Episode 462 - Footprints in the Sand… and DNA? The Return of the Archive Lady

Host Scott Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. The guys open with a few news items from the National Genealogical Society. In Family Histoire News, David reports on a study that showed how rents were once paid in England using eels! Then, Burial Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts is the site of an interesting new project that may allow you to touch the tombstone of your early New England ancestor. The 1931 Canadian Census is out! David shares how it is being indexed. Then, imagine a man who was in both the Civil War and World War I. It actually happened! David will tell you all about him. Dual citizenship can help you travel. Hear what countries you can obtain it from. Finally, the UK has an issue with China over sunken war ships. Find out what it is.

Next, Fisher visits with Dr. David Duffy of the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and the University of Florida. In studying sea turtles, Dr. Duffy and his team discovered that high quality turtle DNA can be found in the sand on beaches. They then decided to see if the same held true for humans, testing footprints of volunteers. Indeed it did! And then there’s the matter of human DNA being left in a closed room in the air. Dr. Duffy describes the research, police interest, and ethical questions they’re dealing with.

Next, Melissa Barker, “The Archive Lady,” is back from Houston County, Tennessee. Melissa talks about the silver lining of the pandemic for archives, and some of her recent acquisitions including one that’s hard to believe.

David then is back for Ask Us Anything.

That’s all this week on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

TRANSCRIPT

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 462

Fisher: And welcome America to America's Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com! It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree, and watch the nuts fall out. Boy, do we have guests for you today! Some amazing stories coming up. First of all, Dr. David Duffy, he's with the Whitney Lab For Marine Bioscience and Sea Turtle Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. And he has made an interesting discovery about how DNA can be extracted from footprints on a beach or from air in a room. And of course, he's done this in connection with wildlife. But how does this apply to people? Well, he'll talk to us about that coming up in about ten minutes. And then later in the show, the Archive Lady is back, Melissa Barker. She's always got some fascinating stories and discoveries at the archive, things you'll want to know. So, we look forward to talking to Melissa once again. Right now, it's time to head out to Boston, Massachusetts. David Allen Lambert is standing by, the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. Hello, David.

David: Hey. How are you, Fish?

Fisher: I am grand. I know you just got back from the National Genealogical Society Conference. How did it go?

David: Good. It was down in Richmond. Saw a lot of the people who we've had on the show before. It's always exciting to hear what's new in the genealogical field. And there’s a really exciting company called Ephemera Search and I really think you might want to give them a jingle. Basically, you're taking postcards, and making a database of them, 1,000s of postcards, and they're looking for your old postcards too. So, exciting stuff there. NGS will not be having a conference in 2024 in person. It will be virtual. NGS has also acquired the rights to the GRIP Conference, the Genealogical Research Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They also have acquired Conference Keeper, so a lot of exciting things going on there. But you definitely want to take a look at NGS virtually next year, because that way, you can do it from home.

Fisher: Sure.

David: In Family Histoire News today, you'll be surprised to know your ancestors may have paid for their rent in medieval England. It wasn't always getting a couple of coppers together. How about catching some eels?!

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: Yes, there was actually a historian by the name of John Wyatt Greenlee who is a medieval historian focusing on mapmaking, but however, he is doing research into the time from the Doomsday Book all the way forward where people were paying with chickens, eggs, and of course, eels.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: First recorded in the year 700 AD.

Fisher: Yeah. And he's actually going through and creating a database of every eel rent payment that he can find record of.

David: Well, that’s almost like a genealogy for eels.

Fisher: Yes, kind of, yeah.

David: Well, I'll tell you, I love strolling through a cemetery. But how about if you could do it without having to leave your living room. And of course Billion Graves and FindAGrave has that. But an anthropologist working in the old Burial Hill Cemetery in Plymouth where Plymouth colony was started is going through and copying out all the gravestones in 3D!

Fisher: Yes.

