Transcript of Episode 42

Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Micky Dolenz

Segment 1 Episode 42

Fisher: Hello genies, it’s Extreme Genes Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com, the show where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. Fisher here your Radio Roots Sleuth, and this week we have the story of the discovery of the wreck of a ship that changed the lives of everyone alive today. That will be in just two minutes. And a postcard that finally found its family after being mailed in 1940. We have someone who’s developed a website to pry those stories out of your seniors and you’re going to love it because of its simplicity and how well it works with seniors. That will be in about eight minutes. And a listener has one of the strangest stories of discovery in his family that you’ll have ever heard. It involves an old house, the wrong side of the family and an oil rag containing a cryptic family record. It is weird and fun and that’s later in the show. And of course, Tom Perry our Preservation Authority of TMCPlace.com will be here to answer your questions. We received a lot of comments on the 12 year old genealogist we introduced you to last week, Hyrum Veach. One listener wrote, “Hey, if Hyrum’s for hire, I’m in. I’m thinking his rates will have to go up. Maybe I’ll become his agent. If you missed Hyrum’s visit o n last week’s show go catch the podcast through iHeart Radio or iTunes or ExtremeGenes.com. And by the way, the free Extreme Genes podcast app for iPhone and Android are now available in your phone store, so download yours today. Our Extreme Genes online Poll for this week was, “Do you have a family bible in your family? Fifty six percent of our respondents said yes, they do. We have one in ours dating back to the 1870s. Those are great treasures. And hopefully, if you have one you’re digitizing the handwritten information found in it and are posting it where others can find it. This week a new question, “Do you have a family name that has been passed down at least five straight generations?” In my family the name Scott has come down four straight so far. I may have to make some adjustments in my will to assure at least one of my kids keeps this Scott thing going. A lot of our guests on the show come from listeners who call our toll-free Find Line 1-234-56-GENES. That’s 1-234-56-GENES, G-E-N-E-S. If you have an amazing story from the trail you’d like to share, give us a holler and you just might find yourself on the show. As you know, the last few weeks we’ve had some celebrities on board talking about their family stories. And we have another one this week. It’s singer Micky Dolenz. I caught up with Micky a few weeks ago. Here’s what he had to say.

Micky: Briefly my dad was an actor and my mom, and so I was born and raised in a showbiz family and I didn’t know anything else. I thought everybody’s father was an actor.

Fisher: And so they got you started obviously at a very young age. What’s your earliest recollection of performing? 

Micky: Oh, prenatal work I did.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Micky: It’s coming out on ultrasound.

Fisher: [Laughs] What about your grandparents? Now where were they?

Micky: No, they were not in the business. My father’s side of the family was in Italy and my mom’s side of the family was in Texas.

Fisher: And so did they ever get to see some of the stuff you did?

Micky: Oh yeah, oh sure, they saw the stuff eventually. But my dad and mom both came out to Hollywood to be movie stars.

Fisher: And by the way, I did a little research on Micky, and learned that back in the 1960s he came from a group of monkeys. Next week actor Edward James Olmos shares his remarkable heritage. It is time for this week’s Family Histoire News and we start with a huge story. In a special report for USA Today, reporter Tracey T. Watson tells us that an underwater archaeological explorer believes they’ve located the wreck of Christopher Columbus’ flag ship the Santa Maria in shallow water off the coast of Haiti. Talk about a ship that changed the world. It sank on Christmas day in 1492, only three months after Columbus’ first arrival in the new world. When Barry Clifford and his crew first discovered the ship’s remains back in 2003 they had reason to eliminate the possibility that it was the Santa Maria. But a few weeks ago Clifford and company returned to the wreck and are now convinced they’ve located the ship that carried Columbus to the Western Hemisphere. About two years after the initial discovery Barry Clifford had been studying fifteenth century weaponry. He suddenly awakened one night as he realized that a tube photographed by his son back in ’03 was actually cannon of the type that Columbus likely had on the Santa Maria, a Lombard. Sadly, when the team returned to the wreck several weeks back they found the Lombard had been looted along with several other items they had originally photographed. 

