In Fisher's opening segment, Fisher reveals that many listeners indicated they had direct ancestors who died in their teens and 20s.  In Family Histoire News, Fisher talks about Jeremy Guthrie, a Japanese-American who recently pitched in the World Series for the Kansas City Royals.  Guthrie was on an All-Star tour of Japan and used a day off to connect with distant cousins his family had never met.  Hear how it all came together.  Next was the story of a mother and daughter who both gave birth on the same day!  Then, hear about the few dozen children of Civil War soldiers who are still among us, and their memories of their fathers.  It's amazing to think it's even possible, but it is!

Transcript of Episode 67

Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show

Host: Scott Fisher

Segment 1 Episode 67

Fisher: Genies, what a time to start researching your family. 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 and I am so glad you found us. For me, it was a great week finding obituaries with stories of people I’ve been looking for, for a long time. Digitized newspapers are changing everything. We even have websites that searches for matches for you from your entire tree, while you sleep and then notify you. Thank you My Heritage. Our guests this week include David Allen Lambert. Senior genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, talking about the conflict you might call “The Forgotten War.” In fact, if you fought in this war, there came a time when you were eligible for a pension with just a few weeks service. Which war was this? And what records are available on it? David will fill us in, in about 8 minutes. Then later in the show, Andria Cranney of the General Society of Mayflower descendents will be here to talk about the very first Thanksgiving. Just what did those pilgrims and natives eat anyway? Well, I’m not sure you really want to know, but we’re going to find out anyway. Maybe you can catch your kid’s attention by providing them some of this food for Thanksgiving. I guarantee you they will never forget it. Then Tom Perry our Preservation Authority joins us to talk about how Quantum Physics. Quantum Physics! Are going to protect our data? This is really weird stuff, so I only ask is that you hear him out. Our ExtremeGenes.com poll for this week asks the question, “What is the earliest age that one of your direct ancestors died teens, 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s?” I was amazed to see several votes for direct ancestors dying in their teens. Several more said 20s, fewer and fewer as the ages went up. Interesting to think of teens dying after fathering or giving birth to a child and having who knows how many living descendents today. Our ExtremeGenes.com poll for this weekend asks, “When you celebrate Thanksgiving, what do you think of most, the pilgrims, the blessings, the food, the family gatherings, the football or the shopping?” Let’s be honest here. Now, here is my free gift to you, and I hear from more people who when they find our free Extreme Genes podcast can’t believe they’ve gone this long without it. Yes, it is free. Just download it from your Android or iPhone store and you can catch up with every single episode. There’s a lot of how to information and inspiring stories too, so why not download it while we speak? We will make a genie out of you yet. We’ll just wait here. [Whistling] done! There you go. All right, we are packed with this week’s family histoire news from the pages of ExtremeGenes.com. If you watched the World Series between San Francisco and Kansas City, you may remember watching Royals pitcher Jeremy Guthrie. Guthrie is part Japanese and recently was among a group of Major League All Stars who toured Japan, playing against Japanese players. It was his first trip to his ancestral homeland. So, Jeremy decided he wanted to try to connect with cousins he believed were still there. He had some leads, as some 40 years ago a relative named Akio Tashikio wrote to his family. Jeremy’s mother took ten years to respond and then didn’t get a reply. And so it has stood for three decades. Before the trip Jeremy asked a friend to try to track down these potential relatives. In time, the friend discovered Jeremy’s third cousin once removed, a member of the family that had tried to reach out to his family in the 1970s. During an off day of the Barn Storming tour Guthrie travelled to Mihara, where he met Akio and his sister. Jeremy was still sceptical that they were related, until Akio showed him a full family tree. And when Jeremy spotted the name of his great grandfather, he knew he had found family. A few days later, Akio, his sister and cousin travelled to the Tokyo Dome where their cousin Jeremy Guthrie started for the Major League All stars against the team of Samurai Japan. Jeremy’s team lost in a combine no hitter by the Japanese team. But Jeremy took great solace in knowing his family had been reunited for the first time since the 1930s. Toshikio’s comment, “It was incredible for us.” Check out more on the story at ExtremeGenes.com. Well, here’s one that will be a little tricky for some people about 20 years from now. Heather Penticoff of Fort Myers, Florida, gave birth to a little girl Madeline last week. Minutes later, little Madeline’s sister Destiny Martin gave birth in the same hospital to a little boy Damien, mother and daughter or mother and aunt or daughter and son and nephew or grandson, well they all doing just fine. And by the way, Heather and Destiny, mother and daughter both found out they were pregnant on the same day. Unbelievable! NationalGeographic.com has a great story about the children of Civil War soldiers that still live among us. It’s true. There are fewer than 35 of these children now living. Of course they’re really old children, but nonetheless, Fred Upham is 93. His father, like the fathers of all the rest of this unique club, had him very late in life. William Upham fought with the second Wisconsin volunteer Infantry Regiment for the Union and was badly wounded at the first battle of Bull Run. Later, William met President Lincoln in the White House and was appointed by him to the military academy at West Point. There are 11 living daughters of Confederate soldiers. Iris Lee Gay Jordan was only 9 when her father Louis Gay died in 1931. According to the article, she still gets teary eyed when thinking of her dad. She remembers him telling stories, sitting on the front porch on Sundays. Louis Gay fought for Florida’s fourth volunteer infantry and fought throughout the South. Very few from his unit survived the war. Fred and Iris have something else in common. Both of their fathers were taken captive by the other side early in the war and were released. It’s a great story with some terrific photos find the link at ExtremeGenes.com. And coming up next, did you know that there was an American war where veterans could receive a pension for just a couple of weeks of service? David Allen Lambert of the New England Historic Genealogical Society is back to tell us about what war that is and what records were created around that war that may contain the names of your ancestors. That’s in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 67

