Fisher has more news on the corpse of King Richard III.  The modern day discovery of his body under a parking lot was well timed, as a CT scan and a 3D printer have revealed something people had only guessed about in the past.  Learn what it is.

Guest Daniel Swalm of Minnesota will get you looking through your database to find out… could your grandmother have died without her American citizenship as his did?  He’ll tell you about the obscure law he discovered and the path that led him to the floor of the United States Senate!  This is a truly amazing tale!

Family history super sleuth Ron Fox returns to talk about “collecting” your ancestors and finding their memorabilia on places like eBay!  Both Fisher and Ron have done it, and you can too!

Preservation Authority Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com returns with news of the latest invention to make your outdoor family reunion safer.  You’ll be amazed at what it is!  He’ll also fill you in on the latest news surrounding 3D printers.

Transcript of Episode 45

Host: Scott Fisher

Segment 1 Episode 45

Fisher: Hello Genies, and welcome back to Extreme Genes Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com, America’s Family History Show. Where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. I am Fisher your Radio Roots Sleuth. Let’s start this week by welcoming our latest affiliate to our growing family of radio stations, News Radio 1029 KARN in Arkansas. Great to be a part of Adam Thomas’s Saturday line up. And no doubt there’s some great family history to be found in the Natural State. Well, this week you’ll be blown away by what our first guest has to tell you. His name is Daniel Swalm and he lives in Minnesota. Like most of us, he just wants to learn more about his family. And in the process of working the records of his grandmother, he learned that despite the fact that she was born in Minnesota, and died in Minnesota almost 90 years ago, and never left the country, at the time of her passing she wasn’t a citizen of any country. In fact, when the United Sates senator heard about it all he could say was, “Wow!” Why? Daniel will explain in about eight minutes. Oh and by the way, the same thing may hold true for your ancestors. I’d never heard of this before and I’ll bet you haven’t either. You won’t want to miss it. Then a friend of the show Ron Fox returns to talk about collecting your ancestors. It’s doable and a lot of fun. I’ve been doing some of this lately and will tell you all about how you can do it, later in the show. 

Our Extreme Genes poll for this week has to do with this type of collecting. We asked, “Have you ever found anything on eBay or similar sites, relating to your ancestors. Yes or no. Fifty six percent of you voted “Yes” forty four percent voted “No.” And this week we ask the question “Is there a family legend in your lines that you just haven’t been able to prove?” Yes or no. Cast your vote at ExtremeGenes.com, and feel free to tell us about it on our Facebook page, while you’re there give us a like. We’d love to have you as part of our Facebook community. Want to be on the show? We love hearing your stories, call our toll free Find Line at 1-234-56-GENES. You can also ask questions there and make comments, and who knows we may end up shining a spotlight on your ancestor and story of discovery. Jennifer Douglas of Reading, Pennsylvania sent me this email at [email protected], she writes, “Fisher, concerning last week’s show with Janet about how to break the news to family members about skeletons in your closet, or how to delicately write about them. You sure seem to have more than your share of scoundrels back there, just saying.” Uh, guilty as charged, but I guarantee you have a few too Jennifer. You just might not know much about them yet. We all have heroes and scoundrels, just like we all have kings and paupers back there. Just remember what Janet said, “There’s always some hero in our scoundrel, as well as some scoundrel in our heroes.” If you missed last week’s conversation on this check out the podcast on iTunes, iHeart Radio or ExtremeGenes.com. And don’t forget to download the totally free Extreme Genes podcast app for Android and iPhone available now in your phone store. Well here is this week’s Family Histoire news from the pages of ExtremeGenes.com. 

