A Quest for Roots and Kinship: Family History in the Television Series Allt För Sverige (The Great Swedish Adventure)

This paper considers the contemporary significance of family history and, more generally, cross-national heritage by studying a Swedish television programme in which Swedish Americans visit Sweden to find out more about their ancestors and possibly to meet present-day relatives. Saar’s theory of three levels of genealogy—history, evaluation, and genre—is used as the analytical framework. The findings indicate that the contemporary significance of family history is multilayered and complex, and is acknowledged to be of great importance in self-reflection, self-understanding, and a sense of rootedness.


Introduction
Family history research is an industry which has grown exponentially in recent decades, 'driven by the combination of technological developments and the online access to catalogues and digital surrogates that this has facilitated'. 1 The increased interest is arguably driven by individualization and privatization, and an example of how 'the historical interest of the world over the past decades has been broadened and democratized'. 2 The fascination with genealogy is evident from the number of television series it has prompted: Genealogy Roadshow, Ancestors, The Generations Project, Long Lost Family, Relative Race, Roots Less Traveled, and Who Do You Think You Are? 3 According to De Groot, programmes of this type 'have been a key driver of the "genealogy boom" around the world as amateur family historians increasingly become engaged with historical culture through their own practice'. 4 Despite its popularity, however, there is relatively little research on why individuals embark on family history research and what the findings mean to them. Existing genealogical research has been described as 'scattered across disciplines and communities'. 5 Stallard and De Groot contend that though family history is carried out by millions of people around the world, the practice is 'understudied, and we need to work hard to understand how it works'. 6 This paper seeks to remedy that by considering the sociocultural meaning of family history, acknowledging that 'Personal reasons for pursuing an interest in ancestry always intersect with wider cultural processes, politics, and social concerns'. 7 From this follows that neither family history nor memory are stable recollections of the past, being instead 'negotiated, changed, and legitimized, within families, but also between families and groups'. 8 The worldwide popularity of family history research paired with the multilayered nature of genealogical meaning-making renders the findings of this paper relevant for international scholars across a range of disciplines.
The case studied is Allt för Sverige (AFS, lit. 'Everything for Sweden', The Great Swedish Adventure), a television series made by Sveriges Television (SVT), the Swedish public service broadcaster with the widest range of programmes of all television companies in the country. AFS is intended for a Swedish audience while the participants come from the US, in an example of the internationalization of family history research. The series, which has been running since 2011, received an International Emmy Award in 2016 in the class Non-Scripted Entertainment. In AFS, ten unrelated Swedish Americans travel to various locations in Sweden in a contest to find their Swedish roots, helped by presenter Anders Lundin. At each stop a participant gets to open a small chest containing a letter with information about their Swedish ancestors. The letters are described as 'keys that will unlock your past'. Sometimes the chest also contains copies of archival records, such as letters, photographs, passenger lists for the transatlantic crossings, church records, maps, and newspaper cuttings. The participants compete to stay in the programme, leaving the winner to meet their present-day Swedish relatives in the final episode. In essence, it is a quest for roots and kinship. In each episode, the participants share their thoughts and feelings with the audience about the significance of family history in their lives-a snapshot of the contemporary discourse of family history.

Background
Family history research has been described as an 'archive-based leisure activity'. 9 The terms genealogy and family history research can be used interchangeably, as here; however, the two terms can also be defined differently, with genealogy limited to an interest in ancestry and descent, while family history stands for the wider narrative of personal events and telling the family's story. The traditional way to conduct family history research is to search in public and private archives. Family historians set out to establish where their ancestors lived, whom they lived with, their occupations, property, and material possessions, and the significant events in their lives. Key sources include census, parish registries, army records, and much more.
Sweden is a country with a uniquely rich archival material and a long tradition of far-reaching freedom of information legislation dating back to 1766, which allows free access to public records. 10 This has contributed to making genealogy a common leisure activity. Sweden also has a tradition of well-organized popular movements, which extends to a number of organizations for family historians, among them Genealogiska Föreningen (the Genealogical Society of Sweden), a national association founded in 1933 and one of Sweden's first associations in this area; Föreningen för datorhjälp i släktforskningen (the Association for Computer-based Genealogy), founded in 1980, which is considered the world's oldest association for computer-based genealogy; and Sveriges Släktforskarförbund (the Federation of Swedish Genealogical Societies), an umbrella organization founded in 1986. There are also a number of professional family historians, some involved in AFS.
