We really should be so grateful to our ancestors. Some of them suffered incredible hardship and pain. One of my ancestors was a shepherd in Southern Italy, during the time that Napoleon had decided to conquer Italy and was making his way from the South to the North. Napoleon destroyed everything he could and left a wake of destruction. When he was 12 years old, he went to take the sheep to pasture and when he went back he saw smoke in the village and knew that everyone had died. He then never went back to the village (nothing was left) and on foot, at 12 years of age (!!!), he walked from the Avellino area to Rome, where he eventually found work as a mason and eventually became a master mason. I descend from him.

Her ancestors would be so proud of Kate and the amazing talented gorgeous person she turned out to be

I tell you, it was a really nice time I had doing this! BBC! Kate!! Thank you!

What a horrible story, but not uncommon back then. We are so blessed we have no idea.

History and genealogy always put my troubles into perspective.

I'm a simple man - I see Kate Winslet and I push play.

What a very sad story! That poor woman lost her baby then her husband. I wonder how she must have survived afterwards!

She's so sweet.

In Mexico, in the early 1900’s and before that, people got paid with items from the store in the Hacienda, the owner controled all aspects of life AND people were not allowed to own land. That slowly changed after the mexican revolution in 1910…. Thank God

A very sad story. Much props to the people who organised all this info for her before she arrived :)

How sad that people from any country are forced to live in servitude. Especially under the circumstances described here. It never ceases to surprise me how human beings can treat other human beings because they think they can. There is still a special place in hell for these people.

I don't think a lot of people realize exacly how extremely poor Sweden was, not that long ago.

“I owe my soul to the Company Store”… quite the racket

Kate is such a beautiful Lady inside out.

That token system may sound like a labor rights mess, but it was a common practice in the mining, logging, and steel mill industries of America until company scrips were finally outlawed in 1938.

Love that she says the word FLIPPIN lol rather than cussing on camera when she is upset, very cute ;D

Hi I am Russian , and I am wathcing from Russia. So sad story. "Who Do you think you are?" team you make great job! Thanx

I’m from Sweden and my great great grandfather was one of them who went to America…

Ahh bless Kate Winslet 👌

I think most people who starts to investigate their ancestors, will find tragedy. It was a werry hard life back then. Even here in Denmark. I spend 3 years on my ovn family, and out of 200 people in my tree, there are a couple of them, back in the 1800, that decided to hang themselves because they could not provide for their family anylonger.

Got shivers down my spine watching this. Eventually their souls were free.

❤ Beautiful Kate Winslet 😍

I love Kate Winslet and enjoyed learning about her heritage. What's painful is that while she can trace her lineage back to four generations, African-Americans are lucky to go back two in light of the culture erasure, renaming, and complete dismissal of ancestry

Yes it is heartbreaking, sadly it seems the tortuous lifes & deaths of many of our ancestors were suffered & lost in vain & it has become blatantly clear that we still subject growing numbers of individuals, families & communitues to these horrific criminal circumstances beyond their control, then treat, accusr & punish them like they are the low lifes & criminals. How many times? When will they ever learn? It can still happen almost overnight to any one of us & does. Natural cycles of land becoming barron or fruitful is one thing, inflicting a life of poverty & torture due to greed & gross neglect, on human beings by other human beings, is unconscienable/evil by definition not label.

What's the difference between typhus and typhoid fever? Both diseases are infections, but they're caused by different types of bacteria that are spread in different ways. The kind of typhus we tend to see in the U.S. is spread by fleas that catch the disease from rats and opossums. Typhoid fever is spread through food that's come into contact with fecal bacteria.

that's such a sad story.

😢Emperor & Empress , King & Queen # Remarkable moment in human history

😢😢😢😢 How life can be this sad 😭

The line of an old song came to my mind. "I owe my soul to the company store." Horrible.

Being an American, I had no idea where my ancestors came from. After researching, I have found over 700 ancestors so far. I had no idea that records went back to the 800's , and earlier. Towns wrote books about the community, so I have been able to see what some of my ancestors were up to. Very cool.

