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Episode 149 – Photo Detective Maureen Taylor On IDing Unmarked Pictures / Just Who Was Molly Pitcher?

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Molly Pitcher

Fisher opens the show welcoming two new radio affiliates in Maui, Hawaii, bring the total to 42! He also announces the introduction of the official Extreme Genes newsletter, “The Weekly Genie.” David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, then joins the segment. David shares a terrific announcement about MyHeritage.com. Hear about what they’ve done now to make your research journey easier. Next, David notes the upcoming service effort, “Finding the Fallen,” from BillionGraves and the Boy Scouts. Listen to the podcast to find out how to be a part of it. Fisher and David then talk about the odd story of Mick Jagger’s upcoming fatherhood… two years after he became a great grandfather! (And he’s not the only Rolling Stone to be having children these days!) David then shares the name of the newest holder of the title “Oldest Person in America.” Who is she and how old is she? Find out on the podcast. David also will tell you about an upcoming display of the hair of several of our nation’s forefathers, along with another Tech Tip and NEHGS free user database.

In segment two (starts at 11:08), Fisher visits with “The Photo Detective,” Maureen Taylor. Maureen has made a career (and quite a name for herself) out of identifying unmarked photographs. How can you do the same? Maureen shares some of her secrets. Maureen has also opened a site for posting unknown photos and categorizing them. Catch how you can benefit from Maureen’s efforts, and how you can help identify photos that others cannot.

Next (starts at 24:45) Fisher talks with NEHGS Senior Researcher, Andrew Krea, about the incredible legend of “Molly Pitcher,” known for bringing water to the soldiers of the Battle of Monmouth in the Revolution, as well as manning the cannons! Was she real, a composite figure, or a just a myth? Andrew has done some research into that and reveals his opinion as to who the real “Molly Pitcher” likely was. Wait until you hear her story!

Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com then returns to talk preservation. When it comes to protecting original materials or digitized copies, Tom shows week after week that there’s a lot to know.

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

Transcript for Episode 149

Host: Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 149 (00:30)

Fisher: This show just keeps spreading out! Hey, it’s Fisher here, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. It’s Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. And, very excited to now be heard in Maui, Hawaii, on KAOI AM and FM. Got to give a little shout out to John Detz and his team there. So proud to be part of their great weekend lineup in Maui! A lot of great family history of course, in Hawaii. Well, welcome to the show! We’ve got a lot of great things going on today. Maureen Taylor is going to be here a little bit later on, in about eight minutes. She is the Photo Detective. She can take your unmarked photos, somebody you don’t even know who it belongs to, right?  And just by looking at a hat or maybe a hemline, or something about the photograph  itself, she can help you figure out who that is a picture of. It’s going to be a great interview coming up later on in the show.  And then, after that, we’re going to talk to Andrew Krea, he’s a Senior Researcher at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. And, with all the recognition of the Revolutionary War going on this month, we thought we’d talk to him about the legendary Molly Pitcher. Real person? A conglomeration of several? Of course, the story revolves around a woman who helped the troops in the Battle of Monmouth, June 28th, 1778, bringing pitchers of water, and also firing cannons at the enemy. He’s done a little research to kind of figure out who this person might have actually been. We’ll have that for you later on in the show. But right now, let’s check in with Boston and my good friend the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, it’s David Allen Lambert. Hello, David.

David: Greetings from Beantown Fish, how you’re doing this week?

Fisher: Awesome! Very excited by the way to have started our Weekly Genie newsletter. And this is a way for people to get to know us, the personalities on the show a little bit more. Learn a few more things about doing your family history research, and also link to some great interviews of the past and the present week that you might not have heard before.

David: Great! Well, I hope I can put in some surprises in the newsletter too, and keep the readers informed.

Fisher: Well looking forward to having you be a part of it.

David: Well, you know as Chief Genealogist there are a couple of other people with that title, and one is my good friend Daniel Horowitz, who is with MyHeritage.com, who gave me some exciting new news. If you’re a MyHeritage user you may know about “Super Search.” Well, a new function is called “Super Search Alerts.” So when you originally did your input and you got your matches, you didn’t get anything? Well now your information is already there, Super Search Alerts will alert you when a match comes up. So this is a great new advantage for MyHeritage users. One of the most interesting things in recent years are apps that are made for your smartphone, and of course, for genealogists, there are plenty of them. One of them that I like is the Billion Graves app that allows you to go take a photograph of a gravestone, have it uploaded. The GPS is fabulous! So if you’re a user of that I would say, “Why don’t you volunteer this weekend?” In conjunction with the Boy Scouts of America, they are starting a project on July 30th all day called “Finding the Fallen.” They want you to go to your local and national cemeteries using the BillionGraves app. And you can go out and capture the images and locations of gravestones of America’s veterans. So I think this is a wonderful way of spending time with your family. Get out there with the app and capture some history.

Fisher: Yes. Boy, that sounds like a great service project!

David: Hey, I want to give an early birthday wish to Mick Jagger from the Rolling Stones who’ll be having a birthday coming up this week. I don’t know if you know this, but two years ago he became a great grandfather.

Fisher: Yeah, 2014. He’s 73 years young this week, and he’s got more news.

David: Oh that he does. Sometime next year that great grandchild will have a new great uncle or great aunt because Mick’s girlfriend is expecting a baby in 2017!

Fisher: Yeah. She’s 29, and so Mick’s going to be a dad again, two years after having a great grandkid. This is unbelievable, has this ever happened before?

David: Probably in some of the ceded houses of Europe in the Middle Ages.

Fisher: [Laughs] It’s almost Biblical, don’t you think!

David: I definitely think so, and this kind of leads me to my next news story.

Fisher: Oh no, wait a minute, before you leave the Stones.

David: Yup, okay.

Fisher: Ronnie Wood, two months ago had twins.

David: Ah!

Fisher: So it’s like the Stones are starting all over again.

David: Oh my goodness! A rolling stone gathers no moss, I guess! [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So in other news… Recently in Worcester, Massachusetts, Goldie Michelson was the oldest American. Now the title goes to Adele Dunlap, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, who is now the oldest person in America. Born on December 12th, 1902. She likes to lie about her age so when they asked her how it feels to be a 113, she replied, “No, I’m 104!”

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: Maybe she could say she’s some fraction of 29.

Fisher: Yeah, right.

David: Well it makes sense to go from Goldie to locks.

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

David: And if you ever wondered who had the best hair back in the colonial period, George Washington, John Adams? Now you can find out, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University is putting on display the hair of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson and their museum, presidential archives, letters, hair, and fossils exhibit. That’s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and you can see it through July 29th.

Fisher: Sounds like fun!

David: Now my next Tech Tip kind of ties into social media, but it’s also an old fashioned low tech tip if you will.

Fisher: Hmm.

David: I use genealogical programs, and one of the ones I use is Roots Magic. And I found that as I update the family genealogy this summer, I’ve been adding in contact information. I add an email address and the social media link to their Facebook page, their old fashioned mailing address.

Fisher: What?!

David: Yeah! Can you believe, snail mail is something that I would want to collect. But think about it, it’s a genealogical step, where were they living? It’s a residence, we don’t have phone books anymore, the censuses are done every ten years. Why not ask people where they’re living? And then of course if you mail them a copy, it’s also a nice way to keep in touch, especially during the holidays. I mean the old fashioned traditional holiday cards.

Fisher: You mean through the mail?!

David: The mail, yeah. Remember you lick the envelope and put a stamp on it, there’s a little blue box.

Fisher: Right, yes. I recall that.

David: The NEHGS free guest user database this week are three towns in Vermont from the 18th and 19th century, the towns of Dover, Fairfax, and Hardwick. As always, you can get a free user database account by just going to AmericanAncestors.org. Well, that’s about all I have for this week, Fish, I’ll talk to you next week. And enjoy your summer.

Fisher: All right. Thanks so much David, always great talking to you! And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Maureen Taylor, she is the Photo Detective. How do you tell what era a photo was from or maybe who it was? She’s going to give you a few tips on that, coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. This segment has been brought to you by 23andMe.com DNA.

Segment 2 Episode 149 (11:10)

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Maureen Taylor

Fisher: Hey welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth. This segment is brought to you by LegacyTree.com. You know over my three-plus decades of researching my family, one of the joys of becoming the point person for pretty much every branch of the family not only on my side but on my wife’s, is that periodically people send me stuff. Photographs, old photographs of all types, CDVs, the cabinet cards, ambrotypes.  I mean you go through the entire list. But often these things are not identified. And that’s where my next guest comes in. She is the Photo Detective. She is Maureen Taylor, very well known within the industry. Maureen welcome to Extreme Genes. This is long overdue. How are you?

Maureen: I’m good. How are you? Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Fisher: I am just delighted to have you. And you know, I was looking at your website and how you go about things and obviously everything about genealogy is detective work. And really to me that is the fun and the joy and the excitement because anything that you actually find, you really get to keep forever. But often times we come across these photographs with no names on them and no way of identifying who they might be and this is what you’ve been doing now for some time. Give us a little idea about how you got started in this.

Maureen: Oh gee! [Laughs] Ancient history. But really I credit my mother because she always showed us the family photos. And I don’t have a lot of old family photos, that’s my big secret. I have a lot of early 20th century pictures but not many before that. But she used to drag out the boxes and keep us entertained and tell us stories about these people. And you know I didn’t think anything of it, and I became interested in genealogy as a young kid. And then I got out of college and realized that “Hey, you can actually put the two things together!”

Fisher: Um hmm.

Maureen: That family history and photography go together quite well. And no one was really doing that when I started the photography detective business. Now there’s an awful lot of people who understand the importance of that picture and the power of it to change your family history direction. It’s a fascinating thing. So someone sends me a photo and they find out from one of my consoles they’re 15 minutes in length and I joke “Give me 15 minutes and I’ll change the direction of your research.” And we look at those family photographs and I ask them a series of questions and the questions are things like, “What do you remember about the picture?” And there’s always something that pops into someone’s head that they haven’t remembered until just that moment.

Fisher: Hmm.

Maureen: Which makes it really exciting because they say, “Well, in fact, the first time I saw that picture it was at so and so’s house. And we were doing this. And they told me that.” Or, “Oh wait a minute, I think I have that piece of jewelry in my jewelry box.” We talk about it and we talk about their family history and nine times out of ten it fits together quite nicely.

Fisher: Quickly.

Maureen: Then a list of people these pictures can be, this is when they were taken, based on what people are wearing, the family history, the details in the picture, and what other research turns up in the process. So in photographs, it’s so important for genealogy as we all know. I was working on a case just last week and I was double checking the person’s research because that’s part of the service, and I was looking at their research and I said “Ha! Let me just hack around online and see if I can find any new information,” because there’s new documents all the time.  And what do you know? I broke a thirty year brick wall.

Fisher: Ooh! [Laughs] You were probably as excited as she was.

Maureen: I called her up immediately and I said, “You have to check my work.” Because I can’t imagine, this is a very accomplished genealogist. She’s done this for a very long time. I said, “How could I have broken this case when you’ve worked on it for years and years?” And that’s what genealogy is all about. That is a pay it forward moment.

Fisher: Don’t you think sometimes we put blinders on ourselves, though? We start making assumptions in the past that, “Oh I can’t find it.” And then we’re just not looking, in the same way, as we would as if it were a fresh case.

Maureen: Oh exactly. I do it myself.

Fisher: Sure.

Maureen: We’ve all done it. You get a mindset that it isn’t out there, you can’t find it, you’ve looked and looked and looked, it might not be there, and then a fresh set of eyes says, “Did you notice that?”

Fisher: Yeah, right! [Laughs] Well let’s talk about some of the old 19th century photographs and some of the things that you’re able to do with those because I think that’s really quite fascinating to people. Styles changed even in that era much as they do today for both women and for men, and I know that’s an important part of how you identify unmarked photos.

Maureen: That’s right. You can’t overlook the fashion clues and there are details in every decade, sometimes within a specific year. You know if you think about what the fashion trends are right now today, they might not be the same fashion trend next year.

Fisher: Remember Nehru Jackets? I think they were “in” for like a week in 1967, right?

Maureen: [Laughs] I do, unfortunately. So this kind of thing, it changes quite a bit for men and for women. Now there are people who dress conservatively and so they may hold on to their favorite style clothing a little bit longer. And there are people who change their – young women particularly-  who change their fashion style to keep up with the times. So in terms of let’s say, 1890s, you can tell a lot about when a person, a women particularly, had her picture taken in the 1890s by the shape of her sleeve.

Fisher: Really?

Maureen: The size of it, the direction of it, because it’s always a puff.

Fisher: Well recently there was a story in the Smithsonian talking about how tuberculosis affected fashion back in the day, did you see that article?

Maureen: I did see it.

Fisher: And it just blew my mind because I guess the effects of tuberculoses actually affected a woman in a way that was deemed to be beautiful at that time. Pale, really skinny and wasting away [laughs] and so they built fashion also around it to keep the dresses off the floor so it wouldn’t pick up all the germs and then that affected the shoes and the style of shoes going into the early 20th century. Amazing!

Maureen: Exactly. Fashion doesn’t just pop out of nowhere. It’s an influence from whatever else is happening in society.

Fisher: And so do you have a list of things from each year that was unique to that particular time period? I’m sure the Civil War had special styles that were quite different from the 1870s even though as we might look back on it, it seems much the same period.

Maureen: I do. I have been working on photographs for a long time now so I have a lot of this information in my head. But I also have a pretty good library here in my office of all kinds of little bits and bobs about the history of photography and when photographers were in business, and fashion of course. I have many, many fashion encyclopedias in my office. There’s always something that I see in a picture that I may never have seen before.

Fisher: Sure. Well, we were talking off air before we came on about people who throw away old photographs because they can’t identify them, and what a physical sickness that brings on you when you just think about that. You are doing something about that with the Photo Detective Lost and Found. Tell us about that, and what people should be doing with their unidentified photos.

Maureen: Okay. So first off, three times in the last month three different individuals told me that they had either seen somebody throwing out their family photographs or after they met me they looked and they said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t realize that you found the clues in the pictures.”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Maureen: And they had tossed them as well. So I’m on this mission to bring photographs back into families. Especially if people aren’t interested in keeping them, please don’t throw them out. Please contact me before you do so and we’ll brainstorm some ideas on what you can do. So on Instagram, I have a new Instagram account or fairly new Instagram account, where I’m posting photographs from my own collection but I could easily post other people’s as well. And I may extend this into Facebook as well where I’m posting images that I have found that have a name on them. And there’s a lot of people that do this, it’s called an “Orphan Photo Movement.” But I’m using the hashtags in Instagram as a sort of index point, you know if you think about an old card catalog subject headings?

Fisher: Sure.

Maureen: So somebody could go in and search the hashtags for a particular surname and come up with a list of them that I’ve posted on Instagram. And then I’m dating all the photographs which is something that doesn’t always occur on some other websites. So I’m using my Photo Detective skills to also then reach out to those descendants of those individuals. So if you get an email from me that says, “By the way, I have a picture of your great grandparents.” It’s not a scam! [Laughs].

Fisher: How cool is that? So we go to the Photo Detective Instagram account?

Maureen: We go to Photo Detective Instagram, and I post I think three times week at this point, and all of those will eventually be featured on my website blog on MaureenTaylor.com.

Fisher: Okay.

Maureen: And they also go over to Pinterest Photo Detective and find some things.

Fisher: How about Flickr?

Maureen: I am not in Flickr.

Fisher: Okay, so Instagram and Pinterest?

Maureen: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Fisher: All right. She’s the Photo Detective, she’s Maureen Taylor. You can find out about her at MaureenTaylor.com. Once again, you’ve got the Photo Detective Lost and Found for your unmarked photos. You want to get them through to the Instagram account or through Pinterest or through Facebook. You’re all over the place.

Maureen: I am all over the place.

Fisher: [Laughs].

Maureen: Can I take one last pitch before we end?

Fisher: Please, yes.

