Episode 466 - Witness Stones Project Teaches Students Research and History

Host Scott Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. David shares one of his great finds from his recent trip to Scotland. Then, in Family Histoire News, he begins with a story out of Spain about a half-millenium old find behind a wall in house! Hear what it is. Next, up in an attic, some pictures and film have been recovered, never before seen, of the Polish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. David has details. In Uruguay, a large bronze eagle with the Nazi swastika has been recovered from the wreck of a Nazi ship. Find out what the government is planning to do with it. David then talks about a fascinating story out recently about a man enslaved by George Washington. But he didn’t stay enslaved forever. David will explain what happened to Harry Washington. Then, another ghost vessel has appeared along the coast of England. Catch the details.

Then, in two segments, Fisher visits with Dennis Culliton of Connecticut. David is a teacher, and founder of a program called the Witness Stones Project. The “stones” are actually cube shaped markers that are placed in front of the one-time homes or work areas of some of Connecticut’s early slaves. Dennis will explain how the project began, how his junior high students are involved, and how the efforts have progressed.

David then returns for another round of Ask Us Anything.

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

TRANSCRIPT

Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 466

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. And what a guest we have today! We're going to do two segments with Dennis Culliton. He's a Connecticut man who has put together a thing called The Witness Stones Project. And what this is, is a way to commemorate where enslaved people lived and where they worked all throughout the state of Connecticut, and now it's spreading to other places as well. And it's a great way for students to learn about what was going on as far as enslavement went in New England. So, it's a fascinating interview, and you're going to enjoy hearing what Dennis has to say, coming up in about ten minutes or so. And right now, we have to get back out to Boston and our well traveled Chief Genealogist from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. It's the lovely David Allen Lambert!

David: Hey, how are you doing, Fish?

Fisher: You sound pretty good. Last week, last week, you were still going through a little jetlag, but you sound pretty good now. So now we can ask you, you know what happened on the trip? Did you have some great discoveries in Scotland?

David: Oh, I made some really great discoveries. My kids have ancestors from Scotland on their mom's side. And I made a discovery a couple of years back that one of our ancestors was killed in a railroad accident back in 1857. So, when I was in the library of Scotland in Edinburgh, I found a newspaper article about it, in fact, 10 different variations on it, which is, my advice is, look for more than the first article and seeing what other people have written in other adjoining papers, especially if it's closer to the scene. So this is the fatal accident on the Peebles Railway. “On Saturday evening, a train from Edinburgh reached Leadburn Station about 10 o'clock. While the porters are removing some goods on the trucks, the main line to be taken off the train. One of them, Gibson Rennie, attempted to climb upon one of the trucks for the purpose of adjusting the brake, as there is an incline. And doing so, set his foot upon a rope, the rope slipped, he fell down among the wheels, received a deep gash in his throat. And when taken up, he was quite dead. Sir Graham Montgomery was in the train at the time and having heard the man fell was the first to call attention to the accident. Gibson Rennie was about 30 years of age, and his left a widow and six children to lament his loss.”

Fisher: Wow, that's a great article! And the thing is, you were telling me earlier, this is not online.

David: No. I mean, there are variations of stories online, little snippets, but not that one.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: And then I found others on microfilm. And of course, there are ones online, but I found like 10 variations of it, which is great.

Fisher: That’s great, yeah.

David: Because you want all of them. Don't settle for just one.

Fisher: That's right. Well, we're thrilled to have you back, David. So let's get on with Family Histoire News today. Where do we begin?

David: Well, I think we're going to begin with somebody who found some old books in their walls.

Fisher: What?

David: Yeah, about 20 years ago out in Spain. Someone was doing some work on house that was falling down. And wedged in the walls for the past 500 years were a series of books over 500 years old, including the second oldest known copy of the Quran ever in Spain.

Fisher: Wow!

David: From the 1400s.

Fisher: That is crazy!

David: Not bad.

Fisher: Yeah, well, you know, think about first of all, how many people in the world even have a house that is that old? I mean, I realized that overseas, everything is much older than it is here. But still, to think that somebody's living in a house that old and found these books sitting in that, I guess it was behind a wall in a cupboard, right?

David: Um hmm, that's what they had found when they were doing some renovations. So it was packed in straw.

Fisher: Crazy!

David: You know, a house like that, I want to get out in the front yard with a metal detector.

Fisher: [Laughs] Right.