In the part with the token, she expresses her sadness for her ancestor being trapped in this life and not being able to find a way out for him and his family. This is a modern perspective. Get out to where? Maybe the French Riviera? People were separated into classes. The upstairs-downstairs of Downton Abbey as it were. He had a secure job. His family safe with clean lodging and had food to eat. Out there was danger, hunger and death for many. I would imagine, while at times wished for a better life, was thankful for his lot.

What a tragic story.😢

Sounds like this Manor had an early example of the Coal mines with their Company Store where once the miner had run up a tab they couldn’t get free of the debt.

This is so incredible!!!

I cannot believe how people in the 1700 and 1800s live! And we are so spoiled!

Sounds like when I used to work for Kroger. They would give us bonuses that we can only spend at Kroger.

Lovely Kate. More gordious than ever.

Such a fantastic story. Glad you found out about your history. I wish I found out mine if I was given the opportunity 😔. It may not be the greatest but it made you strong so be grateful

This system of forcing people to shop with the employer is called 'gedwongen winkelnering' in Dutch, and as I have now discovered it has it's term in English also. It's named the Truck system. I have a hunch this happened a lot for it to have a name.

The fact we can't watch any season we want online from a streaming service is ridiculous.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...

This is so sad and depressing.

Crimes of poverty, even today, should be addressed with some form of help rather than punishment. The system of governance is to blame for the conditions surrounding the crime and so the system is to blame for it's poor treatment of the people. I think this is relevant today in all countries.

What this story makes clear to me is that our lives everywhere have improved tremendously since this era. (I can add my own grandparents stories to that.) However they have improved at the cost of the worldwide environment. We will return to these horrible times if we don’t stop producing millions more babies and if the wealthy don’t stop being environmentally irresponsible at the rate of 10 times what the common man is.

Bless your heart kate winslet! I would’ve stolen the potatoes too if my family was hungry like your great great grandfather. Ilyvm Kate have a blessed day.

These stories are sad but i can't help but think that while these people live in mansions and many just blow millions there are still people stealing to eat.

They were most likely going to make Mead from the bee honey, the lashings were for not being a "Legal Distiller of Alcohol Goods".

I had ancestors in jail in England for religious services being held in their house. Came to the U.S. Not uncommon to find an ancestor that had been in jail during certs times.

The coalminers in the UK were forced into a similar system of informal bondage even after they were legally freed. Often the pit was away from town, so miners lived in hovels owned by the mine and were forced to buy their work supplies and tools at inflated prices at the “truck” store owned by the mine owner. But since they were often advanced the tools on “tick”, or were given credit for food when some of the family were ill or injured (the whole family worked as a gang) they were perpetually in debt to the store. So they seldom got cash pay, or very little. If they refused to buy at the store’s inflated prices, they could just be “put off” - barred from the mine and evicted from their home - and the mine owners kept blacklists, so they couldn’t get work in that region.

Well Kate, isn't life just? Hearing the fate of so many, to this day, as the average citizen does with less, while the noble few enjoy their comforts...

Wonderful and sad. The tokens and in the states had company money to buy from the store. In WV the housing, if the miner died the wife would be kicked out unless she married another miner. Thanks for sharing your story Kate.

Sounds like what is happening one the sugar plantations in Jamaica, or Haiti. It was done to enslave the workers. The cost of the food is really high.

1:40 from what I understand it was common practice, mudlarkers on the river thames find them a lot.

Life was tough in the Old World. I did my genealogy in Quebec since 1603 and apart from being killed by Natives (until 1675), they had it easy! Food was plentiful, and if willing to work a bit, they lacked nothing. People reached a ripe old age, some 90 +, most babies surviving, with large families living next to each other.

One of her 32 three times great grandparents.

This tradition of servitude is why so many people emigrated to America including my ancestors from England and Norway to have a better life. Luckily my ancestors became successful farmers as new states were opened up in the 1800’s including Wisconsin where they settled.

