I remember way back watching WDYTYA with my O/H.
At the end of the programme he said to me " How come they do a family tree in an hour and you have spent years and £££'s on yours and it's still not finished?
Yes, it does have a lot to answer for.
Dorrie
I used to get that all the time from a certain relative. So much so that, nowadays, I simply don't bring up the subject and chat about what she's been doing, which, conversely, I'm supposed to be rivetted by.
Fair do's to WDYTYA - it was that programme which started me off on family history. At the risk of banging a familiar drum, when WDYTYA first started (goodness knows how many years ago that was) each episode was followed, on the red button, by a short (about 10-15 minutes if memory serves) introduction of 'how to's' introduced by Adrian Chiles and with that Nick Barrett bloke who seems to have moved on to bigger things. These 'tutorials' (for want of a better word - I don't remember them as stuffy or too simplistic) were very helpful to me as a beginner. I wonder why the BBC don't repeat them or make them available via iplayer.
Doesn't anyone else remember these? I sometimes think I've imagined them!! They certainly showed any would-be researcher that it wasn't a simple task to undertake, but by no means impossible.
Repeating them could go some way to countering Ancestry's impressions that all you have to do is what ChrissieL describes. It might also mean that some of those people who have done DNA tests but haven't bothered with any tree or much else at all might actually realise that to get anything out of the money they spent on the test, they might just have to make a bit of an effort themselves!
Jackie, that was my rant of the day!