The reason why so many Americans have roots in Sweden lies in the nineteenth century, when people emigrated to the US in their thousands, driven by famine and unemployment. Between 1821 and 1930, 33 million Europeans emigrated to North America, and emigration from Sweden gained momentum in the mid-1850s. Sweden's disastrous state in the late 1860s fuelled the major wave of emigration that culminated in the 1880s. More than 1.2 million Swedes, almost one-fifth of the population, left for America. For some, though, the history goes even further back. Sweden had a colony in the West Indies, Saint-Barthélemy, between 1784 and 1878. One participant in the ninth season of AFS could trace his roots to this period. According to the Swedish Genealogical Association, research on emigrated Swedes has grown in popularity over the past four decades, 'conducted with extreme frenzy […] by individuals as well as institutions and authorities'. 11 This has amounted in a large collection of material about emigrants and a long line of books. Svenska Emigrantinstitutet (the Swedish Emigrant Institute), founded in 1965, exists to promote emigration research and strengthen contacts with Swedish emigrants and their descendants. The focus is on North America, but also Australia, South America, Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere. 12 Researching family history can sometimes be difficult due to name changes, reflecting a desire to start a new life in a new country: 'Some consciously created a new identity to forget about their old life.' 13 Early examples of family historians in Sweden include Johan Thomasson Bure (1568-1652), who was the first commoner known to have been a hobby genealogist, and the first to almost exclusively devote himself to non-noble families. 14 For most of its history, however, genealogy was generally a concern for the privileged classes. In 1749, as part his attempt to shore up royal power, the king issued a decree on biographies urging the relatives of recently deceased noblemen, clergymen, other people of rank, and distinguished citizens to act as their memorialists. Women, peasants, and other 'common people'-in other words at least 95 per cent of the population-were exempt from writing down their relatives' life stories. The regulation was little observed and soon forgotten, but the interest in family history was evident from the long obituaries found in church records from the mid eighteenth century. 15 The wider popular fascination with family history began in the nineteenth century, primarily among the Swedish middle class as the result of increased individualization and notions of self, and became a popular movement in the 1960s. 16 The audience for AFS thus has a long-standing interest in family history.
The reasons for doing family history research have varied, however. According to a genealogical handbook from 1938, 'The ultimate goal of knowing one's family is to create a fixed point in the individual's life, to place him in a larger context, and to facilitate adaptation to society and people'. 17 More recent handbooks focus on the personal reasons, as an example from 2014 indicates: 'At home we had a potted plant all my life, and my father always said it came from his mother-in-law's mother's home. But he didn't know her name and that's what I want to know.' 18 AFS may promote its audience's interest in family history but it did not create it.
In the US, family history research initially met with suspicion, since 'the practice was still associated with some colonists' grasping attempts to secure social standing within the British Empire'. 19 But in the nineteenth century, genealogy developed 'from an elite pastime to a legitimate, popular pursuit for the people'. 20 The New England Historic Genealogical Society was founded in Boston 1845 as the first of its kind in the US. The information collected, documented, organized, and made available by genealogists in both the US and may parts of Europe, eventually led to a new 'genealogy boom' in the 1960s, with people taking an interest in more 'common' ancestors. In the 1970s, Alex Haley's bestseller Roots and the television series of the same name, first broadcast in 1977, inspired many African Americans to trace their own family history back to their ancestors' countries of origin, and also spurred the interest of other people around the world to investigate their own families. 21 The Mormons have long maintained a useful resource for genealogists and family historians worldwide, including Sweden. They founded the Genealogical Society of Utah, later FamilySearch, in 1894 to gather genealogical records so people could be baptized posthumously, allowing them to unite with their extended families in the afterlife. 22 Between 1948 and 1963, the Mormons microfilmed records from around the world. Approximately 100 million pages from Swedish archives were microfilmed, covering most church records until 1895. 23 Since 2011, FamilySearch International has organized RootsTech, an annual conference and 'global family history event where people of all ages learn to discover, share, and celebrate their family connections across generations through technology'. 24 RootsTech is considered the largest family history and technology conference in the world. 25 The development of affordable DNA testing has brought new possibilities for genealogical projects, but falls outside the scope of this paper, since no such technology is used by AFS.

Purpose and Aim
The present study addresses the contemporary sociocultural significance of family history-why is ancestry and heritage deemed important, and what meanings do people assign to family history? AFS is used as a case study of how family history is socially constructed in order to answer two research questions. How is the significance of family history described in the programme? What main themes emerge about the significance of family history?
The paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study and includes only the ninth season of AFS, broadcast in 2019. Though the sample is small, the series is part of a larger discourse of ancestry and family history research in both North America and Sweden. There is thus an international scope to its findings. The discourse of family history is both shaped and circumscribed by the specific social setting of the series. As a television production, AFS is constructed by professionals to win an audience. The context of the series sets the stage for participants' reactions, and though the participants share their thoughts and feelings with the audience, they might have expressed themselves differently in another context-further insights could be gained by studying more seasons of AFS or other television programmes on the same theme. There have been no interviews and only the discourse as broadcast is analysed. The focus is not the practice of doing family history, but the potential outcomes of such research. The participants in AFS do not do their family history research themselves, whereas they do imagine and narrate the significance this knowledge will have in their lives. The analysis is not generalizable to all family history, but provides a case study of the discourse in the setting of a television series about crossnational family history.

Related Research
Cannell has studied the meanings of genealogy in the ongoing BBC television series Who do you think you are? and stresses that genealogy 'rarely has only one kind of importance for those who engage in it', but that one central aspect of family history is 'to re-make kinship relations with the departed, and to care for the related dead', and that 'the dead can lead people to new links with the living'. 26 Cannell contends that the message of Who do you think you are? is that 'genealogy is a process by which the dead are brought back to some form of social life, the life of kinship, through the work and the journeys (both literal and emotional) which their living descendants undertake on their behalf.' 27 Cannell emphasizes that the emotions in Who do you think you are? are staged, but not feigned. The production team selects certain facts in advance and arranges to film the participating celebrity's reactions, and though emotional reactions are not easily predicted the individuals still offer personal responses. The same is true of AFS: the production team creates the preconditions, but cannot foresee how participants will react to the family history presented to them.
