Episode 141 – A Visit With the Creator of Relative Finder / EG Classic Interview With Apolo Anton Ohno

May 31, 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 is on the road in Albany, New York. He talks about the devastating 1911 New York Archives fire that destroyed and damaged so many early New York records. In “Family Histoire News” David and Fisher discuss the recent identification of a sailor lost at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the return of his remains to his family. David also has a unique story about the discovery of the funeral cost breakdown from the services for Mary Todd Lincoln in 1882! In England, a theater where Shakespeare himself once performed has been unearthed. And it created quite a stir among historians. Why? Catch the podcast! David also has another Tech Tip and NEHGS guest-user free database.

Next (starts at 11:09) , Fisher visits with Dr. Tom Sederberg, a computer science professor at Brigham Young University. Dr. Sederberg is the creator of Relative Finder, a unique software that can tie you to friends and celebrities. Dr. Sederberg will share the history of its development and talk about some stories unique to its use. It’s free. We’ll tell you where to get it!

Then (starts at 24:48), it’s an Extreme Genes classic interview with Olympic Speed Skating champion Apolo Anton Ohno, now a commentator for NBC. Apolo is half-Japanese and has learned some fascinating things from that side of his family. He explains how, as well as what he’s doing to break open his mother’s unknown background. It’s one of the most talked about segments ever on Extreme Genes!

Then Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com returns to talk preservation. Who would know there was so much to discuss concerning “thumb drives?!” Tom shares some important pieces of information on these common storage devices.

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

Transcript of Episode 141

Segment 1 Episode 141 (00:30)
Fisher: And welcome to 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 excited! Later on in the show we’re going to talk to a guy connected with a program I’ve heard a lot about and haven’t had a lot of experience using. It’s called, “Relative Finder.” And basically, you can put in your tree with those of many other people and find out how you’re related. So if you’ve got an office or a church group or something like that. You can put in all the names and see where these trees come together and you can find out who within your group is related. So that should be a very interesting segment. Plus we’re going to share an Extreme Genes classic interview, my visit with Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, talking about his background and his search to know more. But right now, let’s check in with my good friend the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org,
David Allen Lambert. How are you David?
David: Live from New York! It’s your Chief Genealogist, here in Albany!
Fisher: [Laughs] Now, Albany is not New York, when you say “Live from New York!” That is going to throw people off. What are you doing there?
David: Well, NEHGS every other year does a research tour to the New York State Library and Archives. So this is the week they’re out here in sunny Albany, New York. And it’s been really good, people are finding lots of things. But I can tell you there are some things with the old records that they don’t exist anymore. Did you ever hear about the fire that happened out here?
Fisher: Yeah. 1911 and of course I’ve dealt with that a lot because I have a lot of New York ancestry. But that fire took out some very important records.
David: A lot of the colonial records are completely gone, and the early Dutch records for New York of course were singed. But it’s going to take many years of digitization and preservation to actually make them all accessible. But it’s a start. I came across a database that may be very useful for people that are doing New York research. It’s very hard to get records from the state, sometimes it takes up to a year to get a record.
Fisher: Yes.
David: But they have just recently released the New York state vital record death index from 1957 to 1966.
And on my Twitter feed, @DLGenealogist, you’ll find the link and I’m sure we’ll echo it for Extreme Genes. So that was exciting. But you know getting to “Family Histoire News” I’m going to go right on the other side of the U.S. out to Pearl Harbor where the remains of Albert Hayden a former Navy veteran who perished on Pearl Harbor, on December 7th ’41. He was aboard the USS Oklahoma, and he is now buried beside his mom, and how’d they do that? DNA.
Fisher: Of course.
David: It’s amazing.
Fisher: Isn’t that great. And you know all the remains from the Oklahoma were kind of all together, so they buried all these people in a grave of unknowns. And now they’re able to start going through and say, “Oh this is this person, this is that person.” And they’ve identified five of them so far and it’s only going to get better.