It almost feels like 2013 again with regular stories about King Richard the III. Well, last week we told you about how the High Court of Britain finally ruled he could be buried in Lester Cathedral. This week Lester University decided they wanted to know something about the king that they could finally determine once and for all. It’s been passed down through the centuries that King Richard had a hunchback. You know like Quasimodo. When Richard was found beneath the parking lot last year in England, there was indeed a curve to his spine. Then the question became, “Was the curve natural or was it the result of the deterioration of the body?” Well, how lucky we are that he was found at this late date. Because Lester University has a wowie 3D printer, and colleagues at nearby Loughborough University made CAT scans of the 500 year old body. From that the Lester University folks where able to make a 3D replica of Richard’s spine, and from there they were able to determine just how Richard stood. Their conclusion was that Richard wasn’t hunchbacked, he was crooked backed and short too. The diagnosis? “Scoliosis” With severe spine curvature it would not have been easily visible to others. In fact, they said a good tailor could have created clothes for him that would have mostly hidden the problem.  They say he also mostly had to have suffered from back pain. See photos and read more about it at ExtremeGenes.com. And who knows what other historic figures we’re going to learn about in this way in the future. Next, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports on a man who dug a family bible out of a trash bin, (that happens all the time) and allowed it to take him on an amazing adventure. In 1982 Shaun Walsh of Marston Mills, Massachusetts, was asked to lug a heavy trash bag out of his grandparents’ Florida home while on a visit. When he dropped it on the curb, the bag busted open revealing an old leather bound bible. Walsh was fascinated and took the book home carrying onto the plane. Well, a few years ago he began researching the Walsh family names found in the book and learned about his third great grandfather John who served in the Civil War. In time he learned that his ancestor’s grave was unmarked. Well with the help of the VA that matter was recently resolved, as his ancestor finally got a tombstone in Brooklyn. Read the rest of this remarkable story, there’s a lot more to it, through the link at ExtremeGenes.com. And coming up next, he was just an average genie until he discovered something few, if any of us knew anything about. And it just may tell you something about your female ancestors, you’re going to want to know. We’ll talk to Daniel Swalm of Minnesota next about his ancestral search that eventually resulted in a vote on the floor of the United States Senate. Amazing stuff! In three minutes on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com. 

Segment 2 Episode 45

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Daniel Swalm

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, Family History Radio ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth and you know most of us when we do our research we like to share it with our family, maybe some friends, extended family or whatever, and it doesn’t go much beyond that. Maybe you do a book and it can get a little bit of attention, but what Daniel Swalm of Minnesota has done is beyond I think what most of us could ever have imagined. And Daniel is on the line with us right now. How are you Dan?

Daniel: I’m good. Thank you for having me on. 

Fisher: Just delighted to have you here, and let’s just start with what your project was and then we’ll get to where this went because it’s really quite remarkable. You, like many of us, wanted to know a little more about your family.

Daniel: Yes. I was researching family history a number of years ago. I came across a piece of information that I had no idea existed. My grandmother, Elsie Newton Warren was born near Lake Superior in Minnesota’s Arrowhead country in 1891. And she lived all of her life in Minnesota. She married my grandfather who was a Swedish immigrant, a carpenter who came and settled in north-eastern Minnesota

Fisher: A lot of Scandinavians settled in Minnesota.

Daniel: Lots, yes. It’s very Scandinavian, particularly on the north shores, the mining and fishing and lumbering area. Just like the old country. And they were married in 1914, probably unbeknownst to her and certainly unbeknownst to me as I was doing research. I discovered that on her wedding day in 1914 she was stripped of her American citizenship.

Fisher: What?!

Daniel: Yes! She was stripped of her American citizenship. The Congress had passed in 1907 a law that was called “The Expatriation Act” and it was a law that basically stated that if any American born woman married somebody that was an immigrant who was not naturalized, and my grandfather was not naturalized at the time they were married, then that American woman, her citizenship was forfeit!

Fisher: Wow!

Daniel: And the law was retroactive so when it was passed and 1907 it meant that people who had been born and were married in the 1800s retroactively lost their citizenship.

Fisher: I did not know that. I’ve never heard that. Amazing!

Daniel: Well it’s kind of one of those unknown pieces of American history and probably not Congress’s finest hour.