David: So it's amazing. And so far, she has documented 75 gravestones with the help of volunteers. She says that you don't need to have a $2,000 camera. Just use your phone and you can do it. I think it sounds exciting.

Fisher: Yeah, I think it sounds like a fascinating project.

David: It truly does. And hopefully more people will undertake the same thing. Ooh, undertake, cemetery. Bad humor. Sorry.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: June 1st marked the release of the 1931 Canadian census, which is amazing for some of us who have distant relatives or ancestors up there. My great grandfather's still living in Ontario at that time. It is browsable right now. You can't actually go in search on a name, but give it time, because Ancestry and Family Search are teaming up presently to index and verify all the fields in the census.

Fisher: Wow! And then will all be done by the AI as well. So, this is going to go very quickly.

David: Um hmm, very much so. You know, the Civil War was bad enough for some soldiers, especially teenagers who fought, but fast forward over 50 years later, and imagine being 72, hearing about the atrocities of World War I and joining the US Army to be shipped overseas. Yes, this is the story of John William Boucher, who is in Smithsonian Magazine. He was a 72 year old enlistee in World War I. Probably the oldest enlistee. He fought in both the Civil War and in World War I.

Fisher: Isn't that crazy? And you think about the last World War I soldier who died in what, 2009, 2011 Somewhere in there. And then here's a guy who would have been his comrade in World War I who fought in the Civil War.

David: Exactly. And actually think about it, he would have been old enough to be the grandfather of most of the World War I veterans serving.

Fisher: Yes, you're right. [Laughs]

David: You know, if you're looking to leave the United States maybe permanently, want dual citizenship with another country, well, you can do so with Condé Nast article about Ireland, Germany, Poland, Israel, India is one, Italy and lastly, Ghana.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: So, some from your parents, to sometimes your great grandparents and even in Italy, your great, great grandparents.

Fisher: Yeah. So, if you have any connection to those countries, you can get dual citizenship really easily and makes travel a lot easier.

David: It definitely does. You know, World War II is still close to home for many people, especially if you lost a loved one and the UK Royal Navy and the UK in general is a little upset with China right now. They are legally salvaging, Fish, two wrecks of the battleship, HMS Prince of Wales and the HMS Repulse that were sunk on December 10, 1941 off of Malaysia, and they're out there now salvaging scrap steel, aluminum and brass fittings. But these are the graves for some people.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: And you know, I can understand why they wouldn't think that was a sensitive item to do. It's not like they're bringing up their own vessels.

Fisher: Right. Yeah.

David: Hopefully this will be stopped. More news, probably about that shortly.

Fisher: Yes.

David: Well, that's what I have from Beantown this week. And don't forget, if you're not a member of American Ancestors, you can be for $20 cheaper if you use the coupon code “Extreme” on AmericanAncestors.org.

Fisher: All right, David. Talk to you at the back end of the show for Ask Us Anything. And coming up next, we're going to talk to Dr. David Duffy from the University of Florida about finding DNA in the air and in footprints on the sand and other places. What does this mean for us? He's got some ideas of where this may go, coming up next when we return in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 462

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Dr. David Duffy

Fisher: You know, recently there was a fascinating story on CNN about researchers at the University of Florida who have been able to obtain DNA from all kinds of different places, footprints on a beach, permafrost, snow and ice cores, out of the air. And one of the lead researchers on that study is Dr. David Duffy. He is my next guest here from the Whitney Laboratory For Marine Bioscience and Sea Turtle Hospital by the way. Dr. Duffy, welcome to Extreme Genes. It's great to have you.

Dr. Duffy: Thanks, Scott. Great to be here.

Fisher: Now, I know that you're doing this research primarily in connection with your work on marine bioscience, but this whole thing of being able to obtain DNA out of a room, the air in a room or from footprints on a beach, that obviously brings up some questions that may come up down the line when we start seeing maybe police getting involved with tracking down criminals or perhaps tracking individuals or groups. A lot of things can come from this, can't they?

