Episode 126 – A Roots Tech Breakdown With Fisher and David / A Valentines DNA Day With 23andMe

February 15, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. David’s “Family Histoire” news tells us about a Connecticut couple who have been married longer than any other couple in America! How long have they been married and who are they? Catch the podcast. We also hear about the passing of a woman who was America’s oldest surviving veteran. David will share with you where and when she served and her remarkable age. Then, the two talk about a new cruise ship, set to sail in 2018, that is the modern replica of another ship that sank in 1912. Can you guess what it is? Plus David’s “Tech Tip” has to do with an exciting new announcement by MyHeritage.com. And he shares another free database from NEHGS. Listen to hear what it is.

In the second segment, David returns and talks with Fisher about their highlights from the recent Roots Tech Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, focusing first on new products, including those from the winners of the Innovator’s Summit. They also talk about a new data storage service that uses a life insurance company model to assure your data stays within your family’s control for generations! (Fisher talks to the founder next week.) David also reviews JRNL, a product having to do with keeping a digital journal, and a French company that serves as a social media base for your family and family history, only without the databases. Fisher then plays back an incredible family history discovery from Roots Tech. (Hint: She obtained an ancestral item dating back to 1812!) Fisher and David also talk visiting with keynote speaker, the renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, backstage.

Then, Dr. Kasia Bryc of 23andMe joins the show to talk about what their research is saying about how we come together as couples! Are they the differences or similarities that bring us together? Is there a genetic tie here? Dr. Bryc has some Valentines Day insight.

Then, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, returns with great advice on managing your various formats and bringing them together in a presentable way.

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

Transcript of Episode 126

Segment 1 Episode 126 (00:30)

Fisher: And you have found us! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
It is Fisher here, The Radio Roots Sleuth, your host on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out, and it is our first show back since Roots Tech, the largest conference on family history in the world that was just this past week or so in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I’ve got to tell you it’s taken me just a little bit to get my voice back. Because it’s loud, I had a little bit of a cold working and so trying to talk through that I got a little bit squeaky there for a while.
But I’m back and in full health and excited to break down Roots Tech, with David Allen Lambert coming up here in just a few minutes, and later in the show we’re going to do our DNA segment with Dr. Kasia Bryc from 23andMe.com and we’re going to talk about what DNA says about people and how they come together. A little love thing going on with DNA as we celebrate Valentine’s Day weekend.
Let’s check in now with David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Society and AmericanAncestors.org, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Hello David!
David: Greetings from Beantown Fish! I hope that you survived Roots Tech, I know that it was an amazing time for me from beginning to end, lots of fun especially at the ‘My Heritage’ after party.
Fisher: Oh yeah, watching you work the karaoke microphone sir, was something I’m still recovering from. I want you to know that right now.
David: [Laughs] Well, I hope that’s a good recovery.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: When Thomas MacEntee, mentioned he was singing, I was like “Well if he can do it, I can croak!”
Fisher: You were good! I was impressed, I had no idea you had it in you.
David: Yeah well, it’s all that musical theater, I guess occasionally the windpipes are good for more than just radio.
Fisher: [Laughs] All right. What’s going on with Family Histoire News this week? Fill us in my friend.
David: Well, first off to you and your lovely bride a Happy Valentine’s Day weekend.
Fisher: Thank you sir.
David: How many years you’ve been married?
Fisher: This summer it will be 35.
David: Well for me it’s going to be 28. But we don’t hold a candle to a lovely couple out in Connecticut; this is John and Ann Betar’s 83rd Wedding Anniversary.
Fisher: Gosh 83! What were they married at like 6?
David: [Laughs] Well, he’s currently 104 and she’s currently 100. So it looks like he was a 21 year old and a 17 year old that fell in love and got married. They’ve known each other since the Great Depression, and fell in love. In fact, he used to give her rides to school in his 1932 Ford Roadster.
Fisher: [Laughs] And he’s still driving I understand by the way at 104.
David: It’s amazing, and it’s amazing thing to think that technology has embraced so many of our older friends and listeners. This couple this weekend have actually decided to tweet the secrets of their marriage.
Fisher: They’re on Twitter? Oh that’s insane!