An examination of Columbus’ log entries noted that the wreck of his flagship was 1.5 leagues from the fortified encampment it made after the ship was destroyed, the La Navidad. This wreck fits that distance exactly. It also settled in a sandy area near Breaking Waves as Columbus also noted in his journal. Clifford says there’s a lot more evidence that he’s not quite ready to reveal. Experts around the world are buzzing about the site, and many are ready to lend their expertise in authenticating what is looking more and more like remains of Columbus’ one and only Santa Maria. Next, Alan Marion of Butte Falls, Oregon has received a postcard that was intended for his great grandmother Florence Marion seventy four years ago. This is one of those strange events where no one can explain how the postcard could have been lost in the postal system since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The card was filled out in pencil by one of Florence’s relatives. It reads, “Arrived in Portland at 8 o’clock. Having a fine time. Be home sometime Saturday- Blanche.” The post office employee named Sunny Bryant first came across the note last year and took ten months to figure out if she could locate a living descendent of Florence Marion to deliver the card to. She turned to Rogue Valley Genealogy Society, Charlene Brown, and after some investigation Charlene realized that another society member Alan Marion had once talked to her about his family in Butte Falls.  Alan later confirmed from the relationship and now has the remarkable heirloom safely in his hands. How cool is that! Read about both of these remarkable stories and see the pictures at ExtremeGenes.com. And coming up next, he’s a guy who may have figured out the best way to suck those stories out of the brains of the seniors in your family. Nick Baum talks about his creation of Storyworth.com in three minutes on Extreme Genes Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com.

Segment 2 Episode 42

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Nick Baum

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, Family History Radio ExtremeGenes.com America’s one and only syndicated radio show on digging up your dead. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Nick Baum from a company called StoryWorth.com. Hi Nick, how are you?

Nick: Hi Fisher. I’m great. I’m really excited to talk to you today. 

Fisher: I’m glad to have you on. San Francisco, what a great town to start a new company in. 

Nick: Indeed. It’s beautiful and sunny. I’ve got sea lions outside honking away, so, can’t complain.

Fisher: [Laughs] Not a bad place. Well and the reason we’re having Nick on is, we’d like to find companies out there that kind of help us to preserve our history however it is. Whether it’s in a story form, video form, audio form, Nick kind of has options for several of these in a simplified way so that you can get especially your seniors in your family to come through and share some of their stories from their past that they might be, shall we say, a little incapable or hesitant to give up. Tell us about your story Nick and how you started this thing.

Nick: Sure. I actually came to this from a very personal side. My dad is 83 going on 84 and he’s had a really interesting life. He was born in Germany, he moved to the US when he was very young, he was in the Navy, he has been a lawyer, he moved to France, married a Swedish woman, who is my mom, and so of course he has accumulated a lot of really great stories. And on my side, I actually just got married about a year ago. We’re coming up on our first anniversary, so we’re thinking about kids in the next couple of years and so I think there’s a good chance that my dad will get to meet his grandchildren. But what I started thinking was that, would they really remember him? And what would they know of him? And I wanted to find a way to record his stories the way he would tell them, with his tone of voice, with his details, in a way that they could really know who he is as a person. And that’s where StoryWorth came from. 

Fisher: And that’s where it started. And then you took this concept into website form. I remember once running into a book, little booklet of questions that people can ask. And it’s filled with them, and the idea is that the relative fills these things out and you wind up getting quite a story from them ultimately because there are a lot of details a little at a time and it’s not something they have to do all at once. It’s not like that all consuming question of, “Tell us about your life.” 

Nick: Right.

Fisher: It’s about the first toy. It’s about your first memory, who was president when you were born, all these pacific little things. And over time you get something out of that. That is if the ancestor, if the relative, is actually willing to fill out the book. 