Maureen: So on my blog on my website, which if you go to MaureenTaylor.com there’s a click where you can click on my blog, I have been working on some really complicated photo mysteries, and everybody out there, many of your listeners, may have a piece of information to help me solve this photo mystery. I now know that these women who were in the military or in the military in U.S. Army Air Corps, they were in Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery Alabama, but I do not know their names and I find it hard to believe that someone out there doesn’t recognize one of the women in those photographs. So please take a look, let me know if you recognize any of those faces.

Fisher: All right. Thanks so much Maureen. Hopefully, you’re going to get that solved and we can help a lot of other people solve their mysteries with their photographs at home. Great having you on!

Maureen: Thank you!

Fisher: And coming up next, of course, every family has a family legend that needs a little exploration. We have kind of a national family legend that we’re going to get into with Andrew Krea from NEHGS, the legend of Molly Pitcher, in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 149 (24:50)

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Andrew Krea

Fisher: You know, just a few weeks ago, it was the 238th anniversary of the Battle of Monmouth in the Revolutionary War, June 28th 1778. Hi, it’s Fisher, and one of my ancestors, Samuel Pease who lived in nearby Freehold, New Jersey was a part of that. And as a result of looking into the Battle of Monmouth in my own studies, I ran across this incredible article in a blog, the Vita Brevis blog with the New England Historic Genealogical Society, from my next guest, Andrew Krea who is a Senior Researcher there. Andrew, how are you? Nice to have you on the show!

Andrew: Hi Fisher. Thanks so much. I’m very happy to be here.

Fisher: So you’ve been researching into one of the great sub stories of the Battle of Monmouth. And the Battle of Monmouth by the way was one of the final battles of the Revolution. It kind of put an end to British hopes of winning the war. And in the middle of all this was supposedly, theoretically, historically a woman. And she was nicknamed “Molly Pitcher.” Now Molly of course is a nickname for the given name of Mary, especially back in those times. So a lot of people think that her name may have actually been Mary something. And you decided to dig into this and see if you could actually put a name on this mythical person or this actual person who was out giving water to the soldiers and helping fire the cannons, supposedly dressed in men’s clothing. She was quite a woman. What can you add, by the way, to my description here, Andrew?

Andrew: I can add some things like, she smoked and chewed tobacco and swore like the best of them! [Laughs]

Fisher: Aha! Okay. [Laughs] So Molly Pitcher became really quite the legend and we still hear about her to his day. There are all kinds of illustrations of her, especially through the late 18th and into the 19th century. And I guess it’s been some kind of, shall we call it a mystery or debate as to her actual identity or is it simply a matter of she’s a conglomeration of several people who participated in the Battle of Monmouth that day?

Andrew: Yes, that is definitely the question. There’s many theories out there. I believe it’s just a conglomerate of various women. When I started looking into this, I found it fascinating that there are some actual women on file who were paid pensions by the local state and federal government.

Fisher: Wow!

Andrew: For service in the Revolutionary War. And I had no idea about that.

Fisher: I didn’t either. I’ve never run in anything like that.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s very few. I believe, in the sources I checked. Most people find maybe three to five women in the general New Jersey area that I happened to be researching, throughout the entire war that actually received pensions. But still, I didn’t even know two or three women. I didn’t even know about that at the time.

Fisher: Right. So you started digging into this to see if you could put a name on this individual. And what did you learn?

Andrew: I learned from, first of all, I want to say that I learned from an article written in 1999 by Emily J. Teipe. She has an article titled “Will the Real Molly Pitcher Please Stand Up” in Prologue magazine which is online at the National Archives website. And while reading her article, I learned that most researchers can boil it down to perhaps three different women that may have been Molly Pitcher, or, as we mentioned, it might be a conglomerate of all of them. The first is a woman named Mary Ludwig Hays. And the first name, Mary, as you mentioned earlier, Fisher, Molly is the nickname for that, so that lends credence to the fact that this could be the actual Molly Pitcher.

Fisher: Sure.

Andrew: She was the daughter of German immigrants and her husband was a captain in Francis Proctor’s company in the Pennsylvania artillery. Her husband was John Hays. So, because her husband was a captain and they didn’t have children at the time, she fought alongside her husband. And she has an official Revolutionary War record. She certainly participated in the Battle of Monmouth. She supplied soldiers with drinking water as you mentioned earlier. I believe that’s how she earned the nickname “Molly Pitcher” bringing pitchers of water to people.

Fisher: Sure.

Andrew: And supposedly there are reports that she may have received thanks directly from General George Washington. But that’s sort of more of a family lore type of situation.

Fisher: She was actually at Valley Forge too, right? She was camp follower there.

Andrew: Yes, good point. She collected an annual pension of forty dollars from the State of Pennsylvania. So this is a likely candidate. And also in my research when I wrote this blog post, some people commented on my blog post and happened to mention that there is a memorial right next to Mary Ludwig Hays’ gravestone. There’s a memorial to her remarking that she is Molly Pitcher.

Fisher: Fascinating.

Andrew: Anyone can put a memorial anywhere.

Fisher: Right. Sure.

Andrew: But it’s very interesting that all those facts just come together. So the second woman who Molly Pitcher may be was a woman named Margaret Cochran Corbin. She was the daughter of Robert Cochran and she was the wife of John Corbin. John Corbin enlisted in the same company, Captain Francis Proctor’s company in the Pennsylvania artillery. So her situation, the reason that she’s another good candidate is, her situation mirrors and follows Mary Ludwig Hays’ very similarly. They were in the same company and their husbands were in the military and they followed their husbands into battle basically. And Margaret Corbin also received disability pay for her services.

Fisher: So she’s another one who got the pay and she was also in the Battle of Monmouth. This is crazy!

Andrew: Yes.

Fisher: Because it certainly breaks the stereotype, right, that it was all men? These were very active women in this battle.

Andrew: Yes, exactly. And the descriptions of them are fantastic! I mentioned earlier, but I’ll reiterate. Mary Ludwig Hays was described as, and I quote, “A rough, tough woman who reportedly smoked and chewed tobacco and swore like a trooper.” [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] Okay.

Andrew: That description alone is worth, you know, I can picture her in my mind. [Laughs]

Fisher: Yeah. And then these are tough women. You wouldn’t want to run into them in a back alley.

Andrew: Especially with a cannon. No, definitely not!

Fisher: No! Right, and they had cannons. They had guns and things!

Andrew: Yes, I know, I know. So the main reason I mentioned both Mary Ludwig Hays and Margaret Corbin is because I believe that their situations were mirrored and so similar that they’re both excellent candidates to be the real Molly Pitcher.

Fisher: Except that Margaret is really not a name from which Molly would come.

Andrew: Exactly. That’s a good point.

Fisher: Yep.

Andrew: Now the third, in my opinion, least likely candidate, and her first name is Deborah, so that’s even less to the nickname of Molly than Margaret.

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Okay.

Andrew: At least Margaret begins with an M. But the third candidate that myself and most of the other researchers have found in the past, was a woman named Deborah Sampson. She is reported to have actually disguised herself as a man, cut her hair really short and dressed up as a man to sign up, basically out of patriotism. And she thought it was her duty. I mean, she signed up with the 4th Massachusetts regiment where she was nicknamed, again supposedly nicknamed “Molly,” because of her high voice and her girlish complexion.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Andrew: Compared to the other men fighting along next to her who must have had beards and you know beards and so forth. So, she received a federal pension for her service also. And eventually, she settled in Massachusetts, had three children and so forth. But I mean, she seems, very possibly, a viable candidate as well.

Fisher: But the least likely of the three. Who do you think it is?

Andrew: In my humble opinion, I think it’s Mary Ludwig Hays, because of the name Molly. And because her family, the generations that followed her are adamant about her service and the plaques along the side of her gravestone and things like that, just a sort of a gut feeling on my side. There’s no true evidence that she was actually Molly Pitcher.

Fisher: Well you know, it’s a lot of fun too, you can apply all that you’re doing to any one of our family history stories, right? There are legends in everybody’s family.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Fisher: And it takes this kind of effort to kind of get a handle on what’s real, what’s not and what might have been. And I certainly think that’s the case here, because it could have easily been a conglomeration of all these three women and maybe some others we don’t even know about.

Andrew: That’s the thing. I agree 100%. It’s probably even many, many more women that we don’t know about. Because as I found all this information, I mentioned three that were actually paid by the governments, so I was shocked. But you know, there’s so many women out there that may have participated in the battles.

Fisher: He’s Andrew Krea. He’s the Senior Researcher for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Thanks for coming on and talking about this, Andrew. Enjoyed it!

Andrew: Oh Fisher, my pleasure!

Fisher: And this segment of Extreme Genes has been brought to you by FamilySearch.org. And coming up in three minutes, we’ll talk to our Preservation Authority, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, about your questions about preserving your precious heirlooms and documents. That’s in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 4 Episode 149 (37:10)

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It is Preservation Time on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, and this segment is brought to you by Forever.com. Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com is here. How are you, Tommy?

Tom: Super duper.

Fisher: Got a great email here from Ryan McMichael and I love this. He says: “My mom came across a single 25ft roll of old 8mm film.” He does “old” all in caps, and he says, “The catch… I’m not sure it was ever processed and I’m a little nervous about checking because I don’t want to expose it to light. If it hasn’t been processed, is there any hope at all of anything useful coming of it, if the process before date is February 1957?”

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: He says: “Are you done laughing yet?” [Laughs]

Tom: I just got started.

Fisher: Oh my goodness! Well, where do we go with this one, Tom?

Tom: Alright. That’s a really good question. We’ll talk about a couple different ways to do this.

Fisher: Sounds like nothing to lose.

Tom: Oh no. Yeah, you have nothing to lose but a few bucks. Yeah, he actually, which is smart, when you write to me with weird stuff, take a photo of it with your phone and attach it, because I would have to question him. But he actually sent a picture of the box. He also sent a picture of the can inside. This is definitely Regular 8, and in the old days, you had this little can that was 16mm wide. You’d put it in your Regular 8 camera and you’d shoot it until you got to the end of the roll, then you’d pop out the reel, pop it back in the opposite way and then run it again. And then what you’re supposed to do is send it into Kodak, have them develop it. Once they developed it, they split it into two 8mm reels so then you can watch the 10 that you’ve just recorded. But in his case, he shows a picture of the can with the black tape still on it. If the tape looks like it’s never ever come off of it, chances are it’s never been shot. However, to me, it’s worth the money to take the chance. We don’t physically do it in our store because Kodak doesn’t even make the chemistry anymore.

Fisher: [Laughs] Right.

Tom: But there is a place that’s called “Film Rescue.” Just go and Google the word “Film Rescue.” They’re actually in Canada, but they also have a shop in the U.S, I believe it’s in Michigan. And you can send the stuff to them. They take it across the borders, you don’t have to worry about customs or anything. And they only do it a couple of times a year because they have to make their own chemistry. So what I would do is do exactly what this gentleman did. Send them a copy of the box, or it will say Chemistry C41, or whatever. See, I’ve got one reel of this. They will give you quarter of what it would cost to develop it, when you want to get it in, so you can make sure you make one of their deadlines.

Fisher: Is it pricey?

Tom: It generally runs… I’ve seen it go as high as $50 a reel, depending on how many it is. But if you have like 10 reels it’s not going to cost you $50 for each reel.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So go in there, find out. Some of the chemistries are less expensive to make, some of them are very expensive. But find out. I mean, he’s had it for longer than I’ve been alive.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: So I mean, if he has to wait another 6 months or even a year, it’s probably not going to be a situation.

Fisher: This goes back to the Eisenhower Administration.

Tom: It does.

Fisher: I guess the question would be, Tom, how old is the oldest bit of film that you’ve actually developed? I mean, as far as how far back it went.

Tom: I would actually have to look at our stuff. We’ve got stuff from, you know, the Candy Bomber from World War II, we did all of his films for him. We’ve got some video that I’ve watched like a 1920 Model A Ford driving by so you know it’s got to be older than that.

Fisher: Right. But you did film?

Tom: Oh yeah.

Fisher: You actually processed film that hadn’t been processed before?

Tom: Oh, absolutely. Back in the day, you know… In fact, it’s funny about, you said our 3rd-anniversary last week, it was out 43rd anniversary for us last month. And so we’ve been doing this forever. And in the old days these guys at Film Rescue they used to do film for us once a month.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: We would get it a lot in. We would get it, send it back to them, they would develop it for us, send it to us. And also if you have the newer kind that’s in a little hard plastic things, and you can actually see a little bit of the film hanging in the cassette, we have people bringing those in today too. And on those kind of films, in the little plastic black cartridges, you’ll see a little bit of film and if it has white words “exposed” on it.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: The whole roll’s been exposed. If it doesn’t say exposed, you really don’t know if it’s the beginning of the roll or the end of the roll. And so after the break, I’ll come back and tell you some little ways you can find out if it has been exposed or if it hasn’t been exposed.

Fisher: All right. Really interesting stuff, great question too! We’ll be back in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 5 Episode 149 (44:20)

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back, final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority. Tom, some exciting events coming up, I know you’re going to be at some of these if people would like to visit you personally.

Tom: It’s awesome because a lot of times you can come up with your questions, bring things and show them to me because it’s a lot easier sometimes to see something when somebody’s describing it to you. And I can give you some tips and tricks to transfer it yourself or give you some leads to where you can go.

Fisher: All right. We’ve got the Scandinavian and German Research Expo at the Nebraska Prairie Museum, that’s in Holdrege, Nebraska, coming up August 25th through 27th. I know you’re still making plans on that one to see if you can be there.

Tom: Correct.

Fisher: There is Salt Lake City Family History Library Research week in Salt Lake City, Utah, October 10th through 14th. And then there’s also one in Midway Utah. And I know you’re going to be a part of that one. What’s the story on that one, Tom?

Tom:  This is one of my favorite ones to do because it’s a little bit smaller. It’s kind of like a mini Roots Tech. So you have chances to go and talk to the exhibitors. You have a chance to go and talk to the presenters. So it’s an awesome opportunity. You can go to FamilyHistoryExpos.com. It’s at the Homestead in Midway, Utah which is absolutely picturesque. It’s one of the most beautiful places in Utah. It’s wonderful. It’s November 11th and 12th. Hope to see you there.

Fisher: All right. Getting back to Ryan’s question here that we were getting into the last segment, and I love this, about processing old home movies from 1957. It was never processed and he wants to find out more about this, and you had some other direction you wanted to take this?

Tom: Exactly. So we’ve covered his, which is the old 16mm which they split into two 8s. If you have the cartridges, little black cartridges that just go right into the Super 8 cameras generally, if you see it and it doesn’t say “exposed” and you’re not sure… do I want to send this and develop it… one thing you can do is go into a dark room and make a little mark on it with like a grease pencil and go into a dark room, and get like a screwdriver and kind of turn the crank and see how far it goes. If it goes for a long, long ways, then it’s probably never been exposed. If it goes a short time and, “Hmm, It’s not moving anymore” and you can see the word “exposed” then it’s at the end of the reel. Then you know it’s almost done.

Fisher: And so the flashlight though wouldn’t cause any damage because you’re at the end of the reel, right?

Tom: Right. Exactly, and the thing is even if you turn it on at some other time, all you’re going to lose is like a one inch section which is like a fraction of a second.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So if you want to put a mark on it, in fact, if you have a red light it won’t even expose the film at all. And then you can actually see it moving and see how long it takes to move. If you’re really tight on dollars or you found a whole draw of these, if the box itself is sealed from the factory, I guarantee nobody’s ever done anything with it. So it’s not even worth using. You know I would always take the gamble and develop it just to see, because you never know what’s going to be on it. It’s not that big of an expense but it makes it kind of cool. If you’re really tight financially and you found a lot of these, this is just a simple trick to go and find out “Hey, how close am I to the end?” Because in the old days, just like today, people sometimes would keep one reel when, for Christmas, they’ll keep another one of birthdays, another one for their vacations, and when they’re done with that they take the cartridge out, put in another cartridge. And then when it goes to Christmas again they put in the Christmas cartridge until the whole thing is shot. And so quite a number of times you’ll find one that never ever got to the end so it says “exposed.” So this is just a cheap trick to kind of find out how close it is to the end.

Fisher: Boy, I had no idea there was so much to this. And you’re right. I actually found in an old family Bible once a negative of a photograph.