David: So, definitely need to follow them. I’m sure they’re going to get more following than the U.S. President ever got on his tweets.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: So that’s a great, great story. We tip our hats in remembrance of another person who was a centenarian, a gal from Boston, Massachusetts, Alice Dickson, who was born here in 1907. She was an African American veteran with the 6888th battalion in World War II and when she died on the 27th of January at 108, she was America’s oldest female veteran of World War II.
Fisher: Oldest living veteran period.
David: Yeah that’s true. But she’s definitely someone who’s seen a lot of history, and our heart goes out to her and her family and friends.
I can’t tell you the winter that we’re having. I know that the country is wrapped in cold weather all the way down to Florida. But I was thinking, I’m so looking forward to our cruise it just has a warm feeling.
Fisher: Right!
David: Even though it’s in the fall.
Fisher: Yes in September. Find out about it on our Facebook page, by the way.
David: Absolutely. They can see both of us and hopefully they’ll have karaoke. [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] Oh please spare us that!
David: I know about a certain person and their great singing is on the other end of this mic so I want to just let you know you’ll be in for a good surprise with Fish singing as well.
Fisher: [Laughs] Oh boy!
David: Okay. I had an idea. In 2017 hopefully we’ll have another cruise. 2018 I’ve already got a ship lined up for us.
Fisher: Tell us what it is.
David: Well, it is called… you may have heard of it before… the ‘Titanic’
Fisher: Shut up!
David: Yes the Titanic is not being raised from the ocean bottom and being refloated. A company out of Australia is building Titanic 2, this vessel is going to rival the size of the ship plus 13 feet apparently.
Fisher: Wow!
David: It’s going to launch and go from China to Dubai in 2018. So maybe we can convince them they need a genealogical talk.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: And maybe our listeners by then will already be out in Dubai, into China, there’ll just be a demand that they want Fish and Dave Lambert right there on the cruise. It will be our third annual, taking the Titanic by storm.
Fisher: No, no, no wait a minute! Let me ask you this. Would you like to go on a cruise on the Titanic?
David: Hmm that’s a really good question. I’ll take about 10 seconds to answer it. Yes!
Fisher: You would?
David: Because I’ve been fascinated with the Titanic since I was 11 years old.
Fisher: Sure.
David: And I think that somebody’s going to the detail of trying to replicate it. Just to look at it docked would be interesting.
Fisher: That’s true.
David: But you know that the cruise that they’re taking from Southern China to Dubai is not really an iceberg territory.
Fisher: [Laughs] Good point!
David: If they didn’t recreate it in April of 2018 to go from South Hampton to New York, but hopefully when they do that it’s going to be in the much warmer weather.
Fisher: That’s true and they’re going to have better technology anyway. They’ll have wifi.
David: And more lifeboats, lifeboats on this boat will be adequate for every passenger, and it’s costing approximately five hundred million dollars to build.
Fisher: Wow! All right.
David: So we’ll see how that one develops. So that’s a really exciting one. You know with tech tips going on there’s so many things that we’re going to talk about what happened at Roots Tech. But I want to just give a shout-out to our sponsor ‘My Heritage ‘and the exciting news about the audio app that is available from MyHeritage.com, now you can record your stories and put it right on your ‘My Heritage’ account, so that’s going to be great.
Fisher: That’s great! That’s a great advance no question about it.
David: All you have to do to get to it is go to www.MyHeritage.com/mobile. Well talking about technology, NEHGS as you know, listeners of Extreme Genes get to go on as a guest user as anybody else, spread the word, and we have free database that lasts for a month and the new one that we’re sponsoring is the marital records of Lincoln Maine from 1829- 1890, so if you have some ancestors that lived up in Maine back in the 19th century check it out, and more exciting databases to come.
Fisher: All right. Good stuff David! Thanks so much, now you’re coming back for another segment?
David: I will.
Fisher: And we’re going to talk about some of the highlights from Roots Tech. We’re going to actually hear a story from a listener that I met. That will just blow your mind, its good stuff! It’s coming up in three on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 126 (25:20)
Fisher: And we are back! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
It is Fisher here your Radio Roots Sleuth, with my good friend David Allan Lambert, he is the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org and this is our annual breakdown of Roots Tech, the Roots Tech Conference in Salt Lake City in Utah which took place last week. David I think for the most part I think the things we generally take away from this thing are the products that are out there. The new innovations and the new inventions in fact, that enhances our efforts to discover and preserve and share.