Dr. Duffy: Absolutely. So it's quite complicated just how many different doors are potentially opened by these techniques. So, we're hoping that these are used for beneficial applications, and that people really can take the time to consider what should and shouldn't be allowed to be used for the sorts of technology, what sorts of investigations or studies should be used.

Fisher: Sure. So, how did you come to the realization that DNA was so available and you could actually obtain it? You were doing some comparisons to animals even to some people and finding, yes, you could identify the DNA of individuals who are volunteers in your group. How did this all come to pass that you made this discovery?

Dr. Duffy: Well, so for over a decade, people have been using environmental DNA to track animals in the wild. So, we know that every organism sheds DNA into its environment, whether that's through skin cells, or scales, hair cells that we lose, so we know that DNA is present. And it's actually been a very useful tool for tracking animals and understanding their movements all without ever having to actually visually see them. So we we've been adopting these techniques to study sea turtles and to study the pathogens of sea turtles from environmental samples. At the same time, we were interested in looking at all of the DNA essentially that we recovered. So, instead of just particular species, also seeing what will happen if you look at everything. We expected we would have some human DNA in those early studies, but we were actually shocked to find that in pretty much every sample that we took to let us study sea turtles were recovering some amount of human DNA. And what was really shocking was that there was actually more human DNA in the environment than there was at our institute. So we keep 60 journals to rehabilitate them and release them back into the wild. So, we have sea turtles in tanks at our facility. And we expected obviously, that you will get a little more human DNA in the tank water where these animals are handled and cared for by humans than you were just in a river. But actually we found the complete opposite where there was far more DNA in the environment than in our facilities, tanks. And that was really got us started.

Fisher: Wow!

Dr. Duffy: Was where we started thinking about why is there so much DNA? And is this really true? And that's where we kind of spawned this human focus study to really get a handle on what was going on.

Fisher: You know, it's kind of crazy to think if I walk along the beach with my wife one day that my footprints could actually leave traceable DNA there that somebody could use your technique and actually identify me from that.

Dr. Duffy: Absolutely. So we've been using it to track sea turtles as they come ashore later nests in the sand. We could recover turtle DNA from that sand and without ever having to disturb or even see the turtle. We could get genetic information about where that animal came from. So, it was not much of a leap to realize, well, if it works for sea turtles on a beach, then why wouldn't it work for a human as well?

Fisher: [Laughs] Sure. And then you have the people who are part of your team do the walking and see if you could match them up. And it worked out pretty well. That's crazy!

Dr. Duffy: Yeah, we were able to recover it. We were always surprised at just how much human DNA we got and the quality of that DNA as well. It was really almost as good as taking a blood sample or a tissue sample, in some cases.

Fisher: Wow! So, tell us about the circumstance where you were able to obtain DNA out of the air in a closed room.

Dr. Duffy: Yeah. So DNA has been recovered from water for a long time, from soil, from sand. And it's also been recovered from the air, because people are interested in things like pollen for hay fever studies. But in the last couple of years, people have actually been able to recover DNA from vertebrates of large animals like humans, from the air as well. So, once we realized how much DNA was just been released, one of the things we also wanted to check was, well, how much DNA can you pull from the air for humans. So again, we had some voluntary participants who knew that their DNA would be captured in this way. And we were able to recover the DNA from a room that they were working in, essentially.

Fisher: And so, it was in the air was it, because it was skin cells or it was just because they exhaled and the DNA was released in that manner?

Dr. Duffy: It's probably a mixture of everything. So, it's probably exhaling, it's also releasing skin cells. So we haven’t specifically looked to see which part of our bodies is releasing the most DNA, but we do know that skin has also been shed. And, for instance, in a footprint on the beach, we expect the majority of human DNA is obviously coming from skin cells.

Fisher: Sure

Dr. Duffy: It sheds as you’re walking on the beach. So it's likely that in a room, it's a mix of all of these different sources.

Fisher: Now, in your research on people, have you had occasion yet to try to use any of the commercial websites to compare DNA or is it just strictly done in your lab?