Scodari has examined the television series African-American Lives, African-American Lives 2, Faces of America, Finding Your Roots, the US adaptation of Who Do You Think You Are, and The Generations Project. 28 She finds them to be biased towards decontextualized family narratives that are postclass, post-racist, and post-feminist, accentuating individual transcendence rather than collective struggle. Family history, according to Scodari, rarely goes beyond the personal and historical to touch on current politics. Past injustices are bracketed as bygones in the television productions she has studied. Any lingering doubts or resentments related to class, race, or patriarchal structures exist to be resolved not by public policy, but by 'private virtue, charitable acts, and/or personality adjustments'. 29 Scodari emphasizes that the stories of ancestors who arrived in America in the Century of Immigration (1820-1924) have the potential to facilitate a recognition of inequality that present-day immigrants still face; however, none of the television series in her research material take the opportunity to educate, and none draw parallels with the causes and effects of immigration today. Meanwhile, AFS's stated ambition is to recognize the concerns of the past in the present. Lundin stated in an interview 2016, 'We touch the present and can draw parallels to the people fleeing across the oceans today.' 30 These parallels are not explicit in the ninth season, but sometimes participants reflect critically on how events might have unfolded in a way more beneficial to the lives of indigenous populations in the past.
In her study of information-seeking among family historians, Yakel describes family history as an information-intensive activity, and yet 'While information needs may be expressed in factual terms, the underlying need is affective.' 31 Interviews with 29 family historians leads her to conclude that an important reason for searching for their ancestors is 'seeking meaning related to the process of finding coherence as part of the mastery of life'. 32 The present paper does not include sources on information-seeking, but it nevertheless permits insights into the affective side to family history, since AFS participants share their thoughts and feelings with the audience. The affective dimension of family history has also been emphasized by Edwards in a study of genealogists in the north of England. She found that different ancestors can arouse different feelings. Her informants spoke of liking some of their family forebears more than others, showing that 'ancestors can evoke antipathy and disgust, as well as admiration and pride'. 33 Equally, Yakel highlights that the evidence in previous research about how much genealogists and family historians want to connect with others in the present is mixed. In the context of AFS, connecting with present-day relatives is the goal of the competition. The primary focus of the present paper, however, is family history.
Bottero has used practice theory to explore 'identity-work' among family historians. She finds that family history research as a social practice is closely tied to notions of identity, and that 'For some genealogists, family history is part of a reworked account of personal connection or belonging.' 34 This can also extend to others than the individual family historian, since 'Family histories are also stories however, with the production of narrative accounts organized for practical purposes and varying audiences'. 35 The present study does not include data on family history research per se, since this was done by a professional genealogist employed by the production. Instead, the focus is the significance of access to previously unknown knowledge about one's ancestral heritage. Fredrik Mejster, the professional genealogist employed by AFS for four years, has said in an interview that 'For someone out there this will mean everything'. 36 In a study of the relationship between family and locality in contemporary popular genealogy, and specifically online family history research in Austria, Timm argues that 'historical emplacement is always involved in popular genealogy' and that 'genealogical practices can articulate the family again and again as the sum of locations and dislocations'. 37 Genealogical sources have historically arisen in relation to place, and have traditionally been generated by the 'technologies of rule', with church records and census created to control the population. Starting with these resources, databases created to locate ancestors then 'generate a digital kinship that is no longer represented within this national, ethnic, and geographical order'. 38 People from all over the world can access such databases and assemble individual narratives that transcend national borders. The participants in AFS cross national borders and nationality is still very much present as an important component of heritage.
Nash explores the relationships between ideas of nation, ancestry, and diaspora in Ireland, maintaining that 'travelling in search of roots raises interesting questions about relationships between rootedness and mobility across, often intersecting, local, national, and transnational forms of identification'. 39 She discovered different reasons people come to Ireland in search of their Irish heritage: 'For most visitors I spoke to, doing genealogy in Ireland was about "finding out where they came from", knowing "who they are", and "exploring their Irishness"'. Most shared a desire for connection, to match something in themselves to another place and to other people. 40 The participants in AFS similarly wanted to find their Swedish heritage, and, as will be seen, this new knowledge when interconnected with their existing sense of self and identity proved both illuminating and challenging for them.
Sleeter uses her own family history to illustrate how silenced or suppressed national narratives can emerge in family history research, and how injustices live on and affect descendants' social situation. 41 Her concept of critical family history aims to 'challenge family historians to construct their histories in the context of social relationships forged through colonization, racism, and other relations of power'. 42 She emphasizes that neither family memories nor personal identity are private matters, yet most family historians do not focus on the social context in which their family lived, something that 'leads to uncritical appropriation of national mythologies'. 43 In AFS the social context was highlighted on several occasions, allowing participants to reflect on what life might have been like for their ancestors. The consequences of colonization were brought up, and to some extent related to the present-day.