David: I tell you, Roots Tech is really the place for the innovators summit and all the new products by vendors that are already in the field and brand new ones that have just started. It never ceases to amaze me. Some great things, some really amazing things that I hope our listeners can try out and download. Most of them are free.
Fisher: Well let’s start with this one ‘Forever’. Now this is one of the gold sponsors that were there at Roots Tech, in fact I’m going to talk to the founder of the company and have him on the show next week, but this is a really interesting concept.
David: It really is, and what ‘Forever’ is it allows you to one, they offer a scanning service so you can box up your pictures and send them. They have software if you want to digitize them yourself and actually create online books etc. and online displays. You can invite your family to be part of it, but the biggest part of it is their data storage. Now I’ll tell you about this, Fish, it’s amazing.
Fisher: Right.
David: You have the possibility of getting an account with them for your lifetime plus a hundred years.
Fisher: Now the question would be, that anybody would ask, is how anybody can guarantee that something is going to last in the cloud for a hundred years beyond your lifetime? And this is where it gets a little bit different.
David: It is, in fact they basing it on the model of an insurance company. I actually asked them “So how do I know whose going to be alive in a hundred years?” so your heirs assign heirs and it becomes your legal property. You don’t have to worry “Oh my goodness am I going to find somebody that’s going to be able to read my USB drive in a hundred years from now?” They going to refresh all that data, they going to keep it standard part of the operating part of the company and that will be to actually make sure that the date of transitions into your lifetime plus a hundred years. I think it’s amazing to think that this has so many applications both on the family history level and small historical societies and libraries have some great ideas that I want to talk to them about. I think it’s more far reaching then just genealogy.
Fisher: Sure. Also we had the innovators summit that was the first day that was on Wednesday, and that’s where all these people come in either with new inventions or something they have innovated and there’s a hundred thousand dollar prize money involved in this thing, and the winner was a company called Tap Genes.
David: They were very interesting indeed because a lot of people test their DNA to know about their family health history, but their concept is crowd sourcing and using your own social media connections to reach out to cousins to track family health history, fascinating and obviously big, big winner for innovative summit.
Fisher: Well it can affect your treatments.
David: Oh absolutely, and I think for instance, I am a type two diabetic, I mean I want to let my other cousins know. I mean some of them it may not come up because I don’t see them but their kids get diagnosed at least they know the route they may have followed through. There are so many different great people at the innovative summit, another one that I wanted to mention which was an intriguing new product is ‘JRNL’ and it’s pronounced journal but its spelled JRNL.
Fisher: Yeah just get rid of all the vowels.
David: Exactly! In jrnl.com I’ve encouraged people as one of my new year’s resolutions as I mentioned was to keep a journal to share. This is a way to do it electronically in a secure environment. You can invite people like your cousins and friends to participate, you can put in photos, videos, etc. and it’s an exciting new product and I’m looking to see that company grow and take off with what they’re offering and I’m going to give it a try. It’s free to start, and as everything else there is a premium level where you want more space for things, you pay, but I’ll give it a try and maybe it will give me a chance to remember to keep a journal.
Fisher: Right [laughs] good point.
David: Next one that I saw and I do chat with him a bit, is Family City, which is a French company all the way over from Paris, France, they came to Roots Tech. It’s sort of a .com for social media to connect your family and share what you’ve already done but with no data bases.
Fisher: Nice.
David: The price is free so famicity.com. Another thing, I don’t think anybody thinks about so much into technology but books, but on a very basic level.
Deanna Novak from Kids Heritage Inc. from Orlando Florida was there, and what she offers is the groundbreaking old technology, a book.
Fisher: Yeah that’s right. She was my neighbor actually in the neighboring booth, and it’s just absolutely astonishing because if you’ve got a kid and you want to introduce them to their family history, she basically has a template with countries for instance, if you can give her four countries that your family descends from, they’ll put that in there and it can go up to six, then they customize the book with the kid’s name and birth date in there and maybe a little greeting from somebody. It’s a hard bound kid’s book and it tells them about the countries and their heritage. How cool is that.
David: It really is. In fact I was lucky to get one for Hanna, and she’s already enjoyed it, my twelve year old, listens to Dad ramble on about pedigree charts and genealogy and DNA tests, but this is a real good way to get your kids interested and of course incorporate your own family stories, and there’s a spot in it that you can put in your own family tree. So they can have that and it’s really a nice little product.