David: Well that’s great. I mean we’re approaching the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and we still have a handful of the vets that were actually there. So it’s kind of fitting to see their shipmates finally going home with their parents. So that’s amazing. You know, getting into funerals let’s go ahead a little bit further back in time, in 1882 the late Mary Todd Lincoln passes away, Abraham Lincoln’s beloved wife. The recent acquisition and merger of the Butler Funeral Home with the Boardman-Smith Funeral Home which were both located in Springfield, Illinois has produced a list of the funeral expenses for the late Mary Todd Lincoln.
Fisher: How cool is that!
David: It’s amazing. Including the cost of the casket which cost $225 and $150 for drapes, and a horse drawn carriage for $15, well that’s a pretty good rate but we are talking about 1882 dollars.
Fisher: Right. [Laughs]
David: This is going to be out in a display apparently, talking about the history of the funeral associated with the late 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.
Fisher: How cool is that. That’s amazing.
David: It really is. And you know, I tell you discoveries always turn up, but I always love to dig deep especially with archaeological stories. So going across the pond to England, remains of the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, England have been recently found. And you think of William Shakespeare, you know it’s the 400th anniversary of his death, you’ve got the Globe Theatre which has been recreated on the other side of the Thames in London, and its round.
Fisher: Right.
David: Well, guess what? The Curtain Theatre was not round!
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: It was rectangular. So this has thrown historians through a bit of a loop. Well not a loop, a rectangle! [Laughs]
Fisher: A rectangle! [Laughs] That’s right. They’re going to have to redo some of their books.
David: I think so. I mean they’re finding all sorts of artifacts. They found bone combs to clean out little critters from your hair.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: And they found a lead token to pay for a pint of ale. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be handling lead then drinking or eating anything.
Fisher: No kidding.
David: So that’s exciting stuff that’s happening. For my Tech Tip, and this really kind of comes down to spring cleaning, I found over three hundred old cancelled checks from my late mom and dad. They go from the 1970s to the 1990s or so and I was going to pitch them. Then I thought to myself, besides having their signatures, it has the counter signatures of all the people they wrote to, like checks for people who got married, flowers for funerals or vacations we went on, or things they purchased like maybe a bike for me. So it’s really important. It kind of gives you a diary. My parents didn’t keep one, so if I keep these checks in chronological order, some of them are insignificant but it does tell a story that in some cases I forgot about.
Fisher: Interesting.
David: It really is. Speaking of databases that you can make of your own family possessions, NEHGS is always making databases and this week is no exception. If you go to AmericanAncestors.org you can use the guest user database by signing up as a guest user for free, and we are having currently now working our Western Massachusetts 1790 project. The key thing on that is, if your ancestors lived in western Massachusetts in 1790, send us in the information, and we’ll include you in the database and help you put together a sketch on your ancestor. That’s it for me this week, I can’t say signing off from Beantown, so I’ll say signing out from Albany, see you next week in Beantown, or from Beantown.
Fisher: All right David, and take care of those kids, it sounds like there’s a lot of learning going on there.
David: There really is. There’s a lot of school groups going through so who knows… these are future historians and archaeologists, and genealogists abounding.
Fisher: All right, talk to you next week, buddy.
David: Take care, my friend. Buh-bye.
Fisher: And coming up next, we’re going to talk about a piece of software called “Relative Finder” that can help you find out if you’re related to lots of people. Tom Sederberg will have all the details on the way in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 141 (11:10)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Dr. Tom Sederberg
Fisher: Hey, welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, and with over thirty years of tracing my dead, I’ve often found it interesting to discover that sometimes people you know, maybe somebody who lives right next door or somebody you work with, is related to you. And it’s often a big surprise, but it’s not that big a surprise to people like Tom Sederberg, my next guest. He is a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Tom, welcome to Extreme Genes.
Tom: Thank you Scott.