Tom: Oh yeah.

Fisher: And I was able to take that and put it on a scanner, scan it and then reverse it because of course, it was a negative. Made it into a positive and I was able to see the photograph from it. But these things are out there.

Tom: Oh absolutely. And another thing that you’re bringing up that is really wonderful is you can get color negatives and scan them. And if your scanning them at home or don’t have the right kind of a scanner, there’s software and apps you can go out and turn it into a regular positive.

Fisher: Great stuff. Thanks so much, Tom. Talk to you again next week.

Tom: Great to be here.

Fisher: Hey, that wraps up our show for this week. This segment has been brought to you by MyHeritage.com, and our friends at RootsMagic.com. And by the way, if you get on our Facebook page or ExtremeGenes.com, you can now sign up for out new weekly newsletter, The Weekly Genie. No, we will not be spamming you! Just giving you great information to help you with your family research. Thanks so much for joining us. Take care. We’ll talk to you again next week. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

Episode 130 – “Relative Race” Is Hot New Genealogy Reality Show/ Ireland Senator Talk Irish Records for St. Patty’s Day

by

Relative Race

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

This week, Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, talking about the recent birth of a “Leap Baby” in North Dakota.  What made this one unusual was that it is not the first Leap Baby in the family!  Hear all about it on the podcast.  David then shares some fascinating DNA news about the Aboriginals of Australia.  Just how long have they been isolated from the rest of the world?  Now we know.  Plus, another family artifact has been found and returned to a family… only this one was from World War I!  It’s a century old piece.  Also, another Civil War vessel has been found.  What kind was it, what did it do, and where was it found?  David will tell you.  David also has another Tech Tip, and guest-user free database from NEHGS.

Fisher then visits with host/creator/producer Dan Debenham of “Relative Race,” an incredible new genealogy based reality TV show that everyone was raving about at last month’s Roots Tech conference.  Dan will tell you how it works, how his company came up with the idea, and what you can expect in the coming episodes on BYU-TV.

Then… who’d have thought a Senator from Ireland would appear at Roots Tech?  Fisher talks with Senator Jillian Van Turnhout, who is a passionate genie who traveled too many time zones to count to attend the conference.  Senator Turnhout shares a lot of good news about on line records from the Emerald Isle that are coming available for Irish Americans.  Then, Fisher chats with Denise May Levernick about the grant her family has set up in her mother’s memory to award a cash grant to a young adult student for genealogy!  Hear how to make your student eligible.

Tom Perry returns to wrap up the show to take on fears and offer advice on using “The Cloud” for storage of your digital material.  Concerned about security?  Usability?  As always, Tom has insight you won’t hear anywhere else.  Have questions about preservation?  Email Tom at AskTom@TMCPlace.com.

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

 

 

Transcript of Episode 130

Segment 1 (00:30)

Fisher: And welcome back to another week of “Extreme Genes,” America’s family history show 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 I’m very excited, finally, to get on Dan Debenham today. H e is going to be a guest on the show in about eight minutes.
He is the host and producer of this genealogy family history reality show that everybody’s talking about. It’s called “Relative Race” and it is nuts! It is so much fun, and you’re going to hear right from Dan himself how this idea came about, how it got formulated, where you can see it, where you can catch it on demand. It is a great show and it was the talk of “Root’s Tech” by the way, when we were there, because they debuted the first program.
Plus, later in the show, since it is St. Patrick’s Day celebration this weekend in many places and, of course, formally in the coming week, we’re going to talk to an actual Senator from Ireland, and find out about what’s happening with family history records for those of Irish descent here in the United States.
Great stuff! And if you have a young adult student, somebody’s offering a free grant as they develop genealogy and family history. It’s like five hundred bucks if you want to hear how your young student can get into this. We’re going to have that for you too coming up later on in the show.
So, great stuff lined up! But right now it is my… I wouldn’t say you’re my cabin mate for the coming cruise in September, from Boston to Nova Scotia, but you’re going to be pretty close I’m thinking David. David Allen Lambert, the chief genealogist of the New English Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org
Fisher: Hi David.
David: Hey! Greetings from Bean Town, and we’re very excited because St. Paddy’s Day is around the corner but it means something more to us here in revolutionary war terms. Do you know why?
Fisher: Because what?
David: We kicked the British out of Boston!
Fisher: [Laughs] Yes you did!
David: A nice little Virginian named George Washington decided to stop by, and evacuation day is why we have closed schools in Boston, not for St. Patrick’s Day as many people think. [Laughs]
Fisher: Interesting.
David: Nice to hear from you as always. You know I’ll tell you, we were talking about leap year week and I just want to say that the odds of this family and this might not be told, probably have the bookies scrambling for the next four years.
Did you hear about the Allison family, new baby?
Fisher: Yes! It’s insane a new baby on February 29th Congratulations! Pretty rare, but…
David: the strange thing is it happened four years before and both daughters.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: You know it’s a 50/50 chance for a boy or a girl but the idea to be born on a leap year that is some pretty good timing.
Fisher: I know, four years apart, so I guess they only have a birthday every four years when they’re 16 they’re celebrate their fourth and the other one would celebrate the third.
David: What a happy first birthday for the sister of little Abigail.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: My goodness! So Brandy and Abigail, happy birthday and happy birthday! [Laughs] Well you know, speaking of birthdays going across the other side of the world, the archaeological and anthropological work being done with DNA studies is just mind boggling.
In recent years they’ve always thought that South East Asians about four thousand years ago intermarried with the aboriginal families in Australia. Well, that’s not the case. New DNA evidence shows that they have had no contact for fifty thousand years.
Fisher: The Aboriginals?
David: The Aboriginals are isolated genetically going back fifty thousand years. So if we think about our ancestors coming up and going into Europe, we weren’t even into Europe yet.
Fisher: No [Laughs] wow!
David: That’s amazing. So it’s always exciting to hear this news. So a new aspect of genealogical DNA is unfolding. Digging a little closer to home we talked about that mess kit well I’m going to go….
Fisher: Right. That was a World War 2 story last week, right?
David: Exactly. Well, I’m going to go a war before. A gentleman named Michael Babin, who lives in France, is a retired banker, and collector of World War 1 ephemera. At a flea market recently he bought an aluminium dog tag that belonged to Frank L. Smith, of the U.S. army, and the thing about that is he’s tracked down through gravestone records and talked to this man’s 73 year old daughter, and this girl lost her dad when she was twelve. So, Dotty Wright has been reacquainted with an artifact associated with her father nearly a century ago.
Fisher: Incredible! What a great story.
David: I love what metal detectors find. I’m a metal detectorist myself.
Fisher: Really?
David: Oh yeah! It is a lot of fun digging in the ground and finding what other people lost. I haven’t found any Anglo sacks and gold or coins, but I’m still looking.
Fisher: [Laughing]
David: That being said, if you were off the coast of North Carolina, in 18 feet of water, they have found the wreck of what they believe is one of three blockade runners. So this vessel was set up during the civil war to stop the running of the ironclads and to block the coast and the Union Army’s blockade, if you will, and this is fabulous! This is perhaps one of three boats, the Agnes Fry, the Georgianna McCaw and I’m really hoping it’s the third one, the Spunkie.
Fisher: The Spunkie! I hope it’s the Spunkie, yes!
David: I hope it’s the Spunkie too.
Fisher: [Laughing]
David: So while I waited for the Spunkie too, that will be the one name for the Spunkie.
Fisher: Right.
David: In any event, so that’s really some exciting news. My tech tip for the week, I talked about it last week that I was going to give a test drive to Research Ties, which is researchties.com And this is a company out of Provo, Utah. And we all have our research logs where you may print one off and write it down or you might use a notebook. This is a professional program which you can even beta test for free. Our subscription annually is for $30. It gives you three logins and 10 gigabytes of space. I can put in the repositories I want to visit, I can put in the film numbers, I can create all the shopping lists so when I go to the family history library in Salt Lake City, the National Archives in Washington DC or my local public library, I can access it online by logging in. I don’t have to, “Oh I forgot my notebook” or “Why am I here?” This is a great program online to try out. It is a cheap service, but very efficient.
Fisher: What’s the website again?
David: The website is www.researchties.com
Fisher: All right.
David: And speaking of data bases, on americanacestors.org, every week we give a free data base to our guest users. And this week we have the Chatham, Massachusetts and Harwich, Massachusetts metal records to 1850 help you with your pilgrim ancestors. You probably have some Cape Cod family. If you have ancestors in the northeast then hopefully this will help you find it. Well, that is all I have from Boston until next time Fish.
Fisher: Alright. Thanks David, talk to you next week. And coming up for you next in three minutes we’re going to talk to Dan Debenham, the host, producer, creator of Relative Race an incredible new genealogy reality show on Extreme Genes, America’s family history show.

 

Segment 2 Episode 130 (25:20)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Dan Debenham
Fisher: Welcome Back to America’s family history show ‘Extreme Genes’ and extremegenes.com. It is Fisher here, your radio root sleuth and I will tell you, at Root’s Tech we were exposed to all kinds of new products and ideas and services, but I don’t think there’s anything that got a bigger reaction, a bigger positive reaction than the debut of a television show that they provided there called ‘Relative Race’ and the producer and host of that show, Dan Debenham, is with me right now.
Fisher: Hi Dan, Welcome!
Dan: It’s good to see you Scott! Good to see you again actually.
Fisher: I know! I haven’t seen you in a long, long time.
Dan: Fifteen years I think.
Fisher: Something like that. But this show, where did you get the idea for it? How did this thing get started? And look at where you’re going with it.
Dan: Great questions. BYU- TV who has a mantra of ‘Seeing the good in the world’ they approached us about a year ago and they said “We have a general concept and a need that we’d like to see created for our programming” and they talked to us about this idea, and I mean really from the fifty thousand foot level.
Fisher: Right.
Dan: Just generically speaking about this idea of a show that would kind of hunt down relatives and gee, wouldn’t that just be great?
Fisher: [Laughs]
Dan: Now when we heard about this project we got pretty stumped and we came up with this concept where we would cast four couples. We flew them to San Francisco, and then every day we provided them with clues to run across the country and discover relatives that they never knew they had and had never met before, and they were racing from San Francisco to New York City, and along the way each day the last one to find their relatives receives a strike, three strikes and you’re off the show.
Fisher: Uh oh.
Dan: If you make it all the way to New York, you pick up twenty five thousand dollars and even that came with a twist and the twist was, now that you have really earned this money, congratulations! Because believe me, this trek across the country, this race, is full of ups and downs and highs and lows and happy and sad, and everything in between, but we then said “You can keep the money, or you can give a portion, or all of it, back to the relatives that you’ve met along the way”
Fisher: Oh how cool is that.
Dan: Yeah, so in fact, just this past…
Fisher: That’s easy; I’ll keep it all [laughs]
Dan: [Laughs] I believe you will. It was very interesting to see what these couples and those that made it to New York and ultimately the couple that won first place, what they were going to do with that money.

Fisher: Well you know people who are into family history are very giving people, they don’t only share of themselves but they share information, they find photographs, that type of thing. I’m not surprised that, that carries over in the financial side.

Dan: Well we didn’t know quite what to expect as we researched these couples. They submitted DNA to Ancestry DNA, and Ancestry DNA’s pool at the time was less than a million, so we had to find a route that went from San Francisco to New York City. We provided them with rental cars; we took away their cell phones, all GPS devises.

Fisher: So let me get this idea here; you took the DNA from them and then you had to literally track down descendants that fit the route so that they were all going to the same places?
Dan: Now that’s what we wanted to do at first was to go to the same towns.
Fisher: That’s crazy because it’s not possible.
Dan: That was impossible. So they were going to different towns, and what made the race fair is that every day they were given an allotted time, an allotted time to get to the different towns because they were all racing to different towns.
Fisher: You have to adjust it.
Dan: Yeah. And so it was the couple that came closest to their allotted time that won, and the couple that came furthest from their allotted time that received a strike, three strikes and you’re off the race.
Fisher: You guys must have been up till two, three, four o clock in the morning every day trying to work these little problems out.
Dan: It was wild. It was a wild ride, and the show is… you mentioned that episode one debuted at Roots Tech, and we received a standing ovation.
Fisher: Oh it was nuts! “Did you see it? Did you see it? It was great!” People were really enthusiastic about it. This is the thing about family history, if it’s entertaining the people who aren’t into family history, you know you’ve got something great, and that’s what it looks like to me. So tell us now, I was looking at this debut, now BYU-TV by the way is a cable station, available on a lot of markets
Dan: Fifty six million homes in America.
Fisher: And there are plenty of places that they do not get into, so I would assume you could watch online?
Dan: Absolutely. Binge watch the first two episodes right now because coming up, we just saw episode two this past Sunday, and every original episode is every Sunday night 8pm eastern time, and then you can back it up from there. 7pm central, 6pm mountain, 5pm pacific. You can watch it online at byutv.org, so anytime. Catch up episodes one and two and then you can watch it on either byutv.org or you can stream it at relativerace.com but again we hope as you get caught up that you’ll join every original episode airing every Sunday night.
Fisher: Sure.
Dan: It’s really fun. It’s wild.
Fisher: It’s just a good thing to set your recorder on no matter what you’re watching and catch the show.
Dan: Exactly, that’s what I do.
Fisher: I was just thinking. I’m looking at your bad luck, the first night you’re on against the Oscars, your debut night. The next week you’re on against the closing, the last episode of Downton Abbey
Dan: And the Presidential debate.
Fisher: Well that we can all skip to watch this, but still, I mean that’s your first two shows, your first two weeks, that’s a tough line-up to be up against.
Dan: You know what, we just filmed this past weekend episode 11 which we flew all the couples back and shot this episode 11 which is called ‘After the Race’ where the four couples come back and then talk about their experiences more and we toss them different vignettes, different parts of the episodes and we have them comment on them more, and there were representatives there from BYU-TV and I actually asked them I said “Can you explain to me what the thinking was here?” and they said “You know, it was a little bit of an error on our part when we put this in place, like eight months ago” and they said “But you know what they said, we’re finding that social media and the streaming is really peaking upwards already” so people are saying “I wasn’t able to watch it Sunday night against the Oscars, but I am streaming it and watching it online”
Fisher: So when you pick these couples, were these people who actually applied to be on the show?
Dan: Yes. We put out a casting call through a number of different mediums including a lot of the social media, and we created a website called ‘TRRCASTING’ which stood for ‘The Relative Race’trrcasting.com. Over a thousand people went to the site, and we asked them to submit a video, 1 to 2 minutes that explained who they are and why they should be on the show, and we gave a little bit of a premise of the show, they didn’t know the details in fact episode 1, which again we really hope you watch episode 1.
Fisher: [Laughs] it’s kind of important to watch episode 1.
Dan: Well it gives the back stories of all the couples, and you find out on episode 1, when they arrive in San Francisco, one of the very first things that is asked of the host, (me) so I’m standing there at peer 39 overlooking the ocean and I said “Welcome to Relative Race” I said “You’ve come from all over the country and you have four thousand five hundred miles in front of you. Now first thing I want to know is, how many of you like your phones and have brought them here?” They all raise their hands of course, and I said “How many of you think you could do without them?” Their jaws start dropping.
Fisher: Oh boy.
Dan: So we took away all of their cell-phones, we took away every GPS device. I then said “Welcome to your new GPS navigational device” and I raised it up and I said “This is what we call a map, a paper map” And so the age group is all over the map of our couples, we actually thought the youngest couple who were in their twenties, would just implode.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Dan: And they actually did pretty well. There’s much more than a dynamic here of discovering new family relatives. The interesting dynamic is that they have up to 8 hours together in a rental car everyday and they trying to figure out how to get to different…
Fisher: With a film crew.
Dan: Exactly. With six people around them, multiple cameras, Go-Pros inside their car, everything is recorded and it is fascinating to see how they get through this journey.
Fisher: So do you have each team basically have their own editing crew that puts together their package and then somebody else assembles the whole thing?
Dan: Yeah there is a media manager on site and then all that media comes back to us in our studios, and we’ve been spending about five months editing everything and we’re very close to editing the entire series. So again, now is the time to catch up and get hooked because… we’ve done a number of original television shows throughout the years and we feel fortunate to be able to do that, this is, I can honestly say, the best show we have ever created. It is really good!
Fisher: Well that’s what I keep hearing from everybody and I wouldn’t say it if that wasn’t the case. So give us one little hint of one story from this entire season that hits you most right here.
Dan: You know what it’s actually the next episode. Episode 3 happens to be my favorite episode. I got chills right now saying it. In this episode, one of the couples, it’s the husband, because you never know when you show up whom am I related to, is it the wife or the husband.
Fisher: Right.
Dan: And the couple discovers a cousin, and it’s the husband that finds a first cousin that he never knew that he had.
Fisher: Really?
Dan: Oh there are nieces that have never been met. These aren’t like sixth cousins; some of these people are first cousins and uncles that they never knew they had, one is a niece, in this case it’s a first cousin, and for me it was so poignant, it was so strong to see two strong, big, American men hugging each other and the moment they grabbed each other, they just broke into tears. They’re just sobbing and they say; and the statement is made by the couple that’s racing, they say “If we hadn’t done this, we would never know about our family” and he said “And here’s my cousin” and the moment I looked at him, I went “You’re my mother!” He said “Everything about you” his demeanour, the way he acted, was his mother who he lost fifteen years ago.
Fisher: Wow!
Dan: And he just looked at this man and they both just started sobbing and they said “The same blood is running through our veins.” And it’s a poignant moment, and these moments, the series is just riddled with them. But there’s also plenty of drama, there’s some compelling… it’s not all these incredibly emotional moments. There are some times when they met relatives where they were kind of like “Nice to meet you…can we get on with our race?”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Dan: Like all relatives.
Fisher: You’re not getting any of the twenty five grand. Okay, don’t like them.
Dan: It’s a good show.
Fisher: Well you know that’s what family stuff is all about.
Dan: Exactly.
Fisher: There’s politics even with this.
Dan: Exactly.
Fisher: So who knew? Well it’s ‘Relative Race,’ it’s the name of the show. It’s on BYU-TV which is on many cable networks throughout the United States. Otherwise you get it where?
Dan: Dish and Direct TV both have it nationwide. Everyone who has Dish or Direct or you can go online at byutv.org and stream it, or its own website at relativerace.com
Fisher: Dan Debenham, the host and producer, thanks for coming on!
Dan: Scott, it’s a pleasure, great to see you again.
Fisher: Alright, good to see you.
Coming up next; it’s a “two-fer,” we’ll talk to an Ireland senator who visited Roots Tech, and talk about what’s happening with Irish research… very important with St. Patty’s Day coming up, and another woman who’s offering a family grant to your student for genealogy, in three minutes on Extreme Genes.