Nick: Right. You know it’s very funny that you bring that up because I actually did get one of those books for my parents and I think it’s a great system. The issue I ran into is that you really only have one page per story, and then you have all the questions laid out there at once. So it’s still a bit daunting to get started because you have to get it right. 

Fisher: Um hmm.

Nick: So the idea for StoryWorth was, well let’s take this project and break it down into the easiest possible steps you can do. So here’s how it works; once a week we email our customers a single question about their life. We have a huge library of questions, things like “What were your friends like in high school?” Or “What’s the most exciting place you ever travelled?” Or “What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?” And then of course our customers can also take their questions or their family members can suggest them. And what we do, once a week we email one of these questions to each customer. All they have to do is reply with a story. And they can either reply by email or they can reply by phone. We then save their story and share it to their family members. It’s completely private, only the family that sees the stories. And if you do that for a year, you answer fifty questions you start to build up this biography and get a really good story of the person’s life. 

Fisher: So I’m assuming that you’re talking about a lot of seniors, and even most seniors these days have email. 

Nick: That’s right. In fact, I’ve been very happily surprised that I have customers in their 90s and sometimes they call me for customer supports issues. You know we start discussing how I can help them and some point in the conversation they come up to say, “Well, you know, I’m in my 90s and I’m not very tech savvy.” And my reaction is, “That’s incredible!” That here you are and you’re comfortably using email, and a lot of people have iPads now and you know what I think I’ve noticed is actually computers are really complicated. 

Fisher: Oh yeah. They were supposed to simplify our lives. [Laughs] It didn’t work that way. 

Nick: Exactly! And I think when you’ve grown up with computers you take so many things for granted about how they work.  

Fisher: Sure.

Nick: And one of the things that we are really proud of at StoryWorth is that we really try to take a step back and think, how can we make this as simple as possible? So even someone who is not very familiar with computers but have an email account and wants to give this a try, can really easily figure it out. And I think we’ve done a good job at that and it’s really rewarding to just see people who are in their 80s, 90s and who are able to use the product and get a lot of joy out of it.

Fisher: And yet I know from looking at your site you can also do audio. You haven’t gotten a video function for it yet. How’s the audio thing work? 

Nick: Right. So the audio thing does still require an email account. The way it works is the person gets the email and right in the email there’s a button that says ‘Reply by phone’ and when you click that button, the system will actually call your phone. So you don’t need a smart phone, you don’t need an iPhone or an android you can just do it with even a landline. And it works just like your voicemail. The system calls the person up and says, “Hi, this is StoryWorth. Here is this week’s question recorded after the beep.” And then what we do on the other end is, we save that recording and send that recording to the family. So you actually the full voice story with the tone of voice and that of course gives a lot of personality so people like that a lot. 

Fisher: Wow! That’s awesome. Now are you going to go to video eventually? 

Nick: I think it’s possible. It’s not something we prioritize so far because our whole premise is that people will only write these stories or record these stories if we really lower the bar and make it as easy as possible. And video is really great if you can get it, you know the quality and the motion of video is really high, but it takes a lot of effort. You have to make up your hair, you have to clean up your apartment, you have to put on some nice clothes, get the lighting right.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Nick: And so I think video is something we’d like to encourage people to do a little bit further down the line once they’ve already started recording some stories. And in the meantime what we found is, you just have to get people started. 

Fisher: Yeah.

Nick: And that’s where doing this one question a week, everyone can write one email a week. And especially because we have these question prompts. It’s not even starting from a blank slate. You have this specific topic to deal with and that makes it so approachable that I like to say there’s almost no excuse not to do it. 

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Nick: And once people get started, what’s so wonderful is that they tell us that even a really nocuous question brings all these memories back and starts them flowing. So it might be a question about, I think I brought up earlier, what were your friends like in high school. Well that can turn into the stories about what teachers were like, or high school crushes, or what it was like to go to prom, or first car, or anything like that. And it’s really just like you start pulling on this one little thread and then all the memories come out. 

Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. What about people who don’t use email? Have you ever had anybody say “Do it with snail mail?” 