Dr. Duffy: So it is, it is obviously something that we've been tempted to do, because obviously, there's a lot of information in those commercial databases, but it's not something we felt comfortable doing. We're more trying to raise awareness of how feasible this is and how prevalent human DNA is in the environment. And we're hoping to start a societal discussion of what should and shouldn’t be allowed to be investigated. So we didn't go to the level of using these databases, but we do know from the amount of DNA we were able to recover that, at least from prints or samples, where you've got one individual, it's very likely that you will be able to pull a lot of information from those databases. It gets more complicated when you've got mixed samples, like a water sample or room where multiple individuals. So how much this technology can be used for right now kind of depends on what way the sample is taken. If it's a footprint, most of that DNA is going from one individual. So that makes it a little bit easier to make sure.

Fisher: Sure. So, since word got out about your study, have police authorities reached out to you to talk to you about this technique?

Dr. Duffy: So I have had some interest from certain regions. It's more feature forecasting than trying to use it right now. So we did show from all of our samples from water from sand and from air, we were able to do genetic ancestry analysis and show that DNA from the individuals who ended up in that environmental sample, we could identify what the genetic ancestry was. And obviously, for a lot of criminal investigations, you will need to go further, you need to do DNA fingerprinting and identify individuals. So again, if you're talking about a mixed sample, a room that's got a lot of people in it, or a water body where you have lots of people's DNA mixed together. Environmental DNA isn't ideal for that, at least not using current techniques, because what currently is used is lots of individual, small sites from all over the genome, which for an individual sample, like a footprint that might be okay, but for a mixed sample, you need to be sure that you're calling those sites from the same individual. And if your DNA is all mixed together, that's very difficult to do.

Fisher: Right. Well, that's the case in genetic genealogy right now, where they're using, for instance, false teeth or something from a deceased person where the teeth had been handled by someone else. And there are two or three different profiles involved in that. So, it's kind of a challenge there. So, you're having ethical discussions. What are some of the things that people are talking about in terms of, you know, privacy and your concerns? What are the topics and what are the areas of discussion that you're hearing?

Dr. Duffy: Yeah, so we were particularly concerned, obviously, about privacy and issues around even ownership of genetic data. Generally, the person who that DNA belongs to should be considered the owner. And if you're trying to intentionally take samples that involve an individual giving up some tissue or some blood or whatever it may be to get that DNA, consent is a big issue. You have to have consent to do that. Whereas in environmental sampling, consent is practically impossible, because you don't know exactly how far that DNA has traveled, you don't know exactly who the individuals are who contributed to that DNA are, until potentially you do analysis, and you may be able to find out. So, consent is a big issue. And what I guess most people are worried about is surveillance and privacy as well. So again, it's like doing DNA fingerprinting for ancestry. How much it can be used for surveillance right now is an open question. So, just like surveillance, genetic ancestry are… you're using these regions from all over the genome. So, that doesn't make it particularly easy for mixed samples where you’ve got lots of individuals.

Fisher: Right, right.

Dr. Duffy: Anything that would show, which is something that we're beginning to see more and more in the human medical field is that we've known for a long time that all of our genomes have plenty of regions where you have insertions of additional copies of DNA or deletions of sections of DNA. And there's actually a lot more of these than we anticipated in the human genome. And they are potentially a different way of identifying groups with similar genetic ancestry or potentially even individuals. And that's something that environmental DNA is much better suited for, because what you can do is sequence if you do one long stretch of DNA, you know, that all comes from the same individual. And if we're in that stretch, you see these differences after insertions or deletions that are unique to individuals or unique small groups of individuals. That's potentially another way of identifying. We did show that we can pick these up with environmental DNA. And indeed, some of these are related to specific disease risk as well. And we were able to show that we could identify from environmental DNA some of the diseases that people may have a higher risk from as well.

Fisher: Wow! So there's a lot of benefits then that could come to humankind with also this fear of privacy and surveillance issues?