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, Family History Radio ExtremeGenes.com America’s Family History Show. I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth, and back with us once again from the New England Historic Genealogical Society, my good friend David Allen Lambert, the senior researcher there, a senior researcher. I know there are others who are very senior too David, right?

David: [Laughs] Well, I try to be a senior as possible without having to be retired yet.

Fisher: [Laughs] Absolutely. And David is an expert in all things military and that, I think, affects a lot of stories that we collect on our ancestors. You know, I’ve been watching a lot of war movies lately David, with my wife. She gets to watch a chick flick and then I get to watch a war movie. So I’ve been watching George C. Scott do his thing as General Pattern. They didn’t have a general Pattern in the war of 1812 now did they?

David: No. But I’m sure there were definitely people of that calibre that were George Pattern predecessors if you will, not wanabes.

Fisher: It could very well be.

David: Absolutely.

Fisher: Because America’s always loved a winner and will not tolerate a loser.

David: Yeah. Well, the war of 1812 kind of tosses that one up as a possibility, did we win?

Fisher: Or did we lose? [Laughs]

David: Or did we lose? [Laughs]

Fisher: Well that’s a really good point because if you look around at the different histories written by the different participants, the Canadians, they feel they’ve won, the Brits feel like well, they just didn’t have much time for it because they had others wars to fight. We feel like it was a consuming victory and a reiteration of the revolution, wouldn’t you say?

David: Absolutely. In fact, I would say a lot of the young soldiers who cut their teeth   in the revolutionary war were older officers by the time of the war of 1812. Heavens, even Andrew Jackson was a revolutionary war soldier as a young man, and then you know obviously to his victory during the war of 1812.

Fisher: Yeah, that’s right. Which actually happened in 1815 I think it was?

David: Absolutely. In fact, that’s the one thing the war that has one single year actually went on from 1812 to 1815. So we’re still in the Byzantinial celebration if you will, of that war.

Fisher: That’s right. We’ll we wanted to talk a little about records on that, because I think a lot of us tend to skip over them. We look at the revolution, we look at the civil war, we look at world wars I and II. I think the Spanish American war gets missed out a little bit. The Mexican war gets missed out a little bit. But the war of 1812 actually does have some meat on its bones, as far as records that we can find concerning our ancestors.

David: You know when I look at any war and when I look at a lot of people’s charts, I look for men that are born approximately between about 1785 and 1795 because they’re prime cannon fodder if you will, to be in the ranks. And you’d be surprised. You’d think that there would be more participation. New England has a fair amount, but it really gets in to the New York area where you get the stronger contingency of soldiers that are enlisting.

Fisher: And why do you think that would be?

David: I think the battlefronts are closer and I think there was more of a threat. Now for New England, you do have people that served six days and guarded the fort at Wiscasset Maine because there was an impending invasion by British Naval forces. We were always waiting for the other shoe to drop, at least in the New England Range. That they were going to go in and burn the city or burn that city. I mean obviously Washington got sacked.

