Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org.  They talk about the news of the discovery of the very spot in Salem, Massachusetts where the accused witches were executed in the 17th Century.  Hear where you can see it!  David then explains how the 5,300 year old Ice Man continues to make headlines.  He apparently left a prehistoric GPS of his movements. Hear how scientists can now tell where he traveled in his life. And, the guys then talk about how the last survivor of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 has passed.  Catch his survival story.

Next, Fisher talks with guest Brent Ashworth, a Provo, Utah man who collects items related to his family history.  He offers great advice on how you might do the same.  He also shares how he, as a Mayflower descendant, was excited to obtain one of the two Bibles carried by Gov. William Bradford to the New World on the Mayflower! (Are you kidding me?!)

Then, Fisher visits with Ken Krogue, founder of InsideSales.com, who will be a keynote speaker during the Innovator Summit on the first day of the Roots Tech Family History Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 3.  Ken offers sound advice on helping seniors get comfortable with technology to advance your family history efforts.

In the final segments, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, returns with thoughts on how to get the most out of the Innovator Summit, whether you're there in person or following the events on line.

It's all this week on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show!

Transcript of Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 122

Fisher: Hello Genies! And welcome to another spine tingling episode Extreme Genes, Family History Radio, America’s Family History Show.

I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And we are in a countdown right now to Roots Tech, which is the largest family history convention in the world. It’s coming up in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 3^rd through 6^th. We are going to be there and it’s going to be so much fun!

In fact, one of my guests today that we’re going to be talking to later in the show is a keynote speaker at the Innovative Summit, which is the first day, Wednesday February 3^rd, talking about how to get your seniors comfortable with dealing with Facebook and other digital materials so that they can further your family history experience. So it’s going to be very valuable to hear what Ken Krogue has to say later in the show.

Earlier than that in about 8- 10 minutes we’re going to be talking to Brent Ashworth, he lives in Provo, Utah, and he happens to have the Bible of Governor William Bradford, of the Pilgrims. Yes, it was brought across on the Mayflower!  If you’re a descendent of Bradford’s as many people are, or you’re a descendent of any of the Mayflower people, you’re going to want to hear what Brent Ashworth has to say about how he obtained it and what it means to him. Also, he talks about how to collect your ancestors, which is a great way to go.

But right now let’s head out to Boston, and talk to my good friend the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, David Allen Lambert, of course you’ve got AmericanAncestors.org as well. How are things in Beantown, David?

David: Well we’ve got little bit of snow and winter’s here but Beantown is doing pretty well. How are things out your way?

Fisher: All right. Looking good, and you know we’ve got so much going on right now, we’ve got our cruise coming up in September, our family history cruise. It’s going to be out of Boston, going to Nova Scotia, and of course we’re going to be lecturing on there, talking about the history of the area, the Revolution, the patriots, the loyalists, you descend from both as I recall right?

David: Oh, I came on both sides of the battlefield that’s for sure. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] It’s going to be a lot of fun. Find out more about this of course on our Facebook page or ExtremeGenes.com, what kind of stories do you have to us for family histoire news for today, my friend?

David: Well, nearly 325 years ago the hysteria of the witch trial gripped Massachusetts, in the New England area and it took that long for them to finally pinpoint where Gallows Hill is.

Fisher: Really?

David: Yeah! Some exciting news out of Salem, there’s a project called ‘The Gallows Hill Project’ and seven scholars spent the past five years using maps, and research and ground penetrating radar and over a thousand documents where the execution of the Salem witches occurred, and they now know where it is. Proctors Ledge is conveniently located near a Walgreens.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So if you need to get film when you’re going to go photograph your selfie at Gallows Hill you can go around the corner.

Fisher: Right.

David: The thing that identified it was a crevasse essentially in the glacial rock formation that basically is where they buried the witchcraft victims and it’s hard to know what lies in the ground but I’m sure archaeologists are going to tear into it as soon as the ground isn’t frozen up here, to see what might be there.

Fisher: Wow!

David: So that’s exciting news.

Fisher: Oh it is. You know, so many people have ties to the Salem Witch trials.  I run into them all the time, “Can we go there? What’s there to see?” You have ties to it, my wife has ties to it, I have ties to it, and I’m sure many, many people listening right now do, whether they know it or not.