Dr. Duffy: Absolutely. Because one of the things environmental DNA is already being used for in recent years is to monitor wastewater for human pathogens. So, you can see spikes and pathogens and you know that there's going to be more patients presenting to hospitals and you get like a week or two in advance notice of that by monitoring wastewater, so you can prep your hospitals and get them ready for people to arrive with diseases.

Fisher: Wow!

Dr. Duffy: What we've shown is that at the same time, you could be recovering the human DNA from that water and looking to see, well is this population particularly susceptible to certain pathogens if genetic factors which make you more or less susceptible.

Fisher: He's Dr. David Duffy from the Whitney Laboratory For Marine Bioscience and Sea Turtle Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And Dr. Duffy, amazing stuff. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts.

Dr. Duffy: Thanks, Scott. My pleasure.

Fisher: And coming up next, it's the return of the Archive Lady, Melissa Barker, coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 462

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Melissa Barker

Fisher: All right, welcome back to Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, your Radio Root Sleuth. So glad to have my good friend Melissa Barker back from the Houston County archives in Houston County, Tennessee and welcome back. It's great to have you, Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you, Scott. It's great to be back.

Fisher: You know, I listen to your voice. And I'm still amazed to think that you're from where?

Melissa: Oh, I was actually born in Massachusetts. My father was in the Air Force. He was stationed in Cape Cod.

Fisher: Okay. You don't sound like David, you just don't.

Melissa: No, I don't. I didn't carry that with me.

Fisher: Okay, and then you wound up there in Tennessee. And now you sound like a sweet Southern belle!

Melissa: That's right. Yeah, I've lived in Tennessee since I was 10 years old. So I've been here a long time.

Fisher: Well, Melissa did some amazing things taking over this county archive, and has been really out front in explaining to people what archives can do and helping you with your research and discovering more stories about your ancestors. And during the pandemic, off course, this was an interesting time because a lot of people really took advantage of that to straighten out the archives because a lot of archives don't know what they even have, right?

Melissa: Absolutely, once that silver lining came out of the pandemic, many of our archives that have wonderful records in them. They actually took that time to work at their facilities or actually work from home, doing a lot of indexing and doing a lot of digitization and also working on their finding aids and some of the stuff they already had produced and getting it first step for researchers.

Fisher: Nice and so people can go to websites for these archives quite often now and find things they weren't able to discover before. The archive itself didn't have the budget or the people to help you. I know I've worked with archives before. And I'd actually had to bring them something a document that said, you have this now that you have to go find it because they didn't know where it was. Then they dug it up. And there it was.

Melissa: That happens a lot. A lot of times you'll see where archives will say we discovered something in our archives, when it's been there all along.

Fisher: Right. That's true. I've always been struck by that. How can you discover something you already have. But I guess to them, it was a discovery because they didn't know they had it. And so let's talk about some of those things in your archive right now. Because I bet you over the last few years, you've pulled a few things out that made you go, hmm.

Melissa: Absolutely. We have lots of wonderful things in our archives here in Houston County, Tennessee, and most recently, we've had some great donations too. One of the things that's been kind of interesting is that a lot of archives we have these things that happened to us were a certain week where we get certain items that are the same thing donated by different people.

Fisher: Isn't that weird?

Melissa: That's weird. So one week recently, we had two donations of signature quilts.

Fisher: Really? Okay. And how many did you have before that, in all the time you've been there?

Melissa: We had none, zero.

Fisher: [Laughs] Wow!

Melissa: And in one week, we got two. So that's a pretty good haul.

Fisher: Yeah.

Melissa: Signature quilts, if no one knows what a signature quilt is, it’s a quilt that is produced with a normal quilt pattern, but then within those blocks on the quilt are signatures of individuals. And many times they're written on there, and then they're stitched or embroidered on there. And so one of the ones we got was from the 1934/35, Spring Hill School, which was a local one room schoolhouse here in Houston County. And it had all the students stitched in embroidered on it,

Fisher: Really. So the kids wrote their names on it, and then people would stitch over the signature to copy it. Is that it and make sure it lasted?