David: Well, you know, it isn't always in the walls that you find discoveries and it doesn't have to be from 500 years ago. A batch of undeveloped rolls of film and photographs on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were found in an addict in Poland, detailing this historic uprising in 1943. Never seen before and never published before images, which is making historians very excited.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: For studying this part of World War II.

Fisher: Isn't that amazing?

David: Of the Holocaust.

Fisher: So behind a wall and up in an attic and this is the archives in the attic kind of theme that we've talked about here the last several weeks. You just don't know what's upstairs, right or downstairs or in the closet.

David: I mean, we're talking about historical Societies sometimes they have treasures. You might have treasures in the neighbor's house next door. You just never know.

Fisher: That's right.

David: Well, you know, going to another World War II story, in Uruguay, a few years ago, they found a scuttled World War II Nazi battleship, and they recovered from it a Nazi eagle with a Swastika on it. Well, Uruguay is not going to preserve it. It's going to melt it down and make a dove.

Fisher: Really? And this thing's made of bronze, is that right?

David: Um hmm, 770 pounds of bronze, but it's going to be repurposed from hate to love.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: That's a good thing.

Fisher: In the form of a dove. That's great.

David: You know, I always love the stories of African Americans connected to history. But how about an enslaved of George Washington, who escaped and joined the British Army, and he was fighting against his former enslaver. And then later on went to Nova Scotia with the loyalists in the British military, and later went on to Sierra Leone. And this is a story about Harry Washington that was recently published in Smithsonian Magazine, really fascinating story.

Fisher: Wow, that's a great story!

David: In England, they found a ship that has reappeared on the banks of the UK. And it might be from the 1890s or could be even earlier, historians are claiming 28 shipwrecks are known to be in that area. And now it's trying to determine which one it is before it disappears again.

Fisher: Oh, wow! That's right. Yeah, because it's kind of brought in and then the tides can bring it back out later. Interesting stuff! Yeah, it's another ghost ship over there.

David: If you happen to be in Boston, you might notice that NEHGS is having a big renovation. The building next door has been torn down. But we're still open virtually. And you can join American Ancestors save $20 by using the coupon code, EXTREME. Stay tuned for 2024 when we open our new facility with the Discovery Center.

Fisher: All right, David. Hope you'll be back for the back end of the show. We'll have Ask Us Anything at that time. And coming up next, we're going to talk to Dennis Culliton. And Dennis is a Connecticut man who is the founder of a thing called The Witness Stones Project. It's a fascinating project. You're going to want to hear all about it from Dennis, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 466

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Dennis Culliton

Fisher: Hey, welcome back. It's America's Family History Show Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth. And, you know, we have history all around us all the time. And there's so much of it. I think that we missed because we just don't bother to look and we're busy people let's face it. And I got a man who actually did take the time to look at the history around him. His name is Dennis Culliton. And Dennis has taken this passion for discovering his history surrounding him into an amazing project we're going to talk about called The Witness Stones project in my home state of Connecticut. And Dennis, great to have you on the show!

Dennis: Thank you, Scott. It's nice to be on the show here from Connecticut.

Fisher: What town were you in as you got this going?

Dennis: Yes, I was living and also teaching in Guilford, Connecticut. It's on the shoreline about 15 miles east of New Haven and it was settled in 1639. So it was one of the early communities in Connecticut and in the country.

Fisher: You were a transplant there from Massachusetts. And what was it about Guilford you wanted to find out?

Dennis: Well, if you go to Guilford, it's a beautiful New England town. It looks like a Norman Rockwell painting where you have four churches around an eight acre green, the hardware stores there, and an ice cream shop, and a market, and you know the town hall. And it's a place where you meet your friends on the green or the common. And when you go there, you also realize that these houses that are there from 300 years ago, 200 years ago, maybe 150 years ago, and they're beautiful houses that have been kept. And you realize there was a level of affluence. There's levels there was there was money there, there was always somewhat money and part of the money had to do with it's on Long Island Sound. And people would fill vessels and send them off and bring back money and molasses and sugar. And I always wondered who lives in the houses and not only the owners are the names of the people whose plaques are on the building, but also who was keeping the fires going? Who was cooking the meals? Who was mucking out the chicken coop? So I was always interested who the other people were in the household.

Fisher: And so there are records of course that can get you the ownership of the houses. But you got to dig a little deeper sometimes to find out about the folks who were engaged in the household.