Fisher: I’m excited to have you on because sometime back you were the creator of a program called “Relative Finder.” And this program does exactly what we’re talking about, helps people discover how they might be related to somebody else. This goes way back, Tom. I mean, we’re talking pre-twenty first century!
Tom: Right. Yeah. Yeah. The first version of Relative Finder was written about 1997. And I’m an avid genealogist, and I was interested in helping my neighbors get interested in family history and genealogy. And back then this was pre-FamilySearch, pre-anything online. But there was a database called “Ancestral File.” And anybody could go to a family history library and download their genealogy from Ancestral File, assuming that they had the data in there due to the kindness of some relative who had entered it. And many of my neighbors had that and so I went to the family history library over the course of many months, and downloaded my neighbor’s family history and you know, going back 10- 12 generations. And then I helped them load it on their personal computer. Just to, you know, be of assistance. Because usually I’ve discovered if somebody just starts to play around with it, they really get hooked on it.
Fisher: That’s really true.
Tom: So anyway, one night I was sitting at my computer, I said “Gosh, I’ve got about a hundred of my neighbors’ data on my hard drive here. I wonder if anyone’s related.” And so, being a computer scientist I wrote a little computer program that would read into everybody’s family tree, and just compare to see if anybody had any common ancestors. And lo and behold, I was just flabbergasted! It turned out that on average, every one of those hundred neighbors of mine was related to about two thirds of the other people!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: And I’m talking, some of them were second and third cousins. My wife turned out to have three third cousins within a block of us. And we’d live there by then for about a dozen years. She had no idea that she was so closely related to these neighbors.
Fisher: Wow! That had to be quite a revelation. You know, they talk about George Herbert Walker Bush, as being the first president to be related to perhaps more than half the population of America, because he has early southern roots out of Virginia and early New England roots as well.
Tom: Wow.
Fisher: And that kind of gets into the bulk of the early settlers in the United States, and they were figuring he is related to about a 150 million Americans!
Tom: Wow.
Fisher: Yeah. And so when you break it down to the neighborhoods, I don’t think most of us think that we might have somebody whose related to us just living on the same street. But I would guess that if you go back to the sixth or seventh cousin level, most of us do!
Tom: Yeah. And you know it’s an interesting mathematical thing. I subsequently did this – I teach here at BYU and I ran this for all of the professors in my college about seven or eight years ago, 180 people, we discovered thirty eight instances of second cousins and 160 instances of third cousins, just amongst these 180 professors. It was quite fascinating.
Fisher: Wow! That’s incredible. This is kind of a mind blower to most people I guess, although I think more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that the math says “We really are one big family.”
Tom: Yeah. We ran a probability analysis and discovered that for two random people with European ancestry, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that they share a common ancestor within twelve generations.
Fisher: That would make sense. That’s going back to about the time of the Mayflower, right?
Tom: Yeah, roughly.
Fisher: Somewhere in that neighborhood. In fact, I just finally found a common ancestor with my wife and myself. So we’re cousins. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Tom: No! No!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: Just as long as it’s not first cousins!
Fisher: That’s right. That’s right. But this goes back about to the late fifteen hundreds to finally find one. I was really kind of surprised it took this long. So, that was 1997 and then you did the thing with the professors about eight years ago, what has happened with it since? And how can people get a hold of this? And how do they use it?
Tom: Yeah. Well, since then a lot has happened in the family history technology to begin with. FamilySearch is online now, you’ve got Ancestry online. There are lots of companies. The appealing thing for us about FamilySearch is that all of their names are linked together with fairly good accuracy into one big tree, which is critical for us in order to determine how people are related.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And so, anybody that has a FamilySearch account, and generally it’s important for them to go back at least eight or nine generations in FamilySearch before they start tying into too many other people. They can just go to RelativeFinder.org is our website, and it will have them log in to their FamilySearch account and that’s how we credential the users of Relative Finder and it will download their… I think we’re grabbing like fifteen generations, if they have that many. And we download that much and then we just run a report and compare them against, uh… We’ve got about three thousand famous people, including presidents of the United States, and artists, and movie stars and lots of different groups. And it will show how they’re related to these people.