David: You know, I have ancestors on both sides, I have accusers, I have an accused and I also have an ancestor whose brother was a judge.

Fisher: Wow!

David: And one of the people at RootsTech, one of the keynotes, Doris Kearns Goodwin, I did her genealogy a couple of years ago and sure enough, she has two people including my ancestor Mary Bradbury who was accused of being a witch as well as Roger Toothaker, who unfortunately died in prison after being accused of being a witch. So that’s exciting and I’m wondering when she is going to have some curiosity to go up to Salem to see the site as well.

Fisher: That’s going to be fun.

David: You know this time of the year people get the stomach bug and they’re not feeling quite well, so it’s interesting to know how long lasting that will be. I talked about doing diaries but the iceman who dates back to 5,300 years ago, found back in the early 2000’s they’ve dissected his stomach and done the genealogy, if you will…

Fisher: Oh boy.

David: … of the stomach bug by the parasites that are in his stomach and they can trace human migration based upon this.

Fisher: [Laughs] So they know where he lived and where he moved.

David: Exactly. They don’t have his mailing address yet.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: [Laughs] But it’s interesting to think what you carry with you. If you become an archaeological treasure some day it might tell your descendents what you had for lunch or what ails you. It’s really fascinating to know that this man had so many problems with him; he had gum disease, heart disease, gall bladder stones, lime disease and now including parasites. But because he was frozen they’re using the stomach bug to trace ancient human migration.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

David: Shocking news is, we lost somebody from a time that you wouldn’t even think would be anybody. An infant by the name of Bill Del Monte, 110 years ago as an infant, escaped with his family on a buckboard wagon, out of the burning streets of San Francisco, has just died. 110 years old Bill is the last survivor of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Fisher: That is just crazy. My grandfather was in that as well, he was on the Oakland side of things and then went into San Francisco to help with the recovery efforts, and it’s just amazing to think “Wait a minute there was a guy just of a week ago who was still living from that.” Incredible!

David: It really is amazing. Well I can tell you about some genealogy open source software you might be interested in. Recently I read on OpenSource.com a great little piece on three source genealogy tools for mapping your family tree. Essentially with open source you can manipulate the software and make it work for you in other than just a regular package software piece.

There are three of them available, one of them is called ‘HuMo-gen’, another one is called ‘Gramps’ and the third one is called ‘PHP Ged View and Webtrees’ and I’ll have all these hyperlinks available on the Facebook page for Extreme Genes, so check that out.

And of course talking about technology AmericanAncestors again is pushing your New Year’s resolution by helping you do genealogy, so try out our Massachusetts vital records, New Hampshire vital records and Vermont vital record databases I spoke about last week. All you have to simply do is go to AmericanAncestors.org become a guest user and check it out.

Fisher: All right David, take care, thanks for coming on! Coming up next; we’re going to talk to a man who somehow obtained the Bible of Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower. We’ll talk about his adventure in obtaining it, and how he collects his family history.

We’ll talk to Brent Ashworth, from Provo, Utah, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Brent Ashworth

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth.

Always excited to meet my guests and introduce them to you, and this is a man I became acquainted with several years ago, who is a world class collector, and many of the things that he collects has to do, not only with his own family but with many others, Brent Ashworth is on the line with me from Provo, Utah right now.

Hi Brent! How are you? Welcome to the show.

Brent: How you doing Scott?

Fisher: Just great, and I’m excited to hear some of the things you’ve got because I’ve never ever really gotten totally under the hood with everything that you have, especially the things relating to families. Now one of the things I know you’re into, your family has a lot of Boy Scouts in them, right? All of them were Eagle Scouts. Your grandfather, your father, yourself, your kids, tell us about that collection.

Brent: My grandfather, Paul Ashworth, was actually too old to be a scout, but he really wanted to be on a scout member committee about scouting in 1913, and received a Silver Beaver Award in 1947. So he was an early scouter, but more a leader.  My father was a first Boy Scout in his troop to receive an Eagle. I received mine when I was thirteen, it was when John F. Kennedy was president back in 1962, and all seven of my sons are Eagle Scouts. We actually opened a Boy Scout museum in 2000. We named it after the oldest living Boy Scout who was living in Arizona at the time and was on the late show with David Letterman, wearing his Scout uniform.