Fisher: Yes.

David: Horribly. Affecting revolutionary war records because the war department had its second fire, besides the White House being burned, the war department was burned and hence a lot of the old pension files and bounty land records, we have no record of because of these fires.

Fisher: So they weren’t all together though, because some of those have survived.

David: They have. And mostly the pension files are for most soldiers don’t take in to an act until 1818. So the earlier ones were often arranged by Congress or they were bounties. So a lot of the early bounty lands assigned by the Federal Government, you’ll see a number of it referenced but it’ll say no papers because the papers were burnt. There were actually two fires. The war department also burned in the 1800s. That was obviously no cost to the British. But to add insult to injury, the other fire took out whatever was pre 1814. But there are muster roles, because those are still on the state level. War department records seem to burn all the time. 1973 San Luis Missouri, the big fire there took out all the army records for the most part, WWI right on through to Vietnam.

Fisher: Wow! What a loss that was. You know, you think about that, I mean fire is something that is universal to all ages and places and we tend to think of it as a disaster when an entire repository is gone, but we don’t generally think that our own records could be lost if something, you know, a kitchen fire took place in our own home.

David: Absolutely. 

Fisher: That’s why preservation and duplication and duplication of locations is so important and we’re always talking about it on the show.

David: Absolutely. I will always say, share your records, scan your records, put them up online, I don’t care if you put them on social media, or you take them and put them on a flash drive and put it in your safety deposit box , put it in the dash of your car. Something you don’t have to recreate, all your years of hard work and documents from one sad fire, you know?

Fisher: Yeah, wouldn’t that be awful? All right, what else is available from the war of 1812?

David: Well, one of the things that is really a wonderful effort is FGS, Federation of Genealogical Societies, has put together an effort to digitize with Fold3 and they’re raising money to put the war of 1812 pension files online. So, their efforts have been fabulous. They’re already appearing online on Fold3. War of 1812 is kind of a funny time frame though, because you don’t get pension files for most soldiers until the act of 1871. So here’s a fella born is 1785, 1795, he’s very, very old or his widow applies by the right there’s actually money available.

Fisher: Right. Now I had one in my line and the widow got it. I want to say in the 1850s, does that sound right? I’m just doing it from memory.

David: Probably got land by then.

Fisher: Yes, land. And so that record exists, although I’ve never found anything further about it, about what land or did she turn around and sell it or how that worked.

David: Well you know what’s funny about that Fish? That people would get these land grants and if you look in the newspapers of the time, there are ads, kind of like you know, cash for gold that now you see all the time.

Fisher: Yes.

David: Cash for bounty land. They were putting money on the barrel. If you wanted to sell that land, then they would take that and they would resell the property. So your ancestor or his family may have never ever even seen that land let alone even saw what it looked like on a map.

Fisher: I totally believe that that was the case. Yes. I just don’t know that they would have made that much on it, but I would imagine people who are looking to put some of these pieces of land together in ideal locations, would eventually profit from it.

David: Absolutely. Because I mean, I’m sure the pensions were handed off on a calendar basis as blocks of land as the land was divided back then. If you got enough of the parcels together, heavens you could just start your own town.

Fisher: Yeah pretty much. [Laughs] That’s true. So what records exist? I’ve seen the index that shows this particular bounty land offer, but it’s after the soldier died and the widow has obtained it. Is there anything else connected to that, or is that all lost as well?

David: Well I mean, for the bounty land, once you have that you can actually get the application with the number of the land and all that from the national archives. For those who got pensions, as of the act of 1871 and then 1878, originally the 71 act basically said you had to have the minimum of sixty days service, which doesn’t seem like very much, but so few had very great service other than marching on the alarm that the British might invade. So the 1878 act made it down till the service only had to be two weeks.

Fisher: Two weeks?

David: Two weeks, right. And then you get a pension for the rest of your life.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: Which is amazing when you figure the 1870s the brutality and the losses of the civil war, how many pensions the union army had obtained and they were handing out handover for a pension. So there was money that was already being dished out for the civil war and here they’re paying for a war fifty years earlier. Sixty years earlier.

Fisher: You’re right. And it leads to one question because I remember looking for some people who should have been in the war of 1812. They were male and it was the right age for them to have been in it, but I don’t find any record of them fighting. Were not all able bodied young men required to fight in this? 