Fisher: Absolutely.
David: You talk to a lot of people at Roots Tech did you get any interesting stories while you were there?
Fisher: You know I did and in fact one of them I got on tape because I just thought it was so uniquely special. You want to hear it?
David: I’d love to hear it.
Fisher: All right listen to this; this is Ellen from Idaho;
Ellen: My story is that I found a cross-stitch sampler that my third great grandmother made when she was eight years old, from the internet. So there was a lady in Canada that found it in an estate sale, didn’t know anything about it, fell in love with it, did a Google search on the name that my third great grandmother cross-stitched on there, her name, so she did a Google search on Mary Elsie Collinson, found some information that one of my distant cousins had put on the internet.
This distant cousin lives in Australia. The Australia cousin emailed my family and said “There’s a lady in Canada that has a cross-stitch that was made by your third great grandmother. So I emailed this lady in Canada, I said “This is my third great grandmother, I really want to have this” and she said “I knew that this was a risk if I did a Google search” she said “I don’t know, I love the piece so I’ll get back to you” I thought I’m never going to hear from her again. A couple of days later she emailed me back and she sad “I love this piece, but if you let me have it for two years and if you still want it, contact me and I’ll sell it to you for market value.” I wrote it down in my calendar for two years from then.
Fisher: Your two years are up.
Ellen: I wrote her back and said “I’m still here, I want it” and she said “I was hoping that you would forget but I figured that you wouldn’t” [laughs] so we made arrangements and she had sent me pictures, so we made arrangements for me to purchase it from her. So now I have this piece that was cross-stitched when my third great grandmother, Mary Elsie Collinson was eight years old, in England. I still haven’t tracked down how it got to Canada, there are two little branches of the family that go there but I can’t get it to the right place yet, but when she was eight years old she made this and now I have it hanging in my living room.
Fisher: And now what year are we talking about?
Ellen: It was made in 1812. Isn’t that incredible? It just brings me to tears every time I walk by it.
Fisher: Did you hear the dropped jaws from all the people around us as she was telling that story, David?
David: A 200 year old family heirloom found via the internet.
Fisher: Yep.
David: Doesn’t that make the internet all the worthwhile just for that?
Fisher: Well you know I found an original movie of my father playing in a big band in the 1930’s on eBay, years ago. It’s a treasure.
David: Unbelievable stuff. The things that are titanic in the industry are a lot of the .com names but a company that I’d never heard of before it produced something mammoth in fact this titanic or mammoth chart was the 30 by 100 foot long chart with over two hundred thousand names. Did you see it?
Fisher: I had a picture taken in front of that thing yeah [laughs] they even have pictures, they have life size pictures of people climbing up it, and it’s just astonishing. I’m sure it’s the largest in the world. It was from genealogicalwallcharts.com. Two hundred thousand names on there and these lines went back to Moses.
David: You know I was wondering how to get some of the stuff I got at Roots Tech back in my suitcase, that would be a little difficult.
Fisher: Yeah [laughs] how do they pack that up?
David: I don’t know but I bet you all the data fits in the USB drive.
Fisher: Right [laughs] that’s true.
David: We get so micro on some levels of our research and so macro on others.
Fisher: That’s absolutely true. We’re talking about the Roots Tech Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah that took place this past week. The largest in the world, twenty five thousand people attended over four days and another hundred and twenty five or so another hundred and twenty five thousand watched online from live streams, and of course the keynote speakers were very important there. We got to meet one of them David.
David: Oh we did, my good friend Vinny at NEHGS and I had the honor to do her genealogy for her.
Fisher: Right.
David: Doris Kearns Goodwin, quite the lady and the historian’s historian as I like to say.
Fisher: And she’s so very pleasant too, just really nice to be around.
David: Well especially when you’re dressed as the first President of the United States, I don’t think she could say no to want to chat with you.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: I mean there might be a book in the works just on that conversation alone.
Fisher: We did a photograph as if we were actually dancing the quadrille or something and she just loved it. It was really fun and you can see the picture. It’s on our Facebook page for Extreme Genes so check that out, and a lot of fun.