Dennis: That's correct. And when I started looking, I was also interested in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s family. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the attitude of people in the North about what slavery was like. Her parents grew up in Guilford. And I was always interested in the time she lived in Guilford. And when you look deeper into her story, she's interviewing her father for his autobiography. And he says, you know, there were slaves in Guilford. And that was a shock to me. I didn't realize that in that part of the world and that part of New England or in New England at all that there had been enslaved people. And once I started looking at her story and her family's story, I went to the town historian and I said, were there slaves here? And he said, yes, go on the property vault of the town clerk's office and you'll find manumissions. You'll find the emancipations of enslaved people. And that was really a starting point for the work we were doing.

Fisher: Wow! And you say we how many people were involved in this research?

Dennis: Well, initially it was it was just me that was doing the research. But as the ideas came together, I put together a booklet and then I presented at the local library in the winter of 2017 of all my findings of enslaved individuals and families, and enslavers, and stories of freedom and things like that. A friend of mine, he heard that and then he went to Germany saw the Stolperstein memorials that are put in the ground, where Jews lived freely before they were kidnapped and murdered during the Holocaust. So my friend Doug Negron, having brought that story back to us really planted the seed about how we could remember enslaved people here. And then we put together a local committee to try to make a project. And I'll just say, if you bring a sore knee to a surgeon, he's going to want to operate or she's going to want to operate. You bring an idea to a teacher they're going to want to make an educational activity out of it. And that's what I did.

Fisher: Wow! And so were these other people involved with you teachers?

Dennis: Well, I certainly brought together a team of teachers in our middle school, Adams, Middle School, language arts teachers, or English teachers, as well as social studies, teachers. We had everyone from a Yale professor, to the local minister, to members of the African American community in the town, and then other people who were involved with preservation of the town telling the story of history in the town. But having previously helped tell the story of the white people in town, and now they were eager to help tell the story of African Americans who lived in the town.

Fisher: Interesting. So in these very early days of your Witness Stones project, you're working in Guilford, talk about the very first one and what you can tell us about the individual that you were commemorating and what you did to commemorate him.

Dennis: Yeah. So, when Doug came back with the idea, it took me about a couple of weeks to look at my research and say, how can we use this research to tell the story of an individual and then memorialize that individual by putting a stone in the ground that closely resembles the Stolperstein?

Fisher: Let's explain the Stolperstein for a minute here. That was over in Germany, and who created that and what was its purpose?

Dennis: Yeah, Gunter Demnig was an artist and he created the Stolperstein. And again, the purpose was to remember where Jews lived freely before they were kidnapped and murdered during the Holocaust. It started in the 1980s. And by the time we started our project, there were 60,000 Stolperstein memorials. And it means stumbling stone with the idea that you stumble over the fact the idea, the history of the Holocaust, while you're walking in a neighborhood today in Germany, or Rome, or Cologne or Copenhagen, where there may be no longer any Jews. So you're stumbling over a history that has been hidden by the murder of all these people. And again, there's 60,000 in the ground when we started the project. There are over 100,000 memorials across Central Europe across Nazi occupied Europe today. It's an amazing project that tells 100,000 individual stories about the Holocaust.

Fisher: Wow. And what are these things look like?

Dennis: They're about four inch cube. In Germany, the top is a brass plaque, the information about the individual is stamped on the top, we use a four inch cube and on the top is a bronze plaque where the information about the enslaved person is etched on the top.

Fisher: Okay, and what kind of information do you use there?

Dennis: Well, we don't always have the name. But if we have the name, we share the name of the person. We like to use a term either enslaved here or something similar to enslaved near here to help people understand that this happened right onto your feet, right where you're standing building that you're looking at. We try to put information you know, with birth and death. We also try to put occupation because many enslaved people were very skilled craftspeople. They might have been weavers, or millers, or carpenters, or shipbuilders, or things like that, just to let people know that slave wasn't a job description. It was a property status. And then if we have evidence of emancipation or manumissions, we put that on their life when they lived there, where they died or when they died or anything like that. And really that information is just a distillation of hopefully, sometimes a half a dozen or a dozen records we are able to find about that enslaved person.

Fisher: Interesting. So you started in Guilford then and you started it when?