Fisher: Right. [Laughs]

Daniel: The law was enforced by three presidential administrations. The Roosevelt Administration, the Taft Administration, and the Wilson Administration, and the law was challenged in 1915 at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the law.

Fisher: Wow!

Daniel: So, it was a very bizarre law and as women’s suffrage gained steam.

Fisher: Right, up to 1920.

Daniel: Yes. Parts of the law were repealed in 1922. It was a piece of legislation called “The Cable Act” and in 1940 the law was completely repealed.

Fisher: Now, help me to understand something here though Daniel. That is, if this went retroactively back into the 1800s, what happened when the man would naturalize? Would the woman automatically become an American citizen again?

Daniel: Right. Then she was re-naturalized. She became a naturalized American citizen.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Daniel: Kind of weird because she was already born here. And so, the issue that I discovered, how I actually discovered it, was that there was a form that people had to fill out back in those days. It was called the “Alien Registration and Property Form.” And what they did is, the government had this form and people had to fill it out and turn it in. The rationality behind that was that if a Mrs. Rockefeller or a Mrs. Carnegie or somebody from the gilded age married the Duke of Bulgaria or the Baron of who-knows-where in Europe, their money and property would not have been allowed to be transferred.

Fisher: Wow!

Daniel: Now you’ve got to remember, in the 1910s, that was during the time when World War I was going on and then the United States entered in 1917. And that was when my grandma’s document was dated. I had no clue because this was never talked about by my parents in my family because Grandma Elsie died in 1926. She died in childbirth. Both she and the baby died.

Fisher: Quite young.

Daniel: Yes, yes, she was probably about 35, and then my grandfather did not get his naturalization until 1928. As I was researching this and finding all this stuff out I just kept digging and poking and researching and what I found was that this had not just affected my grandmother, but it had literally affected thousands and thousands of people all over the United States.

Fisher: And so your grandmother, because her husband didn’t naturalize until after her passing, actually died as a… well I wouldn’t say a foreign citizen, just as a citizen with no country at all, right?

Daniel: Exactly. She died expatriated and not a citizen of any country even though she lived her entire life in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, and never left the country to the best of my knowledge. They were not wealthy. My grandfather was a carpenter, she was a housewife. They had three previous children. My mother and then my two uncles and they have all since passed away. But yeah, it was just one of those historical oddities, and the more that I researched it and the more I found out about it the more irritated I felt.

Fisher: I would too, yeah. Now this thing wasn’t repealed before she passed either?

Daniel: No.

Fisher: And this applied to many people, and many people listening no doubt have ancestors in a similar situation.

Daniel: Absolutely. So what I did, I did a number of things, I wrote an editorial for the local paper here in the Twin Cities for the Minneapolis Star Tribune about my grandmother’s story. It was titled “The Citizens That a Nation in Time Forgot.” And it’s still online and people can still Google it and find it. I then started a Facebook page called “Justice for Elsie” in which I told the story and then I also met with representatives of Senator Al Franken and told them the story. And much to my surprise, they were very interested. Nobody had heard of this. They were very interested in it. So we began a process to either restore citizenship to my grandmother and these women, or to at least have that wrong acknowledged in some way. And as we went on, it became apparent that it was just going to be too much of a legislative nightmare to posthumously restore the citizenship, which kind of irritated me.

Fisher: Sure.

Daniel: Because the law that stripped people of citizenship was retroactive.

Fisher: Yes.

Daniel: So now it was like “Oh no, well we don’t do that anymore.”   

Fisher: Oh I see. [Laughs]

Daniel: So then I hit on the idea that the Senate passes resolutions, and I said how about if we write a resolution that the Senate can then vote on. Then it will apologize, that will acknowledge the wrong that was done to Grandma Elsie and to all of the other grandmas out there, and see where that goes. The story was picked up by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

Fisher: And look at it go.