Wow

Reading girl. 👍

the famine in sweden was worse than you can imagine , the cold period tooke the war out off the swedes , ond no help was given from the richs world

Kate says, "Good on you Anders, I would have stolen the potatoes as well!" But I wonder would she have really? Those were stolen from two farmers. There were no seed stores, no Amazon or Whole Foods to order seed potatoes, the farmers had to store seed potatoes thru the winter to plant in the spring. Without those seed potatoes there would have been no potatoes for anyone the following year. So I wonder would she really have stolen several barrels of potatoes? The reason the punishment was harsh is because the impact on the whole community for such crimes was great. Then he steals bee hives as well. I doubt the community felt he was a good person, they were all starving but he was going about stealing whatever he could get his hands on, with no care of who went without.

Sounds like the company stores in Americas coal country. I didn't know they existed elsewhere. So sad.

How awful! 😭

Oh gods, her great-great-great-great-grandfather was stuck in a proto-company town situation. That's horrifying on its face, and for it to lead to the death of his son and his imprisonment, it's truly nightmarish.

I was shocked by the idea that owners would create their own store and currency for their employees to shop at so they won’t live

وہ اتنا بڑا انسان کون ھے جو میری ایک لائن نہیں سن سکتا

We have a better life than our grandparents. Something Klaus Schwab wants to undo.

Kind of sounds of the extreme areas of poverty today around the world.

No one going to mention how beautiful she is?

I don't know why anyone would take it personally what a distant ancestor did or didn't do... If you go back to a "great-great" grandparent, remember you had 16 of them and each one is as significant in some way (or not) as all the rest. It's nice to know their stories, but all of us spring from thousands of ancestors and all of them were a mix of good and bad in their own times.

Done some genealogy work myself, back then they really brutally put it on the regular person and the working classes.

Hell is in Finland not Sweden.

1.5

It's understandable why Kate would side with her ancestor for stealing the potatoes to feed himself and his family, but let's think about the person he stole from. That man needed the money from those potatoes to feed himself and his family. What if her ancestors were the farmers who had their potatoes stolen and their child had died because of it?

I KNOW HOW POOR WE WERE... AND JUST ABOUT ALL RELATIVES...AND IN DOING FAMILY RESEARCH PROBABLY GOES BACK CENTURIES IN "OLD" COUNTRIES....I KNOW THE COBLE line of my family fled religious prosecution in two or more countries( wife was Mennonite ...unfortunately almost all of them died at hands of I believe Dekware Indians in 1700's.

Excuse me 3x great grandfather I apologize for the inaccuracies

How do you sluater a bee?

I wish she is related Titanic passenger/survivor related because she played Rose in Titanic

He was in reality a slave. Being payed in non legal tender does not equate freedom.

Sparreholm?? Where is this?

They’re dead, you’re new history

Winnie the Pooh would have stolen the honey as well.

I have an ancestor that went to jail for spitting on the sidewalk. Things have changed. Half baseball players were arrested.

Current people who do this are criminalized the same way

🙏🏻🤨🇮🇸

Those were not the good old days.

No one mentioned that she arrived in an overall as if she had flown to the meeting on her own plane? Ok, just me.

I find out i had turkish ancestors cause this person came to my country cause the ottoman empire had just fallen

Terrible story. Good heavens. Well at least some child lived because she is here.

Look up Within Heaven's Gates by Rebecca Springer 😇

So she has Swedish ancestry, interesting.

This system of "token" payment existed for coal miners in west virginia in modern times 😢

An how does that impact life now it doesn't move on so ridiculous.

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The rich alway kept poor under the thumb…it has not changed , with the lobbying rules intended to keep masses under the thumb

Terrible news Kate.

get a grip. happens to the best of us.

The estate owner was a slave owner. He made it so they could never leave. Absolutely evil.

Well, most of her films are criminal....

Why does anyone care about the past? You are you, now is now.

I’ve been stealing potatoes, my whole life. Never been caught.