Nick: [Laughs] I have actually and I think it’s something that we could do eventually. I know of at least one person who got for their grandmother an internet connected printer. So this is a printer that you plug in to your network and then you send an email to this printer and it prints it out. So what he does is, he sends the StoryWorth email to this printer, it prints out the question and his grandmother then writes in long hand the story on the back of the page and mails it to him. 

Fisher: [Laughs]

Nick: I know people are doing it.

Fisher: That’s fantastic though isn’t it? I mean and not only that, not only is it low tech, you are getting an actual handwritten letter. I mean doesn’t the handwriting itself tell you something about the person?  

Nick: Absolutely. Yeah, so I think that is something that we’ll try and explore at some point, for now I think we’ve been lucky to find that a growing number of seniors do have email accounts.

Fisher: Sure.

Nick: That’s getting larger and larger over time. I think probably the first thing we’ll want to do is have a phone only version. Because I think having a version where instead of the service calling you, you could call in once a week and record your story then. You could really use it without even an email account. I think that’s something we’ll do in the next year for sure.

Fisher: A nice simplification. Now, how long have you been around? 

Nick: So we launched a year ago so just coming up on our first year and it’s been a really exciting first year. As I said, it was a very personal project for me at the start. Just something I built. Literally the first prototype was me sending questions by email to my dad and seeing how he responded to them.

Fisher: And what was the best story Nick that you got out of your dad that you didn’t know before?   

Nick: Oh, well, he has this wonderful story, I guess when he was in law school, and he had a girlfriend who decided to throw a crayfish party at his parents’ house. And so what they did was, they found some space, and this was of course before the internet that they mail ordered a barrel of crayfish. 

Fisher: [Laughs]

Nick: And so he is in the kitchen and he is trying to pry this barrel open and of course the lid flies off and the crayfish spills all over the floor. And the result was here that his family had two little Dachshunds and the Dachshunds just went berserk running around the kitchen hunting down these crayfish. And I don’t know actually what they ended up serving for dinner but I think the crayfish might have been replaced by hotdogs or something. 

Fisher: So the Dachshunds basically ate the crayfish on the spot?

Nick: Or chased them under the couch and it was just mayhem.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Nick: I think the Dachshunds had probably their best day ever among all that excitement. 

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] 

Nick: But you know I think that’s one of those little things that wouldn’t necessarily come up in regular conversation and we try to take questions that get that kind of small things, so another really fun question as well is “Have you ever pulled a prank or been a victim of one?” And there you can often find kind of funny little stories. At some point there’s been a prank and that gives you a good story.

Fisher: That is a great question. I like that. Well Nick Baum, I love it. StoryWorth.com is the place. I saw that you were written up in the New York Times. That’s very fun.

Nick: Yeah we were very lucky. They reached out to us and wrote a very nice article, so it was a very nice moment for us. 

Fisher: Well great stuff and good luck to you and this project.

Nick: Thanks so much Fisher and I hope your listeners enjoyed it and email me with any questions.

Fisher: All right and how do they do that?

Nick: So you can reach me at [email protected] and I reply to every single email and I’m very responsive and I love to hear from people. We try to keep the business very, very personal and hands-on. 

Fisher: Perfect! Thanks Nick. And coming up in five minutes, a listener shares his incredible story about a 175 year old oil rag fought over by family members because of the cryptic family information found on it. You’ll hear all about that when we return on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com. 

Segment 3 Episode 42

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Kelly MacFarlane

Fisher: And welcome back, Extreme Genes Family History Radio ExtrmeGenes.com. It is Fisher here the Radio Roots Sleuth with one of our guests Kelly MacFarlane who today has a story about an oil rag [Laughs] that turned out to be something a lot more than that. Hi Kelly, welcome to the show.

Kelly: How are you doing?

Fisher: Good! Now, we have people call all the time on our toll-free Find Line which is 1-234-56-GENES to get stories like this and it is absolutely amazing the things that happen. You found an oil rag that was in one of your relative’s homes from one side of the family, but it should have been the other side. Let’s clarify this thing.