David: Absolutely not. There was no draft for it. So you don’t find an overall everybody of that age preparing to go in. In fact, using New England as an example, the length of service of many of them let’s say went into the regular military or US army or Navy, most of them are marching for months if not weeks. There are obviously exceptions to the rule, they go in it for a year or two and become seasoned veterans of the war. But for the most part it’s really short, short service.

Fisher: And why was that?

David: Because of the threat. I mean, they looked at it as state related troops that were marching off to war. Massachusetts is going off to the Habor Islands and going down Cape Cod. Main troops which were part of Massachusetts, were marching to the coastal towns to defend and watch you know, forts, to make sure the British weren’t going to invade and burn the cities up there. And that’s the same thing through right down the Atlantic seaboard right into where you get in to Baltimore, of course you know the star spangled banner, and you get the invasion right into Washington DC. I mean, we were ill prepared for this war.

Fisher: Yes.

David: And maybe there needed to be a draft. But I mean, the idea that American sailors were being plucked off of vessels and they were being pulled into the British navy with the idea that these are British sailors and they need them for the Napoleonic wars. The Brits were more interested in fighting the Napoleonic wars except for this little trouble over here.

Fisher: Yes. [Laughs]

David: The other reason the war, I believe, is that the British were arming Native Americans, halting American expansion west. The Brits also felt that we were going to invade into Canada, which I think we had full intention.

Fisher: Which we were.

David: For New Englanders, we’ve been trying to push into Canada since the 17^th century.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: We’ve been invading into Nova Scotia, invading into Quebec, and this never really did change much. I think the only thing that kind of did stop that was the 20^th century we became allies. [Laughs]

Fisher: We even tried to get baseball in to Canada and only one of the two teams have actually stayed, you know? 

David: I know.

Fisher: It’s sad.

David: It’s sad.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: I think it kind of turns around with baseball for us, doesn’t it Fish?

Fisher: [Laughs] It really does. David Allen Lambert from the New England Historic Genealogical Society thanks so much! Great records available! Where would people find most of these would you say as a source?

David: Ancestry.com is a good place to search for some of the indexes, but the compiled military service records and the majority of the pension records are on a great trip right down to the nation’s capital, the Nation Archives in Washington DC where you can still see the originals when you put in a request.

Fisher: Woo love that. Thanks so much David.

David: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on again.

Fisher: And coming up next, we’ll be talking turkey, about the first Thanksgiving, in five minutes on Extreme Genes, family history radio, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 67

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Andria Cranney

Fisher: Welcome back, its Extreme Genes America's Family History Show. I am Fisher. And, you know, the old saying, "You can't pick your relatives." Well, the same thing goes for your ancestors. So we all have to be careful to remember that we can't get too prideful or too ashamed about those individuals we find to populate our family tree. Well, a few years ago, after thirty years of searching, I finally caught a break on a pair of third great grandparents. The husband's obituary was finally digitized, and I was able to tie him into his parents. Both he and his wife brought two Revolutionary soldiers into the history. And then the lines just kept going and going until I would up with four direct ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. Well, to get an unbiased review of my research, I applied to the Society of Mayflower descendants, because, they're tough! And if something was incorrect, I wanted to know about it. But the application went through on the first try without any problems validating the lines. So the last few Thanksgivings have been a little different knowing that I had people at the very first Thanksgiving. Well, what was that like? Since millions of Americans are Mayflower descendants, I thought we'd talk to Andria Cranney of the Society of Mayflower descendants about that first Thanksgiving. Hi, Andria, how are you?

Andria: Good, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Fisher: It’s good to have you back. And you know, we're kind of excited because the holiday is coming right up, this week. And the Mayflower Society is actually getting ready in your area to have an authentic Mayflower feast. Now, what did that entail? Let's go back. It was 1621.

Andria: Yes, uh huh.

Fisher: This was a three day gathering. There was no grocery store nearby. What did they eat?

Andria: [Laugh] They would have loved a grocery store.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Andria: Well, at the feast, there were probably duck and goose and a lot of shellfish. I know they recorded a lot of eels. The Indians had showed them how to get eels and leeks and watercress and dried berries. And then of course they washed it down with wine. But it was more like just an outdoor barbecue for everyone. It was just three days of gorging themselves on all of this food.

Fisher: Wow! I know family reunions there wasn't the crazy old aunt and uncle.