Daniel: And look at it go, exactly! The Washington Post had a story about it. And so I started hearing from people all over the country and we were able to find cosponsors for Senator Franken’s resolution, and so the first person to sign on was Senator Ryan Johnson of Wisconsin. Senator Franken is a Democrat, Senator Johnson is a Republican and so right there we saw some partisan repentance.

Fisher: Holy cow! Granma Elsie could bring the whole country together.

Daniel: What did I tell you, Grandma Elsie was rocking! [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

Daniel: And the resolution was finally passed this past month unanimously in the Senate.

Fisher: Wonderful, unbelievable. 

Daniel: Unbelievable. And I have to say that this had nothing to do with me because I’m not connected enough or smart enough or anything to do any of this. This was something where I was being guided by some kind of higher power wherever that higher power resides.

Fisher: Absolutely.

Daniel: Because they were filling me with the right words to say to the right people at the right time because I don’t have the smarts to do that on my own.

Fisher: Well, maybe Grandma Elsie doesn’t have her citizenship back but she certainly has been acknowledged in the right places, the United States Senate.

Daniel: And I mean it happened at Memorial Day at the Women’s Suffrage Memorial Garden in Saint Paul on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capital. I met with Senator Franken and there were members of the public at large and the media there and Senator Franken spoke and talked about his efforts in the Senate and presented me with a copy of the official resolution with the seal of the Senate of it, framed, the whole nine yards. It was a very nice honor to receive, and I presented Senator Franken with the only photograph of Grandma Elsie, signed from her entire family, which is now… I’m her grandson and there’s great grandchildren and then there’s great, great grandchildren. I’m the only one still here in Minnesota but there are relatives in Washington State, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas and Massachusetts. 

Fisher: Well you’ve absolutely written a new chapter in your family history, and it’s a big one.

Daniel: Well, thank you very much, I appreciate that. There were times when I just figured I’d never hear from anybody again and they might just write me off as this crazy old coot that we should never have talked to in the first place. 

Fisher: [Laughs] What a story. Daniel Swalm from Minnesota, thank you so much for your time and congratulations!

Daniel: Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day.

Fisher: And coming up next, friend of the show and family history Super Sleuth Ron Fox returns to talk about “Collecting your Ancestors” it’s not that hard to do, and the stuff you can find is amazing. We’ll tell you all about it in five minutes on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com.

Segment 3 Episode 45

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Ron Fox

Fisher: Welcome back to Extreme Genes Family History Radio, ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with my good friend Ron Fox who is a noted researcher, mad man of sorts in fact, who tracks down things nobody else could ever find especially in the realm of photographs. We’ve had Ron on before. Good to see you Ron! 

Ron: Good to see you.

Fisher: You know we thought today we’ve talk a little about “Collecting your ancestors” because you’ve done a good job of this, finding things that relate to people from the past and things they may have owned or may have been tied into. And I’ve done a little of this myself lately, but this is exciting and fun stuff. 

Ron: It is. We have so many more things because of the internet nowadays to be able to reach out to areas where we don’t live, to collect things. And eBay is a great example of millions of items online and many of them belong to relatives of someone, you know? 

Fisher: That’s right.

Ron: All you have to do is search and you can put up to a hundred search terms in there, you put in people’s names or last names and who knows what you’re going to find. But there’s also Craigslist, and then you know there’s the local garage sales and the other types of online sales that you can go to, or local swap meets. Because people clean out attics and these are cousins or second cousins and they have things that belong to ancestors, and there’s just a lot of great stuff out there. There’s photographs, it’s scrapbooks, it’s medals from World War II, a unit that your grandfather may not have saved but somebody else did and you can buy it, make a shadow box.

Fisher: Right. Well, a couple of thoughts on that because I’ve done this myself and what’s a great thing to collect, your parents for instance.