Fisher: How old?

Brent: We opened it on his 102^nd birthday.

Fisher: [Laughs] So what do you have in this Boy Scout collection?

Brent: Well, we’ve got thousands of things actually. I probably have enough material to open a couple of Boy Scout museums. I’ve inherited some things from family such as the first US Jamboree. My grandfather had a set of the newspapers on the issue back in 1937.

I’ve got the journal of the very first Scout Master in Utah. The diary starts in the 1920s and runs up through 1935 when the first Boy Scout jamboree in the United States was to be held at the mall in Washington D.C.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: One of the neat things about it is, one of the pages he put a sticker from the jamboree that was never held. So it’s kind of a rare piece.

Fisher: Oh, fun [laughs].

Brent: They held it two years later in 1937 in the mall. I have a book signed by several of the local leaders that went back to that jamboree and took troops and so on with them.

Fisher: So it has particular meaning to you because of the Boy Scout connection that runs through how many generations, four right?

Brent: That’s right, all our family history.

Fisher: Or is it five at this point? Your kids are having kids.

Brent: We don’t have an Eagle Scout grandson yet, but he is fourteen and I think he is on his way.

Fisher: Pretty darn close. Now you have a Bible, a couple of Bibles in your collection that I’m aware of. One in particular that I think could be of interest to many people listening because he has millions of descendants in this country and that’s William Bradford, the Governor amongst the Pilgrims at Plymouth. You have the Bible that he brought across the ocean on the Mayflower.

Brent: Well, I have one of two, there’s one in Pilgrim Hall, which is his Geneva Bible, and I have his Calvin Bible which he brought. I have an ancestor that came over on the Mayflower too, John Oldham. I’ve always been interested in the Mayflower so this Bible came up for sale, oh, it’s been fifteen or twenty years ago at the Christie’s Auction House in New York.

Fisher: Wow!

Brent: In fact, it was a frontispiece of their catalogue, and I didn’t think I stood a chance at getting it. The history of this book pretty ironclad because, Bradford actually listed the books he brought over in his will which we still have.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: And that was published in Calvin on the Gospel as it was called, it’s a New Testament. Calvin and the notes are interspersed with the New Testament. I know the history of this book too. It was printed in Leiden, Holland, and that’s where they were, the Separatists, you know, the Pilgrims.

Fisher: Right. Are his family names in there?

Brent: No, he signed the book on the title page and then he signed it partly on the board. Back then the boards of the book were wooden, you know, they were boards.

Fisher: Right, yeah.

Brent: And so when I first got it, I got it at this auction, I was really shocked. It had been on display I found out at the New York Public Library in 1920. They did a big 300th anniversary for the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 at New York Public Library in 1920.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: Amongst the items that they had on display that they knew they could document was this New Testament that belonged to Bradford. The book itself has a history that we know a little beyond Bradford.  One of the Separatists that was there, a friend of his, Jessie DeForest, actually owned this book originally. It was published there in Leiden, probably at a Pilgrim craft by some Dutch. It was published in 1602 and has Leiden on it, and it was all in Dutch and Jessie DeForest was going to bring it over but he was on another boat.  

Fisher: The Speedwell.

Brent: The Speedwell that didn’t speed so well, you know.

Fisher: Right [laughs]

Brent: They had a leak back there.

Fisher: Yeah it leaked well [laughs]

Brent: Yeah [laughs] It leaked well, and they didn’t have a lot of places for these folks aboard the Mayflower, they tried to take a few, but can you imagine, the Mayflower ended up with 102 people on board crammed on a deck. The ship was shorter in length than my home.

Fisher: Right, yeah, I mean it’s not the Marriott!

Brent: No, it was not [laughs]

Fisher: What did that feel like for you the first time you held it?

Brent: Well, I was thrilled. I was just ecstatic when I got the thing. It was expensive, I didn’t think it would make it but it did.

Fisher: Your wife okay with that? [Laughs]

Brent: She’s been a great support over the years. She really has. She allowed me to do this, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s something we kind of worked on together over the years, but she’s been a great sport.

