It is just under three weeks now until Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2011 at Olympia, London and the organisers have announced another celebrity guest. Eric Knowles is a familiar face from British television and an expert in antiques, but unlike the other celebrity guests he isn’t being interviewed or giving a talk.
Eric will be at the show on Friday and Sunday and “will help date any family treasures important to your family history”, although visitors are restricted to one item per person and he will not be providing valuations of the items (why would you want to sell that family heirloom anyway?).
Heirloom or otherwise I don’t think I have any antiques knocking about the house that need dating (and I will resist comments about other members of the household), but I am sure there are other visitors that will have family heirlooms that need identifying.
This could be a great opportunity to find out if that pocket watch is old enough to have been owned by your 2x great-grandfather or could that plate really have been passed down through six generations?
What a good idea, finding out more about a precious family item can give us more to add to the picture we are creating with the research. Shame i’m not going as i have a few things i’d like looked at.