Kelly: Yeah, with the name MacFarlane our claim to fame I guess, is a gentleman that came out of Scotland, John Menzies MacFarlane. And his father was John MacFarlane who was a coachman for the Prince of Wales and he married the chambermaid Annabelle Sinclair. And it’s Annabel Sinclair’s line that I was looking at carefully, and found that her parents had several children. And we knew several of the children, but there was one child that there was rumored that when the family apparently joined the church and moved to America, he didn’t want anything of it. And there was rumors that he instead went to Australia, or he went to another place in America, but nobody knew if this Peter Sinclair was really a brother or not. 

Fisher: Ha.

Kelly: So, my mother was a Snow nuffin from the Snow’s family and her sister purchased a home in Cedar City, Utah. And while she was cleaning it out, it was an old, old home, and it turns out that it was a home that Annabel Sinclair who then married John MacFarlane had lived in. 

Fisher: Wait a minute. So you’re saying that on your mother’s side there was this house, but the relic was from your father’s side?

Kelly: That’s right.

Fisher: Well, that’s bizarre.

Kelly: Which drove my family crazy, because she was searching for this in the attic and found an old rag and she opened it up and it was a sampler.

Fisher: Okay, so they’re old stitching, right?

Kelly: Stitching usually done by the younger schoolgirls to practice their craft stitch and they are very well known to depict usually initials of the family members and dates and sometimes they’ll have a famous building cross stitched into it from that town where they’re from, a castle in this case. And this stitching was being used as an oil rag. 

Fisher: [Laughs]

Kelly: And so my aunt on my mom’s side, cleaned it up, framed it then we found out that it was the sister of Annabel Sinclair in 1838 did this. Her name was Catherine Sinclair. She never married, so she obviously passed this to her sister. Somebody didn’t understand the value, probably one of the men in the family who used it for a tractor or something. [Laughs]

Fisher: Right. [Laughs]

Kelly: And lo and behold! She’s listed all the initials of her siblings and right there amongst Catherine Sinclair and Jane Sinclair and John Sinclair and all the children we knew about is the initials P.S for Peter Sinclair.

Fisher: And you weren’t sure previously if he was part of this family grouping?

Kelly: Did not know for sure.

Fisher: But this is obviously a very strong hint in that direction.

Kelly: Yes, there was one letter that someone found that Annabel’s mother asked one of her children to write and ask about the whereabouts of Peter Sinclair. We have that letter, so we’re pretty sure that he was a child that her mother was concerned about and they never did know where he was, but this just really confirmed it. And it also cleared up that a lot of people have been spelling Catherine Sinclair with a K.

Fisher: Hmm.

Kelly: And so I published it on one of the websites and said they had it both ways and said they didn’t know and I said, “Well, assuming that Catherine knows how to spell her own name, we can feel rest assured that it’s with a C.

Fisher: With a C because she did the stitch.

Kelly: She did the stitch herself.

Fisher: On the oil rag. [Laughs]

Kelly: On the oil rag.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Kelly: So it’s tough because to clean the oil off they lost some of the color in the old, old threads. And so it’s kind of a catch 22 of what to do, whether to clean it or not, but it was not in my family. And so I’m a Lawyer and everybody wanted that thing. [Laughs] They wanted it back in the MacFarlane side, and my aunt would have none of it.

Fisher: And then this was the aunt on your mother’s side?

Kelly: My aunt, and my mom would say, “Carlene, it’s not even your family. What do you care?” But she loved antiques and she was so proud of this and she would never let it go, and one day she got Parkinsons and she approached me as an attorney and said, “If you will keep my kids from fighting, I’ll give you that sampler.”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Kelly: And that’s how I got it.

Fisher: You obtained it.

Kelly: I was more than happy and I am now the envy of the MacFarlane clan.

Fisher: Yeah, but you’re taking care of it and making sure that everybody gets the benefit of the information that’s on there.