Fisher: It kind of brings up a question I think a lot of people go through when they gather; I like to collect my family as well. I have a family Bible from the Fishers in the 1840s and I have a bunch of the daguerreotypes.

Obviously, most are not going to come across some of the things that you’ve talked about, but the Boy Scout thing, for instance, I think is typical for a family history interest. Do you have some advice for people who would like to collect their family in particular or around their family interest?

Brent: Well, I think there have been a lot of opportunities that have come up. I had just one recent example, family that you see once in a while, unfortunately mostly at funerals, you know.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: They wrote me an email a few months ago about a photo album that she’d seen that had come up for sale, and I don’t know if it was on eBay or where it was, I can’t remember exactly, and it had some photos that we didn’t know existed of our mutual great grandfather and great grandmother that we’d never seen before.

Fisher: Wow!

Brent: And this photo album was in perfect condition. The guy wanted a small amount for it, really wasn’t that expensive, and she said it to me and I immediately wrote on it and was able to pick it up. In fact, I haven’t shown it to her yet.  I told her I’d make copies and I will for the rest of the family, but there were four or five photos in there of our great grandparents that we’ve never seen. They were young, and my great grandmother, there was even one before she was married, you know, when she was a young girl in her teens. 

You know its fabulous buying, occasionally you will get tips from a relative or if you’re just on top of it yourself, you’ll see things that might have something to do with your own family.

Unfortunately, most of my family’s papers were, at least on the Ashworth side, were lost.

I located one little group that belong to another family now. They gave me permission to copy them, but because they are owned by a bunch of people that couldn’t agree on themselves to sell it.

Fisher: Right, yes.

Brent: At least I got the copies. On my mother’s side, it’s really my grandmother that I need to blame for my collecting because she saved just about everything. This is my mother’s mother, we called her Nana.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: She died a year after I was born so I’ve got a couple of pictures holding her, but I don’t remember her, but I feel like I know her because she was such a collector. She would save everything, a little invitation to a dance or this or that, and I guess that’s why the garage that we have is so full of materials. When she passed away in 1950, my grandfather, I remember him saying one day when I was a kid that he sure wished he could pull his car in the garage.

Fisher: [Laughs] Because she had that much stuff.

Brent: He didn’t have the heart to go through her things, and when he passed away in 1956, the family, the six children, including my mother who is the youngest, took all the stuff out of the garage and built a big fire outside and just started tossing everything in, and I was only seven years old at the time, and I remember thinking how crazy this is, because family history and all kinds of things are going up in flames.  I can still remember my grandpa's false teeth in the fire. That was weird. I asked my mother years later, I said, "Did you guys save anything of grandma's?" And she says, "Yeah, there was one box." It was up in the rafters of the garage, so when we move the next year, I'll have your father go out and get it." Then I pestered her until she let me go through it, and I found all kinds of family history.

Fisher: What do you do with it all? And what are you going to do with it all? 

Brent: Well, good question. That's the $64,000 question, we used to call it. You know, I've donated a lot of things to my church. There's been 130,000 items I took up on two missions at our church archives and only kept about 33,000 or something.

I have them all together, including 9,000 documents. I've tried to give them to other libraries, university libraries here. As far as the core collection, we're trying to find a home for it, honestly. I'd rather not have to go back to auctions and things, because I've got children that we've allowed to pick out favorite items.

Fisher: Sure.

Brent: But the collection is gigantic. We’ve over half a million items now in the collection.

Fisher: Oh my goodness!

Brent: Many of them are books. There’s 300,000 books alone in the collection.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Brent: So I’ve been trying to give away a lot of books and things. They don’t do much use in storage you know.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

Brent: So, we’ve really been looking for a location where it could be put to better use, and we’ve been donating to big libraries too. So we’re looking for an eventual home for it, it may have to eventually be sold off. I certainly don’t want it ending up in a fire or something.

Fisher: No. no, you don’t want it behind somebody’s home with grandpa’s false teeth! [Laughs]

Brent: Exactly! Yeah. So we’re trying to find a better location than that. It’s been a labor of love over the years. We’ve learned a lot about our family as a result of it.

Fisher: Brent Ashworth, thank you so much for your time. What an amazing story! What a journey and what a collection! How lucky are you to be able to have some of these things in your lifetime.

