Megan Robertson on The Spark April 4, 2024
Cumberland County woman “finds her roots” on PBS program
Megan Robertson was one of three chosen nationwide to learn about her family history
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Scott LaMar
Megan Robertson on The Spark April 4, 2024
Aired; April 4th, 2024.
Finding Your Roots with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the popular TV shows on PBS. Every Tuesday at 8 p.m., Dr. Gates leads a celebrity through their family histories.
What makes the show so fascinating are the mysteries uncovered about their families.
Recently, Finding Your Roots did something it had never done before – it offered viewers of the program – people who aren’t considered celebrities – an opportunity to go on the show and trace their families’ roots. Nine-thousand viewers applied. Three were chosen to appear on the show.
Megan Robertson of Mechanicsburg was one of them and she was with us Thursday on The Spark.
Megan Robertson with Finding Your Roots host, Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
On the show, the family mystery Megan was most interested in learning more about centered on her great-grandfather, “Green Marshall Church was born in North Carolina, and we knew very little about him as a person because his son, my grandfather. My grandfather’s name was Eugene Dewey Church. Everybody called him Dude. And, my grandfather was only about five years old when Green passed away. He was a railroad worker in West Virginia and was tragically killed on the railroad. So my grandfather didn’t have any information about his dad, so there was no information to be had because although Green’s widow — my dad remembers her — they called her Ma Church. Although he knew her, I don’t know that Green shared a lot about his past because it was maybe painful for him. I don’t know that he shared it with his wife, his widow, so there was no information to be had by anybody. So, I remember growing up and when we would do school projects on our background or hey, where’d your last name come from? I would go to my dad and he said, where did Church come from? And he was like, well, we can go back to here, but we don’t know. So we were always told that was his adopted name, and we didn’t know what his actual last name would have been.”
Megan said she learned a lot about great-grandfather, Green Church, including his military service record,”What I know about Green, he was a veteran of World War I. He served in France during World War I, and I don’t know what they put it in the episode, but I know what battles he was in over there now. I didn’t know any of that. I mean, we had some of his service records from from the military, but we didn’t know a whole lot about that.”
The Finding Your Roots episode that tells Megan’s family story airs Tuesday night, April 9 at 8 p.m. on PBS nationally and WITF-TV. Megan hasn’t seen the episode, so she doesn’t know what was left in the program or edited out from the six-hour taping.
The Finding Your Roots producers asked that she not divulge too much information before the show is broadcast, but she did say she learned the identity of Green Church’s father and more about her family on both her father and mother’s side.