Dennis: So, the idea came together in spring of 2017. And by October, we started implementing the projects in the classroom. And you had asked about one of the first memorials and the first Memorial we put into the ground was for Moses. So we love the idea just because Moses was the leader of this people in the Bible. And Moses was the lead person of the Witness Stone Memorial. In one corner it says CT1, so the first memorial in Connecticut and then the other corner it has Guilford or GLF D1, for the first memorial in Guilford, Connecticut. And Moses, as described by Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was a king of the slaves. So, in Connecticut, in parts of Massachusetts, in Rhode Island, and maybe other areas that I'm not familiar with, local enslaved people elected kings and governors. Think of it as an extra judicial level. In Western Africa, there are a lot of villages where you have a village king or a village chief, or a village governor. And that same model seemed to have been brought across the Atlantic to New England. And so he had slave kings and governors. So Moses was considered the slave king. So again, the name Moses and you think of the idea of him being the king of the Israelites or the leader of the Israelites, and also the leader of the project. And the stone was put in front of the Town Hall. So the town hall wasn't there during the time of slavery, but two buildings before was the home of Reverend Amos Fowler. And we know Reverend Amos Fowler held Moses in captivity because we find Reverend followers will which discusses the care of Moses in his old age. And we also see in the will of a woman named Ruth knotty, the fact that she's giving or gifting Moses to Reverend Fowler. But really more interesting is that Lyman Beecher autobiography we spoke about earlier, talks about Moses and says, Moses, ran the farm, kept the accounts, rang the church bell, sent priest Fowler’s son Johnny to college, was the factotum, which means a jack of all trades.

Fisher: Okay.

Dennis: And remained a slave because he was king. So Moses, within the confines of the institution of slavery, did all those things. And that little college that Johnny Fowler went to was Yale. So, he helped pay the tuition of his enslaver’s, son to go to Yale. And this is all given to us by Lyman Beecher who lived in Guilford during the time when Moses was still alive.

Fisher: Wow! So this was really well documented, wasn't it for those times, you don't get that very often?

Dennis: No, although the people who settled in New England, the Puritans, the British Congregationalists, they did keep pretty good records and the towns did. So we have records of Moses death, of Moses birth. We have information about his parents, we know about his brothers and sisters. And we know so much about Moses in his family, that we've traced his sister's line, so Moses’ sister Floraline all the way to the present. So, we have 11 generations of Moses family as part of the Witness Stones project. And our board chair is a ninth generation descendant of Moses parents, Montrose and Phyllis.

Fisher: Wow!

Dennis: And she was the commissioner of social services in Connecticut. And she was a state representative and her father was a Tuskegee Airmen. So it's like this fantastic American story.

Fisher: Yes!

Dennis: That had been hidden from us until we started looking. You have to look to find something, right?

Fisher: Absolutely. I'm talking to Dennis Culliton. He is the founder of the Witness Stones project in Connecticut. We're going to continue this conversation and find out how you've engaged the kids in this throughout the entire state when we return in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 466

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Dennis Culliton

Fisher: All right, back on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show. It is Fisher here talking to Dennis Culliton. He is the founder of the Witness Stones project in Connecticut. It started in Guilford, Connecticut, where Dennis was a school teacher there basing his idea of memorializing the places where enslaved people had lived and worked back in the early days of New England. And this was all based on a similar project over in Europe, where Germans were commemorating the homes of those who lost their lives in the Holocaust. And, Dennis, it's great to have you on the show. We were just talking about Moses, who was your very first enslaved person you commemorated right there where he lived and worked, where the town hall of Guilford now stands.

Dennis: Yeah, that's correct. I think it is such an important story for everyone to learn, and especially for the students because in the past, we've done a really good job of talking about the bad, well, not really. We've done a service to talk about slavery in our textbooks, but we don't always reach into the ideas of the humanity of the enslaved people and their agency, their resistance. So it gives us an opportunity when we learn about someone like Moses, who was an amazing citizen and resident of Guilford, even within the confines of slavery, and those stories are important for us to share.

Fisher: Sure. So, when you started this whole thing with your students about five years ago, tell me about the first one and how you presented this to the class and what went on from there?

