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Who Do You Think You Are? The 55th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, looks back at his family history with the help of his father Stanley Johnson.
- Boris Johnson - Who Do You Think You Are - BBCONE - YouTube
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- Prime Minister Boris Johnson Traces His Family History - YouTube
The UK's new Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel...
- Boris Johnson - Who Do You Think You Are - BBCONE - YouTube
- Great-Grandfather: Ali Kemal
- Step 1 - Personal Family Archive
- Step 2 - Business Letters
- Step 3 - Travelling and Meeting relatives
- Step 4 - Libraries
- Step 5 - Local Research
- Step 6 - Experts
- Step 7 - Personal Testimony
- Step 8 - Foreign Academics
- Step 9 - Searching For Personal Accounts
Boris wanted to find out the truth about what happened to his Turkish paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, who was a journalist and politician in the early 1900s. He knew that Ali Kemal had been lynched by a mob in the 1920s, but didn't really know anything about the context of his life and death.
Our starting point for the journey was Boris's family. When investigating any family story or ancestral line, a first port of call should always be the personal family archive of documents, photographs, journals, diaries and letters that may be held by one or several family members. In most families there is usually at least one person who becomes ...
Once we had discovered that Boris' apparently quintessentially English grandfather had been born with such an exotic name, we wanted to know how, why and when the family name had been changed so dramatically. A short letter from the Home Office, found amongst papers belonging to Stanley, was the key. Seemingly innocuous business letters can provide...
To find out more about Ali Kemal's life and death in Turkey, Boris would need to go to Istanbul. Travelling to where an ancestor lived can be an obvious way of continuing an investigation into a relative's past. Boris's journey to Turkey would involve talking to relatives still living in the local area, meeting academic experts and visiting archive...
But Boris was still no nearer to understanding what had led to his great-grandfather's brutal and untimely death. Our main clues were that Ali, like Boris, had been both a journalist and a politician. More significantly though, we also knew that Ali had been active during a controversial and turbulent period in Turkey's history. It was crucial for ...
We had already begun the process of making contact with academics and researchers both in the UK and Turkey who might help us to understand the historical context for Ali Kemal's story. Finding local researchers or translators can be a tricky, time consuming and potentially expensive process. Alongside searching online, it's worth contacting local ...
Once we had tracked down original examples of Ali's articles, we sought advice from a historical expert to help us understand their significance. Boris met with Dr Benjamin Fortna from London's School of Oriental and African Studies, who spends time in Istanbul researching the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle Eastern history. Finding experts c...
But how much risk was Ali himself really taking? Boris understood the need to be forthright and provocative as a journalist, but he wanted to get a sense of the specific danger faced by Ali, and the effect that his views were having on the life of his family. Before his trip to Turkey, Boris had been given a bundle of personal documents and letters...
We now had evidence of Ali's controversial writing and understood the danger in which his articles placed him. But we still wanted to find out about Ali's later political role, his subsequent death, and the context of Turkey's dramatic regime changes. Boris went to meet historian Dr Ahmet Kuyas at Galatasaray University who was able to shed light o...
From Dr Kuyas and others, Boris learned that Ali's actions led to his forced resignation from government. He returned to writing opinionated articles challenging the tactics of the nationalists. But when another regime change occurred and the nationalists regained power, Ali's fate was sealed. We knew that Ali's arrest and death had been fairly hig...
Returning to western Europe, Boris sets off in search of the truth about Granny Butter's background, and follows an intriguing family trail that leads him to a surprising conclusion. Find out how...
In 2008, when UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was Mayor of London he appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? to explore his heritage.
Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. Boris discovers that there is a mystery surrounding Caroline de Pfeffel. Twenty years later, after Caroline's death, the persistent Count Tauffkirchen ...