Kelly: I’ve been publishing and posting it on all the boards I can in hope that we can find where Peter went, because you know, we know Peter but I’m assuming he lived a life somewhere.

Fisher: But you have no records of him at all from either civil registries or church records or anything, do you?

Kelly: Nothing so far.

Fisher: Just this letter and this oil rag that indicates he actually existed.

Kelly: Yeah, it’s very sad. When I publish it too, all the family, people that aren’t even interested in genealogy. I’ve had people repost it as their Facebook profile.

Fisher: Really?

Kelly: In the MacFarlane family now and everybody’s now looking and trying to find this Peter Sinclair. It’s like the quest.

Fisher: The quest. [Laughs]

Kelly: Of the family right now.

Fisher: Well, to think of it, I mean the idea that it winds up on your mother’s side of the family and it’s from your father’s side. I mean, completely serendipitous here.

Kelly: Yeah.

Fisher: And then it’s used as an oil rag and then cleaned up and then treasured!

Kelly: Especially because John Menzies MacFarlane moved to St. George, so my dad’s family and my mom’s family are actually from a town about 45 minutes south of this house. And it’s just so crazy that my aunt ends up moving back to Cedar City and happens to buy the very house that her sister’s husband’s family, you know, was tied to.

Fisher: [Laughs] Even though they’re small town, still there’s a lot of houses out there.

Kelly: There’s still a lot of houses there. [Laughs]

Fisher: And the idea of it is just absolutely insane. And it reminds me very much of you know, what would you call it, a codex from like the Revolutionary War?

Kelly: Yes we are trying to sleuth this out. 

Fisher: Right, and are there any other initials on there that complicate things?

Kelly: There’s amongst the siblings, there is also an I.S.

Fisher: Okay.

Kelly: And that is a new name that is not recorded anywhere. Annabel Sinclair remarried a man by the name of Hate. Isaac B. Hate. And some people believe that it might be a child from the additional marriage. And because they were all living in the same house, she may have included it. So, that’s an additional mystery to follow.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Kelly: There may be another child but nobody knows about.

Fisher: Right, that maybe died young.

Kelly: Right.

Fisher: And so have you gone to some of the cemeteries from around where they lived just to look for that I.S?

Kelly: Cedar City, Utah is my next stop. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

Kelly: Go see what’s going on down there.

Fisher: Well Kelly, thank you so much for sharing the story. It’s absolutely astonishing what you’ve been able to find and what a weird twist

Kelly: I appreciate it and if there are any MacFarlanes across the nation that happen to know about a Peter Sinclair that is related to that family line, please let me know.

Fisher: Yeah, I think they should, absolutely. And you’ll share what you’ve got back. It’s great stuff. And having seen it online it is absolutely an amazing piece. Now we’ve got it posted on ExtremeGenes.com so people can check it out. It’s really fun stuff. Thanks so much Kelly.

Kelly: You bet. Thank you.

Fisher: Does it get any stranger than that? Wow! And coming up next, you’ve got questions and Tom Perry our Preservation Authority has answers, in three minutes on Extreme Genes Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com.

Segment 4 Episode 42

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: Hey, welcome back to Extreme Genes Family History Radio, ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here with Tom Perry, our Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com. How're you doing, Tom?

Tom: Super duper!

Fisher: And glad to have some questions in from our listeners. This one from Sheila in the 480, wherever that area code is, don't know. Sheila writes, "I have a bunch of slides of my husband's from over twenty years ago that I'd like to have put on DVD. I listen to Extreme Genes each week and love hearing all you can do to preserve memories. It’s gotten me fired up to do just this. Problem, I live in Arizona." Well, there you go. "Any suggestions on how I can safely get my slides to you? Thanks for your input. Sheila."

Tom: Good question, Sheila. And if you bring them into any of our outlets or ship them in to us, remember, we have the option, if you want, we can send you a GPS tracking chip that you can put in your box, and you can literally watch the UPS truck go down the street.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: You can tell if he's pulled over to Denny's for lunch or other things.