Andria: No. [Laughs] No, it was just a wonderful gathering.

Fisher: It was. And no football, no Frisbees or anything, wow!

Andria: You know, they did have their own games and contests going on. Maybe it was their version of a football game, but.

Fisher: What did they play?

Andria: Well, they had contests of skill, like running and jumping and wrestling, the Indians performed some of their dances and singing. And then Myles Standish, he put his little army of fourteen men through a little military review, four rounds, so, of marksmanship and things like that, so.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Andria: It was great gathering.

Fisher: So let me ask you this, Andria, do you think the whole thing with Myles Standish was more to show the Indians what they were capable of doing?

Andria: No, I really do feel like it was because, like the Indians also performed with their bows and arrows. At this point, I really think they had established a sweet relationship with these Indians. I mean a great warm feeling between these Indians and the pilgrims.

Fisher: Talk about who some of these Indians were. Why were the Indians there with them and how did that all work out? Because I think we see these pictures out there, and it shows everybody kind of hanging out together, singing kumbaya. It was a tough first year.

Andria: Oh, clearly! And the pilgrims realized that they really, probably wouldn't have survived without the help of those Indians. Well, even the fact that the land that they finally settled on, it had been left, deserted by an Indian tribe. And so, it was vacant of inhabitance that it was left with fields cleared and ready to plant. So I think that in itself was a miracle. And then of course, summer set working in that first spring and introducing themselves. That to me was a miracle. And then introduce them to Squanto who was such a great translator for them and was able to nurture that relationship then, with the other Indians. And then eventually, they got to meet Massasoit who, and he was there, you know, at that first banquet, too.

Fisher: Right. You know, I think back on it, I mean, probably the place was deserted because of the diseases that had been brought into the area and decimated a lot of the natives at that time, but you know, you look back on this and you think about how remarkable it is, Europeans got a foothold in North America at that time. Because as I look at my own street, I live in a little cul de sac, and there are only, what, fifty one survivors the first year.

Andria: Yes.

Fisher: And that's how many people live on my cul de sac. [Laughs] And I think, "You've got to be kidding me!" All this started from there, and I think there's an estimate now of, what, ten million Mayflower descendants. Is that about what you've heard?

Andria: Actually, I was thinking it was more like thirty million that could claim an ancestral lineage.

Fisher: Yeah. The question, I guess is always whether or not you can find it and whether you can prove it, because, you know, a long ways back.

Andria: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Fisher: But millions of Americans have descent from these fifty one people. And I guess you could narrow it even further, because there were some that never had children, right?

Andria: Well, that's true. Yes. Yeah, there were like twenty, I think they'd figure twenty three heads of families that have descendants.

Fisher: Right. And then you have those like my guy, who's John Howland, who married Elizabeth Tilley, and she had her parents. So her parents died, as well as an aunt and an uncle in that first time. So, I descend from four, but you usually just look at the Howland line to see all four of them.

Andria: Yeah, since they did intermarry. Sometimes when you trace back to one, it does branch off into others as well. I can go back to three actually.

Fisher: So, let's talk about your banquet that you've got coming up. And I know you've invited a lot of people to take part in this thing. What is it that you're going to be serving this time around that was actually there at Plymouth in 1621?

Andria: Well, I know that they serve us just a regular dinner, but then they have a tasting table that is for the very adventurous people.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Andria: So I think that's when we get to taste our eel, and, actually, to me, it’s only the eel that sounds really adventurous. Roast duck, turkey, clams, you know, other shellfish, it will be the unusual things at the tasting table.

Fisher: I keep thinking that maybe, you know, they're going to be eating twigs or, you know, something had to be so difficult that first year. What a change from what pilgrims had experienced, those who were from England and those who had come over from Holland.

Andria: Yes, yes!  I mean, even the corn, they’d never seen corn before, so when they found those baskets, it was such a blessing. It helped them survive that year. But it took them a couple of years to even figure out how to plant that and get it to grow into a healthy harvest. The thanksgiving feast wasn't really the end of their troubles. In fact, actually after the feast, that's where they had eaten for three days. I think it was after it was all over they kind of worried that maybe they'd overdone it a little bit and were worried for their food for now, the next coming year. And they still really didn't have it down as to how to plant in this new land and how to get the crops to grow. So, it was a couple of years that they were still really just trying to survive.