David: It really was and I’ll tell you there were just so many happy people at that conference. One thing that Roots Tech does besides the technology is the networking. Between sitting with people at breakfast all the way up to the after party with MyHeritage.com it’s bonding. I mean I have more Facebook friends now than I did when I went, and I’ve got a pocketful of business cards and lots of emails to send and phone calls to make, so it’s a really good networking opportunity to make no matter where you sit in the industry and genealogy and if you’re just a family historian. I think there are so many people that go to it every year now just like the national conferences that have been along for over twenty years.
Fisher: All right David thanks for coming on. It was great being with you last week.
And coming next; we’re going to talk to Dr. Kasia Bryc of 23andMe DNA and she’s going to be talking about what it is that they’ve learned through DNA about how we are attracted to each other over this Valentine’s Day weekend, on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 126 (44:45)

Fisher: And, welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and it is so good to have DNA day. I always enjoy talking to the experts of 23andMe, about some of the things that they discover about us as people, and I’ve got Doctor Kasia Bryc back on the line. Good to have you on the show again, Doctor!
Kasia: Great to be here! Thank you for having me.
Fisher: I am very excited about this study you did about real world couples, 15,298 of them, and you did a little analysis on them and since it is Valentines weekend, fill us in on what you discovered.
Kasia: Yes, we looked at – like you said – fifteen thousand couples and their children together and looked at correlations amongst senior types. So, what that means is, we looked at whether two people had the same trait or hobby or whatnot that they’ve reported and found that the vast majority of traits that we looked at, couples were more similar. So, there was the correlation. For example, athletes were coupled with athletes, skiers hung out with skiers, hikers with hikers. We looked across a lot of different traits of people who spoke a second language.
Fisher: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute! We have always heard that opposites attract. You’re destroying this.
Kasia: [Laughs] So, we’re looking at the data and the data seems to suggest that for the vast majority of traits, people were more similar to each other. Of course there were a few exceptions.
Fisher: Okay.
Kasia: So, some things were different. So, opposites attracted, so night owls tended to be with morning people. If one of the couples attracted mosquitoes the other happily didn’t.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Kasia: And people with good direction were maybe partners with people without such great sense of direction.
Fisher: That’s funny you say all those things, because that is the case in my marriage. I am a…
Kasia: It’s certainly the case with mine.
Fisher: Yeah, I’m a late night person and my wife is very early. She attracts mosquitoes. She is my best mosquito repellent, because they all go to her and not to me.
Kasia: Same here.
Fisher: And then, she’s very good at directions and I’m not, of course I wouldn’t ask for them anyway, right?
Kasia: Well I, I happen to be the directions person in the relationship.
Fisher: Sure.
Kasia: But yes, I mean, it works out great. [Laughs]
Fisher: Okay. So, this is an interesting study, because you’re finding similarities have more to do with it than differences, although, obviously people do complement themselves often and that’s very useful in keeping people together, I think, right? If you all have the same skills, there wouldn’t be much to keep you going. Is there some kind of genetic predisposition to this? There’s obviously a correlation, but is there a causation that brings this about? What is DNA showing us?
Kasia: Yeah. So, the big question is always, does correlation imply causation, and in this case, we’re just looking at correlation, so we don’t know what’s causing what. We can certainly speculate and it’s certainly fun to do so around Valentine’s Day, but we don’t know which came first, but we definitely see that there’s definitely a lot of similarities among couples, you know, and that doesn’t necessarily tell us, you know, why they fell in love. Whether they fell in love because they had all these in common or maybe they grew these shared interests in common after becoming a couple. So, we don’t know which came first, but it certainly leads to couples sharing a lot in common.
Fisher: Do you notice the same thing with physical types?
Kasia: So, we definitely saw some interesting tidbits, for example, couples who had similar BMIs or happier.
Fisher: Yeah, that would make sense. I mean, you don’t usually see people who are really, really skinny with people who are really, really overweight. That’s not as common.
Kasia: And it’s very odd that there’s a correlation between that and happiness. So, I’m not sure what to read into that or how to read into that.
Fisher: Um-hum.
Kasia: So, luckily for me, my husband is very tall and there’s no such effects for height, so you don’t have to be similar heights to be happy, which is good, because he’s much taller than me. [Laughs]
Fisher: Well, so, the bottom line is it kind of makes it a little more difficult really, doesn’t it, to determine what sides certain traits came from if similar people are attracted to one another. It could come from either or both, right?