Melissa: Absolutely, that's how it happened. Because there's boys and girls names because I thought, well, I don't know that the boys would do this project. So I think that someone actually did it. But you could tell that all of the writing is written differently as if they had written it themselves.

Fisher: Sure. And how old were the kids?

Melissa: This is a sixth grade class.

Fisher: Okay, so they could write by that time fairly well, you would think.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Fisher: Yeah.

Melissa: So this is 1934/35. So you're talking Depression era. And the quilt is fabulous. It's a wonderful piece of local history. The other signature quilt that we got was actually from a church, the Midway Pentecostal Holiness Church, and this had their membership names on the quilt.

Fisher: Wow! So how many people were on that one?

Melissa: We have counted over 100 on that quilt. And so what we will do is we will write down all the names, index it and we'll provide the index for the public. And the quilts can be looked at by the public. Signature quilts actually, the history of them, go back to the 1800s.

Fisher: Yes.

Melissa: And there's actually a museum of signature quilts in the United States. So a great piece of history that we should be looking for. Maybe we'll find a quilt with our ancestors name on it.

Fisher: Well, think about that. I mean, the group that you were talking about in the school, those are kids who were about 12 years old, in 1934. So they would be about 100 or 101 years old, if they were still around now, certainly within the memories of their children and grandchildren. I would think this would be a great find for them.

Melissa: Absolutely. A great piece of local history.

Fisher: Yeah. What else have you found here during the last little while?

Melissa: Well, I’ll tell you what, you never know what's going to walk into the archives. That’s all I’d like to say, you never know. And I was on vacation, and I came back and there was a package sitting at my office door and I opened it up. And there were pieces of a silver tray, just the outer edges of the silver tray. And there was a note inside that said that it had been found at the Lewis branch Creek.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Melissa: I know. You just don't know what's going to walk in the door. So I did some research on the pattern. And it was not the middle of the silver tray, not the middle of the tray, but the pattern along the edge. And I was able to identify it as an 1883. FB Roger Silver Company at  Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts silver tray.

Fisher: Wow! That's strong work there, Melissa.

Melissa: [Laughs] Yes, the floral pattern. The internet is interesting when you can look up floral patterns for silver trays. I was able to match it. And they found that in a creek here locally.

Fisher: Isn't that amazing? I mean, finding it a creek is incredible. But the fact that you were then able to go online, maybe sit at home in your pajamas, and research this and find out all the story. I mean, what a time we live in. It's incredible.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Fisher: What else you got?

Melissa: Well, I'll tell you what, one of the things that's really recent as in like a couple of weeks ago, you know, archives have paper documents, they have photographs, they have some artifacts, but have you ever done an archive to receive a donation of a post office?

Fisher: [Laughs] No, no, I have not. Tell us more.

Melissa: Yes, there's a little community here which actually used to be a big community when the railroad was here, called Stewart, and it's in Houston County, and they had their own post office. And when they built the new post office in the 1980s, they took the inside of the post office, which is the front desk area and all of the old post office boxes. If it was handmade, beautiful wood, and they removed it and put it into the old Stewart school building.

Fisher: Okay.

Melissa: That building is not going to be used for something else. And so I've been contacted and asked if we would like to have the post office.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Melissa: So yeah. So, that's our recent donation and it's a beautiful, beautiful handmade work and something that we're going to really love to put on display.

Fisher: How far back does it go?

Melissa: We believe that that part of the post office was built in the 1930s.

Fisher: In the 30s. Okay, so a lot of people grew up with that. How much room do you have for a post office in your archives there in Tennessee?

Melissa: We don't have room for the post office right this year, but we're going to store it. And we have some things in the works for the future that we hope to have another building. But I actually have a family connection to my husband's family actually lived in Stewart and I have a photograph of his grandfather getting his mail out of one of those boxes.