 

Segment 3 Episode 130 (44:45)

Fisher: You have found us! America’s family history show, Extreme Genes and extremegenes.com
I am Fisher, your congenial host. And, are you surprised at how much we continue to pull out of the Roots Tech family history conference that was held in the Salt Lake City, Utah, last month? I’m not! Only because I was there, and I can tell you, we continue to have things that came out of it that we have to pass along in the course of the brief time we have each week.
And since a lot of places are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, it felt like a good time to share with you a visit I had with a woman who came all the way from Ireland for Roots Tech and she wasn’t just an Irish genie, she’s also an Ireland Senator with a strange name.
So, I’m talking to Ireland Senator Jillian Van Turnhout. I’ve got to understand, Senator, how it is that an Irish Senator has the name, Van Turnhout?
Jillian: It’s not a very Irish name. In fact, you will only find two of them there, my husband and myself. He’s Dutch and apparently Napoleon gave them all surnames when he was doing the census.
Fisher: Right, which happened in much of Europe at that time. So, you’re here at Roots Tech. I’m just amazed to have you here, and pleased and honored to have a little time to talk to you. Tell us about what’s going on with family history in Ireland, because we have so many Irish-Americans who’ve had such a hard time over there over the years.
Jillian: Well, the records are really opening up and becoming online. Our national library and archive are coming on board with some of the subscription websites and some of the free websites. We do have the 1901 census and the 1911 census are free online. You can see the images.
Fisher: They weren’t burned?
Jillian: They weren’t burned. You can see the images. You can see where your ancestors lived. And because we’ve had so many records that were burned, we’ve had to be inventive. But the Irish, we are inventive, and we’ve found a lot of work arounds. Like, I have been able to trace my family to the late 1700s. And very substantial and they were farm labourers, they weren’t anybody of any means, or anything of such sort, that you’d say they’d have land records. So, you can do it. It takes a little bit of digging, a little bit of work, but it is a great achievement. We’re also seeing more records now coming online. In Ireland, we’re celebrating commemoration this year of the 1916 Rising, so a lot of public are digging out records out of their attics. Coming forward with information and resources and our government are seeing the value that that’s encouraging more people in.
Fisher: For travel?
Jillian: Travel. I might be saying, my point is, people don’t travel to Ireland to find out if they have Irish ancestors. You come to Ireland to walk where they walked, to stand on the land, to see where they were buried, to see where they were born, see why did they leave that area and the government are waking up to that fact, and the state is beginning to put more and more records online. We see the Parish records are now online on our national library of Ireland, and I believe shortly to be announced, two major companies are going to have an index to those records. So, that would be great, because that’s all the parishes around Ireland. You’ll really be able to see the births and marriages of your ancestors.
Fisher: Well, and I’m noticing also that there’s a lot of talk about hotels now bringing in genealogical consultants to help people find their people while they travel to Ireland.
Jillian: Yes. Many of the top hotels are having consultants online, and many freelance people, genealogists in Ireland if you go to the association of genealogists. They’re there to help you. We want you to come to Ireland, but we want your experience to be rich and rewarding and that you really can. I say there’s somebody who travels to Wisconsin, to see three generations of women in my family, who went to a small town in Watertown, Wisconsin. And, I went, because I was able to access the records at home. I was able to go out, meet the historical society, find out even more rich information, and I feel I have a special link, because this town, were very welcoming and I hope in Ireland, we’ll return that type of welcome.
Fisher: Oh, I have no doubt that that will be the case. Thank you so much Senator for coming on, and it’s exciting to see what’s happening in Ireland now. It’s been a long time in coming, but new days are ahead for genealogists with Irish ancestry.
Jillian: It’s the time to start looking when it’s suspected if you have a name that has a slight Irish twinge to it, or you’ve always heard stories in your families. I’d say to start searching, you will have Irish roots.
Fisher: Awesome stuff! Thanks for coming to Roots Tech.
Jillian: Thank you very much for having me on.
Fisher: How cool is that? That Senator Van Turnhout would travel however many time zones that is to attend Roots Tech. Unbelievable. You know, people are passionate about family history. Enough so to actually start a family grant, to encourage high school and college students to pursue genealogy.
Denise May Levernick is behind this thing and she’s on the line with me right now from Pasadena, California.
How are you Denise?
Denise: I’m great, I’m great. Enjoying some wonderful weather here in California.
Fisher: I’m so excited for what you’ve got going on. Back in 2010, you lost your mom who was a fabulous genie, even researching her cousins right down to the end and you’ve set up a scholarship in her name for student genealogists. You want to tell us about this?
Denise: Oh, I’d love to. Thanks for asking. Mom was…she called herself a genie, and she was very excited about discovering where she came from, and when she retired, she lived here in southern California, grew up here in Orange County. When she retired, she moved to Arizona and became very active there with the genealogy groups, but every June, she came out to California and we would go together to the Southern California Genealogical Society Conference, the Jamboree.
Fisher: Right.
Denise: And mom just loved it. It’s a great conference. Three days and well over a thousand people attend. So, when she passed away, and we were looking for some way to honour her memory, it just seemed like a great fit. She always worked in volunteerism. She worked with students and young people. It just seemed like such a good fit, to set up a student genealogy grant, and tie it in with the jamboree, because, to be honest, I’m a little bit selfish, I get to meet the winner each year.
Fisher: Oh, how fun.
Denise: Yeah, it is fun, and we set it up in 2010, and we had five young people receive the award and each one of them have continued in their family history work and research. It’s just been so exciting to see them kind of grow in this field.
Fisher: Now, this is a $500 cash award, and it’s going to be awarded at the Jamboree, which be the way is going on June 3rd through 5th of this year so, it’s coming right up.
Denise: Right.
Fisher: And they have to be between the ages of 18 and 23?
Denise: Right. That’s it.
Fisher: That’s it, and a student? Okay, so they’ve got to be going to school.
Denise: Um-hmm and they have to also come to the jamboree to receive the cheque.
Fisher: Okay.
Denise: And, because part of it is, the whole conference will give them a free registration, so they get to attend at no cost, and we take them around, introduce them to people, and you know, they get to meet the genealogy guys, and David Lambert if he’s there from New England. It’s just a wonderful opportunity for them to kind of meet a bigger community of genealogists.
Fisher: Absolutely. Well, Lambert, you probably shouldn’t have mentioned that, I don’t want to discourage anybody, showing up there, but…hey, this sounds like a lot of fun. How do people get involved in this? How do they submit their application to possibly score this $500 cash award?
Denise: Well, send any students you know to the grant page, which is at my website, www.thefamilycurator.com/swf-grant
S.W.F. Suzanne Winsor Freeman, that’s my mom’s name and the whole packet is available there. We’re taking applications through March 20th, so there’s still time. I know students love to put these things off till the last minute, so we’re looking forward to that.
Fisher: Yeah, this kind of says right now, ‘Do it now or forget about it’.
Denise: Yeah.
Fisher: Absolutely. So the familycurator.com actually, you can find the links right there. We’ll link it on our page at extremegenes.com as well, so…
Denise: Great! Thank you so much.
Fisher: Great stuff Denise. Thanks for coming on, and we look forward to hearing who the winner is this year.
Denise: I will keep you posted. Hope you can win.
Fisher: And, coming up next, Tom Perry from tmcplace.com the Preservation Authority returns to talk about “The Cloud” Seems there’s some folks that have some concerns about preserving their digital family photos in audio and video there. Are they justified? Tom will set the record straight next in three minutes on Extreme Genies, America’s Family History Show.
MC Segment 4 Episode 130
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome to “Cloud Talk!” On Extreme Genes America’s Family History Show, and extremegenes.com
I am Fisher the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from tmcplace.com
He is our Preservation Authority we have on every week and Tom we’re just talking about this off air. It is just amazing how quickly things are changing with the Cloud and how that is kind of confusing. You know what it really reminds me of? Going way back when fax machines first came out.
Tom: Yup.
Fisher: Remember this?
Tom: Yup, absolutely.
Fisher: Fax machines came out and business immediately went to these things because it was a huge boon in communication and yet there were so many people that hadn’t even heard of them yet and they were already in all the businesses around the country.
“Wait a minute, what does the fax machine do, we can have this at home?”
Remember?
Tom: Oh yes! Any place you had a phone plug they had a fax machine.
Fisher: Right. So everything has changed. Now that the Cloud has become, I think in some ways it’s very much the same thing as a 21st century version of the fax machine where it’s out there, everybody’s using it but there’s still a huge number of people left kind of scratching their head going “Wait, what do I count on, how to do I use it, what should it cost me, why should I use it?”
Tom: Oh exactly!
Fisher: All these things.
Tom: Oh you know, that is absolutely the best comparison I’ve ever heard of what the Cloud is. Even before this when there were copy machines which actually turned into fax machines, you’d go into the precursors to Kinko’s and they didn’t let you touch the machines. You’d hand them your stuff, they would run it and then started letting you do it. If you can power on your computer, you can store stuff in the Cloud, it’s really that easy. Not as hard as people think it is.
Fisher: Right and we’re addressing folks who are just getting started in this and in storage and preservation of their digital material. Scanning photographs, photoshopping them and making sure they’re not going anywhere.
Tom: Exactly, and some people they’re intimidated, they think “Oh I don’t want to learn this new software. I don’t want to learn how to fix my pictures up.” Storing stuff on the Cloud isn’t like that. It’s not something new you really need to learn
Anybody that’s even a virgin at computers can figure out how to do this. You have an icon on your desktop and you tell it that’s where you want to store it. Everything is on Lightjar, or Icloud, or Google Drive, or Dropbox, and once its set up it does it for you in the background. You just keep dropping it, dropping it, dropping it, and one of the neatest things about the Cloud that I love is whether I’m on the road, if I’m home, if I’m at work I can access any of my stuff.
I don’t have to “Oh make a backup of this drive, keep it on this thumb drive and haul it with me.” I can go any place where there’s an internet connection, even on the airplane and I can go to Dropbox and work on a photoshop document or work on my genealogy, or anything I want to and the neat thing about it is “Oh hey, my sister Diane might be interested in these photos that I just found.” So I send her an invitation, she gets an email, she has access to just that folder that I gave her permission to.
It’s almost like one of those too good to be true things. It is absolutely incredible and everybody needs to get some kind of Cloud storage. We had a friend that just lost her house just the other day burnt to the ground, and all her stuff was in it. They had nothing on the Cloud, so basically if their brothers or sisters or relatives didn’t have any copies of what they had just had in their house, they would have lost everything.
Fisher: That’s right. We just had a disaster at our home radio station of past storage. Now, fortunately of course everything for Extreme Genes is stored on a Cloud. So while it took some time to restore everything that had been lost locally, it was there and we were able to get back into business pretty darn fast. But this is such an important thing to understand if you’re just getting started in family history, that the Cloud is a simple thing that takes care of itself. In fact, I’ve got one that every fifteen minutes it goes through and looks for any changes I’ve made in my computer at all and makes those changes and duplicates them in this Cloud storage area. So, if I lose my computer, it goes down or somebody stole it heaven forbid. This is all available to me instantly to restore.
Tom: And like you say “instant” is what’s so important. In fact right after the break let’s talk a little bit about how instant this thing can be, but you don’t have to keep everything on every single computer. You can give certain parameters on what you want to keep on each individual computer.
Fisher: Alright. Great advice! We’ll get into it more, coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