Kasia: Yeah, it’s hard to say, hard to say. We had this recent study on morning-ness, whether you’re a morning person or night owl, and we definitely saw lots of genetic variants that are associated, like whether you like get up early in the morning – like my husband – or whether you like to sleep in late, like me.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Kasia: And so, [laughs], there’s a lot of interesting variants that we found, some that were known previously, but also a handful that kind of makes sense but what hadn’t been seen before, and then, we can do things that take it a little bit further, so we can look at whether being a morning person correlates with other things, like Body Mass Index or BMI or insomnia or depression or how long you sleep. So we can ask all these interesting questions because 23andMe customers tell us so many interesting things about themselves.
Fisher: Right and this is something that there’s no names attached to the surveys that you do. It’s just among the customers in general, correct?
Kasia: Yeah. So, we’re looking at aggregated data on the back end so, there’s no names. We have no identifiable names, any sort of identifiable information on the customers when we’re doing research; we’re just using the correlation using genetic data and aggregate to make the inferences.
Fisher: Right. So, there’s no association with name or anything. So, it’s all private and it adds to this development of this amazing database. Now, I read somewhere in this article that you people put together, that there’s something about being almost like fourth-cousins.
Kasia: Yeah, so there was a study recently that looked at whether friends were genetically similar. So, whether there was any correlation between whom you called a friend and how they were related to you genetically.
Fisher: Right. Not necessarily related though, right?
Kasia: Not necessarily related, but the result was that individuals who were friends were more genetically similar than you would expect and there were something along the lines of, as similar as their fourth-cousins are more similar to each other than any two individuals at random. So, it basically shows that you’re more likely to be friends with people, who are more similar to you, something like that.
Fisher: It kind of makes you wonder then, how are we ever going to come together with our differences if our natural tendency is always to be together with people who are more like us and like-minded and look like us and think like us, that type of thing, doesn’t it?
Kasia: That is sort of the way that the world works in some cases but I think that there’s also a strong argument that people who are put in the same place at the same time also tend to mix, irrespective of background. So, one of the research we did, looking at individuals living across the U.S., it was that people who identified as European-American, African-American and Latino, you know, it’s clear that there’s been an ongoing process of what we call admixture, basically, people from different backgrounds, but DNA coming from different parts of the world mixing together.
Fisher: Um-hum.
Kasia: And I think that will be the case in the States, at least, that that’s been happening for a very long time, and you can definitely see the effects of that by looking at the DNA. You can see individuals with ancestry from Africa, from Europe, from the Americas. So, you can definitely see assorted mating, meaning mating like-with-like, but also different individuals coming together as well.
Fisher: Yeah. It’s a melting pot, isn’t it right now, going on, I mean two generations or so, most families will be mixed families in the United States, wouldn’t you say?
Kasia: I don’t know the latest research on that, but I’m definitely looking at the genetics and see that there’s individuals who carry bits of ancestry, even when they may not realize it. So, there’s a large proportion of individuals – especially in the South – who identify as white, who carry bits of African or Native-American DNA.
Fisher: Um-hum.
Kasia: And they may not know about it.
Fisher: Okay, and likewise, the African-Americans who find they have European blood and Native-American blood too, right?
Kasia: Yeah, so you see African-Americans – especially from Oklahoma – who carry appreciable amounts of Native-American ancestry, and that sort of traces back to historical migration. Oklahoma was formerly Indian Territory where the trail of tears migration ended, and you can sort of see the historical migration in the DNA of people there today.
Fisher: Wow! It’s just a fascinating field, and of course you do so much there, not only to determine more about how people are alike or unlike, but also to match up cousins, so that we can extend our family tree lines, and that’s why it’s so much fun. Doctor Bryc thanks. We’re out of time. I wish we had more, but we’re going to get back with you people again next month and have another DNA day and find out what’s on your minds.
Kasia: Great, thanks, looking forward to it!
Fisher: All right, I am too, and we’ll talk to you then. Coming up next, it’s Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 126
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: It is preservation time on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com
Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com
Hi Tom, how are you? How’s our Preservation Authority?
Tom: I’m really, really good. Roots Tech was awesome! I’m trying to put things together so hopefully by next week’s show I can answer some of the questions that came to me at Roots Tech.