Brent: Well, I feel really blessed, you bet! Thank you.

Fisher: Absolutely! Thanks for coming on with us.

Brent: You bet, anytime.

Fisher: And coming up next, we're going to talk to a man who's an expert at helping you get your seniors comfortable with social media and other communication to further your family history.

He's going to be a keynote speaker at Roots Tech. We'll talk to him in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Ken Krogue

Fisher: And welcome back to America's Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, very excited to be in the countdown, the final weeks until Roots Tech in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the largest Family History Convention in America, and in fact, you're going to be able watch it online or listen online.

There's so much to follow there, and I'll be one of the bloggers keeping you in tune with what's happening, and I'm very excited right now to have Ken Krogue on the line with me right now. He's going to be one of the keynote speakers there. Now, which day are you speaking, Ken?

Ken: You know, I'm going to be there the first morning, Wednesday morning, talking more to the business side of the crowd, those who are going to be digipeaters and so on, but I'm really excited, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Fisher: It's going to be a great time and I know you've been to Roots Tech before because you are a family history nut even though you are a tech guy, in fact, you've written many pieces for Forbes magazine and I love your blog! I read about, for instance, how you mom passed this past year and all the things that she had taught you through the years, and the way you laid it out was very beautifully done.

Ken: Well thank you. Yes she’s my favorite cheerleader. [Laughs]

Fisher: Exactly! Well, let's talk a little about this, because I think technology, especially for older people, is a very scary thing. In fact, I see a lot of people who, when I bring up the subject of just downloading an app for instance, they step back, "Oh no! I don't do those kinds of things.”

So, I'll often say, 'You know if you really want to do this and you really want to be in tune with your kids, your grandkids, you need to learn how to do it, and stop being afraid and step up and learn!’ So, you have some great tips here on how to get involved in the technical side, to the social media side of advancing people's family history. How do we get people comfortable with technology, just from the basics, Ken?

Ken: You know that's one of my favorite topics, Scott. I love to start family history social media groups, and I'll tell you what, those more senior folks who struggle a little bit, they've got the wisdom, they just don't have the knowledge on the social site.

Well, the best place to do it is, go grab the kids and the grandkids and have them come over, shut the door and say, "Hey, I need some coaching here!" And I would say, start with Facebook. Get me on, help me try it and help me connect, first with my family and them help me reconnect with some of my old friends, and they just go to town.

I have found it never takes more than about an hour to at least get them started and feeling good about it, and here's the key to all of social media in the family, and that is, have some fun content in the middle that they can use.

So, find some of the older pictures, have them pasted on there and then they can go out and start sharing that with family and friends, and what I've found is, the best way to build rapport is, find a picture with the other person you want to reconnect with in the picture with you.

What a fun way to get started and get people going! So, it's family history but start with the current stuff, then work back, and that's how I always get started.

Fisher: Right. Yeah, or you do it side by side. 'Here's how we were and here's how we are', of course, that might be too frightening for some of us, right? [Laughs]

Ken: Yeah, that’s true. [Laughs] I caught Chest of Drawer’s disease and it shows too much where my chest fell to my drawers!

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Ken: So, I don't like the side by side.

Fisher: I understand that, yeah. I was listening to a blog that you were doing, an audio blog, and you were talking about 31 days to learn, and I really liked the concept of it. You know, I think many of us think of, ‘well, take a class!’ but really, since we can do so much of this now at home, putting aside a period of just, say, the entire month of March, and saying, this entire month I'm going to devote to mastering something. What do you think those 31 days would be best devoted to?

Ken:  That's what actually got me started. It was a guy who wrote “31 Days To A Better Blog,” when I started my blog way back when, and it starts with the very basics of making sure you get your name.  In the early days, it was some handle, something you hide behind, but nowadays, it’s just, here's my name, I'm Ken Krogue, and then you start filling out your profile. You move from profile to learning how to put your content out there which is your pictures and your write-up and your back story. That's the human element, who you really are. That's what people want to see, and then learn how to connect. Learn how to start a conversation through comments. A comment is where I make a comment on your site; a conversation is when you comment back.

Fisher: Right.

Ken: And that's probably the biggest single milestone I have found, is when you finally figure out how to get people to respond, and here's sort of the secret, just ask a question.