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: I found my father’s high school yearbooks. Now he was quite a bit older than I, he had me at 41. And so, he went to high school, graduated in 1931 in New Jersey. I found that somebody had placed his four yearbooks, not the ones that belonged to him but to one of his classmates from the four years he went to that school, on eBay. And I was able to buy all four of them for $60 because I didn’t have them. He just didn’t have them, or didn’t keep them and they just never got passed down.

Ron: And many times you would have found that he actually signed those yearbooks.

Fisher: He did! He actually signed all these yearbooks and you could see his teenage signature in there, and there are ten photographs of him I’d never seen before. You know where he was involved with the softmore class presidency, or he was on the basketball team, things that I’d never seen before that I was able to find on eBay.

Ron: You know, you have to have to be a little bit of a copper sleuth to find a lot of these things, but they are there.

Fisher: Yeah. 

Ron: Just a quick example, a couple of weeks ago, one of the newspapers in town asked me to provide them with someone who sold things on eBay, and from that article somebody contacted him and they sold him and I a set of glass negatives and a photograph and out of it we were able to find a very prominent person in the community. Here’s a person who was unidentified and I spent about a day trying to find out who that person was, but now I’m getting all sorts of emails from people thanking me for finding the only image of their janitor out there. 

Fisher: Wow! Isn’t that exciting? 

Ron: It is! It’s great. It’s like the guy that found the printed copy of the declaration of the independence in the old frame, you know, that somebody put a horrible painting in front of. 

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Let’s go through some more examples because I think as people think about this they might realize there’s more out there maybe than you imagine. Now, I had a great grandfather was a New York veteran fireman.

Ron: Right.

Fisher: He had been a volunteer in the 1850s with the old hand pumpers, and then in the 1880s he belonged to the New York Veteran Fireman Association.  And these guys liked to play hard, just as they had fought the fires, and in 1887 they made this trip across the country from New York to San Francisco and back. And so I have started collecting memorabilia relating to that trip. They didn’t belong to my great grandfather but he would have had a ribbon that was given to him by the Denver firemen when they came through for instance. He would have had a badge or a medal that was presented to him on a side trip to Newburgh, New York, and I’d been able to find those things on eBay and add them to the collection. 

Ron: It’s great because you can find those things. We talked about military units, you can medals that your great grandfather, grandfather, back to the Civil War had earned and like I said, you find photographs, you find medals, you know, some people collect guns. You know, I recently through genealogy got my life six great grandfather’s flintlock rifle.

Fisher: No! 

Ron: Yeah, it was great. 1790s flintlock rifle, another relative had it and I purchased it from that relative because it meant a lot to me. 

Fisher: Now that’s interested because now we’re going in a different area here and it’s really kind of back to the basics, and that is most of the good stuff is in the hands of family members. 

Ron: It is. You just have to find out who they are and ask. And there’s a lot of reverse genealogy that goes on to find things. I do this all the time when I’m looking for specific individuals and I’m looking for photograph or an item. Letters are probably the best because people keep letters. 

Fisher: Right.

Ron: And there are some wonderful letters still out there from the Civil War even before then. People communicated home and you read emotion and the fear, and the cold, and the depravity, and the horror of war. And if it’s your relative, it just gives you goose pimples. 

Fisher: Yeah, that connection.

Ron: Oh it’s unbelievable. It’s like finding something that they wrote and left behind in a little box that nobody had ever seen before. 

Fisher: Exactly, and if you can track down... when you talked about reverse genealogy, you’re talking about researching forward, right?

Ron: Yeah. You go forward, you go down, you go back two- three generations, then you go to brothers and sisters and then you go down on those and then you just keep crossing off people. And a lot of people you know, I hate to say it, after grandpa dies they take everything out to a barrel and they burn it.

Fisher: Ugh! 

Ron: And you know it just makes you sick. But that’s how it used to be because people thought that’s junk.

Fisher: Right. Who needs that anymore?

Ron: And today’s junk is, gosh so valuable.