Theory
Family history research is based on notions of kinship. Kinship can be investigated both as a theoretical concept and as a social category. 44 In his book Ancestors and relatives: Genealogy, identity and community, Zerubavel explains how kinship as a social category rests on a socially constructed logic rather than a biological one: biological facts form part of our worldview, but, crucially, our perception of kinship is founded on socially determined traditions and classifications. 45 Zerubavel argues that the way history is organized in our minds forms 'unmistakably social' and 'maplike' structures. 46 He describes genealogical communities as imagined communities, and as the result of different forms of classification. The basis of the classifications varies, however, and can comprise several strategies. In other words, it is far from self-evident how ancestry and family history is constructed. In a paper on genealogy and subjectivity, Martin Saar addresses Nietzsche's and Foucault's use of the concept of genealogy, proposing a three-level model to explain its various aspects. 47 As 'a multiple or differentiated concept or a multi-layered conceptual practice', Saar stresses the 'triple relation between genealogy and the subject'. 48 The three intertwined levels he identifies are, first, genealogy as a mode of writing history or a historical method; second, genealogy as a mode of evaluation (as critique, in other words); and, third, genealogy as a textual practice or a style specific for a genre. 49 Saar's levels will be applied here as an analytical framework to understand the social construction of family history in the context studied. Ronald Bishop has used Saar's model as the theoretical framework for a study about how family historians 'assign meaning to the information and individuals they discover through their work'. 50 AFS provides a corresponding case of meaningmaking in relation to new knowledge about ancestors. Bishop's study is a useful point of reference, clarifying the insights that the chosen theoretical framework can provide.
It is the 'things that had no significant history before' which are historicized by genealogy, according to Saar. 51 This historicization is not an end in itself; 'it can only develop its force when it turns to objects whose "meaning" and validity is affected by revealing their historicity'. 52 In other words, the self-conception is changed by this new historical perspective or information. On the first level, genealogy is 'a different and radicalized historicism of the self. 53 Bishop contends that on Saar's first level, historicization, 'Names and accounts discovered by researchers achieve historical value only when they are incorporated into a broader genealogical account', meaning that the facts established by genealogical research have to be transformed into pieces of information by connecting them to a specific family or subject. 54 A key motivation for Bishop's respondents was to set their family narrative in a larger picture, in the grand historical narrative, thus establishing causal connections to previous generations. One respondent said genealogical research gave him 'a sense of my place in the stream of mankind'. 55 On the second level, 'Genealogies project delegitimizing, denaturalizing perspectives on the processes of subject constitution and construction'. 56 Each new piece of information has the potential to revise the family narrative. Bishop's informants emphasized that both the 'good' and the 'bad' were part of their roots, and they could still learn from their ancestors, whatever they might have done. Genealogical historicization is thus not neutral. Instead, it contains an evaluative, or critical, element: things could have been different. Saar writes that 'Doing genealogy then is: telling the subject the story of the powers working on him, telling it the story of its own becoming.' 57 For Bishop, a significant event in the genealogical metanarrative was the discovery of new information, which added to or challenged previous knowledge. 58 According to Saar, there is also a formal dimension to the historicization and critique. The third level highlights that genealogies follow the rules and conventions of a certain genre with a specific audience: 'The reader is supposed to understand him-or herself as the subject and object of those very processes of subjectivation that are being recounted.' 59 The story is told to the person it is about, so tying the genealogy to the self. It is the genealogist's intention, writes Saar, that the subject will be 'hit, affected and concerned by his historical account, that they are provoked and shocked, struck by the lightning of instantaneous insight into what they are, how they have become and what they might not want to be.' 60 In Bishop's study, respondents describing themselves as storytellers, 'the act of sharing' their information with anyone interested, 'is a key event in the genealogy metanarrative'. 61 Another prominent feature of the genealogical narrative is that it is never finished. As Bishop says, 'A perfectly accurate family history will never be written, because history continues to be made.' 62 On all three levels, Saar argues that genealogy concern subjects or selves, for 'there is a decisive and constitutive relation between genealogy and subjectivity, or a "self" that comes into play in different ways and forms'. 63 Bottero has similarly emphasized that 'All family trees, after all, converge on "ego"'. 64 Saar continues by saying there is always a reflexive element in the relation to the self in genealogy: genealogies 'shape and structure the ways in which individuals understand and express themselves, relate to themselves, but also how they can be seen, described and counted on by others.' 65 The present study thus considers the AFS participants' selves and how the reflexive elements come into play when they express why family history is important to them-how it helps them construct their social reality. The construction of social realities is usefully understood in terms of discourses, which can be defined as historically specific systems of meaning, which form the identities of subjects and objects. 66 Discourses can also be described as social texts, whether written or spoken. 67 The scholarly basis of the present paper is social constructionism, according to which meaning and knowledge are socially created. 68 Discourses' power likewise lies in their ability to define and produce 'reality'. This is ultimately an anti-essentialist stance: 'our worldviews and identities could have been different-through other boundaries and characteristics'. 69 Thus, the significance socially ascribed to 'genealogy' or 'family history' produces its traits and boundaries. According to Nash, genealogy is 'a practice through which ideas of personal, familial, collective, ethnic, and sometimes national senses of culture, location, and identity are shaped, imagined, articulated, and enacted'. 70

Sources and Method
The empirical material used is the ninth season of AFS, aired in 2019. It is used illustratively to explore how the significance of family history is presented in the series. From the analytical approach chosen it follows that individual statements are discursive in nature-no subject can escape discursive and social practices. The series is treated as social text and the analysis highlights what is explicitly stated and what is implicitly understood. Bishop, exploring the 'elements of a narrative that sheds light on how researchers go about creating the "versions" posited by Saar', did not assess the accuracy of respondents' claims, but was interested in 'the coherence and fidelity of the story that emerges from the genealogical descriptions that come out of their work'. 71 This paper similarly neither focuses on the 'truth value' of the family histories narrated in the series, nor does it delve deeper into the process of the genealogical research. Instead, the focus is what family histories do or mean to AFS's participants.