Dennis: Yeah, so when Doug came in with the idea of using a memorial as a way of sharing the story of local slavery, I realized that with the students that they weren't used to looking at the documents that you needed to look at, and if I'm talking to an audience of genealogists, you know, the wills and the probate inventories, and the property records, and the census data isn't something that we were brought up to learn about unless we were all lawyers, and certainly I wasn't. So, I know I had to struggle through the documents. So, I was trying to figure out, how can I make these documents accessible to the students? Well, certainly you have to transcribe them. A lot of these students aren't reading longhand, and aren't using longhand. But they're also not used to reading handwriting from the 1700s. And the use of language and spelling, and all the different things that many in your audience are familiar with. But also, I realized that we couldn't just give them a bunch of documents, ask them to completely sort them, completely analyze them and come back with a story because we wanted them to be able to restore the history and honor the humanity of the individual. We had to do that through these documents. So what we did is we sorted the documents to these five themes, dehumanization, treatment of enslave, paternalism, economics of slavery, and agency and resistance with the most important being agency and resistance.

Fisher: Okay.

Dennis: And by using these five themes, and having the students work through these documents, then they were prepared to look at the story of one person. So today, for instance, the one person we're looking at, instead of Moses will turn to a woman Latoos who lives in Madison, Connecticut. So Latoos was held in captivity by Reverend Jonathan Todd, and he held about six other enslaved people in captivity. And at his death, he gave them their freedom conditionally. And what that means is he said, in his well that I want Latoos and Tamer and other enslaved people that he held in captivity, I want to give them their freedom. I want them to have this property. I want them to have this cow. And I want them to have the means of production, you know, spinning wheel, at home, and things like that. But I'm only offering that to them, if they keep their ends of the bargain, which would be that they had to not be a burden on the estate, because in the laws in those days, in Connecticut, is if you freed somebody, then you were responsible for them in their old age or responsible for them if they came to want. So we wanted to share the story of Latoos with his students, because not uniquely but in a rare case, Latoos was freed twice. So she was free to under the will of Reverend Jonathan Todd in 1791. But in 1792, the state of Connecticut wasn't happy that after the revolution, more people weren't freeing their enslaved people. So they put an offer out to the citizens and said, If you have an enslaved person, and they're between 25, and 45, and they have good health, you can free them and not be responsible for them in their old age.

Fisher: Okay.

Dennis: So, let's say this was freed in the will but then after Reverend Todd dies, his nephew, also attorney, Todd, frees Latoos again, so he isn't going to be responsible for her and her old age. So she lives freely for another 20 years, but then ends up in the poor house, where her children at the time were bound out from her. They weren't taken from her and they were rented out to other people. So it had some good parts and bad parts. She was freed once. She was freed a second time. She was able to live freely in a society that being a free African American wasn't necessarily the easiest thing to do.

Fisher: Right.

Dennis: She ended up in the poor house. And at the end, we wanted to put her skill, which was something like a weaver and a spinner. And put the dates that she was freed 7091/ 7092 and other information. And the kids came back and said, well, we want to put mother. So we want to put Latoos and then as her occupation we want to put mother. So, I went back to them and I said, well, mother is you know, kind of a common occupation. So, let's do something like weaver, like maybe weaver and mother, show that she had other skills too. And the kids came back and they said we want to put mother and we'll put mother and weaver. And I realized I was arguing with the kids about a historical figure, who they, through going through the documents had found her humanity, had started to relate her to their own mother. It's like what would happen to my mother if she ended up in the poor house and we found out and we were sent away from her? And so they started looking at her not as an “other” not as a Negro servant or as a slave. They were looking at her as another mother like their own.

Fisher: Sure.

Dennis: And I realized that I had to shut up at that point. And let the kids lead.

Fisher: Right, and they’re what, they’re high school kids, right?

Dennis: Well, they were 13 year olds. They were 13 year olds and they're telling me the meaning of the story I'm trying to get them to tell.

Fisher: Oh, wow.

Dennis: Here's a woman who persevered through a very tough life, and that she's should be remembered for that part of her humanity. And I was trying to play historian, let's look at the facts. And they were looking at their heart and God bless them.

Fisher: Yes.

Dennis: And that's when as adults you got to let the kids lead sometimes.

Fisher: As a teacher, though, that had to be a wonderful moment for you to realize that they were teaching you and that you had given them this opportunity to analyze this material and come to that conclusion themselves.

Dennis: It was. It was humbling and gratifying at the same time.

Fisher: Sure. I’ll bet.

Dennis: I'll say this project continues to do that. We hear students say, when they're telling the story of African Americans, I'll say, especially students of color, who oftentimes either don't see historical figures that they want to talk about in the textbooks of people of color, but they also have always learned about the victimization of enslaved people, not who they were, not what they did, and not how they contributed. We've had students say this is the first time history made sense to me, or is this the first time I cared about history.