Fisher: We’ve had a lot of discussions on the show recently with various experts about old family bibles and how they’re typically chucked when you get to the point where somebody has passed away, and how many of them have actually been rescued from the trash bin. 

Ron: I went to a friend of mine who owns an antique shop and he had a bible that was just sort of stacked up and it had no cover to it, but when I opened it up to the center I found the deaths and the births, and one of the family members died abroad the Titanic. 

Fisher: Whoa! 

Ron: And you know, he was a steward on the Titanic. I immediately bought it because there was value there. 

Fisher: Sure. 

Ron: So a friend of mine purchased it from me and he’s had it rebound and now it’s part of his collection on the Titanic. 

Fisher: So let’s go through it real quickly because we are running out of time.

Ron: Sure. 

Fisher: The idea then would be for eBay, you want to do search terms in there where they will send you an email.

Ron: That’s right. You want to do search terms where you place in your family name, especially when it’s not Smith or Jones, but if you have an unusual family name, it’s like sometimes all the daguerreotypes and ambrotypes that come up and tin types, eighty percent of them don’t have names. But if they do, they include that in their listing. 

Fisher: That’s right.

Ron: And if they have a family name and a location, you have a relative. 

Fisher: Exactly. And then you’ve got the opportunity to put in the terms like organizations they belonged to.

Ron: Right.

Fisher: Like the New York Veteran Fireman’s Association.

Ron: Absolutely. 

Fisher: And that would come up. And then of course you can do the searchers and trace down family members and see what they’ve got.

Ron: Military Units, you can do police officers, you can do farmers, farm implements. That’s why people have on their wall the Pepsi sign, the Coke sign.

Fisher: Yes.

Ron: The John Deere tractor signs on there because there is an association with that, historically with their family. They grew up on the farm. You know it’s great to have a milk pail in the corner.

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Exactly right. But you can get much more personal and closer to the events even than that with the way things are now.

Ron: Yes. 

Fisher: And track down those other descendents as well because they’ve got all kinds of things that you would never have thought of. 

Ron: And as we continue to do more and more in the digitization and the indexing of those images, they could be books, they could be all sorts of things. You’re finding that universities have a million, two million photographs. They’re going to index something that’s going to hit on you. So I mean, for example, I go to the University of West Virginia and I put in the home town, all of a sudden they’ve got a class from 1901 and there’s a relative in this photograph that you’ve never seen before. 

Fisher: There you go yearbooks also. 

Ron: Yearbooks are great.

Fisher: And they don’t have to have belonged to your people but they were in the class. 

Ron: A number of companies, Ancestry.com, they’re reaching out and they’re finding yearbooks all the time and they’re scanning them. 

Fisher: So you can get the images that way, or you can own the original. How fun is that?

Ron: It’s a lot more fun to own the original. 

Fisher: Ron Fox thanks so much for joining us again today, good to see you! 

Ron: Good to see you. Thank you much. 

Fisher: And coming up next our Preservation Authority Tom Perry is back to answer your questions on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com. 

Segment 4 Episode 45

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes Family History Radio, ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry our Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com. And Tom sounds a lot deeper and richer in his voice, what are you fighting here?

Tom: I don't know. I just decided to bring my radio voice* today.

Fisher: [Laughs] Very raspy, very raspy. Okay, so we do have a question, it’s from Jake Richter in Carmel, New York. He says, "First of all, love your program and tips." We thank you, Jake. "First, will your reunion campus be available for booking in late August?"

Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely!

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: In fact, our contractors are, you know, busting their butt. And it kind of depends on what exactly you want, but most of our facilities will be open by then. Like the swimming pool and the RV hookup probably won't be completed by then, but most of the stuff will be ready.

Fisher: "Second, have you folks thought of going public or using Kickstart so we can get in on the preservation juggernaut?

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: All right, so tell people who don't know what Kickstart is.