The results were obtained using a qualitative content analysis, which facilitates a systematic reading and thematization. 72 The material was watched repeatedly to get a grasp of the whole, while all the occasions in the series when the participants spoke of what family history did or meant to them became the selected units of analysis, extracted, transcribed verbatim, and sorted deductively according to Saar's three levels of genealogy: history, evaluation, and genre. 73 The material was then coded for themes, resulting in three themes for each of the three levels. 74 The underlying logic and values in the participants' ideas were linked by comparing the themes and contradictions so identified. These themes are presented in the results and analysis section and then discussed in the light of the literature and chosen theories. All quotes from AFS are in the original English-though filmed in Sweden, the majority of dialogue is in English, the exception being the presenter describing the rules of the competitions and the like for a Swedish audience-and participants have been anonymized.

Results and Analysis
The ninth season of AFS starts with the presenter: Now we will do it again. Unite family ties broken long, long ago, and let those who disappeared find their way all the way home, to the farm, the gate, the place, the home, where everything once had its beginning. Relate events that affected their lives long before they were born, and seek answers to questions about what made them who they are. The ten Swedish Americans you are about to get to know have travelled a long, long way to get here, but the journey they have ahead of them is perhaps even longer and stretches back generations and centuries in time. And for one of them, it leads all the way to a reunion where the ties once broken can be retied. 75 This framing of the series privileges the continuing influence of the past on the present and family history as the key to the participants' present self-identity. The key elements are the return home, the significance of place, and a description of identity as something that needs anchoring in previous generations if it is to be fully understood. Already here we get a glimpse of the 'multilayered' nature of genealogical meaning-making and significance. 76 The series is framed as a journey, which will sequentially give the participants missing pieces of a puzzle to help them reconnect with their Swedish heritage. From the start the production has tried to find participants who are relatable to the audience. In an interview proceeding the first season in 2011, Lundin said 'We do not have to look for particularly chiselled, super characters. I think we will find personalities, but they do not have to be tattooed from head to toe. There are ordinary people on this journey. And it gives a heck of a warm base to the whole programme.' 77 The participants in the ninth season were similarly 'average' people-each with their unique personality and their own reasons for applying to the programme. In what follows, findings are presented according to Saar's three levels of genealogy, with different themes identified for each level.

Level 1, History
On the first level, genealogy is a particular way to approach history, with the self at the centre. The individual is set in relation to a broader narrative that extends back in time, thus providing a new, more profound understanding of self. This way of reasoning resonates well with the participants' stated expectations about the significance of knowing their family history. One participant said 'People need to find their roots, that's just… we all need to find that. I can't stress enough how much it makes you know who you are' (Participant 9). Another said knowing your history will 'offer you a view into the past with your own bloodline in the lens' (Participant 5). A third said 'Going to Sweden, even for a brief period of time, I hope will give me a sense of being rooted Theme 1a, Place. On the journey to Sweden, several participants were already talking of 'returning' and 'coming home': 'We're literally crossing back to our homeland' (Participant 7); 'We're almost back on Swedish soil' (Participant 6); 'You have this connection by blood of so many years. And it's, you know, your home' (Participant 5). One participant even described the place itself as related to him, a way of thinking that gave him direct access to his ancestors and the possibility to bridge a perceived gap of several hundred years: Seeing Ramberget that is a dream I have had for many, many years. This is my home.
[…] The mountains in my Cherokee way of thinking, they are family. Each mountain is a separate person, a separate member of the family. And I've come back to family members. These mountains are members of my family. And we've been separated over 380 years. (Participant 10) Their visits to places related to their family history are described as making history more real and accessible: 'We have a hut! I just imagined that it was just going to be some field like maybe they lived here but knowing that there is something physical, that is overwhelming' (Participant 9); 'It's unbelievable to be able to touch things she might have touched, or walk where she definitely walked' (Participant 3). The feeling of being in physical touch with history was described as a powerful emotional and physical experience.