Fisher: Being a native New Englander, the ground is rocky. There's not a lot of great soil. It’s not like west and the mid west. And I can only imagine, it had to be quite an experiment for them. And the natives were obviously very helpful in getting them through that. The natives, of course, needed the pilgrims to support them, because there was some rivalries going on among the tribes there. So the politics seemed to work out for them at that time, although all that came to a horrible crash in 1675 with the King Philip's War.

Andria: Right, yeah. But really, fifty some odd years, they really did live in peace and harmony with each other. And it was a mutual relation, they did need each other. That was the beautiful part of that. They realized that they needed each other. [Laughs]

Fisher: It is absolutely true. And in the end, I think they figured that out, because the cost of not needing each other was devastating to both sides.

Andria: Absolutely.

Fisher: And I understand that when we got through the King Philip's War, they figured out that the effect on the economy in North America at that time was such that it took a hundred years for it to recover, which was just in time for the Revolution.

Andria: Really?

Fisher: Yes.

Andria: Oh, my heavens!

Fisher: It was a long, long time before the United States then could get on its feet after all that. But the first thanksgiving sounded like quite the party, and certainly set in motion a great tradition that so many of us enjoy today. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and have a great event with the society.

Andria: Thank you. Thank you. This is my favorite day of the year. I'm sure it will be wonderful.

Fisher: And have an extra helping of eel for me, Andria.

Andria: [Laughs] I will! I'll think of you as I taste it. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] Thanks for joining us.

Andria: Thank you for having me.

Fisher: And coming up next, I'm not really sure how to explain this, as Tom Perry, our Preservation Authority is going to get into digital preservation through, well, I'll let him explain it. That's next on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 67

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: Hey, back at you. It's Extreme Genes, Family History Radio, America's Family History Show. Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, he is our Preservation Authority. He knows everything about how to preserve what you've got. You know, that's so important because even if you aren't into researching yet and you aren't into collecting, you know, old photographs, you might already have an awful lot of things from your parents and grandparents, and you want to make sure that they stay preserved for future generations. Good to have you along, Tom.

Tom: It's good to be here.

Fisher: And you've been talking to me off air about Quantum Physics, how does this work in family history?

Tom: There's different options you have to keep your data safe and it's really important to do that. For instance, when you run a credit card online, people think "Well, how is that safe? Can't somebody just grab this packet and they have my number, they have my name, they have my zip code, they have all this kind of stuff. Actually it comes right back to math. In fact, almost everything that affects our life today is based on math. It's all mathematical formulas.

Fisher: Well, and math has really kind of been the thing that dictates everything from the beginning of time, really, when you get down to it.

Tom: Exactly. Math totally dictates what we do, it dictates how fast our computers can be, how much data we can put on a CD or DVD, math is everything.

Fisher: In the modern setting, especially.

Tom: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you go clear back to the old times they had an abacus. As everybody knows who's listened to our show before, a CD or DVD are made up of binary codes, there's 0s and 1s, meaning off or on, and that's what tells the computer what to do. And some of the stuff gets really weird. So when you run a credit card, what it does is it goes into prime numbers, and everybody knows what prime numbers are, prime numbers can only be divided by themselves or by 1, so if you take a string of prime numbers and multiply them against each other, you will never be able to by hand, or even with super fast computers, ever figure out what that first number was.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Because prime numbers, they just go forever. So you have the fastest commercially purchased computers today, it would take forever to figure out what your credit card numbers are by trying to crunch these prime numbers to figure out what they are, all these 0s and 1s. So that's the good news. Now the bad news, when you get into quantum physics and mechanics, this basically changes everything. They are developing some prototype computers right now that still use binary code, but they use it in almost I guess what you'd call a third or fourth dimension, and it almost sounds like sci fi, but it's totally legit. These prototype computers, they are huge, like those big IBM when they first came out.

Fisher: Yes, right, where everybody's wearing a white suite.

Tom: Exactly. And they're huge rooms.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: They're not wearing white suites anymore, but these rooms are incredible. The chips that they use are these little teeny things, about the an 8th of the size of a standard postage stamp, but the heat that these things generate on the quantum level is so enormous, the cooling unit for these little chips are as big what something that you would see at a nuclear reactor. They are just absolutely incredible to keep this chip cool because it's doing stuff so fast. And the neat thing about this is as I mentioned, it thinks in second and third dimensions. So you can be at more than one place at the same time.