Tom: Okay. Kickstart's kind of a funding program where if you have an idea for a board game or an electronic item or a lot of different things, you can go in there and put how much you're trying to raise, what the product is, if you've got samples, exactly where you are. In Kickstart, you can go in and say, "Oh yeah, I want to put a dollar towards this." or five dollars or twenty dollars. And if they receive the full funding, then your credit card is run. If they don't receive the full funding they requested, then you're not out anything. And there's been some pretty major companies that have started on Kickstart. However, I don't believe Kickstart does real estate, so it’s probably not for us. And as far as going public, I think that's down the road a little bit. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: Yeah, if you want more information on our campus, you can always just go to TMCPlace.com, or if you want to email us with specific questions about it, our email is [email protected] for our reunion campus. Hey, I got something that's really, really cool, especially for you people that are starting to plan family reunions right now. It’s in the June issue of Popular Mechanics. It’s called The Bear proof Cooler.

Fisher: The what?

Tom: A Bear proof cooler.

Fisher: Oh, no kidding! [Laughs]

Tom: Hasn't everybody wanted one of these? I remember camping, you know, when I was young. And we actually had a bear come into camp, picked up our cooler on his hind legs, and walked out of camp with it!

Fisher: No!

Tom: Seriously! My uncle took after him with a chair and threw it at him.

Fisher: The blunder bus.

Tom: Didn't even break his stride! He just kept on going.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: But you know, people always tell you that. Like when we go camping with the scouts, they always have to hang stuff from trees and don't put candy or food or anything in your tent.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Nothing! Even if its wrapped, don't take that chance, because if the bear smells it, you have all kinds of problems. So if you want to read this, it’s in the June issue of Popular Mechanics. And the winner of the contest was called the Pelican Progear 35QT. It costs about $260, and its good sized ones, it’s about 26 x 28 x 18. And what they did besides you know, putting marshmallows and Kool Aid and all kinds of cool stuff in the cooler so the bear would go after it, they threw it out of an SUV at 50 miles an hour, they threw it off a cliff, and it was amazing how they withstood it all. And this one, the Pelican Progear took everything. It beat the bear, it beat being thrown out of an SUV, everything.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: So if you want a good cooler and you got $260, I would highly recommend it.

Fisher: Well, you know, I'm thinking, okay, 260 sounds steep. I mean, it’s not really on my list of where I would want to put $260, but if it’s a family reunion and there's a risk of a bear coming in, I might be in on that.

Tom: Oh absolutely! I mean, most people know they're supposed to hang the stuff in the trees. Most people don't put stuff in their tent. You know, we had a neighbor that actually had some wrapped candy in his tent and a bear broke in, and he slept through the whole thing, because the next morning, he saw there's a hole in his tent and all of his candy was gone. But I mean, if the bear would have gone a little bit more right or left and got one of the kids, I mean, how could you put a price on something like that?

Fisher: And you hear these horror stories periodically.

Tom: Oh, awful, it’s awful!

Fisher: But what a great idea!

Tom: Oh yeah! $260 and you've got a pretty much indestructible cooler.

Fisher: All right, what are we going to talk about next?

Tom: Okay, next up, we're going to get into a little bit about 3D printers, which we talked about. There's some new technology coming on and some new copyright questions.

Fisher: All right, now baby your throat and we'll be back in three minutes on Extreme Genes, Family History Radio and ExtremeGenes.com.

Segment 5 Episode 45

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back. You have found us, Extreme Genes, Family History Radio. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry. He's our Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com. And Tom, you were saying you've got stuff on 3D printers here. And hopefully you caught the earlier segment on the show where the 3D printer actually recreated the spine of King Richard III to determine, he was not a hunchback as Shakespeare had intermitted. And he actually had Scoliosis.

Tom: You know, it’s just amazing what this 3D printing has. In fact, I just heard of somebody, they done a 3D model of a baby's heart, and it’s so small, it allowed the doctors to go in and practice surgery before they really did the real thing.

Fisher: Because they made a large version of it.