It feels old. You can just… feel the history… I got chills. Touching the house was like… you get so much energy and love off of it and I know it sounds silly because it is wood or whatever but that's where my family started, without that house I wouldn't be sitting here today […] So being able to just touch that, you just like fill up with so many emotions that just like pours out of you and it is just like indescribable. (Participant 6) Theme 1b, Continuity. The continuity theme ties to the framing of the series as a quest to heal broken ties: 'It's so beautiful to think that one of us will be able to reunite our families after all this time apart' (Participant 8). Connecting with the past was described as filling a knowledge gap: 'There is a void to fill. From what I know, on my father's side, my great-grandfather came from Sweden. Landed in Chicago. That's all I got' (Participant 2). Some participants expressed regret at having lost a connection to their history when family members died: 'When my grandmother passed, that link to the past was broken. And as an actor I tell stories for a living, and it's beyond sad to me that I don't know so much about my own story' (Participant 3). But missing links to the past can be repaired with family history research: My father always had an interest in our history; however he didn't have the best relationship with his father. And my great-grandfather died when my father went into the navy, before he could ask any real questions about our heritage. So the link between our Swedish side and the history behind it and our family now, was sort of broken at that time […] I want to recreate that thing that was originally broken, that disconnect, and I want to fix it, mend it. I have to do it myself. So I'll take that opportunity to re-establish that connection.
(Participant 5) Theme 1c, Relation to the Larger Historical Picture. According to Saar, genealogy provides a new historical perspective. The historicization on the first level depends on a transformation of facts into pieces of information that the subject can assimilate into their understanding of their own identity. For AFS's participants, their ancestors are put in relation to a larger historical picture. As Lundin said, 'We have found out that some of your ancestors were deeply involved in the most dramatic events of that time'. One of the participants' ancestors was taken captive at the Battle of Poltava in the early eighteenth century. Another is said to have saved the life of King Gustav IV Adolf, which leads their descendant to reflect on her ancestor's significance for Sweden: 'It's just so cool to have all this history that I am connected to. Like, my family story changed the history of Sweden because one of my ancestors saved the king. That makes me so happy and proud and excited and inspired' (Participant 8).
Another ancestor was one of the first Swedes to arrive in America in the seventeenth century. This participant visited the National Archives of Sweden to read a letter his ancestor sent from America to Sweden, and saw his family history interwoven with colonial history: 'What is incredibly beautiful about this letter to me is that this letter which finally reaches his sister, after several previous attempts, is summing up fifty years, the entire history of the entire colony' (Participant 10).

Level 2, Evaluation
On the second level, genealogy includes an evaluative component. Ancestors' lives and choices are appraised and reflected on. Did they have a good life? Did they make the right choices? How might things have been different? On this level, there is an element of wanting to learn from the past and to see one's own life from a new perspective. As Saar emphasizes, genealogical historicization is not neutral. Instead, it provides points of reference for the self to be measured against. The themes found on these level are existence, the evaluation of ancestors' actions, and the evaluation of the larger historical narrative.
Theme 2a, Existence. One letter from Lundin read, 'If your forefathers never would have left, maybe you would have been Swedish farmers today'. The possibility of alternative timelines is a telling example of the existential dimension inherent in family history: if your ancestors had not made those choices then you might not even exist today. As one participants said: 'if he never left, I wouldn't be here' (Participant 9). Upon finding out that her ancestor was taken captive at the Battle at Poltava in 1709 another participant exclaimed 'It's a miracle I'm here!' (Participant 4). In the light of his difficulties her life was thrown into relief, helping her tell the story of her own becoming. The pieces of information revealed to them left them hoping for more: 'I can't wait to find out more about the journey of all these people that led to me being born and me being me, and I can't wait to learn about all the choices that people made hundreds of years ago that led to me being where I am now' (Participant 5). Evaluating family history in this way encouraged participants to live with intention: 'If you know what your ancestors went through for you to be here, it makes it important not to waste your own life' (Participant 9).
Theme 2b, Evaluation of Ancestors' Actions. On the evaluative level, there is also the element of wanting to learn from one's ancestors. Participants described the aspect of learning as important to insights about their own lives, whether or not their ancestors were role models or warning examples. One letter to a participant specifically stressed the difference between his life and the life of his ancestors: Your family has a long history of struggle with a certain discomposure that seems to have cursed As another participant who discovered similar things about his ancestors said, 'You can't change the past of your forbearers or what they have done or how you have gotten to the situation that you are in, but what you can do is only work to improve yourself' (Participant 5). There were also examples where ancestors were thought of as role models to follow: 'I can only hope to live and love as they have. After learning more about my story I just feel as though I am more ready to start that chapter of my life, start my own family, carry on that tradition that seems there is a lot of love and happiness. I just want to keep that going' (Participant 4).