MC Segment 5 Episode 130
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: We are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes America’s Family History Show in extremegenes.com
It is Fisher here the Radio Roots Sleuth. Tom Perry is in the house from tmcplace.com our Preservation Authority. We’ve been talking about, I guess you’d call this “Clouds 101.”
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: Because like we talked about earlier, it’s a little bit like it was with fax machines. They came along very quickly and a lot of people were left scratching their heads going “Wait, do I have to have this, does it have to cost, is it hard to use, what do I do with it?” and this is a lot of folks who are just now perhaps getting into family history preservation.
Tom: Oh absolutely! Like we’ve done film transfers for people that we say “Hey, do you want us to put it on the Cloud? Then you have it instantly you don’t even have to come back in the store, we don’t have to ship it to you.” It’s like “Oh!” Like it’s this big haunting thing. “Oh no I can’t do the cloud, I don’t know a computer very well.”
I can spend ten minutes with somebody and show them how to use the Cloud. Because like I said in the earlier segment once it’s setup it rocks and rolls and the neat thing about having all your stuff in the Cloud, if you’re at home and you’re working on something and you say “Oh you know what, I was going to finish this thing for the report for the meeting in the morning, I’m going to work on that now instead of going in early. You go into the Cloud and you pull it down and there it is. Like I use one of those new mini ipads I use as a GPS in my suburban because that doesn’t have a GPS, it’s cheaper to do that.
Soon as I bought it, plugged it in and typed in my thing, boom! All my photos, all my apps, everything are right there, I don’t have to re-download them, I don’t have to go search for them, I don’t even have to pay for them again and because the way they’re set up. So this ipad I set up last night already has everything on it that I need and that’s the way it is with the Cloud. Sometimes I get a warning on my computer where it says “Oh you’re running out of memory.” So I go to my Dropbox and I say “Okay, well you know I don’t really need these things on this computer because I don’t access them.”
Fisher: Right.
Tom: So, I go in and say “hey I don’t need this on this computer anymore.” So it erases them from the computer but it’s still in the Cloud. So now I have all this memory but yet if one day I go “Oh you know what? I really do need that.” Go back in, click on it and in 5-10 minutes it’s all back through again.
Fisher: Right, downloaded again. And the question always comes up about security.
Tom: Oh yeah.
Fisher: Everybody is kind of concerned about that and certainly there’s risk of security with anything you do. I would suggest that there’s the possibility that security on your home computer is probably riskier than a Cloud like Google Drive or Dropbox.
Tom: Oh absolutely. Somebody could break into your home and steal your computer, they’ve got everything that’s on your computer and even if you have it encrypted with passwords, most people unfortunately don’t change their passwords very often, or they have something really easy like their birth date or the name of their dog or their first born kid
Fisher: Or 1,2,3,4!
Tom: Oh hey, I’ve actually had customers call and say “Hey, I need you to download this stuff off my phone I want it on a video DVD.” In fact, we tell them “Change your password, send that to us and then change it back so that we don’t have it.” They say “Oh no, it’s easy it’s just 1,2,3,4.”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: And I’m going “Okay you just gave me your password. What other devices do you have with the same password?”
Fisher: [Laughing]
Tom: So, security is important. I have never heard of a breach on the Cloud. I’m sure some day it will happen. But these guys, they’ve learned from all the mistakes from Target, Home Depot, that their stuff is so redundant now. Nothing’s perfect. But I mean it’s getting close to being there. But it’s just so nice that any time you need anything its right there on Dropbox. And like I mentioned in the first segment, if you have relatives and you’re working on things with that, you want to collaborate. You open up a Dropbox folder that everybody has access to.
So they can drop photos in, you can drop photos in. They can look at it instantly. There’s not “send” or not getting disks or mailing them. It saves you so much time, it’s just absolutely a must have. Everybody needs to have a Cloud and as you mentioned, it’s not expensive, a lot of Clouds are even free if you keep your memory under so much. We have tons because we do lots of video for people, but yet we spend less than $100 a year, that’s less than $10 a month for a terabyte worth of storage.
So it’s awesome if you can get two Clouds, make sure the Clouds aren’t related whether you’re on Google drive, Icloud, Dropbox, Lightjar… get them.
Fisher: Alright. Good stuff Tom, thanks for coming on.
Tom: Glad to be here.
Fisher: We’ve covered a lot of ground this week. Thanks once again to Ireland’s Senator Jillian Van Turnhout, for talking to us about what’s happening in Ireland with Irish research as we get ready for St. Patty’s Day. Also, to Denise May Levernick who is offering a family grant to students who are in genealogy, and to Dan Debenham host and producer of the “Relative Race” a great new reality show everybody is raving about.
Talk to you next week and remember as far as everyone knows… we’re a nice normal family!

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Episode 125 – Handwriting Analysis on Ancestors’ Handwriting

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Bottom of birth page second record

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Fisher and David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, open the show.  They anticipate reviewing Roots Tech, the largest family history conference in the world, that is taking place over the weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah.  David then talks about a remarkable discovery of remains under a bus station in Harlem, New York!  Just whose remains have been discovered and what is their history in New York?  David will tell you.  David then talks about another discovery in Yorkshire, England involving Roman gladiators.  He’ll share the incredible numbers and what has been learned from these recently found remains.  Black History Month is in full swing, too, and David shares a special database related to African-American ancestral information from NEHGS.  Fisher then fills in David on a unique app he found that allows any face to be placed over yours in photos or videos.  You can even put your ancestor’s face over yours and then tell that person’s story!  Hear what that app is.  David also shares news about an exciting new audio app coming from MyHeritage.com.

Fisher then visits, for two segments, with Nancy Douglas, a handwriting analyst with WriteMeaning.com.  Nancy explains the various regions of handwriting and what they mean in learning about someone’s personality, and how she got started in this field.  In the second segment, Nancy then reveals information on several of Fisher’s ancestors based solely on their handwriting samples.

Then Tom Perry talks preservation, and how to know about the formats of your current media, and how you can convert them for long term preservation.

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

Transcript of Episode 125

Segment 1 Episode 125 (00:30)
Fisher: And, Welcome to another edition of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com!
It is Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out, and this of course is our Special Roots Tech Edition! It’s going on while Roots Tech is happening, and if you’re not familiar with that, Roots Tech happens to be the largest family history conference in the world! Something like twenty five thousand people converging on the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City Utah, right now.
If you’re listening to this, no matter where you are, you can follow along and hear some of the talks, see some of the classes by going to RootsTech.org, they’ve got streaming video going on there all the time, so check that out, and then next week we’re going to tell you about some of the things we’ve learned, new technology, some of the things happening in some of the classes some of the exciting directions that family history is going in.
But right now in the studio with me, my good friend from Boston, Massachusetts, the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, David Allen Lambert.
How are you David? Good to have you!
David: I’m doing great! Well we’re going to have lots to talk about next week with Roots Tech, but I have some other exciting news for our listeners with Family Histoire News.
Fisher: All right! Where do we start?
David: Well, we’re digging deep right into the old bus station at 126 Street, in Harlem.
Fisher: Well that’s right in the heart of Harlem, isn’t it?
David: It really is.
Fisher: Wow!
David: They found over a 140 bones from an Old Dutch Cemetery, but this isn’t Dutch settlers, these are African-Americans that were part of the settlement. Probably some of them actually would have been slaves and these are from the 17th and 18th century, and with DNA and all this they found it in this decommissioned bus station that they had speculation there was a cemetery under there and started digging in.
Fisher: Voila.
David: And Voila!
Fisher: Wow!
David: There seems to be a lot of that because going across the pond over to Driffield Terrace, Yorkshire, England, they have now been analyzing over 80 skeletons of Romans that they have unearthed a few years back.
Fisher: I saw the digital pictures of this and they have each individual Roman skeleton laid out on a table, and you can’t describe it as anything less than creepy.
David: It is creepy. But the results are going to be very exciting. Using the inner ear bone to extract the DNA information and it’s really interesting. You’d think they’re all from Rome, not really. Their descendents are going to be surprised; they’re going to find that they have some descendents that match with people that lived in Wales, and also surprisingly enough one of the skeletons matches with someone from Palestine or the Saudi Arabia area because obviously the Roman Empire stretched all over the place.
The injuries are interesting. It looks like somebody was mauled by a bear or something like that. And the interesting thing is a lot of them were decapitated. Now was this…
Fisher: I don’t know what that means.
David: I don’t either.
Fisher: They say, they’re all under 45 years old and they’re very strong men, and they were Gladiators is what they are determining with these guys and we’re talking going back now 1800 years, we’re talking about 200 years after Christ. Unbelievable!
David: It is. And you know with everybody out there that’s had their 23 chromosomes done and their DNA work, who knows they may have dug up great, great, great, great, great, great, great Grandpa.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: Well you know we have exciting news in Boston to announce. It’s Black History month for the month of February, and we are always giving out a guest user database at AmericanAncestors.org and the one I want to talk about is the one that we have commemorating Black History month. So if you go onto our site, you can start as a guest user on AmericanAncestors.org and you can find rich content of an African-American study. We’ve gathered up databases that reflect African-American research and whether you’re of an African-American descent or you are a historian and journal and curious to what we have, take a peek.
I tell you, we get some interesting emails but the other day I got a video sent to me from President Nixon, how did you do that Fish?
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: That was kind of scary and creepy but I enjoyed it.
Fisher: [Laughs] All right for anybody listening who maybe doesn’t follow us on the Facebook page, there is a new app out and I didn’t even mention it in the page. I didn’t want to spoil it, but I guess I need to let the cat out of the bag. It’s something called ‘Face Swap Live’ its 99 cents you download it on your phone. And you can take anybody’s face and it can be put on yours.
So you know in my case because I do a lot of character voices and impressions and all that. I’d find famous people and I’d put their face on mine with this app and record something. In this case I recorded a thing as Nixon, and sent it on to David but it’s unbelievable. It’s better than a mask it looks like that person is still with us
David: Well you know for genealogists that like to really dig deep into their ancestry and get to know their ancestor, well guess what? Now you can become your ancestor.
Fisher: [Laughs] its true!
David: Get a great photo of Grandpa or great, great Grandpa and scan it and put it right into your phone and with this app all of a sudden voila! You are now talking to your ancestor or as your ancestor or something like that.
Fisher: Well, I was trying to figure out what the application would be for family history with this thing because first of all it’s so much fun you know for parties or just among friends.
David: Yup.
Fisher: It will also swap faces, so if you get two of you in a picture it will swap your face with somebody else’s face and you’ll be on each other’s heads it’s crazy. But when you do this other stuff you can actually record yourself using the face of your ancestor, for that ancestor to tell their own story. Now how cool and bizarre is that? [Laughs]
David: It really is and I can tell you that I’m going to really scare some of my family members in the next coming weeks with this app. When they have visits from people like former co-workers that they didn’t want to hear from.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: Or better yet, I have some co-workers back in Boston that might get some interesting messages sent from themselves. Stay tuned!
Fisher: Yes! Those things can happen and again the name of the app is ‘Face Swap Live’ it’s just 99 cents, you just download it onto your phone and it’s right there it’s very easy to use just play with it a little bit and you’ll get the hang of it very quickly. You can download pictures, you can take pictures to use, they have a little supply for you to play with to start with but you can do anything. In fact, I did a thing with the Captain of the Titanic and did an interview with him.
David: It looked a little frosty.
Fisher: [Laughs] it did, he looked very cold.
David: Well, I’ll tell you tech tips are wonderful and next week with everything with Roots Tech, you’re going to hear lots of them. One of the apps that I’m going to be talking about will obviously be the exciting new one by ‘My Heritage’ their audio app that’s coming out. It’s going to be really a neat way of saving your family stories with your genealogy program.
Fisher: Yeah that’s a great way to go anytime you can add audio and video it really brings it alive especially when you can preserve a voice.
David: Exactly. Or preserve a video of someone who really isn’t on a video because the camera wasn’t invented yet Fish.
Fisher: [Laughs] But I love the idea that even if you just have nice photographs you can run the audio over those and mix those together to create a nice presentation.
David: Wonderful stuff, and let me mention that I’m going to be reporting live for your listeners from Birmingham, England at ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ live in England, coming up in April.
Fisher: Oh that’s going to be fun!
David: It will. It will be nice to go across the pond where my grandfather was from there so I’ve got some genealogy to do as well. NEHGS is doing a tour of London afterwards so I’m sneaking in to do “Who Do You Think You Are’ a little early with a couple of our staff and we can’t wait, and we can’t wait to meet all the people that are attending and get some stories from the floor of the conference live for our listeners.
Fisher: Oh it’s going to be a lot of fun! All right David, I am very excited today because I have shared with our guest Nancy Douglas, the Hand Writing Analyst, hand writing samples of some of my ancestors to see what she can tell me about their personalities and what they might have been going through actually at the time that they wrote these samples. How cool is this, huh?
David: Sounds exciting.
Fisher: Yes! So we’re going to do two full segments with her today. We’re going to talk about how she can actually help you know the personality of your ancestors through their hand writing and then and then another segment talking about my particular people. I haven’t told her anything about them, then I will share what I know about them with her and see how much of these stories match up.
That’s going to be coming up in about three minutes, so stay close on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 2 Episode 125 (25:20)

Fisher: And, you have found us! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
My name is Fisher, the Radio roots Sleuth, and I’m very excited to have on Nancy Douglas. Now Nancy has a website called WriteMeaning.com, which has to do with analyzing the hand writing of your ancestors, and I’m sure there are other uses for this as well Nancy, but I’m certain that’s one of the emphasises that you like to place on what you do.
Nancy: Yes. That’s correct Scott.
Fisher: Now, how long ago did you start this whole thing?
Nancy: I started this when I moved to Utah, from 2007 and I moved in across the street from a woman whose best friend was a handwriting analyst, and I’ve always had a fascination with handwriting ever since I was little. I remember people by their handwriting and this girl had a series of courses that she offered and I took those classes and then I apprenticed with her for 4 or 5 years.
Fisher: Wow!
Nancy: Through that process I realized it could be one aspect of the services that I provide would be to provide personality profiles for people who happen to have ancestral writing. So it’s been something that has been very well received and successful.
Fisher: Now, you left Utah, for California some time back and you set up business there. What kind of applications have you applied other than the family history side of it?
Nancy: It’s for living people. Just general personality profile, personality insight. From a work perspective I offer employment screening for people who are looking for employees with certain personality traits. I can help them screen the people who have applied for those positions and get people into positions who most closely fit the profile of who they’re looking for. That’s been very successful as well. It’s an excellent way to make sure that people get fit into the correct position and it reduces employee turnover. I can also do team building, something similar to the ‘Myers-Brigg Type Indicator’ but using handwriting, where handwriting will reveal to your co-workers more about who you are and the ways that you can work together when you have this personality profile.
Fisher: Now, I was talking to a friend of mine once who was dating somebody she knew, she actually had his hand writing analyzed by somebody who actually does this work for criminal cases where they can actually determine if somebody has a past. Now, do you do things like that?
Nancy: I don’t do specifically forensic analyzing, that’s what that’s called when you do that for the court system. There certainly are many analysts who have this what they specialize in. but I do, do compatibility screening so whether it’s a business partner, if you want to make sure you’re going into business ‘will we be compatible as partners?’ or if it’s someone who you’re looking to have as a life partner. I can do compatibility screenings and talk with the people about the traits in each of their personalities that would be beneficial or not.
So in addition in this day and age of online dating and online profiles where you really don’t know somebody, it’s a good idea to get an idea of who they are and their handwriting is very revealing about that. So if you’re doing online dating and you really want to know, send me a sample of their writing and I can tell you if you if you should just run as fast as you can or if you should stick around. [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] That is amazing. Well this has been very fun to talk to you about as we set up this interview because I did send you some samples of some of my ancestors handwriting for you to take a look at, just go ahead as to which ones you think are most interesting from the top and we’ll kind of go through them.
Nancy: Okay. That will be fine, I want to get this little bit of quick background on areas that we look at with someone’s handwriting.
Fisher: Sure.
Nancy: Just so your listeners have an idea. We look at the slant of someone’s writing and that is based on what is called the upper zone letters. So in the handwriting there are three zones… the upper zone, which will be for example an ‘l’ or a ‘t,’ lower zone letters, for example ‘g’ or ‘y’ and middle zone letters, ‘i’ ‘m’ ‘n’ those types of letters.
Fisher: Sure.
Nancy: And each of those zones has something to do with your personality; so upper zone letters represent everything going on in your head:
• Your philosophies
• Your ideas
• Your creativity
• Your imagination
• And your intellect.
Middle zone letters represent those reflect:
• The day to day
• The here and now
• What’s going on in someone’s life,
And the lower zone letters represent all things physical:
• Your physical drives
• Your desires around acquisition of money
• Your sexuality
• Your desire for change
• Level of restlessness
Those types of things show up in the lower zone. So we look at that, we look at the slants like I said, we look at the baseline and we look at individual letter formation and we look at how letters are connected together. Those are just a few of the things that we look at. Those are just a few of the things we look at there are many more things but I just wanted to give a little background to your listeners on that.
So, for you and your ancestors; you sent me basically four samples of writing and the first one I think you said is your second great grandfather?
Fisher: Yeah, actually there are a couple of second greats in there.
Nancy: Okay. So this is the small sample it’s from the Bible of John Hardy.
Fisher: Okay, yes.
Nancy: And, he was a person who was very driven and that shows up in the letter ‘t.’ He was a very restless person, he liked change. He liked to do rigorous things. He had very good leadership skills. At the time of this writing he was feeling a lot of personal pressure.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: And he was feeling very squeezed with everything that he had to do in his life at that time. He was very geared towards the physical aspects of life, like I said that lower zone. His lower zone really pops out being much more emphasized than the middle zone and upper zone in his writing.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Nancy: And so, someone whose very driven by material acquisition. Wants to make sure that he’s taking care of himself and his family from a monetary sense, those types of things and that’s also where the restlessness shows up as well. The other thing that jumped up again was he was a very tenacious person and again going back to that drive. That shows up in the variety of ways that he crosses his letter ‘t.’ So that’s a little bit about that grandfather.
Fisher: All right. Let me tell you a little bit about what I know about him. He was born in the area of Nottinghamshire, England, in the early 1800’s. He was married briefly to a woman who died that young, he lost a child and then he married my great, great grandmother and they came to America. He was what they called a boot-closer and they came to New York City and settled there. And at the time that he wrote that, they had just lost a baby girl and so inscribed this Bible to his wife at that time, obviously in my mind just based on the date, to give her comfort.
Nancy: Um-hmm. Very good, one of the things, this is a photo copy of that so I couldn’t see all the levels of details but it’s interesting that he also appears a little bit tired at this time.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Nancy: The up strokes on his lower zone letters, I don’t know if you’re looking at the sample with me at the same time.
Fisher: I’m not.
Nancy: The up strokes on the lower zone letters are much lighter. The down strokes are easy to make you’re going with gravity but when you’re pushing up against that if you don’t have enough sort of vital life energy when you’re doing that it will show up as much lighter and that’s a typical sign of someone whose feeling tired at that time. So it’s an interesting reflection of what he was writing about.
Fisher: Yes. Okay great, who else do you have there?
Nancy: The next sample that you sent was also out of a Bible.
Fisher: Uh-hmm
Nancy: Family Bible of the Fishers, and you’d have to look specifically at this, the smaller writing at the bottom of this but what’s interesting to know is that this is a great example of slants. So the person who wrote the top part has a very vertical to reclined slant.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: Slants tells us about how you go about making decisions. Are you an emotional decision maker or are you a logical decision maker? People with vertical writing are very, very logical they’re what we call the ‘head over heart people.’ They’re good to have around in a time of crisis, so they don’t let emotions run away with them and they don’t crack under pressure. So who’s that writing at the top?
Fisher: That would be Robert Fisher, who was another second great grandfather and he was raised by a stepfather whose name he took. At least I believe that’s the case, I’ve never been able to prove it but there’s a lot of reason to believe that was the case, and it doesn’t appear that he had much of a relationship with him so I think he grew up being a tough guy emotionally, became very involved with the Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, founded a church there, was part of it. He wasn’t clergy but he was very involved in that and I think he was a very stern father with his children.
Nancy: Um-hmm, I can see that in here. So we do have like I said this vertical writing too interestingly reclined and when you’re writing begins to get reclined its people who withhold emotion.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: And so he would not have been a very warm and giving person with other people. In that sense he was very reserved, emotionally reserved.
Fisher: All right. We’re going to take a break and when we return we’re going to talk more with Nancy Douglas, the handwriting Analyst from WriteMeaning.com and she’s going to look at some of the signatures of, shall we say, one of my more colorful ancestors, when we return in five minutes on America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes, and ExtremeGenes.com