Fisher: Interesting. Wow! What a win.

Dennis: When we have teachers and we have teachers say, this is the most important work I've ever done. And it is gratifying.

Fisher: So, the project is now spread throughout the state of Connecticut, and these little monuments are all over the place. How many do you have up throughout the state?

Dennis: Well, we have about 170 in Connecticut, but we are working in four other states right now.

Fisher: Okay.

Dennis: With some proposals out to our friends in Pennsylvania. So, we've been working in New Jersey for two and a half years. We just started working in Westchester County, New York, and we did our first installation in Washington County, Rhode Island, just earlier this month.

Fisher: This is all in the last five years. That's absolutely incredible. So where can people go for more information about this, if they want to do something similar in their state?

Dennis: Well, our website is WitnessStonesProject.org. Or if you just Google witness stones and look for WitnessStonesProject.org, we pop up, there's a contact page there or my email is [email protected]. We have spoken to people pretty much up and down the East Coast. And now it's starting to spread a little bit further. Each state is a new challenge. I'll say slavery is different in every region, and every state, and every county, and every community, and every household.

Fisher: Well, what an inspired teacher you have been Dennis, and congratulations on this. And to all of your people at the Witness Stones project, I wish you the best of luck. And I so appreciate you coming on Extreme Genes and talking about it.

Dennis: Well, thank you, Scott. And I really appreciate your interest in it. And for those who do genealogy, these community genealogists do some fantastic work out there. And we depend on them to show us what the bodies are, I guess, in a way of different communities. So thank you so much for helping me reach that community.

Fisher: All right, he's Dennis Culliton, the head of the Witness Stones project. And coming up next, David Allen Lambert returns for another round of Ask Us Anything. On Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show

Segment 4 Episode 466

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Fisher: All right, we're back for Ask Us Anything on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, David Allen Lambert is back. And here we go, David. This question comes from San Diego, California. It's Luann. And she says, “Guys, I believe my ancestor was a colonial tavern keeper.” I had one of those. “How can I find out if he really was? Luann.”

David: Well, you know, it's interesting. The colonial taverns do have a lot of records.

Fisher: Yes, they do.

David: One of the main things you have to find is that they had to have a license to keep a tavern! [Laughs]

Fisher: Yes.

David: So, like in Boston, for instance, tavern keeper licenses show up in the Boston town records. But how about if you had something that went on in your tavern that was kind of newsworthy? Well, Ancestry’s Newspapers.com is going to catch your tavern keeper’s events, maybe when they opened the tavern, maybe when they closed it, maybe when someone was killed in the tavern. So there's all sorts of different angles, because you're dealing with colonial era that you have newspapers since 1704. So you can use those as well.

Fisher: Yeah. And these taverns often included, basically what we would call today a bed and breakfast, right?

David: They did, yeah. They would have the occasion to stay at the tavern itself above, and they would have you often sleep in a bed with more than one person.

Fisher: Yeah, that’s right.

David: That would be your board. And you would basically have your meal there in the tavern itself. And if you incurred any beverages, that would be tagged on to your bill of fare essentially.

Fisher: Yeah, yeah. I had a relative who was a female tavern owner and her name was Hannah Fisher. And Hannah had quite a reputation. She's written up in the history of Westchester County and talks about what a mighty strong woman she was, and that she could actually lift a barrel of ale and drink it from the bung hole, which is crazy to me.

David: Wow!

Fisher: And yeah, she had all kinds of incidences, somebody get in a fight, she’d grab them by the head and bang their heads together. She had a real reputation.

David: Well, you know, your wife and I share a coffin family from Nantucket.

Fisher: Yeah.

David: And it was a court case for our Tiana Stevens coffin, who overcharged for the cost of ale and was brought to court. So, we know that she was a tavern keeper. So your wife and I can join Flagon and Trencher, which is descendants of colonial tavern keepers, they have a website at, FlagonAndTrencher.org.

Fisher: That's interesting. I did not know that. But you know, there's virtually a society for everything, right? For cultural descent, for occupations, for when you arrived in the new world, there's so many things, and that's another one that we should look into. But you know what we've just proven here, David? You and I just told a bunch of stories just about people we knew in our own lines, and those were all passed down through Newspapers.com, oral tradition, county histories. They're all in there.

David: It's true. And you know, just look in your family tree and see what your ancestor did for an occupation. Maybe there's a tavern keeper in your line you are not even aware of.