Fisher: [Laughs] Well, that's a good, safe felling then, to know that your stuff, your treasures are absolutely safe.

Tom: Oh absolutely. It’s amazing technology! Literally, you can go online and see it going down I80, I15, I34, you know, US1, wherever you happen to be. You can tell if he took a break at Denny's, and you can tell within three feet of where it is in the truck.

Fisher: Oh, I love that!

Tom: It’s amazing! It’s just incredible technology.

Fisher: And so people, ship your stuff from everywhere to everywhere, wherever you may be.

Tom: Exactly. Right, and some people don't have a problem with that, you know, they're pretty comfortable with FedEx and UPS. However, if you want that little bit of added security, you can go to Shop.TMCPlace.com, and when you fill out your order form, tell us that you want us to send you the chip. And then what we'll do is, we'll ship you the box, the packing material, everything you need and the chip. So you put it in there, print out your UPS label on your home printer, UPS stops by, picks it up, and literally, you can go right online 24/7 and watch it going across the country, across the state or wherever. It’s amazing technology.

Fisher: Now I know Sheila’s sitting there thinking right now, "Oh my gosh! How much does the chip cost, Tom??"

Tom: Twenty five bucks. They're pretty cheap.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: As part of your whole program, it’s very inexpensive to do it. Now one thing, what we do which a lot of other people don't do is, we actually shoot your slides at 16.2 megapixels, which is huge! Now some people are going to say, "Well, what's a megapixel?" Well, let me give you a kind of a correlation that can help you understand. You know how small a slide is?

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Its 35mm, its little, teeny things.

Fisher: It’s really tiny, sure.

Tom: Very tiny.

Fisher: In fact, a lot of people have thrown them out because they think there's nothing they can do with them.

Tom: Exactly. And don't do that!

Fisher: No.

Tom: Yeah. So if you look at this little, teeny 35mm slide, when we scan it, we basically scanning it as if it was 16.4 inches x 11 x 4 inches. It’s almost the size of a newspaper.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So it’s the same things that we're scanning something like that at, like 300dpi. Well, 300dpi is good for, you know, 3x5 photos. Well, we're scanning it as if it were 16 x 11, and so, you can actually make billboards out of it. It’s absolutely incredible.

Fisher: Wow! Could you? [Laughs]

Tom: Yeah, you could.

Fisher: Wouldn't that be fun for a family reunion to take a little slide and have this monstrous picture up there!

Tom: Oh absolutely, absolutely! You can do something like that. It’s just incredible, the dpi that you can do. But don't ever throw slides away. We have people that have gone to amusement parks, had those little viewers that you look in that has this little, teeny 110 images who says, "Oh, this is garbage, I can't use it." No, not necessarily. You can send them in to us and we can mount them for you and then scan them, or a lot of times online you can buy little 35mm slide adapters for 110 film. And then just make them yourself, sent them in to us and we can scan them at the same 16.2 megapixels, absolutely no sweat at all.

Fisher: All right, great question. And of course any time you have a question, you can send it to [email protected], and when we return.

Tom: We're going to have some interesting things from Kodak and some interesting things from Dropbox.

Fisher: New stuff happening right now, we'll have it for you next on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com in three minutes.

Segment 5 Episode 42

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: You have found us, Extreme Genes Family History Radio, ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here with Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com. And Tom, you have kind of hinted here that we've got some big things happening with some bigger companies. You mentioned Kodak, what's going on with them?

Tom: Okay, well, let me go to Sony first. You know, we talked about Sony coming out with a bigger BluRay disk and different things going on like that. We've talked about over in Europe, they're coming out with a quartz disk that will be 364 terabytes.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: You know the little audio cassettes?

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: How would you imagine getting 3700 BluRays worth of storage on a single audio cassette?

Fisher: Oh! [Laughs]  You're kidding!

Tom: No, I'm totally serious!

Fisher: Wow! I didn't even know they made audio cassettes anymore.