 

Segment 3 Episode 125 (44:45)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Nancy Douglas
Fisher: You know, a radio person once asked me if there was really enough material out there to talk about on a family history radio show every week. Well now on our third year of Extreme Genes, I think he knows the answer, and this visit with ancestral handwriting expert Nancy Douglas is a perfect example of how many different aspects there are to talk about.
So before we get back to the analysis of the writing in my 19th century Bible, let me ask you this Nancy, can you tell male from female hand writing?
Nancy: No. And that’s one of the interesting things about handwriting analysis; it’s a very neutral way to see someone because you don’t know if they’re male or female. There are masculine tendencies and traits and feminine tendencies and traits so you sort of just make a guess but really it’s just a guess.
Fisher: So my guess was that, on that Bible the top handwriting was male and the smaller hand writing at the bottom was by a female.
Nancy: It could be or not I really couldn’t tell you.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: Honestly there’s no indication. Now you’ll notice that the bottom writing slanting more to the right.
Fisher: And smaller.
Nancy: Yes it’s smaller but I wasn’t sure if there’s more information here. She or he, the writer had an area that they had to fit the writing into so I’m not sure I mean it is smaller but I don’t know if it’s an accurate reflection of the size.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: And the size of writing does absolutely say something about people as well. The interesting thing that I’ve noticed on this writing that I saw is the lower zone, the lower zone letters have what is called the ‘dumping stroke.’ What that means is people who feel extremely overwhelmed at the time of the writing and they just really need to get rid of responsibility and the writing is downhill and I think their health was not very good when they were writing this.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: Downhill writing is a sign of someone who is either extremely fatigued, not feeling well or emotionally depressed, and there’s other signs of this writing that shows there is a lightness like a lack of vitality, a lack of life vitality this time. But it’s also a person who had been balanced, very clear thinking but they were feeling overwhelmed at the time of this writing.
Fisher: Now see I believe that’s the widow of Robert Fisher, who wrote that. I don’t know for a fact because I don’t have any handwriting to compare it to but she would have written it just analyzing when the dates and when the hand changed within the Bible. There were five different people that wrote in this Bible. This was later in her life probably in her 80’s that she wrote this. Now all this seems to fit beautifully.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah and then the last sample that you gave me is a series of signatures of your great grandfather. Is that right?
Fisher: Yes. Great grandfather Andrew (Fisher) the fireman and his wife Jenny.
Nancy: Very interesting and the thing that grabbed me right away was that she signed her last name like his. In particular where the word breaks so she does ‘F’ and a break and then ‘i- s.’ Then a break, then ‘h-e-r.’ And she does that very similarly because that tells me there is a level of maybe tradition in there following her husband.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: She is an interesting person. Both of them had a very similar slant. Which might have made them hard to be around because their slant is what’s called ‘very inclined’ which means a high level of emotional decision making, and so people who have that kind of a slant introduce a lot more emotion into their decision making and they can tend to overreact when faced with a crisis they don’t handle that too well and I mean, he’s a fire-fighter. That’s very fascinating to me.
Fisher: Yes. There’s a lot more to him too. [Laughs] Keep going.
Nancy: Yeah. He also has these very interesting hooks on his capital letter ‘A’ and those hooks are something that shows that he was hooked on something in the past or something he couldn’t let go of, and he also has a hook on the end of his letter, on the letter ‘r’ and that hook in its best form can be someone that’s very tenacious and worst form, someone whose extremely opinionated and could be sometimes cruel and sarcastic with others. So that was very interesting to me both of those hooking. He was a very analytical person, he had a great deal of personal pride, and he could be very sensitive to criticism.
Fisher: I believe all these things, absolutely! He was into politics; he actually ran for office at one time, he did not make it. He was a merchant with his brother but he was the junior merchant between the partners, and he had…. shall we say a lot of relationships. [Laughs]
Nancy: Okay. Interesting, interesting he was definitely a talker as well. He leans on the letter ‘d’ he leaves the belly of the ‘d’ open from the stem which indicates someone who liked to talk, and in many of these samples there’s a lot of what I call ‘pressure points’ which means that he was feeling like he was under pressure when he was writing these. There’s a very sharp angular quality in his writing which can indicate him being not in particular warm and fuzzy with other people.
Fisher: I think that’s true too. He was also the head of the Veteran Fireman’s Association, for the retired guys at one point. So we see a lot of newspaper quotes from him, he was very talkative.
Nancy: Interesting. Yeah and he also was an intuitive person. The way that he breaks up his letters in his name, they’re not connected. If you go back and look you’ll see that he writes the ‘A’ and then there’s the ‘n’ and then there’s a space, then he puts the ‘drew’ together and he does the same in his last name too, and when you have those disconnects in the writing it means that you are someone who rather than being a person who has to logically step through step by step by step you’re more of an intuitive seeker, so you think about many things at one time and can’t put puzzle pieces together.
And then, in contrast to that, your great grandmother Jennie, she was a softer person, softer than him, she probably had to be a counterpoint to his sort of sharpness. She was a cultured woman, I wondered if she might have been a musician, she had a great imagination and she was much more open and friendly to other people than Andrew was.
Fisher: Yeah, one story about them got passed down in oral tradition that came through my family that one day a neighbor came to Jennie in New York City, this would have been in the 1880’s probably, and said “I saw Mr. Fisher come home in the great cab last night and assisted into the house. Was he ill?” and she said “No. He wasn’t ill. He was just dead drunk!”
Nancy: [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] so you know, I can see the softness of her just accepting the situation and I can see the hard living of this man, very interesting.
Nancy: Yeah. So that’s just a little bit about your folks, and when I do an analysis depending on how big my sample size is I should say it could take me a day’s work to actually…
Fisher: Oh I bet.
Nancy: … go through the writing and really understand. There’s a lot of variation, a lot of subtlety, it’s a science and it’s crossed referenced as a science in the Library of Congress. But there’s also a level of art to it, it’s classified under the same system as psychology is, so there’s bold aspects to that. So when I look, I almost inhabit the person and really try to get a sense of who they are and the feedback that I get from folks… nobody gives me free information because I never want that, I always get post information and its really exciting to see how stories match up and particularly if there are still ancestors who are alive who knows the person that I was analyzing. So that’s always fun to see.
Fisher: Well, all the folks you talked about lived and died in the 19th century. So it’s very fun to get that insight that you couldn’t get any other way.
Nancy: Right exactly, and the interesting thing is you can see in your own self are there personal traits that you inherited and that will show up in that person’s writing.
Fisher: Right.
Nancy: and that’s always a fun aspect of this as well.
Fisher: Well, this is great stuff Nancy, thank you so much for your time, your insight, fascinating! I know listeners are going to want to know more about this and they can go to your website WriteMeaning.com, all your contact information is right there, and by the way for people who have been listening to this segment who want to see these samples of the hand writing, I’ll have them posted on our Facebook page so you can check it out.
Nancy: Okay that’s sounds great. Well thank you Scott so much for your time! I appreciate that.
Fisher: All right, great stuff. Nancy Douglas from WriteMeaning.com, and coming up next Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority joins us to answer a couple of great listener questions about digitizing old photo albums and why a flash-drive works showing a video in a computer but not in a high def. TV, find out what Tom’s got to say about these issues coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 4 Episode 125
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And we are back! America’s Family History Show Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
It is Fisher here the Radio Roots Sleuth. It is preservation time with our Preservation Authority Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com
Hello Tommy,
Tom: Hello, it’s wonderful to be here again.
Fisher: Yes! And we do have a question here that has been emailed to AskTom@TMCPlace.com It’s from Lisa Sorensen. It doesn’t say where she’s from but Lisa asks “I’m interested in having a very old photo album digitized, two old albums actually. Do you work with very old photos and what would the cost be to have this done?”
Tom: Oh absolutely! You bet. We do photo albums. You know photo albums are really generic it’s like saying photograph. There are different kinds of albums, I’ve seen ones with the garrets types in them, I’ve seen ones that have the old glass plates, and we’ve seen ones that are torn, that are faded, all kinds of things. It’s going to depend on what condition your photos are in, how old they are, if you want any changes with them.
For instance we had someone who brought in a photo album that we were digitizing and then they called us and said “Hey, my mother’s just passed away we need a good photo for the obituary and my favorite photo of her is the one with her and me at my wedding. However I’m in the picture too and I don’t want to be in an obituary and if I just cut myself out I’m going to have to cut off her shoulder and it’s going to look really bad. What can you do?”
So what we did, we actually had our artist go in and remove him, rebuild her shoulder and then it looked just like it was a single picture, it looked wonderful.
Fisher: Yes.
Tom: It’s just amazing what you can do with apps, what you can do with PhotoShop, and different kinds of software. So the biggest thing is to figure out exactly what you want. If you want them just digitized and you want to do all your work with them, it’s pretty inexpensive to do photos whether you have us do it or a reputable place close by, you just make sure that wherever you get it done that they do it in house.
I hear all kinds of horror stories where somebody sends them off to India or something like that to save some money, there’s no way I would do that. There’s no way, so try to find somebody local. If you are going to ship it, I always tell people make sure you double box everything and put a label on both boxes just in case the worse case happens. We’ve been doing this for over 40 years and fortunately we’ve never lost anything in any transit one way or another and you might want to go back to one of our older episodes that are available on the podcast, a free podcast where we tell you actually how to make a box, the best way to do it.
Fisher: Yes. That’s right, that’s a good point, and you know when they use the term ‘old,’ an old photo album. What does that mean? You know maybe to Lisa, old is the 1960’s.
Tom: Oh absolutely.
Fisher: To me it’s the 1920’s and maybe to somebody else it’s the 1870’s.
Tom: Oh yeah exactly! We have people call us all the time and say “Oh I’ve got this film; it’s so old can you still transfer it, it’s from the 70’s?” and it’s just like “Okay.” [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: I mean we have stuff that’s playing in our store for instance that’s back in the old black and white days, the early 1900’s where you see these 1920 Model A Fords drive past.
Fisher: Really, you actually went and digitized some of those?
Tom: Oh yeah we’ve got them playing in our store. The customer gave us permission to play them. We had people that had to want to colorize black and white, we had people that want to go and take outlaws out of their home movies. All kinds of things just like this photo album.
Fisher: Wait a minute. You can actually colorize black and white home movies?
Tom: Oh absolutely!
Fisher: Really?
Tom: Oh yeah it’s not cheap and I wouldn’t do it. I mean I’ve got some old black and whites that my dad shot and I wouldn’t want to colorize them because that changes the whole thing. Just like some of the old ‘I love Lucy’ movies I watched them when they were black and white. I don’t like seeing them in color.
Fisher: Right. No I agree with you. I don’t like it for instance when they colorize something like ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’
Tom: Exactly!
Fisher: It’s not right.
Tom: Right. Because you’ve got to understand when that show was done and they cast it and they got the costume directors etc. they knew it’s going to be in black and white so they used colors that looked good in black and white. They would complement each other not clash. When you take those and turn them into the colors that’s not what the producer had in mind, that’s not what the continuity people had in mind, and to me it’s just not comfortable.
Fisher: Right. But you can do it! I mean that’s the fun part.
Tom: Oh absolutely! We had a customer that has an ex-son-in-law, we had to edit him out of all the photo albums, we edited him out of all their movies, everything. So you see this water skiing and he was at the back of the boat so you see this water skier and just as it gets to him we’d have to cut, this time-lash thing is kind of lost. If you can imagine it we can do it.
Fisher: That’s absolutely astonishing! All right, we’ve got another question coming up, we’ll take a break. We’ll be back in three minutes with more from Tom Perry on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 125
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: You know I don’t know why Tom, we get people who write in and give us their name but not where they’re from and then other people who tell us where they’re from but not their name. [Laughs]
Tom: [Laughs] Exactly. That’s the case…
Fisher: … with this next question. Hey, it’s Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, with Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth and Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, answering questions about preservation.
This one’s from Santa Ana, California, asking about flash-drives and he says if you plug it into the back of his computer everything’s great. But if you put it into a flat-screen TV, nothing… what’s the story with that Tom?
Tom: Okay there can be several different things there. We had a customer the other day that actually stopped in our store and she said “Oh, I’ve got this flash-drive, I need these photos.” I take it and look at it, and what it is, is actually a USB adapter with a Micro SD Card into it. So she just thought it was a normal flash-drive but it’s not, it has a removable SD card in it.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: So there’s all different kinds of things out there but the way they work the normal cliché so to speak is all the same.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: So what you need to do is know what format it is, a lot of times we ask people when they call in or write in, what format are your files? And they go “Huh?” so what you’ll want to do is take whatever kind of format you have, whether it’s a USB drive, whether it’s a disk it’s irrelevant, put it in your computer and if you’re a Windows user for like a PC, what you want to do is once you see the icon on your desktop, you double click on just the icon you don’t want to open up anything inside that.
So that will expand the window and you’ll see all your files. Then you’ll want to go to the top of your screen and tell it to sort by ‘Properties’ that will show you the file name, the file size, if it’s an MOV, if it’s a PDF, no matter what file it is, and a lot of times if you’re going to have us do work or you don’t know even what these files mean. Do a screenshot on your computer and then you can email that to us or have it in front of you when you’re talking to us.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: Okay. If it’s a MAC, you don’t have to search under properties. The same thing you put the disk in or USB drive, double click so it opens the folder and then it will automatically on a MAC give you all that stuff generally and then you’ll do the same thing “Oh I have MOV’s, I have AVI’s, I have X, Y, Z whatever they happen to be and there’s all kinds of weird things out there and if you want to research them, all you’ve got to do is the dot (.) Whatever it is type it into Google and it will tell you what it is.
If you don’t want to deal with that give us a call we’ll find out which ones can be transferred to video, what ones are executable files so they’re not really something that you’d want to watch on a DVD, they’re more of a brain to tell something else what to do.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: So once you get those to us then we can figure out “Okay, it’s this size, it’s an MP4.” So you can take normal software like ‘Power Director’ and edit your MP4 or do whatever you want to do with it. You’ll take that file and say “Okay, I’ve got this, this and this.” And I can say okay well you’ve got an MOV, your TV doesn’t play MOV’s, and most TVs only play MP4’s generally.
So the best thing to do is get out your owner’s manual if you lost it just go online, Google it and you can find your owner’s manual anyplace and find out what kinds of format it takes so when you call us you can say “Hey, my TV takes this, it takes and this, or it only plays MP4’s.” so when we transfer it for you or tell you how you can transfer it yourself, you’ll make sure you end up with the correct file that will play on your TV.
If your TV plays Mp4’s and we make you a QuickTime, you’re out of luck and vice versa.
Fisher: Yeah, not going to work too well.
Tom: Exactly. And so now be careful too, we had somebody that came in and had us make 300 flash-drives for him and we needed to find out what format you want it, people are going to be doing this, this, this and this. If you get a big enough flash-drive you can put an MOV on it, you can put an MP4 on it and you can put a QuickTime so no matter which computer or TV they have it will play on all of them.
Fisher: So you need to know some of this information before you get started.
Tom: Exactly. Just like when we teach you when you’re transferring films or videos, what is your end point?
Fisher: We’re talking fundamentals here and its great stuff. Thanks so much Tom, see you next week!
Tom: Thank you! We’ll be here.
Fisher: And that wraps up our show for this week. Thanks once again to handwriting analyst Nancy Douglas, from WriteMeaning.com, for coming on the show and talking about the personalities of my ancestors and she was able to determine it from old Bible records and I’m sure she could do some of the same for you. Hey, and don’t forget next week we’ll be talking about all that’s gone on at Roots Tech. It’s going to be a great show! Talk to you then, and remember as far as everyone knows, we are a nice, normal, family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 121 – A Visit With Karen Batchelor, The First African-American Woman to Join the DAR!