Theme 2c, Critique of the Larger Historical Narrative. Adding to the evaluation of individual ancestors, there was also a broader evaluative aspect. Ancestors were part of historical events that both exceed and affect individual life choices. Notions of suppressed narratives were brought up. One participant said: 'As a Native person I am often turned off by history lessons because they are often told to me from the perspective of just one side which is the people who tried to find a new world that was ready to be settled' (Participant 9). She shared her conflicting feelings about her Swedish descent, which she had long thought of as part of the colonizing movement, opposed to the Native American side of her family: 'I admittedly had mixed feelings about exploring other heritages. It's a dissonance in my head […] how do you come to terms with embodying both the colonizers and the colonized?' (Participant 9). After learning about the circumstances that forced her Swedish ancestor to emigrate, she came to the conclusion he might not have had a choice: 'I think about how much European settlers hurt our culture but that wasn't at all what was on his mind, he just wanted his family, he loved his family and wanted them to survive. And you can't fault people for that' (Participant 9). Another participant reflected on how the scarcity of food forced people to emigrate: 'Most of the people here in our group are descendants from immigrants who came during the great famine of the 1800s, nineteenth century, so a lot of these people here are products of the starvation. So many things can go wrong and if they do, back in those days you either died or you had to find someplace else' (Participant 10). This participant, who also came from a Native American background, offered his thoughts on the Swedish colonizers and argued that the colony of Saint-Barthélemy had moved towards greater respect and even unity with the Native population: The Swedes were involved in the Thirty Years War, as a military superpower in Europe, couldn't keep the colony well supplied so we started learning to live like Indians.
[…] Visitors later reporting to the king in the 1740s on the descendants, the cultures had meshed so well they couldn't tell them apart, they were even raising each other's children.
[…] I think if North America would have followed the example set by this generation of Swedes in the 1600 s, the so-called inevitable clash of cultures between the Native Americans and the Europeans was not going to be inevitable. We had a choice. All you had to do was treat with equality and fairness. And it could have greatly improved the story of America. (Participant 10) His critical evaluation of the larger historical narrative offered an alternative to how things might have been different if more colonizers had been like the Swedes. The participant with conflicting feelings towards her Swedish ancestry was cautiously positive about this description: 'If it is true that the attempt was more peaceful and a more collaborative way of living, that would be great, because cultures do meet and so we have to find ways to work together, so maybe it's a good model' (Participant 9). The evaluative level thus offers ways to address, or resolve, the tension between different ethnic identities, whether by painting an idealized picture of the past or by a more nuanced understanding of the past.

Level 3, Genre
On the third level, genealogy is a specific type of story that follows certain rules and conventions. The narrative is told from the perspective of the self, relating the self to previous generations. This reflexive element is meant to affect the self-perception of the reader by illuminating how the individual views their own self: 'The "object" or theme is the subject at the same time affected by the story as it is addressed by it and is therefore a part and implication of the account itself'. 78 The themes found on this level are revelation, knowledge-sharing, and the future. Bishop finds that the interest in genealogy among his respondents was often spurred by a wish to re-establish connections with ancestors and family. 79 This was true of the AFS participants. The prize of the competition being a family reunion, participants talked a great deal about what it would mean to them to connect-reconnect-with their Swedish relatives. It did not seem to be as important how they were related, as that they were related. In the second episode, the participants met one Swedish relative each, a meeting that was very emotionally charged. The event can be interpreted in terms of Saar's third level, genealogy as a genre, and specifically the element of revelation, perhaps best illustrated by the participant who, on meeting her relative, exclaimed with tears in her eyes, 'I never knew you existed!' Several participants stressed the significance of family history for their children, for example: 'The whole experience is very special to me because I try very hard to be a good man, and for me to be whole and know where I come from, so my kids can have a better life, so they don't have voids to fill' (Participant 2). This theme also comprises feelings about living relatives and how meeting them will affect participants' lives: 'I just get so excited, because whether it's one person or a hundred, it's going to make my family so much bigger than it was before' (Participant 3); 'Meeting the Swedish family would be like reconnecting with my grandpa. And that's huge to me because my grandpa was like a dad to me' (Participant 6); 'It's something that seems almost impossible, to go back and bring families together that haven't connected or that weren't even aware of each other' (Participant 3); It's just like the letter in the coffer said, bringing us all together after hundreds of years' separation' (Participant 9).

Discussion
The purpose of this study is to better understand the contemporary significance of family historywhy it is deemed important, and what meaning is assigned to knowing about ancestry and heritage? The research questions were how the significance of family history was described in the series, and what main themes emerged.
The results confirm what previous research has found: family history rarely has just one kind of meaning, and instead has different implications since its significance is socially constructed. As De Groot has argued, genealogy influences how individuals conceptualize, imagine, and engage with the past. 80 In the context of AFS, knowledge about one's ancestors was framed as a valuable asset that the participants were competing for. Yet it was not only knowledge per se which was desired, but also the effect it was expected to have on the life of the individual.