Fisher: Yes so much. So much stuff to cover but it was an amazing show. Hey, we’ve got another question here and this one comes from Olympia Washington, where they listen to us on KMAS, 1030 AM and the question is this “Tom, I have all kinds of different files on a flash-drive and I want to make a compilation video, how do I do this mixing and matching all these different formats?” Great question.
Tom: That is. That’s an awesome question. That’s kind of little bit what we talked about last week. But since they’re all kinds of different formats, again you’re going to need to find out what your end result is. In this case you want a playable DVD.
Fisher: So you have to somehow standardize all these into one format and decide what it is yes?
Tom: Exactly! We have people bring us in a disk and say “Hey, I played this on my DVD player, it won’t play.” We look at it and go “Well this is a BluRay disk that’s why it won’t play on your DVD player.” Or they give us a DVD and say “Hey, you know this plays on my computer why won’t it play on my DVD?” so I pop it into my computer and look at the file types to see what kind they are, so if you’ve got all miscellaneous kind of file types what you need to do is organize them… okay I’ve got all these AVI’s, I’ve got these MOV’s, I’ve got QuickTime’s, I’ve got MP4’s, whatever you have if you can get them to play on your computer you can save yourself a lot of money.
If you’re on a MAC, just open them into QuickTime, if you’re on a PC usually the Windows’s program that comes with it will open it, and if you look down in the corner usually it will automatically pop up a little time code like a little clock and it will say ‘okay, you’re on chapter 1, there’s 8 chapters.’ You’re at :00 and there’s 3 minutes and 14 seconds long or whatever.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: And what you’ll do is just make a track-sheet like a professional editor would make for a movie and you write ‘okay, I’m on file X, Y and Z, it’s a .MOV and I want it to start at 13 seconds and I want it to run to 2 minutes and 14 seconds.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: And then we’ll say okay and I want this next one that’s an .MP4, and it’s A, B, C and I want it to start at 14 minutes and go to 32 minutes. Write down all this information in the order that you want it to be. A lot of people come in and they say “This is what I don’t want.” A computer doesn’t understand ‘I don’t want this or take everything else.”
Fisher: [Laughs] Right.
Tom: You need to tell the computer I want to start here and I want to go to here, and we’re the same way so we’re entering all these different edit points and then let the computer basically do all the work for you which will save you a lot of time and a lot of money that way.
Fisher: So what you’re going to do basically is, take these different things in different formats edit them to what they’re supposed to be and then standardize the format. I would assume to an MP4 yes?
Tom: Right. That’s what I would suggest. The neat thing about MP4s is they’re universal, they’re like QuickTime, they’ll play on about anything. Most wide screen televisions will play MP4s.
Fisher: Apple and PC?
Tom: Yup. Windows Machines, MAC machines, OSX machines, anything pretty much that you have will play MP4s and QuickTimes, it’s a great standard, good quality video and it’s ultra compressed without losing quality. So what we’ll do as you mentioned is standardize all the things because like if you have MOV’s, AVI’s and these different kinds of things probably what we’ll do is edit them in their native format. So we’ll get out this piece, we’ll get out this piece before we combine them and change them.
Because there’s no reason to go change everything to an MP4 and then edit it, so we’ll edit in its native format because it’s going to be a lot cleaner edits and better quality.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: Then once we have some MOV’s, some AVI’s, some QuickTime’s or whatever then we can turn them all into the MP4 or the AVI or the QuickTime whatever you want, and some people bring us these same thing and say “Hey, I’ve got this old VHS, I want to turn it into BluRay.”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: They think we have a magic wand that can take this poor quality VHS and make it better by burning it on a BluRay disk. We need to go back to what we talked about quite a while ago. You want to look at storage devices as boxes and after the break I’ll explain to you the difference between a data disk and a playable DVD for instance.
Fisher: Oh boy, it sounds complicated but you know, if you’re going to save your stuff you’ve got to learn how this works.
Tom: Take notes.
Fisher: Tom’s got more answers coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 5 Episode 126
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We’re back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, talking with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, and Tom, I’ve got to tell you I can feel people’s heads swimming right now talking about converting formats and editing videos and assembling it all together. But you know at the end of the day this is what has to happen otherwise your stuff goes away.