Fisher: And some of that will be good and some of it maybe not so much.
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: We get complaints about people “I didn’t want to be related to this politician!”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: One of the ones we get coming on a lot is, we’ve got President Obama in the database and a lot of people turn up being related to him and they say “Oh it must be a mistake.” They don’t realize of course that his mother was European, and so that’s how most of those relationships with him show up.
Fisher: Right, because the father’s side goes back to Africa immediately.
Tom: Yeah, and I don’t think there’s too much of his ancestry in FamilySearch.
Fisher: Right. The mother was early American.
Tom: Yeah, I believe so.
Fisher: I’m actually related to President Obama myself. Who else have you found on there that people respond to quite a bit?
Tom: Well, of course the Mayflower people and I just got an email the other day somebody said they do East Coast history tours and its fun for them to have people do Relative Finder.
Because then they point it out in particular if somebody is going to visit Monticello, they can say “Oh yeah, I’m related to Thomas Jefferson” Or Gettysburg and so forth. So it just makes it a lot more of an historical tie in realizing that their own ancestors played a role in some of these historical sites.
Fisher: And some of the places they were actually going. Yeah that’s absolutely true. You know, there’s so much that goes into preparation if you’re going to do a research trip somewhere right?
Tom: Yes.
Fisher: You want to find out about the area, where are the archives? What am I looking for? What can I order in before I even leave so I don’t have to spend a lot of time there doing things that I could do from home? This is a whole other aspect of it that I would have never thought of. Finding out what your relationship might be to the sites of famous individuals that you might be dropping in on.
Tom: Yeah. We have kind of a skeleton crew of students working on Relative Finder, and we’re just computer scientists you know, we’re not historians. So it’s hard for us to broaden the user base of how many famous people we have in our database. But we are now soon to roll out a feature where anybody could, you know, who might have an historical interest in a certain group of people, who’ll be able to add their own groups of famous people to Relative Finder, and that way we’ll kind of crowd source the management of it.
Fisher: Interesting.
Tom: And make it more usable for people, more interesting.
Fisher: So you’re developing it still to this day, and it’s been 19 years. Did you ever imagine?
Tom: No it’s been very, very exciting, and we’ve been fortunate a lot of very talented computer science students have worked on it.
Fisher: So tell me about some of the most incredible stories you’ve heard back from some of the folks who have used Relative Finder.
Tom: Yeah. Well I think my favorite quotes altogether, I mean of course we ask “Why are we going through all this work?” Because it does take time and money, and effort to maintain Relative Finder, and it all goes back to our passion for family history. And our favorite feedback is just, uh, people that spend three minutes joining Relative Finder and all of a sudden they’re hooked on genealogy. I think my all time favorite quote is somebody who said, “Relative Finder is the gateway drug to family history.”
Fisher: [Laughs] Did that go over well with you?
Tom: Well, you know I don’t know if I like the metaphor so much, but the sentiment! [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] Well that makes sense. You know I was thinking about it too that if you’re interested in, for instance, finding out if you can join the Mayflower Society, this might be a really easy way to at least see if there is some kind of path for you to find.
Tom: Yeah.
Fisher: That’s fascinating. When you think about, you just did this to start with, with your neighbors and your friends and it’s turned into this. It’s got to be very satisfying Tom.
Tom: Yeah. No it’s been very exciting. We’ve really just gone live with the FamilySearch version about a little over a year ago. And we’re already passed a half a million users and this grows about 20 thousand users a week just by word of mouth. So it’s really drawing a lot of attention.
