2019s a story that sheds a whole different light on Clara\u2019s life.<\/p>
Next, Shirley turns her attention to her father\u2019s side of the family. With information supplied by her aunt, Barbara, she discovers that her great grandfather, George Rich, was born in Cape Town, South Africa. It\u2019s time for Shirley to head south. In Cape Town, she sees a death record that reveals George\u2019s sister was of mixed race.<\/p>
Going back another two generations, Shirley\u2019s 3x great grandmother, Caroline Otto, and her children were all baptised as Anglicans at around the same time. How to explain this? The answer is that Caroline\u2019s parents were \u201cMalay\u201d. In the 19th century, this was a term used to describe Muslims who were not European in heritage, and may have had roots in either Asia or Africa, so the family were converts to Christianity.<\/p>
Shirley heads for the neighbourhood of Bo-Kaap, which in the middle of the 19th century was known as the Malay Quarter. It would have been a poor area of the city, populated by former slaves brought to the Cape from territories around the Indian Ocean \u2013 including Madagascar, which was the birthplace of Caroline\u2019s mother, also called Caroline, a washerwoman who died in 1848 aged between 50 and 60. The lack of precision strongly hints Caroline senior spent part of her life as a slave, her name probably given to her by a slaveholding family.<\/p>
Shirley\u2019s discoveries have confirmed those family stories of a heritage that extends far beyond Shirley\u2019s native Merseyside. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget this journey,\u201d she says \u201cand I\u2019ll take a piece of these great great great great grandmothers. Now I\u2019ll carry that with me until the day I die.\u201d<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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By Rich Marshall Published: Monday, 11 December 2023 at 08:57 AM \u201cWhat do I know about my family ancestry?\u201d says ballroom champion and Strictly Come Dancing head judge Shirley Ballas at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are? \u201cNot a lot.\u201d Nevertheless, she knows enough about two family stories to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":29706,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"3"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know.jpg",2560,1706,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-1024x682.jpg",800,533,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/12\/shirley-ballas-on-who-do-you-think-you-are-everything-you-need-to-know-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Rich Marshall Published: Monday, 11 December 2023 at 08:57 AM \u201cWhat do I know about my family ancestry?\u201d says ballroom champion and Strictly Come Dancing head judge Shirley Ballas at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are? \u201cNot a lot.\u201d Nevertheless, she knows enough about two family stories to…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/29705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}