Fisher: That's true. Sometimes they would get in trouble, because they would serve their beer on the Sabbath. And that would make news and they would get fined. So, you’ve got court records, too, that would involve this right?

David: Oh, sure.

Fisher: You’ve got a licenses, which you mentioned, but the court records can tell when they get in trouble. And it seems to me that the tavern keepers got in trouble a lot!

David: There's a tendency to have that happen.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: And then of course, their descendants run saloons in the old west, and well, just watch a John Wayne movie and you'll understand that.

Fisher: Absolutely, absolutely. So that was a really good question, Luann. Thank you so much for it. And I hope that helps you finding out about your tavern keeper ancestor. Coming up, we have a DNA related question from Maryland, when we return with more on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show in three minutes.

Segment 5 Episode 466

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Fisher: All right back for our final question this week on Ask Us Anything on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth. And our question comes from Eric in Maryland, David. And he says, “Fisher and David, with DNA matching. How can I tell if my matches are telling me I come from a certain great grandfather or from one of his brothers? Eric.” That's an interesting question. And I'll tackle this one to start with.

David: Sure.

Fisher: Eric, basically, it begins with this. It depends on how many shared Centimorgans you share with your matches. It's not just the fact that you match with somebody. The amount of shared Centimorgans you have with them of course shows up on your match list on Ancestry or any of the other DNA sites, and the number of shared Centimorgans, you have tell you a range in which you might have a certain relationship with somebody. For instance, 800, some-odd Centimorgans is more than likely your first cousin. But if it's a half first cousin, it's something else. Interestingly, a first cousin and a half aunt have about the same amount of shared Centimorgans, you can generally tell the difference based on the age. A half aunt is likely going to be 25 years older than you or if you're the half uncle, then you might be 25 years older than the person you're matching. So, you get this distance from the amount of shared Centimorgans that you find there. And there's a marvelous tool that Dr. Blaine Bettinger has put out, and you can find it on his website, just Google it. It's the shared Centimorgan Project. And he's printed up a little chart it's like a little card. You could do a screenshot of it and save it on your desktop. And I refer to it all the time. And Dr. Bettinger basically went and surveyed some 10,000 people who had done DNA tests, and they happen to know who certain relatives were within those DNA tests, and figured out the average for, say, a third cousin, and a third cousin once removed, or a second cousin twice removed, and what is the range, the lowest and the highest that he saw out of that entire survey. And this is enormously valuable to you. And even more accurate than, say, what you would get on Ancestry.com.

David: And I love the way that he updates that form. So it's not just something cut in stone forever. He's constantly making changes to it. He is again, one of our leaders in the field of DNA research.

Fisher: Yep.

David: So I always turn to his work.

Fisher: Absolutely.

David: You know, we have the same problem with the SAR with DNA, because people will say, “Well, I have a Y DNA test. So I have to be related to the soldier in the Revolutionary War.” I mean, yeah, sure maybe the soldiers born in 1755. But how many of you actually descend from his brother, who was only three years old when the war ended? Because you're going to have the same Y DNA.

Fisher: Right, that's true.

David: It makes it very, very tough to rely solely on DNA information. So you have to use it with other documents.

Fisher: That's true.

David: To strengthen your case.

Fisher: That's right. And what Eric says here, he's asking about DNA. And I'm assuming he was talking about autosomal. But when it comes to Y DNA, that's a whole different story. Right?

David: Oh yeah.

Fisher: You really can't tell that that well. You kind of need the Y DNA in combination with the autosomal and with records. And that could be a way to do it as well. He also doesn't mention in here, he talks about the great grandfather, but doesn't say great grandparents. So I don't know if this is a half step. So you have those when you get into DNA matching, there're half relationships all the time, and the more distant they get, it's really difficult to tell a half step match from a full step match. So it's a little complicated, you’ve got to get a little education. But there's plenty to be found for free on RootsTech.org, year round, you can get it right now. So check that out. David, thank you so much for joining us again. And we will talk to you again next week for our 10th anniversary show! Can you believe it?

David: Unbelievable what an amazing decade it’s been.

Fisher: It has been indeed. We will talk to you then. And thanks to you for joining us this week. We appreciate that. If you missed any of the show, of course catch the podcast on Apple Media. iHeart Radio ExtremeGenes.com, TuneIn Radio. We are all over the place. Talk to you again next week. Thanks for joining us. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we're a nice normal family!