Fisher: Um-hum.

Ken: They'll start responding and now you'll have a conversation, and those are the basics, like the core of social media.

Fisher: Well, I think the old word would be interaction.

Ken: Yeah!

Fisher: Right? I mean, otherwise it’s just a one-way conversation.

Ken: Exactly! And you know that when you get people interacting and commenting, you're now official on social media, and then it gets really fun.

Fisher: All right. Now, how about preserving some of the things that your grandparents or your aunts or uncles actually obtained from other relatives? Is there a way to do that that's simple?

Ken: Absolutely! And, it’s pretty funny; people think they need fancy scanners and everything else. I say, pull out the smartphone and just take a picture and pop it out there. Whether it’s a sculpture or photos or old documents, and that's my favorite place.

The start is just with fun content that others in your community will be interested in, whether it’s your family community, your old friends from high school or whatever. My favorite place for high school is, go grab the yearbook.

Fisher: Yes. [Laughs]

Ken: [Laughs] And go scan all those pictures with little comments that people wrote when they were a kid, put it out there and say, “Do you remember when you wrote that?" and they say, "I didn't write that!" and you say, "Yes, you did. It's right here."

Fisher: Yeah, and then there's the picture of it. I mean there's no hiding from it, but it’s good to preserve that for the long haul as well.  Maybe, actually even printing it out or saving it in a special folder on a desktop, transferring it from the phone, so that ultimately, you can create histories or some of our seniors can create them for us, which is really the ultimate goal, is to preserve their stories, because as the old saying goes, that when an individual passes away, a library is burned.

Ken: It’s true. We found that with my mother, so many great stories. We captured some of them, but we didn't get them all. I wish we had.

Fisher: Well and how do you ever get them all, right? There's always something else out there.

Ken: True. [Laughs]

Fisher: We have very large libraries in these heads. Then there's some hidden rooms in the back too that I don't think anybody ever accesses. [Laughs]

Ken: And some we probably shouldn't. [Laughs]

Fisher: Exactly! So, how do you get people to follow what you're doing? For instance, if you want to start a family history Facebook page, and you want to attract more people, do you work from just the surname or you're trying to just find cousins who you know or you're trying to extend to many that you don't know.

What's a simple way to get going with it and then expand from there?

Ken: I was pretty blessed to have a unique spelling of my last name, K-R-O-G-U-E, and it was changed several generations back from the original spelling. So, I grabbed the domain name Krogue.com and then I started a Facebook group called, The Krogue Clan, and I did everything. I looked for the early stories, the early content and then I just started searching on the last name 'Krogue'.

I found people all over the Unites States that were direct descendants of our common ancestors that we had never met, never run across each other, and we pulled together a face to face event.

So, the basic strategies go from social media, to digital media, to remote conversations which is a phone call, to a live interaction event where you get together, and we got an extended family reunion at the old homestead around Bear Lake, Idaho.

It was so powerful! We found stories that were phenomenal, we marched up to the gravesite of our common ancestors, and it was one of the most beautiful events that I've had in my life.

Fisher: That is great advice. I think really, it’s always been that way, whether it was sending a letter to somebody back in the old days to introduce yourself, to the phone call, to the face to face, to these experiences, but it's so much easier to do now if you just make the effort to learn how to do it.

Ken: It’s so true, and like I said, tap those younger generations and get a little bit of coaching and it won't take very long.

Fisher: Hey, thanks for coming on, Ken! It's been great having you.

Ken: Thanks so much, Scott. I really appreciate sharing some time with you.

Fisher: Ken is going to be such a great speaker at Roots Tech! I look forward to seeing him there and you as well.  All right, coming up next in three minutes from TMCPlace.com, Tom Perry, our Preservation Authority talking about the Innovator's Summit Day 1 at Roots Tech.

Segment 4 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: Welcome back to America's Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He is our Preservation Authority.

Hi Tom, how are you?

Tom: I'm super-duper!

Fisher: I am excited because we're looking right down the barrel at Roots Tech coming up February 3rd through 6th in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the first day of course is the Innovator's Summit, and as a techy-guy like you are, I mean that's a big day.