Fisher: He’s Tom Sederberg, Professor of Computer Sciences at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The creator of “Relative Finder” You can sign up through your FamilySearch account. Dr. Sederberg, great to have you on the show, thanks so much! And good luck with all the things you’re doing to make this thing grow.
Tom: Thank you very much Scott, nice talking to you.
Fisher: And coming up next, it is a classic interview, my visit with Apolo Anton Ohno, the Olympic Champion about his background, and what he’s doing to discover more, coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

Segment 3 Episode 141 (24:50)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Apolo Anton Ohno
Fisher: And we are back, Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here with my very special guest, Olympic multiple Gold, Silver Medalist, Apolo Ohno in the studio with me today. And thanks for dropping by Apolo! It’s good to see you.
Apolo: Of course. Of course. I love your guys’ show and what you guys do. This is awesome!
Fisher: Well, thank you so much. And I was thinking about this, you’re known around the world, but nobody can quite ever figure out what your background is. And obviously you’ve got an interest in family history. I want to hear a little about what you’ve done and what you know.
Apolo: Sure. I’ll break it down like this. I grew up in a single parent household. My father was Japanese. He migrated to the United States when he was eighteen years old. Was married to my mom, and then they got a divorce when I was very young. My father took custody of me, so he raised me my entire life. So obviously I’m very close to my father. I don’t keep in contact with my mom, so I never developed a relationship with my mother in the sense of got to know her and her background.
Fisher: Right.
Apolo: And my mom was actually adopted.
Fisher: Oh boy!
Apolo: Yeah. So she doesn’t know her background ethnicity, because she doesn’t know her parents. I mean, you can kind of tell based on the way they look, but because I don’t keep in contact with my mom, I don’t know. So when people ask me all the time, “What’s your background ethnicity?” I say, “Well, I’m half Japanese.” And they say, “What’s the other half?” And I’m like, “I don’t really know.” So not too long ago, I did the 23andMe genealogy test.
Fisher: Right.
Apolo: Just to figure out kind of, at least generally speaking, what my history was. And then before that I think there was this show called, “Who Do You Think You Are?”
Fisher: Right. No, it’s still around.
Apolo: It’s still going?
Fisher: Oh yeah.
Apolo: So a friend of mine was producing the show. I had always told him, “I really want to know what my background is.” At least on my one side like maybe on the Japanese side, like what does it look like, the tree?
Fisher: Sure.
Apolo: Because of the half Japanese heritage, what they did you know? And the Japanese keep this very strict catalogue historical documentation of where the family and clans, I guess are from, right back to the Samurai.
Fisher: Right. Yes.
Apolo: And they started to dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and they tried to, they had to get like approval from my grandmother. At the time, my grandfather was alive and my father, and they were trying to just do all this research and using all these different translators. And they kept hitting a wall, because they got to a point where the Japanese just didn’t want to release the information. There was so much compliance and approval that my grandma was just like, “I don’t want to do this anymore!”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Apolo: So, I had the test results back from where I am and it shows that the other portion of my heritage and ancestry is primarily its northeastern European.
Fisher: Okay.
Apolo: Kind of like there’s some Irish there. There’s a little bit of like, British, maybe some Scottish. 1.6% is North African, which I was like, “Wow, that’s a bit interesting.”
Fisher: Isn’t that interesting when you get those trace elements in there and those.
Apolo: Yes, trace elements. People always say like, “What’s one thing that people don’t know about you, Apolo?” You know, and I’m like, “I don’t really know.” I’m pretty open on my public, you know like who I am. And then I started thinking the other day, “I do a lot of reading about some pretty obscure off topic things, and one of them is like ‘The origin of human species.’” I’m always interested in like, what was the first bones being excavated? What about this tribe? Where do we come from? You know, the other day I was reading about, you know, they found out this, they found this skull and some teeth in China. And they found that this kind of predates what they normally thought of any human beings being inside China. They found like, “We know what their last kind of meals were based on the…” I was like, “How do you?” That is so crazy!!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Apolo: Was this guy eating like some Dim sum?