by

Rev soldiers 5

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the first new show of the new year with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org.  They exchange unique family history resolutions.  Fisher then reveals his first research adventure of the new year… his childhood home is on the market in Connecticut, and photos of the exterior and interior are shown with the listing.  Fisher talks of the fun of finding decades old photos to show side-by-side with how those areas of the home look today. David then tells of a centuries old find beneath a Scottish school yard playground.  You won’t believe what has been dug up!  Likewise, in Virginia, a foundation hole for a new hotel was being built when something awesome was found.  You’ll enjoy this one too.  David also reveals the release of new World War I records from the British Archives that might include information on your American “Dough Boy” ancestor.  He also has the first new free database of NEHGS for guest users.

(Starting at 11:39) Then, Fisher spends two segments with Karen Batchelor, the first African-American woman to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Karen says she didn’t think that would be such a big deal in 1977… but in fact it was!  Hear her story.  She’ll also talk about some of the incredible discoveries she’s made in her 40 years of research covering slaves, slave owners, Puritans, and pioneers.  As she says… “I want them ALL!”  She’s a guest you won’t want to miss.

Then Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com shares his “Five Steps for Scanning and Storing.”  As always, it’s great advice from the “Preservation Authority!”

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

Transcript of Episode 121

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 121

Fisher: And Welcome back 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 it is so exciting to be into a brand new year. David Allen Lambert is on the line with me from Boston, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org.  He is the Chief Genealogist there. David, have you got any resolutions for this year?

David: Well, first off I want to wish you a Happy New Year from Beantown, and of course I do! One I keep on stopping and starting over my 40 plus years in this planet is to keep a journal. So I think I want to combine my Tech Tip with this journal and my new year’s resolution because I don’t care if you talk into a commercial program like ‘Dragon Speak’ and record your journal, or you tape record it or you write it with crayon on the back of a piece of paper.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: These are helping for future generations.

Fisher: That’s right.

David: I embrace technology like everybody else does but I’m still trying to find a place to read those five and a quarter floppy disks, or better yet the old ones back in my early school days, those 8 inch disks.

Fisher: Oh boy!

David: Anything you put on those, if you don’t move the media to something else, you lose it. So hopefully this written journal when I record what I had for lunch, my great, great, great grandchildren will look at it and think my dietary needs were suitable. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] Well, yes, that’s assuming they can read handwriting at that time right?

David: I hope so. That’s a conversation for another day in its own right.

Fisher: [Laughs] Well you might want to do it in block letters.

David: Exactly.

Fisher: Just think about that.

David: I’ll type it and glue it in. So what’s your resolution for this year?

Fisher: I’m going to put the finishing touches on my mother’s biography this year. I was working on it all last year, didn’t quite get it done, holidays caught up with me, and so I’m excited to get that done. And speaking of which, I’ve got some new pictures that I’m going to be able to include in that.  My childhood home went up on the market here just recently. My parents built it back in 1958. We were in it for twenty years and then the next people were in it for 33, and these folks were in for 3.

I don’t know if he got transferred out or whatever but he’s selling the place. So as a result, the real estate agents have gone through the house and taken photos of every room plus the exterior, and they are all online.

So I’m able to take a virtual tour of my childhood home that my parents built and I’ve actually gone through and found some pictures from back in the day and put them side by side with pictures of the rooms of how they look today, some of them are very different and some of them are very much the same. It’s very cool.

David: Oh that’s excellent! It’s a shame you can’t get there with a camcorder and do a virtual tour for us of the whole thing while it’s still on the market.

Fisher: That’s a good point. I’d like to be able to do that. But you know, time and distance.

David: Oh that’s for sure. Well you know taking distance into consideration, for our family histoire news, I’m going to dig into a Scottish story. Underneath a school playground they have found the remains of a pirate.

Fisher: Woah!

David: Yeah the forensic analysis of these bones, radiocarbon dates back to the 16th or 17th century New Haven, which is now part of Edinburgh, Scotland, which was a fishing village. They found the remains of a gentleman that would perhaps have been a pirate or some scoundrel because it’s near where they used to gibbet pirates and other criminals.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So, the bones are arranged in such a way that it wasn’t a burial like in a cemetery but sort of just discarded into a shallow grave. So the kids are very excited about this.

Fisher: Oh I would be too! To know I had a hung pirate underneath my playground, how cool would that be?! Of course you’d be seeing ghost for years right?

David: Exactly. But think of all the great stories the kids are having now.

Fisher: Yes.

David: And everybody this Halloween will probably no doubt dress up as a pirate.

Fisher: Yes, the pirate.

David: Well you know going to the other side of the pond back to America, in Alexandria, Virginia, they’ve been recently digging the foundation for a new hotel and they found one third of an 18th century vessel under the ground that no one knew was there.

Fisher: Wow!

David: The speculation is that this was actually laid down to extend the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia into the Potomac River, and they found all sorts of bottles and other paraphernalia of the shipping era with it. So, the archaeologists are going to take all the beams up, preserve them and probably put them on exhibit some place.

Fisher: That’s fun and you know they had that same kind of thing going on at the Southern tip of Manhattan Island, also old ships down there.

David: It’s amazing to think how much stuff lies under our old waterfronts. For sure archeologists keep busy for years.

Fisher: Right.

David: Obviously 1916, years ago, was in the midst of World War I and the first World War I hospital diaries from the national archives in London, England are now online. Now over 247 First World War hospital camp, hospital ships, common list hospital, all these interesting diaries about the lives of patients which may be your ancestor if you have somebody that was over there associated because the Americans were over there helping the Brits early on.

Fisher: That’s right. From late 1917 and 1918, unless they actually signed up and fought as British military people right?

David: Exactly. A lot of the airmen back in the day signed up to fly in both the Canadian and British air force back in the day. Well, I guess that brings us to NEHGS’s New Year’s resolution and that is to help people with their genealogy like we’ve been doing for over a 170 years.

So for the entire month of January if you sign up as a guest user on AmericanAncestors.org, besides just one database that we give every week anyways, we have some extra special ones including the Massachusetts, vital records from 1841 to 1910.

New Hampshire, births, marriages and deaths; births till 1901, deaths and marriages to 1937, and lastly a great database of Vermont, birth, marriages and deaths from the 18th century all the way to 2008. Brought to you by AmericanAncestors.org, just signup as a guest user and try it out and every weekend as you know, I mentioned a free guest database that our listeners can try.

Fisher: Very cool David and you know we’re into the countdown now for Roots Tech, and you’re going to be in Salt Lake City, Utah, I’m going to be in Salt Lake City, Utah, and so many genies from around the world are going to be there.

So we just want to remind everybody. Come on by and see us! You’re going to be at the New England Historic Genealogical Society booth, I’ll be at the Extreme Genes booth, hopefully in the same vicinity, and it’s going to be a lot of fun!

David: It’s great! I hope that maybe we can get some interviews while we’re out there with some of our interesting genealogical listeners. Bring your stories! We’re always hoping to hear about your interesting family members.

Fisher: And coming up next David, I’m very excited about this, our first guest of the New Year, Karen Batchelor; she is the first African American woman to join the ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’ back in 1977.  She’s going to talk about the experience and all of her 40 years of research, some of her favorite stories. It’s good stuff, coming up on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 2 Episode 121

Host Scott Fisher with guest Karen Batchelor

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com.   I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth, and Happy New Year to you! And Happy New Year to my guest, Karen Batchelor!  Karen, where are you? You’re in Detroit, is that right?

Karen: I am, Scott. I’m in Detroit, Michigan. I’m native Detroiter, but I will tell you that being here in the cold midwest doesn’t prevent me from reaching out and doing a whole lot of genealogy.

Fisher: [Laughs] Absolutely! And it’s a New Year and I bet you you’ve already found something.

Karen: I have! Actually, I’ve had three major discoveries and it’s only the 5th day of January.

Fisher: Wow! You know, it’s interesting, because I know your background a little bit and I know you’ve been at it for decades. You started before I did, and I started thirty five years ago. And for you to find somebody as recent as a third great, that’s a tremendous find at this stage of the game.

Karen: Yeah, yeah. Well, I started…I started doing family history, it was in 1976, it was my New Year’s resolution that year, so that’s exactly forty years ago, and my son who is now forty, was only a little, you know, a baby, and I wanted to be able to share more about the family with him, and I realized there’s just a lot I didn’t know.

Fisher: So, off you went on your adventure. And how quickly did you start finding things?

Karen: Well, so this is where you’ve got to set this straight that this is before the internet.

Fisher: Right.

Karen: Before Ancestry.com or anything like that.

Fisher: [Laughs] Yes, we’re talking about self address stamped envelopes, telephone calls, visits to libraries.

Karen: Carry files, notebooks, and within ten months, I had found a Revolutionary War ancestor.

Fisher: Yes.

Karen: Which was a shock, because not only was I not looking for anything along those lines, but, also as an African American, I just really wasn’t looking for anything.

Fisher: Right! Who would have expected that? Now, was it an African American participant in the war?

Karen: No. No. No, I actually have found eight patriots. Of course, I have to do all those supplemental, but none of my ancestors who fought were African, of African descent.   My great grandmother was Caucasian, and she was from Pennsylvania, that…and Scots Irish… as far as I knew and her line was the line where I had my oldest relative, my great aunt Clara. And so, she started feeding me information, and I started searching on that line and I’ve gone back now to migration ancestors in 1630, Puritans in this country.

Fisher: So, you descend from both Puritans and the slaves?

Karen: Yes! Puritans, patriots, slaves, slave owners and a New England Colonial witch or two.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Karen: [Laughs]

Fisher: Wow! Well, no wonder you never stop. I mean, because the stories are endless. I hope you’ve written your own family history for yourself and your son.

Karen: Well, actually that is what I’m doing. That is this year. I’ve committed to myself to get this down, because I’ve spent what I call, a lot of time in base camp with the facts and the data.

Fisher: [Laughs] Yes.

Karen: And so, if you look at our family history as a mountain, which I do, I call it, ‘Story Mountain.’ When you start to climb up to the summit, that’s when you get into the stories and you start blending in the facts, the myths, the data and the, you know, cultural and historical timeline.  And so, that’s what I do now as business, but I also do it for myself. So, my commitment to myself is forty stories this year on my family.

Fisher: Wow! That’s a great goal! Well, let’s go back to this a little bit, back to your beginning, because in 1976, you find a revolutionary soldier in your background; you suddenly start to understand your own multi cultural background. You made a decision at that time, which kind of changed things, at least in one major organization.

Karen: Yeah. I decided to apply to Daughters of the American Revolution, and I found some resistance and, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t think it was such a big thing, but from what I learned during that time, there had been no other African American women who had actually applied for membership and been admitted.  There maybe was one or maybe two who had African ancestry who came in many years ago. I heard there’s one who was of Indian, Native American, Caucasian and African ancestry, but she was the first daughter.

Fisher: Uh huh.

Karen: So, she was the daughter of the patriot. And she came in, in like the 1890s when she was ninety some years old, so, she didn’t have to apply. So, this was kind of the big deal, at least to some people out there and I put together my application.

For every fact that I cited in my application, I had at least three pieces of proof. I was pretty meticulous about my research, and I applied and became a member in October of 1977.

Fisher: Unbelievable! And you were the first African American woman to join D.A.R. as a result. And you mentioned you had some resistance. Now what did that entail?

Karen: Well, I only knew of a couple Chapters in Michigan close to me, relatively close, and I approached both of those Chapters which… who will remain nameless… and they were not interested. You had to be invited to be a member.

Fisher: Right.

Karen: No one was interested in inviting me to the party.

Fisher: Nobody would sponsor you!? I can even imagine that! You’re such a charmer! My goodness! So, how did this get resolved when you had two Chapters say, “No! We don’t want you joining us, Karen Batchelor!” What did you do? Where’d you go?

Karen: Well, I actually had a great friend and mentor, a genealogy mentor at the time, his name was James Dent Walker, and he was head of Genealogical Services at the National Archives in D.C. And he kind of took me under his wing.  He talked to some people at D.A.R. and the next thing I knew, in the middle of 1977, I got a letter from the Royal Oak chapter of D.A.R, which is the Ezra Parker Chapter, and they invited me to be a member and asked if they could sponsor me. And that was really great and I’m still a member of that Chapter to this day.

Fisher: That’s awesome! Now, since then of course, that kind of made you a person of some notoriety, I would imagine, within the Daughters of the American Revolution. Have you given a lot of speeches? Have you talked about this a lot or are you just involved in work on remembering the revolutionary ancestors and getting those records together and bringing in other members?

Karen: Well, probably all of the above. When I first became a member, you know, I mentioned it to a few friends, of course I told my parents, but I didn’t think it was, I really still didn’t think it was that big a deal. And that December, I was approached by a reporter from the New York Times and he wanted to do a story which appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Then, the next day, I got a call from Good Morning America. [Laughs]

Fisher: Wow!

Karen: They wanted me to come in for an interview, which I did. And it was in newspapers all over the country and around the world, but of course you won’t see those online so much, because the internet wasn’t around, but if you go into a site like Newspapers.com, there’s hit after hit after hit.

Fisher: Sure.

Karen: And so, even as recently as a couple of years ago, I was a Final Jeopardy question. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] Really?

Karen: Yeah. [Laughs]

Fisher: It doesn’t get much better than that!

Karen: I know, but I guess learning about genealogy the way that I did and it becoming my passion, as you know, that tends to happen to some of us.

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Yes, it does.

Karen: I love to spread the word, so I have over the years given a lot of presentations. I’ve taught people about genealogy, because it’s really about wanting to know more about who you are, and your ancestors are just part of that bigger story.

Fisher: That’s absolutely true. Let me ask you this; did you get some negative feedback from the African American community that you are now part of what was predominantly a white organization?

Karen: Yes. There have been people who have asked me, “Why would you even want to be a member of that organization? They’re racist.” Yes, they did have a very negative reputation for years because of the Marian Anderson incident and my mom was actually in D.C. in college when that happened.