Tom: Oh, it is! Some of the neat things that they're bringing out there you have the opportunity to see some things may be coming out. You know, immediately they’re almost ready for release. Some of them won't be out for a while and some of them are what I refer to as 'vaporware.'

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Because they just kind of evaporate. They never really show up.

Fisher: That's right. A lot of them just don't work out, but nonetheless, there's some incredible ideas…

Tom: Oh, really!

Fisher:  … that come up at the Innovator's Summit, and we're looking forward to that. That will be on the Wednesday of that week, and then on the 4th through 6th we'll have all the keynotes, we'll have the classrooms working and of course, everything on the show floor, and that is so much fun at the Salt Palace Convention Center, and of course, we will be there. You going to have a booth for your place, it's going to be right next to mine hopefully.

Tom: Yeah, hopefully.

Fisher: For Extreme Genes and we look so forward to meeting so many of our listeners there. Now, speaking of preservation today, what do you have for us?

Tom: Okay, well one thing a little bit back on Roots Tech that we were talking about, one of the neat things about the Innovator's Summit is, some of the stuff will actually be on the floor if you want to go and check out the stuff, see what's available, and a neat thing about that also is, sometimes people like myself that go to these Innovator's Summit, sometimes it triggers something, and you think, 'Oh, hey, you know what… we can take that and do this with it and go do more and just knock the thing out of the park.’

Fisher: Yes, new applications.

Tom: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely, you really want to watch out and be careful, sometimes it's like buying a new car, you see the shiny cool car and you don't take it for a test drive. You say, "Oh, this is so cool! This is what I've always wanted!” You buy it and then you have buyer's remorse.

Fisher: Yeah, that's right

Tom: So, don't be forced into stuff at Roots Tech. Don't think, "Oh, this is what I really want! Oh, I better grab it right now because they say they're almost out of them." If they’re almost out of them, wait for the next run. Don't jump in.

Fisher: They'll make more.

Tom: Exactly! [Laughs] Exactly! And if they don't make more, it's good you didn't buy one.

Fisher: Probably so.

Tom: So, just be real careful what you're looking for and just always remember the basics, you know, like we've talked about on the show many times before. Your basics are, you want to take your old things, you want to find out how to preserve them, how to put them on disks, how to put them in the hard drive, how to put them in the clouds, different things like this.

You want to learn how you can start making memories for your family, for the people who are living right now to be able to extend into the future. So, you want to be really careful. You don't want to get the cart before the horse.

You want to do things in order. The old stuff you have, let's take care of those. Let's get those things preserved. Let's do what we need to with those, whether you want to buy a scanner, whether you want to buy something along those lines, that's what we need to do. We need to take care of the old stuff first.

Fisher: Well that's right, and the old stuff is going to be the rarest stuff, always.

Tom: Exactly!

Fisher: Especially because back in the day, we couldn't just video everything everywhere and preserve it on a phone or some kind of device. Home movies, that was about it, and there's a lot of junk associated with it too, a lot of bad shots, but things that you can actually edit down now and make into something very special.

Tom: You know, we're just through Christmas, and Christmas is always crazy for us at all of our stores. People coming in, we just have tons of stuff. People find the bug, and then usually, January slows down, and as we're going into Roots Tech, we're not finding that out this year.

There are a lot of people that made New Year’s resolutions to, 'Hey, let's get this old stuff done.' and they're doing it, and it's awesome. So, be really careful. Don't leapfrog, like you said, over the old stuff and start just working on the new stuff.

You need to take care of that stuff, because your film is going to fade, your video tapes are going to wear out; they're going to get dusty. If you live in a high humidity place, you can get mold on them, and there's just so many thing that can go wrong. Get that old stuff and let's get working on it now!

Fisher: Absolutely! That is great advice, and once again, it's coming up February 3rd through the 6th in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the Salt Palace Convention Center.  Roots Tech is the largest Family History Convention in the world by far, and of course, you're going to be able to follow it online.  There's a lot of streaming video, from the keynote addresses and some of the classes as well. You can go to RootsTech.org and find out more about that. All right Tom, more when we return in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com.  Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with our final segment with our Preservation Authority Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. We’re kind of getting you ready for Roots Tech, coming up February 3^rd through 6^th in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s the world’s largest family history convention, and there is some prep that goes into going to this thing because you’re going to be hit from all sides, right Tom?