In terms of the three levels-history, evaluation, and genre-the themes found on the level of history were place, continuity, and the larger historical picture. In relation to place, AFS started from a national and cross-national understanding of history and identity. Sweden was simultaneously a foreign country and the 'home' which participants were 'going back' to, despite most never having been to Sweden before. According to Nash, place has a prominent meaning in family history: 'Genealogy is about significant places-family homes-"origins" and complex global networks of travel, desire, and imagination.' 81 Visiting places where ancestors once lived evoked strong emotions in the participants, and feelings of being in physical contact with the past. As Zerubavel has explained, the constancy and relative stability of physical surroundings makes places 'a formidable basis for establishing a strong sense of sameness'. 82 This ties into the second theme of continuity. That the ancestors of the AFS participants had emigrated from Sweden was described as disruptive, creating a 'gap' which the participants would be able to bridge by finding out more about their ancestors' lives. Historical facts about ancestors were sometimes described as a secluded area or hidden treasure. When put in relation to the larger historical picture-the third theme-the ancestors' lives were illuminated by well-known historical figures such as royalty, or by relating the ancestors' situation to historical events such as war, famine, or periods of mass unemployment. Timm claims that such emplacement is always present in popular genealogy, and that genealogical practices articulate the family as the sum of its locations and dislocations. AFS is an example of both the articulation of family and as a way of localizing 'dislocated' families. Wanting to reconnect with relatives or ancestors from the old country can be seen as contrasting with the desire of those emigrants who strove to start afresh in a new country, sometimes by changing their name, which can become an obstacle for people searching for their roots today. Though searching for prominent ancestors is rarely a goal for contemporary family researchers, the material studied suggests that ties to royalty or other people thought to have changed the course of history can come as a pleasant surprise, and add to a feeling of awe in the face of the past. This was exemplified by one participant hearing of an ancestor who saved the life of a king, and another who was shown a much-travelled letter from his ancestor which documented the early history of Sweden's Saint-Barthélemy colony. The themes found on the level of evaluation were existence, the evaluation of ancestors' actions, and a critique of the larger historical narrative. The theme of existence included 'If they had not existed, then I would not exist', and notions of alternative timelines if an ancestor had not escaped captivity, for example, or had not left for America. The evaluation of ancestors' actions included the potential of revising the family narrative by relating that knowledge to participants' selfidentity, reflecting on similarities and differences, and valuing the ancestors as role models, warning examples, or both. As Zerubavel has argued, remembrance often entails a merging of the individual and the collective, in that 'acquiring a group's memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity'. 83 Coming to terms with a perceived change of ethnic and personal identity proved easy for some participants and difficult for others, showing a complex position on ethnic identity whereby ancestors and their actions were critically examined with a desire to understand what affected their lives, and how their lives in turn affected participants today. Genealogy has the capacity to disrupt dominant discourses and give rise to unexpected notions of belonging. 84 For some of the participants, the new knowledge found about their ancestors seemed to effect a profound change in the way they thought about themselves. One of the participants originally had mixed feelings about her Swedish ancestry since she identified more with her Native Canadian roots. To her, her Swedish side represented the colonizers who had oppressed her Native ancestors. But as she found out more about her Swedish ancestor, she expressed a sense that her outlook had changed having learnt about the hardships he had endured. Similar to what Bottero found, gaining access to previously unknown knowledge about ancestral heritage affected the way participants viewed themselves, and occasionally lead them to rework their sense of personal connection and belonging. 85 Considerations where heritage was embedded in discourses of ethnicity, cultural identity, and cultural differences were also present on the third theme, the critique of the larger historical narrative, which sometimes touched upon colonization and injustices. On a few occasions, participants reflected critically about how events might have unfolded that would have improved the lives of indigenous populations in the past. Since AFS focuses on those who generally emigrated to escape famine and unemployment, the historical collective struggle was present in the series. Yet there was no recognition of or parallels to the inequalities still faced by present-day immigrants. The themes found on the level of genre were revelation, knowledge-sharing, and the future. The first theme was present in AFS from the start of the season. Participants described expecting that by learning more about their family history they would have a renewed or deepened sense of identity and greater self-understanding. Participants were struck by the hardships their ancestors endured, surprised by similarities and differences between now and then, and amazed by the stories they discovered. A key element related to the theme of knowledge-sharing was the desire to create a coherent narrative, leading from a starting point in the past to the present-day. This is consistent with Yakel's conclusion that the goal of family history research is 'to create a larger narrative, connect with others in the past and in the present, and to find coherence in one's own life'. 86 This narrative intersected with wider cultural processes, politics, and social concerns. Sleeter argued that 'Uncritical appropriation of mythologies related to racism and colonialism enables people to avoid confronting how their ancestors participated or benefited, avoiding accountability for unjust power relations today'. 87 In the case of AFS, unjust power relations were touched on, but only in terms of history and not in relation to the present-day. Though the historical and personal narratives of ancestors exceeded national limits, they were still firmly rooted in nationality as an important part of one's identity. The affective part of family history was vividly present in AFS, as there were many tears, both of joy and sadness. Previously unknown knowledge about heritage also provided a sense of a 'new start', anchored in the past, which leads us to the third and final theme-the future. Perceptions of a renewed or greater understanding of self had implications both in terms of where the participants were coming from and where they were going. The narrative offered explanations as to why things were as they were in the present, and insights on how to move forward. The significance of family history extended beyond the individual participants, as they imagined that their new knowledge would also be important for their children and other family members. This resonates with Yakel's findings that some family historians see themselves as narrators of their family's history, and shows that the narrative is not dependent on the research being done by the person who narrates the story, since the research in AFS was conducted by a professional family history researcher. 88 Bishop's respondents similarly emphasized their sense of responsibility to both past and future generations to tell an accurate story about their families. 89

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received financial support from Erik Philip-Sörensens stiftelse för främjande av genetisk och humanistisk vetenskaplig forskning [the Erik Philip-Sörensen Foundation] for the research and authorship of this article.