ROOTS & BRANCHES

This week’s “Roots & Branches” column may take a little while to prove its relevance to genealogy, but bear with me.

At least from the point I was say 10 years old (this would have been 1970, by the way), I was a big fan of all things horror, science fiction, suspense, etc.

This interest came to encompass a collection of hundreds of comic magazines on this genre (frank admission: yes, I still read some of these as my before-bedtime wind down from the day … nothing like a good vampire or werewolf story to soothe away the cares of the day!).

But one of the first manifestations of this interest was watching the ABC soap opera Dark Shadows, along with its two feature movies, and a long-running paperback book series that featured the same characters and the iconic spooky mansion named Collinwood.

While I wasn’t a genealogist by any means—though I started in on that around age 24 not so many years later!—I was always fascinated by the family line of Collinses shown in TV, film, and books.

The TV show was especially helpful with this since about midway through its five-year weekday run, the story arcs began to leap around time.

First a character managed to be transported back to 1795 as a handy way of explaining how Barnabas Collins, a vampire portrayed by the late Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, became afflicted with the curse of the undead.

Then after spending some time in the present, the show ratcheted back to 1897 (there were some curses involved in this flashback, too, but I’ll admit I don’t recall what all them were—although at least part of it was to explain Quentin Collins—portrayed by David Selby—becoming a werewolf). When looking for the Collins family tree recently, I realized that the boy Jamison Collins in the 1897 sequence would later be the father to the modern-day main characters Roger Collins and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.

Toward the end of the TV run (the show was cancelled in favor of the game show Password, a fact I held against Allen Ludden the rest of his cancer-shortened life), the show first went to the then-future of 1995 when Collinwood had been wrecked, and then whipsawed back to 1841. In between there a ghost named Daphne Harridge introduced actress Kate Jackson (later to become one of the original Charlie’s Angels) to the viewing public.

Of course, today people have laid out the entire Collins lineage from the late 1600s to the then–present day.

But what I haven’t seen tackled are the paperbacks. Their formulaic author (who went by the pseudonym Marilyn Ross but was actually a man!) invented a whole separate family tree through the centuries.

And then there are the many additional audiobooks, etc., that have been added since the original TV show went off the air. Maybe I’ll stick to my own, real-life genealogy.