Fisher: No kidding! Oh, that's crazy.

Melissa: Yeah, it’s wonderful.

Fisher: You said, you said you're going to store this thing for a while. Do you have like a storage unit because you just don't have enough room for everything?

Melissa: We're actually going to store it at a local, the Fair Board here locally, is going to allow us to use their buildings, and we're going to put it on display there, because they have events there.

Fisher: Okay.

Melissa: And people can see it until we can get us a permanent building to put it in.

Fisher: I gotcha. Okay, so when are you going to get that building do you think, sounds like you're working on it?

Melissa: We are working on it. Right now, we're working on the logistics because we're going to have to dismantle it. It's very, very large, and move it out of the building.

Fisher: Oh, my goodness. You just never stopped because I think about what that place was like before you went to work for them there. You have taken over and taken it to a new level and now you're going to take it to a new building. That's amazing.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Fisher: She's the Archive Lady. She's Melissa Barker from the Houston County, Tennessee Archives. Always a pleasure to talk to you Melissa! Love your stories and keep collecting.

Melissa: Thank you Scott so much. Appreciate it!

Fisher: And coming up next David Allen Lambert with another round of Ask Us Anything on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 462

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Fisher: All right back for Ask Us Anything on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, David Allen Lambert is back from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. And Dave, we got a couple of meaty questions here, all from one person, Sheri from Wisconsin, who's an avid listener of the show. We thank you for your email, Sheri. The first one is, “The local library is a treasure trove of genealogical gems, including paper copies of local births, deaths, marriages, graduations, military service. I have digitized the copies, validated the data, created a database. The result is over 2,000 unique names. I've attempted to give the database to the local library and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, but there was no interest by either. Where can I find a home for my database and is there a problem with me hosting it on my website?” So David, I'll take the first crack at this and would say, yeah, you could certainly put it on your website, but I would think that there would be better places than that.

David: Well, definitely, you know, when the state turns you down for database, that's all right. Try the county or even like one of these local genealogical organizations that may have hosted databases. I know plenty of them in the Northeast where they have websites, up the old GenWeb databases, for instance. Those are all self created, and they were kind of grouped together, so you could find them. Heck, if you asked Cindy's list to index it, she might find and place for it, and you'll get all sorts of traffic. But the idea is that you don't want to reinvent the wheel, if you're trying to drive traffic. Say, if you have a book that you're trying to sell or you're just trying to get interest in general to some things that you're doing, you may look to family history library to see if that data can be transferred over into a searchable database on Family Search, then millions of people are going to benefit by it.

Fisher: Absolutely. The other thing is, Family Search has that family tree up there. And you could take all those 2,000 names and add them to the world family tree for free! And millions of people go there all the time. And there's also the opportunity for you to add some of that special data, also upload the images that you digitized. And the reality is, is that not a lot of people are going to go to somebody's personal website to necessarily find a database. But if you were to go to Family Search and locate those names, I mean, 2,000 would be a tremendous contribution. And you've done some great work here.

David: Um hmm. There was a private database in the 1861 Earle Report that existed on a private website in Massachusetts, but then they shut it down, because they didn't support it anymore. So I decided to create it during the beginning of COVID, transcribe it a different way and I put it on American Ancestors.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: So, thousands upon thousands of views a year versus, say, a hundred views per year.