Fisher: Yeah.
Apolo: It was incredible!
Fisher: It’s fantastic!
Apolo: It’s awesome! So really awesome!
Fisher: So did you get some stories out of Japan, about your parents, your grandparents, your greats?
Apolo: I did.
Fisher: What do you know?
Apolo: On my grandmother’s side, they found out that I actually have real Samurai blood.
Fisher: No kidding!
Apolo: Real, I forgot those, Yasunaga Clan. It was something in Japan, real Samurai blood. And you know I haven’t done a lot of research into it.
Fisher: When did you find that out, at what point? I mean you were probably…
Apolo: Not soon enough, because I would have used that to my advantage.
Fisher: I was going to say.
Apolo: Out there I was skating on razor sharp blades and like feeling “I’m fierce.” You know?
Fisher: Yeah, that had to affect you. So it wasn’t until after you’d retired?
Apolo: Well, I’ll tell you, it was something interesting, because my father didn’t really play sports. My grandfather didn’t really play sports. My grandmother didn’t really play sports. And so I have this like unique athletic ability that was sort of an anomaly in my family, but there has to be some genetic heritage that has passed down through generations. We found that there’s a relative in my family who was an exceptional runner, but never in a competition setting. But he would go visit his wife, and back then, you know, this is years and years and years ago, he would run to go see her. It was like sixteen miles one way or something.
Fisher: Wow! [Laughs]
Apolo: So he was like this incredible endurance athlete.
Fisher: Well you must have drawn something from him.
Apolo: Yeah. And then you know, perhaps from the Samurai bloodline, maybe there’s some fighter mentality there that is, you know. At least I like to think so.
Fisher: Absolutely.
Apolo: You know.
Fisher: So you found out about the Samurais. How far back are we talking here?
Apolo: I don’t know the exact date period, but it’s pretty far back. I think we’re going into like, you know, the 1400s, 1300s time. So this is pretty far back.
Fisher: And did you get some of your tree back that far?
Apolo: A little bit. It’s bits and pieces and some of it’s broken, because they were not able to really connect properly given the approval inside Japan.
Fisher: Right. Right.
Apolo: It’s going to take, what it’s going to take is, it’s going to take for me to fly to Japan with my grandmother.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Apolo: And then like basically just say, “All right, Obachan, I need you to kind of agree to this, this, this, this, and this.”
Fisher: So you need certain approvals from within the family?
Apolo: Every single step needs approval.
Fisher: No kidding!
Apolo: Yeah, it’s very cumbersome.
Fisher: Wow!
Apolo: And so she was just like, “Why does he have to know? It doesn’t really matter!”
Fisher: [Laughs] We’re talking to Olympic hero and idol, Apolo Ohno, about his family history background and some of his research. And you were saying you did the 23andMe DNA test. And since your mother’s side was adopted, did you find any cousins, first of all? Did you find any connection with some folks who might be cousins to help you open up that adopted side?
Apolo: Not yet. Not yet. But there’s been like some, I think they give you like some suggestions, right? In terms of like who might possibly be related.
Fisher: Right.
Apolo: I always wondered why my goatee and my sideburns were red.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Apolo: Because Japanese all have black hair.
Fisher: Yeah, that wouldn’t be from there.
Apolo: And I’m like, this is, I’m either Irish or like, Native American.
Fisher: Scottish, yeah.
Apolo: Scottish, definitely something in the North Eastern, European region.
Fisher: Sure.
Apolo: And it makes sense now.
Fisher: Well, a lot of people will do that. They’ll suddenly find a first or second cousin pops up or even a third.
Apolo: Right.
Fisher: And then they can start coming down into what you know about your mother and start putting this thing together, reconstructing the tree coming forward. And that’s how that can get done.
Apolo: Yeah.
Fisher: But you’re going to have to be paying attention to your results in order to get that to happen.