Tom: Oh absolutely.

Fisher: From all the booths and all the new products that are out. Give us some more advice here.

Tom: Okay, one thing you really need to be careful no matter kind of tracer you’re going to, you need to have a plan of attack. Like we go to the CES show every year in Vegas and it just gets bigger and bigger.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: And it’s physically impossible to get around to it. You need to put together a game plan. See what’s the most important thing to you, do you have some old cassettes that you need transferred, do you have some old VHS tapes, do you have some photographs, do you have them already digitized and you want to see how to put them together, how they are best to distribute them to your friends and family?

There are so many different things you need to put together, a game plan saying ‘This is my first priority, this is my second, third, fourth, however many priorities you have.” And then within each one of those get more specific, like say “Hey, I have thousands of slides, I want to do it myself.”

Great, let’s do that. So you want to say okay your priority is you want to scan your slides, so you need to say “Okay, what’s my budget?” you’re going to run into prices that are $200, you’re going to run into prices that are over $2000 so you need to see what your budget is and one thing that will help, you can call us, you can call other transfer places and say “Hey, this is what I have, what would it cost if I pay you to do it?”

And if you come back and find ‘Okay I can transfer all my slides for a $1000 and I’m done with it, and for me to buy a good scanner, I’m looking at, at least $1500” it’s probably not a good thing to do unless you’re going to pass around to other people in your family.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Or you want to rent one. Like the people we’ve talked to as guests on the show before, they actually rent them out to Florida, and you might think that might be a good way.

Fisher: EasyPhotoScan.

Tom: Yeah EasyPhotoScan. Stop by their booth and look what they have to offer, then you have all these things ‘Okay this is what it’s going to cost if I send it out to either TMCPlace.com or one of these other places and this is what it’s going to cost if I rent the thing. This is what it’s going to cost, this is my time frame.’

If I buy it, this is what it’s going to cost. If I get my family to invest in it to help us out, then you know what your budget is so when you go in there you’re not looking at something that’s… spending time talking to somebody about a $3000 scanner, you’re just wasting your time.

Fisher: That’s right. Good point, yes.

Tom: You want to be really careful, and then another thing on your scanner too ‘quality versus price.’  We have people that come into the store and say “I don’t care what this costs, I want the absolutely best high definition X, Y, Z, I can get.”

And that’s fine we’re happy to do it. Sometimes it’s overkill, so you need to find out what you want and if you don’t know give us a call and we can explain to you the differences what we think is the best way for you to go and then you make the decision on what’s going to be best for you.

Because that will take you like from the $700 price range, the $1500 price range to the $2000- $3000 one. We had a guy in our store the other day that came in and picked our brain, and he’s going to go out and buy one of those real nice scanners that do the slides and he’s going to pay about $4000, and it’s great because he enjoys sitting down scanning them, playing with them.

Where we have the other ones we mentioned that come in and say “Hey, my son’s been telling me he’s going to do this, for three years nothing’s happened. I want is done and I need it at a reasonable price. Here’s what my budget is.’ And then we work in what’s best for them.

Fisher: Right. There’s so much to really consider when you’re looking to invest in a product like that, the various price ranges, the quality and of course the quantity of material you have to work with, in fact some people don’t have a lot of stuff.

Tom: Oh exactly! And you know an important thing too is that you also want to look at ‘what’s your end goal?’  Do you want to put them in your cloud, do you want to make MP4’s, MP3’s, how do you want to do this?

So you make sure you get the right equipment so you don’t go at the end of it “Oh I got this cool software, I’m going to make MP3s and MP4s” and that software doesn’t do it. So do your homework.

Fisher: Great advice Tom, as always. Thanks for joining us.

Tom: Good to be here, and hope to see you at Roots Tech.

Fisher: I cannot believe how fast our time goes on this show! That is it for this week. Thanks once again to Brent Ashworth, from Provo, Utah, for talking about his experience in collecting his ancestors and for sharing with us the story of how he obtained the Bible that came across on the Mayflower with Governor William Bradford.

And to Ken Krogue, one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming Roots Tech convention, catch the podcast if you missed any of it. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice normal family!