Fisher: Ah!

Karen: But, I guess, I have never been one to listen to everything that others say, and I chart my own course and I like to think that that’s my legacy from my, you know, many generations of pioneer ancestors. So, I just keep on trudging along.

Fisher: Yes, you do. You basically just take people one at a time for whoever they are, not in groups.

Karen: That’s correct. I mean, I have ancestors who were slave owners, and you know, the reality is, I think you have to take your ancestor as they come, you know, the good, the bad and the ugly and I do that, because they’re mine.

Fisher: That’s right.

Karen: I want them all! I’m sorry, I just want every last one of them that I can find.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Karen: [Laughs]

Fisher: I’m talking to Karen Batchelor. She was the first African American woman to join the D.A.R. back in 1977 and attracted a lot of attention for it at the time and as you can tell, she’s still quite the passionate genie that so many of us are, and we’re going to continue this conversation if that’s all right, Karen, because you have so much to talk about, I know, in your forty years of research that you might want to share with people.

Karen: Yeah, you might have to pull the plug! [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] I don’t know about that! We will continue with more, coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 3 Episode 121

Host Scott Fisher with guest Karen Batchlor

Fisher: And we are back! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

 

My name is Fisher; I’m the Radio Roots Sleuth, and I’m talking to Karen Batchelor, better known as the first African American woman to join the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) .

 

We spoke quite a bit about that in our first segment, but Karen I want to talk about all the different stories you have found on all your different branches through all your different cultural backgrounds that you’ve discovered.

 

During the break you were telling me you descend from the witches, you descend from the early Native Americans, talk about some of the different people that you’ve run across that mean a lot to you.

 

Karen: Well, there are a couple. One is my great-great grandmother, Charity Anne, who was a slave. She was in Georgia, and the slave of her son, who was white, was my second great grandfather, and that couple had sixteen children together, all of whom survived slavery.

The youngest was my great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Parker, and while I don’t agree obviously with the notion of slavery and the stories of what it did to our collective culture, all very sad.

Fisher: Right.

Karen: But I do have a copy of the Bill of Sale, where my great, great grandfather bought my great, great grandmother from his father’s estate when the father died right before the Civil War. So I thought they were a pretty interesting couple. He never married anyone else. They lived together as man and wife, and I thought they had a lot of courage.

Fisher: Yeah [laughs] I would say that‘s an understatement. Where did they live?

Karen: They were in Harris County, Georgia, which are the very rural areas outside of Columbus.

Fisher: Right.

Karen: And that’s where both of my dad’s parents came from there, and they came up to Detroit when Henry Ford put up those flyers that said ‘Work in the auto factory for five dollars a day’ and they came up here then in 1917.

Fisher: Wow! A lot of folks left the South during that era, didn’t they?

Karen: Yeah, they did. But also on the other side, I have some really very interesting Puritan ancestors. I have done a lot of reading, I’m not just a genealogist, I’m also a history nerd.

Fisher: But you can’t do one without the other because there is no context otherwise.

Karen: Exactly! I’m all about the context, so if I’m researching Puritan lines, then I immerse myself in learning about Puritan society, culture, and I even did historical presenting here at Greenfield Village and Dearborn, Michigan, and I worked at a colonial farm so I dressed in colonial garb.

I learned how to cook over the harth and all that, but it was a harsh time. So it makes me, as I read and learn more about my Puritan ancestors, like, what they went through to be here was amazing.  So, long story, I know that I come from very strong stuff. No matter what line you go on, I came from the survivors, and that gives me a lot of strength as I go through life.

Fisher: Boy, I bet that’s true. So let’s talk about the person that you had that escaped from captivity, amongst your Puritan ancestors back in the day.

Karen: Well, her name was Hannah Dustin, and she was from New Hampshire. She had just had a baby, and maybe the next day or two their farm was attacked by the Native American tribe in the area and of course remember that Puritans were always land grabbing from the Native Americans, so I guess at times I can hardly blame them for wanting to lash out and grab their land back.  But Hannah was captured with her infant and with a servant, her husband. And I think she had like seven kids at the time, they escaped. She was taken on this track, and at some point, more than a hundred miles away from her home, she hatched a plan with another captive and in the night they killed all their captors.

Fisher: Whoa!

Karen: And then because there was a bounty on her scalp, she went back and scalped all her captors, and went back to civilization as a heroine. The thing about ancestors, you take the good, the bad and the ugly, so she’s a survivor, but I don’t like her message.  But that was Hannah Dustin [Laughs].

Fisher: Wow! And this is all stuff you found over the last forty years?

Karen: Yeah. But what’s interesting when you talk about Native American and growing up and the African American community, I always heard that we had a lot of Native American ancestry and I was always pretty proud of that. Well, when I finally got around to doing a DNA test, and I’ve got a couple now and they’re both consistent, I have 2% Native American heritage.

Fisher: Just 2%?

Karen: Just 2%. I have 54% West African; well of course, most of the slave trade came from West Africa. It was the closest to the ocean, and then I have 42% or so northern European.

Fisher: You are very much split.

Karen: Yep, yeah.

Fisher: So that also suggests to me that you also have more European ancestry in some of your other ancestors other than your great grandmother who you knew about.

Karen: That’s correct. Well, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather was from Bermuda and he was a staunch British citizen.  So I know that his heritage was mixed. And my slave side, they were all mixed. They all show up as Mulatto and the ones I knew, talked about the older ones. You know they were kind of like “Yeah, they were all very light.”  So yeah, there’s a lot of mixed, but I’m an American, and I like to think at this point that I’m more American than apple pie.

Fisher: [Laughs] I can’t argue that with you at all, Karen! Did you find some stories back there that have caused you some pain?

Karen: Well, you know the whole thing about the witches, the witch hunt thing that has caused me some. I spend a lot of time researching, not so bound by the time, and the notion of how someone could be accused of witchcraft and this was very early on. They were like the second, third, fourth, people to be executed in this country.

Fisher: That’s right.

Karen: So how did this happen? How do you have a society where someone can point a finger at you and then all of a sudden you lose your life? So that has troubled me a lot and I actually would love to one day veer off my genealogical path and write kind of a historical fiction novel about this phenomenon and this couple.

Fisher: I have no doubt that you can do it. How have your children and grandchildren taken to this?

Karen: [Laughs] Well, my son is forty now, and he’s interested, but he has young kids and both of my grandchildren are of mixed race. So I hope these stories that I put together and share with them, because I think kids and adults learn better through stories so I’m not going to bore them with showing them the family tree that makes my son’s eyes roll back in his head.

Fisher: [Laughs] Yes.

Karen: But I want to share the stories that make them proud to be all of the things that they are, because I am.

Fisher: Karen Batchelor, thank you so much for your time and coming on Extreme Genes. It’s been a delight, and I hope you’ll come on again sometime as you make some more discoveries.

Karen: I would love to, Scott, and thanks for all of the stories that you share. They keep all of us genies out here motivated to continue to stay hot on the trail.

Fisher: You know I think that’s the thing, the stories give us the bigger picture and it’s a lot easier than just instructing on every facet of how you go about doing the research, don’t you think?

Karen: I think you are right.

Fisher: Coming up next; Tom Perry our Preservation Authority. He’s going to talk about things you need to do this year whether or not you planning to digitize your old family films, your photographs, whatever it is, he’s got some important stuff to share with you next in three minutes, on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

 

 

 

Segment 4 Episode 121

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It is preservation time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family’s History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He is our Preservation Authority, and Tom this week, ‘Tom’s 5 steps for scanning and storing.’ That’s a lot of S’s

Tom: It is. It is.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: We have been getting so many emails asking questions about these. It’s really simple whether you’re scanning or storing you basically have the same steps. Some people think “Hey, I’m not ready to transfer my items yet or I’m going to do it later so I don’t need to worry about it, let me leave it in the box where it is right now.”

Well, that’s not a good idea because it could be getting more contaminated. So whether you’re going to transfer right now, you’re done transferring it, or you’re going to transfer it in a while, you really need to do these steps.

First off, you’ve got them in the box where they are right now whether it’s the attic, the garage, underneath your bed wherever it is.

Fisher: And you’re talking photographs or videos?

Tom: Yes!

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: We’re talking everything.

Fisher: Everything, all right.

Tom: Heirlooms anything that you have, you want to take these steps. Even if it’s something that’s never going to be scanned, just things that you’re storing like dad’s old pocket watch or something.  The first thing is, I can almost guarantee you whatever box it’s being stored in is not a good box. Sometimes you open these things and you find that there has been rats or mice that have gotten into them.

Fisher: Hmm.

Tom: And hopefully they haven’t damaged anything which is another whole segment which we’ll do on a future day. So what you need to do is, you need to take this original box and pretty much you’re probably going to throw it away because it’s probably dirty. If it’s an heirloom box, a wooden box that you can clean it out and reuse it.

You need basic five storage boxes, okay? So you want to go through these things so that you don’t have some items that are in pristine condition and then have other items that are really dusty and can contaminate your pristine stuff.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So what you want to do;

  1. You have your original box where everything is in it.
  2. Then you want to have what we call a sorted box.
  3. Then you have a cleaned box.
  4. You have a scanned box.
  5. And a storage box.

And you want these in different parts of the house if you can so you don’t contaminate your items. So first thing you want to do is open up funky boxes that are dirty, they probably haven’t been stored right.

You want to take those and get all your items sorted, put your film together, your video tapes together, your photos all in separate boxes so that they’re not all mixed up because there’s going to be different ways to transfer them, different mediums, different ways that you want to store them.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Okay so first you do that. Now, that you’ve got them all sorted take one item at a time whether it’s your video tapes or your photos or your slides. Take one box and take it into a different area and clean it. There’s all kind of tips on the internet how you can clean things.

Fisher: Now, you’re talking about dirt or mouse turds or what?

Tom: Everything. Everything. Now some things you can do yourself. You know DIY projects, some things you don’t want to touch. For instance if you have something that has spilled onto one of your negatives, those things you’re not going to want to clean off yourself because there are too many ways to damage them.  Some people don’t understand the emulsion side from the non emulsion side. You never want to clean the emulsion side. People are going, “Well which way is this?” and it’s sometimes hard to explain.

Fisher: Sure.

Tom: So the best thing to do, take it to a professional whether you want to send it to us or find somebody in your area that is professional. Not somebody working out of their house but somebody that has this as a business, they know what they’re doing.  It’s not like your brother “Oh I’m sure I can clean that up.” And they could ruin your images. So things like this you’re going to want to set in a separate box. As far as just getting dust off, you can use those air dusters but be very, very careful.

When you’re dusting with an air duster you want to make sure you’re holding the can still, preferably on a counter and you’re moving the item in front of it. You’re not moving the can, because what happens, the compression type of chemicals they have in these can become very, very cold, and if you ever aired something you see the white stuff start coming off, that’s freezing now and that could permanently damage your negatives, your film, your video, anything.  So hold the can still. So you want to hold the can still and move the item in front of that so you’re not moving the can around and don’t shake it. If it starts turning white, stop immediately because that can actually freeze your emulsion and cause all kinds of problems.

Fisher: Wow.

Tom: So the best thing I usually use is ‘Camel hair brushes’ because they won’t hold the dust and they’re really good at cleaning and they’re really, really soft and any good art store will have them for you and you can also get them on Amazon or eBay.

Fisher: That’s right.

Tom: So right after the break we’ll come back and give you some more ideas of what we’re going to do.

Fisher: All right. That’s just step one.

Tom: Exactly.

Fisher: More to come in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 5 Episode 121

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back on America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here with Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, and we’re talking about Tom’s five steps of scanning and storing and we’ve been going through them.

I don’t know what step we’re on here, Tom, but we’ve talked about organizing and separating things into boxes. I guess we’re up to the cleaning area now, right?  Which is number three?

Tom: Exactly. So, basically you’ve taken your things, you’re cleaning them. We’ve given you some tips on cleaning before the break. Now, some other things you want to be careful with too is, if you have old VHS tapes or Video 8 tapes, any kind of video tapes that something spilled into, that’s something you want to leave to a professional.  We have too many clients that bring us items that they’ve opened up the case and the springs have gone crazy and they’ve damaged the tape by closing it together, and the only thing worse than doing that is, not telling your transfer person you’re giving it to that you’ve done that.

Fisher: Really?

Tom: Oh yeah! Sometimes, if you put the case back together very well, they’re not going to catch it. They’re going to stick it in, and if you’ve got a spring that’s loose in there, it could tear your tape. So, don’t think, ‘Oh, if I don’t tell them, everything will be fine.’ Whoever you’re taking it to to transfer, even if you’re doing it yourself, you don’t want to do anything that’s been opened. Take it to professional, have them put it back together properly or the best thing to do is just don’t open it.  If you already opened it, bring it in to us, bring it in to somebody that knows what they’re doing and have them get a new case or whatever it needs to make it right.  Now, if you have dust and dirt and you’re scared of doing something, that’s fine. Just take it in to a professional, say, “Hey! This has been in storage. It’s dirty.” You don’t want to put it with your good tapes, and one thing that’s really bad which we’ve talked about before, is mold.

Fisher: Oh yes!

Tom: Especially if you’re in the southeast.

Fisher: Or the northeast.

Tom: Exactly! Because mold is really, really bad because you can contaminate everything from one bad tape, so don’t put it in your VCR and say, ‘Oh well, I just want to find out if this is something I want to transfer, because now, all that mold is on your heads. The next tapes you’re going to put in, it’s going to go on there. You’re not going to see it when you first do it, because they’re mold spores and they will grow, and they’re really, really bad.

Fisher: So, you can actually contaminate your machine with this.

Tom: Oh yeah! It’s just like chicken pox.

Fisher: Sure. Yeah.

Tom: You know, anybody else gets near you they’re going to get the chicken pox also. So, what we do, we have a professional machine that we can put it in that cleans those.

What we have done in the past is, we’ve gone and got a VCR which are hard sometimes to find, but they are still out there. There might even be a combo unit. But all your memories are worth more than a hundred dollars it’s going to cost to buy one of these machines.

So, what we’ve done for clients, they’ve either brought them in to us or we found them for them. We transfer all the tapes in that machine. So, everything’s done now and then we throw the machine away.

Fisher: Oh, good idea!

Tom: So, you don’t want to give it to Goodwill or any place like that, because you’re giving somebody a time bomb basically that they might think, “Oh, here’s a VCR! I want to watch my tapes.” And you’re just giving them all chicken pox, so to speak.  Okay, now you’ve got everything separated, everything cleaned. Now’s the step where you go and you can get it transferred. Now, if you say “Hey, I really want to do this, but I just can’t afford it right now. I need to save up some money.” Well, that’s fine. Still go though all these other steps to get your stuff ready now, so it doesn’t deteriorate any more than it already has. Especially slides, negatives and film.

Fisher: And it gets it in your mind too, that, “I’ve got to get this taken care of” because everything is in a constant state of deterioration.

Tom: Oh, absolutely! So, even though you might not be able to afford this for a year, you’ve got to save up some money to do it, at least you’ve slowed down the progression of the deterioration. So, just skip the scan step and go to a storage place, and make sure now that you’ve done all these steps, you store it right.

I like storing stuff in Ziploc bags and if I have old things from like, electronics you’ve bought that says, ‘Do not eat this’, the little silica gels. The reason those are in there, they absorb moisture when the items are coming across the sea in the big cargo ships, so they’re great.

If you don’t have those, you can make your own. You need some cheesecloth, you need some string and you need some uncooked rice. I put things in Ziploc bags, I put them in the box and that will keep a lot of the moisture out. If you don’t know how to make these rice bags with cheese cloth, write me and I’ll send you some tips on that as well.

Fisher: All right. Good stuff, Tom! Thanks so much!

Tom: You bet! Thank you.

Fisher: That wraps up our show this week. Thanks once again to Karen Batchelor of Detroit, Michigan, for coming on and talking about her forty years of experience in researching, and the experience of becoming the first African American woman to become a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

If you missed any of our segments with her today, be sure to catch the podcast on iTunes, iHeart Radio, ExtremeGenes.com, wherever you are.

Thanks for joining us! And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

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