Tom: Oh absolutely. In fact, at Roots Tech, we talked to more customers that came up to our booth about this exact subject. “I’ve got all this stuff I’m just overwhelmed.” Wait, wait, wait don’t be overwhelmed. Just take one box off the shelf and take one videotape and start there and just do one at a time, one at a time.
Fisher: Exactly.
Tom: But the biggest question we got at Roots Tech is, people get confused about “Hey, I have this DVD that says DVD on it but I put it in my DVD Player, why won’t it play?”
As in the first segment that we talked about, we have different kinds of boxes. Storage things whether it’s a DVD, a CD, a BluRay, a Flash-drive, an SD card. Whatever they are, they’re just storage devices. Different sizes of boxes, they’re all boxes of old stuff.
When you hear DVD people think video DVD, well there’s also data DVD.
Fisher: Yes.
Tom: So the disk itself doesn’t care whether there’s a video on it, whether it’s data on it, it doesn’t matter it’s irrelevant.
Fisher: It’s a type of box basically.
Tom: Exactly!
Fisher: It’s a storage thing.
Tom: Right. Exactly and they think of CD’s as just audio especially in Africa, we get a lot of disks from Africa that are CD’s that have video on them.
Fisher: Really?
Tom: And they’re really major compressed in a kind of a weird format that’s really not very good quality. But I guess they have more access to CD’s than they do DVD’s or it’s just their culture. But we get these CD’s that have ultra compressed video on it. So that CD is still a box, it’s just a smaller box than the DVD.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: Where the BluRay is a bigger box and when you get it in the Thumb-drives and SD cards they’re Terabytes or Gigabytes, all different kinds of sizes. So what you want to do is decide “Okay I’ve got all these files, this is what size they are this is going to fit on a DVD or it needs to go on a BluRay because it’s so big not because of the quality.” Now one thing we’ve talked about before when you’re transferring film or anything that’s optical it’s always best to go to BluRay because it’s going to look better because it gives us the opportunity to give you a bigger file that wouldn’t fit on a DVD, and again as a BluRay player plays a BluRay it makes it look better but it will also play DVD’s better than a DVD does because it has what is called an ‘up converter’ built right into it.
So that’s why when you get your new BluRay, you’re looking at our old DVD’s and saying “Wow these look so much better on this big screen!” well it’s probably not your TV that’s making them look better. It’s now you’re playing your old DVD’s on a BluRay machine and it’s ‘up converting’ them so that’s why it looks better.
So it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a CD, a DVD or a BluRay, if you want a disk it depends what size of information. For instance audio, we’ve had people that have this huge record collection that we transfer for them, there are so many we put them pm MP3’s but we have to put them on a data disk that’s a DVD or multiple CD’s and they go “No, no, no that’s fine put them on a DVD because I’m going to put them on my computer and load them on my hard-drive once you’re done compiling them for me.”
So it really doesn’t matter what kind of a device it’s on its again, what is your end product? Do you want to be able to play it in your car, do you want to be able to play it on your Mp3 player, or your iPhone, what do you want to do with this? Let us know so when we convert it we’ll do it the right way. We had somebody a year ago that brought in a disk for us and said “I want 10 copies of this.” So we made him 10 copies. He called us a year later and said “This won’t play on my DVD player.”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: So we searched and found out what it was, he brought us in a data disk and said copy it, so we copied it. So he got exactly what he had before but it wasn’t a video DVD it was a data DVD. So be really careful whenever you contact us or whoever you’re working through, let them know what you have, what you need and what your end use is going to be.
Fisher: And get to know what you’re storing it on.
Tom: Exactly! You have to know these things and please, if you have any questions just email me at askTom@TMCPlace.com I’m happy to help you in any way I can.
Fisher: All right. We’ll talk to you next week Tom, thanks for coming by!
Tom: Yup. We’ll be ready with Roots Tech.
Fisher: Hey, that’s our show for this week! Thanks once again to Dr. Kasia Bryc from 23andMe.com, for coming on and talking about how DNA kind of effects how we come together as couples. Great stuff! If you missed it make sure you listen to the podcast at ExtremeGenes.com, iTunes, the iHeartRadio Talk Channel. Thanks also to David Allen Lambert, for helping me with the review of Roots Tech; we’ll have more on that coming next week.
Take care, we’ll talk to you again next week and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 125 – Handwriting Analysis on Ancestors’ Handwriting

February 8, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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!