Tom: Yeah, exactly! So they could see exactly what it was, what they problem was, where things were, and then practice on that before they went and did the real operation. I mean, it’s incredible!

Fisher: Well, 3D printers can have applications for family history as well. We've talked about it a little bit in the past. Let's see where it’s going.

Tom: It’s pretty crazy. Like you talked about doing an old watch that used to belong to grandfather, things like this. There's a lot of different things. And we've had some people that have basically bitten the bullet and bought a home 3 printer and says, "Now what do I do?"

Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah. "I spent all this money, now what?"

Tom: Yeah. "I got this 3D printer and I fixed all the parts in my toilet, so I don't need anything more like that anymore."

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: Yeah, if you've got a 3D printer and you're looking for stuff to print, you can go to a place, I'm going to spell it, because if you pronounce it, you're going have too many Gs in it.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: It is T H I N G I V E R S E.com. So it’s kind of like Thingiverse.com. T H I N G I V E R S E.com.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: And they've got all kinds of things you can download and, you know, play with your 3D printing. Now, what has happened is, some people have actually gone to this site and said, "Hey, cease and desist! You can't have our items on there." For instance, like Disney's been really neutral about this, you can go and download Yoda, you know, he's owned by Disney. You can download and make little models of him. And Disney to not get in the fracas, so to speak, is amazing, because I've done a lot of contract work with Disney and they're really touchy on this. But there's a Belgian company, an HBO that have sent these people cease and desist orders, saying, "You need to take this offline. We don't want people making our product."

Fisher: Ha!

Tom: But the biggest thing you need to remember with 3D printers is, 3D printers aren't cheap. It’s made out of plastic, the stuff that you're making, and they take a long time. So nobody's going to go and do knockoffs, because you can go to China and make stuff really, really cheap. If you're trying to do it with your 3D printer, who's going to pay more money for a knockoff?

Fisher: Well, and the idea that these companies think they're going to stop this technology by saying, "Well, what people might use these for are going to impact us, so you can't provide your machine." is absurd!

Tom: Oh yeah, oh yeah! That'll never happen. That'll be like trying to make people that have CD recorders not be able to have CD recorders, because they might get their vinyl and turn it into a CD and sell it.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So it’s totally different. The manufacturing of the little, teeny one of type things is never going to be a thing for the black market. It makes no sense at all. Some companies like Hasbro, they're actually setting up a site where kids will be able to go online, design their own little toys and then print them out on their parents' 3D printer.

Fisher: Oh wow! [Laughs]

Tom: So it’s really smart. These guys, you know, "Hey, we're not going to fight it. Let's join it. Let's do something that can make this really good."

Fisher: Well, wouldn't you think that Hasbro would want kids to be able to design the thing and then put it on their own Hasbro 3D printer and ship it to these people?

Tom: Absolutely! Absolutely! I'm sure that's probably down the pipe. That makes a lot of sense.

Fisher: Well, I'm looking forward to the price coming down on these things, and we can recreate our family's memorabilia and distribute it to all the cousins.

Tom: Oh absolutely! That's what will be the neatest thing, you come to a reunion, you bring the old clock or whatever, you know bring it in, we'll scan it for you and we'll make 3D prints, and then everybody in the family that wants one can go home with one. It won't be the same thing, but it will be a facsimile.

Fisher: Unbelievable! Thanks, Tom. Good to see you again. We'll catch you next week. Hope you're feeling better.

Tom: Yep. I hope I lose my radio voice by next week.

Fisher: [Laughs] Hey, thanks again for joining us. Thanks to Ron Fox for talking to us about finding ancestral material on eBay! I've done it and you can, too, and Daniel Swalm of Minnesota, who learned that his grandmother who was born in Minnesota and lived there her entire life and never left the country, died as a citizen of no country at all. If you didn't catch those segments, catch it on the podcast. Download the free Extreme Genes podcast app for your iPhone and Android. We'll catch you again next week. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we're a nice, normal family!