Tom: Well, yeah, they do. And see, that's another thing, a little bit off, but ties into this. People say, "Oh, they don't make VHS tapes anymore." Yes, they do. In a lot of audio recording studios, they use VHS tapes. They don't use them for video, they use them for digital audio.

Fisher: Ha!

Tom: But it’s the same tape. And this is the same thing, Sony announced at the International Magnetics Conference that was just over in Dresden that they have this new way, they will be over everybody’s head, but I love talking big.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: Use a vacuum forming technique called Sputter to deposit a creative layer of magnetic crystal by shooting argon ions at the polymer film substrate.

Fisher: You aren't just over my head.

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: You're over my house, you're over my airliner! I mean, really!?

Tom: This is crazy! You can get a million of these on a pinhead. And by doing this on what we would call an audio cassette, they can get so much data. Like when we talked a few weeks ago about the difference between a CD, a DVD and a BluRay.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: They're all the same size disk.

Fisher: Yeah, they're like a box, you were saying.

Tom: Exactly! It’s just, you can get smaller and smaller and smaller based on light waves. Well, they've got a way that they can make this magnetic particles 7.7 nanometers, which is so teeny, they can basically get 185 terabytes of data on an audio cassette, which in more perspective is 148 gigabytes per square inch.

Fisher: Wow! In other words, you can store everything you could ever do in your lifetime on one of these.

Tom: Yeah, probably every piece of genealogy, everything could go on one cassette.

Fisher: [Laughs] Okay.

Tom: I mean, it’s absolutely incredible stuff.

Fisher: Next.

Tom: Okay, next, let's go onto what Kodak's doing. This is kind of funny, and people might say, "Well, what's this have to do with family preservation?" You know how sometimes you have an old uncle that maybe stinks?

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: And you don't want to be around him at your conferences.

Fisher: Oh, come on!

Tom: Kodak, who is the largest user of silver, has figured out a way to take this silver and through some special method, impregnate it into clothing. And you can wear the same shirt for a week and there will never be smells.

Fisher: Really!?

Tom: It’s absolutely incredible. They're already making scrubs out of it and different kinds of things. So somehow these microbes that cause you to smell, it eliminates them!

Fisher: Well, Kodak's gone on a whole new direction.

Tom: It has. It’s just absolutely amazing some of the things they're doing.

Fisher: Okay, what else?

Tom: Okay, some other things, this comes from our friends at Easy Photo Scan. They're talking about some of these new things that are going on with Dropbox, as I’ve talked on here before. Dropbox is great program. I use Dropbox.

Fisher: Sure. Lots of people do.

Tom: It’s a good Cloud form.

Fisher: Yep.

Tom: They just bought Hackpad and they just bought Looms. Readmill is part of the group also, they do e reader type stuff. And so basically, they're gone now. All three of these were startup companies. And I believe this Readmill was bought for $8 billion.

Fisher: [*Gasp]

Tom: It’s like, you know, are you kidding me? These are little, teeny startup companies. And so, Loom service basically closed on May 6th, so people can take the opportunity right now. They need to get on there, transfer it over to Dropbox, and Dropbox will give them their full credit and everything. They'll be able to still keep everything they have. But the neat thing about this is, now all these features are going to be available on Dropbox, and all these engineers that are probably twelve to fourteen years old that are like brilliant are all coming to Dropbox now.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: So beside all this storage stuff, the engineers now at Dropbox are second to none. They're going to be doing stuff like Apple, just absolutely incredible stuff. So if you don't have a Dropbox account, signup for at least a free one, just to see all the new things that are going to be coming down the pipe. 

Fisher: So Dropbox is cloud is now kind of becoming a "best of" all of these companies.

Tom: Exactly. It’s taken all these, you know, these book publishing companies, all these things and bringing them all into Dropbox. It'll be an absolutely incredible future.

Fisher: Unbelievable! Thanks so much, Tom. And once again, if you have a question for him, you can [email protected]. We'll see you again next week. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we're a nice, normal family!