Fisher: It makes a big difference. I mean, you want people to find what you've done. Otherwise, why did you do all that great work! So that's good stuff. And hopefully that answers your question. And, you know, you can save yourself a lot of time if you just were to make a GEDcom file out of this and upload it to Family Search. You could even do it on Ancestry, and provide similar opportunities there for people to find what you have done. You know, that's really the nice thing about this database is, it's got names, lots and lots and lots of names. So you can really build all the data that you have around these names into pages for each one of these individuals as you load them up, say on Ancestry, or over on Family Search. So, it's going to make a big difference as to the exposure of all this material that you've put together. So, don't be frustrated by what we're saying here. We're just saying, hey, you can make more out of this than you could ever do by putting it on your own website. So, great question there Sheri. And David, she's got another one too. This lady is full of energy and vitality and enthusiasm, so we will get to that, coming up for you here again in about three minutes when we returned for more of Ask Us Anything on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 462

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Fisher: All right, back on Ask Us Anything. Our final segment this week on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show. And David Allen Lambert is back with me. It is Fish here. And our second question here from Sheri in Wisconsin, a very enthusiastic genealogist. She says, “I was gifted dozens of paper copies of my local newspaper, the Plainfield, Wisconsin Sun, dating from 1875 to 1963. I plan to start digitizing and making these newspapers searchable this summer. Are there standards or best practices for digitizing these newspapers? If so, where can I find them? And I want to start this massive project off on the right foot.” Don't you love this person's energy!

David: I do. Well, first off, I hope you're not planning on standing on a chair in your kitchen with these on the table, because the resolution from your cell phone or even a good camera that doesn't have an attached tripod to it is going to be hard to get the whole page and you don't want to do it in sections.

Fisher: Right. No. [Laughs]

David: So you might want to consider finding a place that has such equipment, maybe your state library or a university. The other thing is, it's not a complete run.

Fisher: Right.

David: So you're going to have gaps. I mean, and Fish, one of the things that comes to mind is, is this on microfilm someplace?

Fisher: Well, actually I took a look. And on Chronicling America, it tells us that there are microfilm copies right there in Wisconsin. And since you bring that up David, that is how most all of the major newspaper sites digitize their newspapers. They don't take individual pieces of paper and scan them. Those have been done mostly on microfilm years ago, using the old technology, they just take the microfilms and that's what they make them from. And so, I know for instance, with Newspapers.com, which full disclosure, by the way, our sponsors here on the show, they take suggestions for what papers we might like to see digitized next. So there's a place on the website you can go to and suggest to them, Sheri that perhaps the Plainfield Sun ought to be on their to do list, because in my mind, I'm thinking, even if they take a really long time to get it done, they'll still probably get it done faster than you can do it and make it available again, to many, many, many more people than would find it through maybe your own site.

David: Right, exactly. Even the traffic that might come through a local historical society, you might want to consider what you have is valuable, because a lot of those newspaper morgue books are thrown out, and consider maybe the preservation, getting acid free folders and putting them in a local historical society. And indexing the obituaries. If you go through that or the major news stories or the marriage announcements and just looking through the pages you have or maybe just taking photographs of certain pieces of it for a historical society. I used to do a column in the newspaper in my own hometown, looking back 50 years 100 years ago, and you might have some material there to do an online column, like a blog.

Fisher: That's really interesting, wouldn't have thought of that. Yeah. So there are a lot of things you can do with that. Because when you say I've got dozens of paper copies, I mean, that's a lot of work. And there's so many, so many simpler ways to do this and make sure people can take advantage of it. But you know what you got to love about Sheri, David is, she's out there making sure that material is being shared with folks who are interested in material in her own area right there in Wisconsin and making sure it's available. That's a great thing to do. And it's a great service to so many people.

David: Well, I wish you luck, because I think your hearts in the right place. I just don't want you to extend any effort as you probably agree with me, Fish that can be done digital on microfilm a lot quicker and the whole thing.

Fisher: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well David, thanks so much. We will talk to you again next week. And thanks to everybody for joining the show this week. And if you missed any of it, of course catch the podcast. You can find us on Apple Media, iHeart Radio, iTunes, Spotify. I mean, we're all over the place. Thanks once again to Melissa Barker, the archive lady for coming on with some great stories and to Dr. David Duffy from the University of Florida talking about getting viable DNA samples out of the air and from footprints in sand along the beach. Yeah, if you missed any of this, make sure you catch that podcast. We'll talk to you again next week. Thanks for joining us. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we're a nice normal family!