Fisher: Oh boy. Now you're getting weird.

Tom: It's getting really, really weird. So there could be four of you all existing at the same place in different areas. And so after the break we'll go and explain how this works.

Fisher: [Laughs] We should have been doing this for Halloween, because you're getting a little freaky on me here I'm thinking, Tom. All right, we will return with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com with more on this strangeness in minutes on Extreme Genes, family history radio, America's Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 67

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: Welcome back to Extreme Genes, Family History Radio, ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here. That’s Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com and our Preservation Authority of course. We’re talking I think in things that are way too deep for me about how Quantum Physics fits into preserving our family history. [Laughs] But you figured something out of this Tom, so pick it up. We were talking about, what?

Tom: We were talking about being in two places at the same time.

Fisher: And how do we do that, just as a quick review?

Tom: It’s really almost like Sci fi. This new technology of Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics, this is real.  They are doing it with computers where they can have the exact same thing in two different spots, which means when they’re protecting your data there’s more options to protect your data from people that are trying to hack into your data that they are going to be confused just like with the prime numbers. They are not going to be able to do that math backwards to find out where your credit card numbers are.

Fisher: Uhhhh. [Laughs]

Tom: So, when you’re protecting your data online.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: You want to make sure you’re using somebody that’s reliable, and that really knows what they’re doing, you know. Ask some questions. Ask, “What kind of data protection are you using? Are you using the Prime Number type system? Are you using Quantum Physics?” etc. And if they go, “Huh” go to somebody else. When you have things at two different locations, another thing that gives you a headache is as we mentioned earlier, all binary numbers are either a 0 or a 1, or some people refer to them as on and off, numbers and values, etc. 

Fisher: Right. Sure. Yeah.

Tom: Now, with these new quantum computers, a 0 can be a 1 and a 1 can be a 0 at the same time.

Fisher: Oh boy!

Tom: So, as crazy as that sounds, what this technology gives us the ability to do is, say we’re individual, and say we’re sending something to our brother. Now we put this packet together that is made that is made up of, say molecules. And when we send it to them, only I and he know what the codes are. So when he receives it, he can interpret it. He can figure out what it was.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: But the neat thing about these so called molecules, when they’re sent, if somebody peeks at it and still maybe is not able to figure out what it is, but just peeks at it, it actually changes the structure, and so then we are both immediately notified that somebody peeked!

Fisher: Okay!

Tom: Even though they didn’t get any information possibly out of it, we know that somebody peeked. Whether it’s a phone call we’re sending, whether it’s a photo we’re transmitting, whether it’s video tapes, anything that we’re doing, we’ll be able to know that somebody peeked at our packet and then we can take precautions to stop that so they can’t peek at it and then maybe down the road figure it out. So this technology gives us incredible options to really, really protect our information.

Fisher: And this is in effect now, somebody doing that?

Tom: Oh, absolutely.

Fisher: What companies are doing this?

Tom: Well I don’t know of any specific companies. Most of this is still in the research studies at major universities, but you can to Nova and you can Google the word “Rise of the Hackers” and they have some different things on that. And as technically minded as I am, some of the stuff is still so far above my head. It’s neat to see that it’s actually not just experimental, that they are actually doing things with it. And as things go faster and faster and faster, like they say, things double every so many years. We mentioned back in ’13 we had to update our photo and slide scanners three times because the new technology was going so fast. And so the same kind of thing, things are happening so fast. But I would go to Nova and Google hackers and you’ll be able to find some more articles on this, and see the university studies are doing some interviews of people. It‘s just absolutely amazing technology. By having these zeros and ones being blind to these normal hackers, it takes things at such a high level that it’s going to be almost impossible for people to hack into credit cards, family that you’re trying to keep, Facebook. And a lots of people who keep Facebook, they never check their settings. You really need to go into your privacy settings and check every single thing. If you have the thing that says, “Allow it to be shared with other Internet providers” you can have everything that you put on Facebook available to anybody that Googles your name.

Fisher: You are getting far deeper than I even thought you were capable of Tom.

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: Hey, thanks to my friends David Allen Lambert of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and Andria Cranney of the Society of Mayflower Descendants for joining us on the show. If you missed any part, catch the podcast at ExtremeGenes.com, iHeart Radio’s talk channel or iTunes. Have a great Thanksgiving. And remember, as far as anyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!