Apolo: Basically what is does is, it takes work, right? So you have to kind of sit down and you have to be committed and really kind of see what you can
Fisher: Well, and like you say, you’ve got that natural curiosity.
Apolo: Yeah.
Fisher: About history and the human factor. I mean, this is something you can do on the plane.
Apolo: Yeah.
Fisher: On your handheld device.
Apolo: That’s what I do. I do it on the plane.
Fisher: Yeah, all over the place. So what are you doing now?
Apolo: So you know, I retired in 2010 from my pursuit of the Olympic Games.
Fisher: You miss it?
Apolo: Every day. I miss the Olympic space every single day, but I get a taste of it every couple of years when I go to the Olympic Games. You know, I’m an NBC correspondent for the Olympics. I will be in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games as a commentator. I’ll be in the 2018 Games as a commentator. I’ll be in the 2020 Games as a commentator, ’22 and ’24 and beyond. So that’s what I do in relation to sports. Then I have my own serial entrepreneurial activities that I kind of focus on.
Fisher: Sure.
Apolo: I do some, you know, hosting and some acting based in Los Angeles. But those three are the main things that I really spend my time. And obviously the Special Olympics, and other different types of organizations that I’ve become partners with and try to lend my time to.
Fisher: Love the Special Olympics!
Apolo: Yeah, phenomenal.
Fisher: I remember the first time I was ever asked to host some even there. And I went there, frankly, with kind of a bad attitude.
Apolo: Yeah.
Fisher: It was like a Saturday and it’s like, “Agh, I’ve got to go host this other thing.”
Apolo: Yeah.
Fisher: And I got down there. And it was the most fulfilling, heartwarming thing. And I drove home with just such a glow. And I was thinking back about how I’d felt coming down and how I felt. And I couldn’t do enough of that stuff for many years to come. And it was just a joy to do it. And I can see you feel the same way about it.
Apolo: Yeah. You know, its…
Fisher: It’s a revelation!
Apolo: You think it’s a giving experience, but you get so much in return. And that’s what I try to tell people, “Look, just try it. Just see what I’m talking about. I can’t explain it to you.”
Fisher: And the love!
Apolo: The love is so genuine!
Fisher: Yes!
Apolo: Yeah. I mean, the Special Olympic athletes are so incredibly special and they’re just unique. And I love being part of an organization blessed to be able to represent them and always kind of take part. It’s been a big part of my life, you know. I’m excited about it.
Fisher: Apolo Ohno, thank you so much for your time. And good luck in your pursuit.
Apolo: Thank you. Thank you so much!
Fisher: Because I know this is going to be something that’s going to keep pulling you back, especially when you’ve got all those Samurais back there calling at you, you know.
Apolo: “Learn more about us!”
Fisher: Well, don’t athletes ultimately use things, like anything they can use as a motivation, right? Some kind of slight, like the Koreans did with you, right?
Apolo: Yeah, I was their motivation! [Laughs]
Fisher: Yes, you were! [Laughs]
Apolo: Oh man! Yeah!
Fisher: He’s Olympic Legend, Apolo Ohno, on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 141 (37:10)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: It’s Preservation Time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority. Hi Tom, how are you?
Tom: Super!
Fisher: All right, what have you got for us today?
Tom: Okay, we’ve got some updates, we talked a lot about storage devices, people are still asking us questions about storage and we have an update. We’ve always talked about thumb drive technology, people call them different things but basically they’re something about the size of your thumb.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: Now they have them in shapes of credit cards, they have them in shapes of cars, and they have them in shapes of about anything that you want.
Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah, I had a cruise ship one once.
Tom: Did you?
Fisher: Yeah, it was great!
Tom: And you know there are a lot of different ones out there on the market. Some of them come pre-packed with information, you plug it in you know, it goes to their website or has information of about whatever when they’re handing them out at trade shows. The one thing you have to be really careful with, is you have to make sure you get some really good quality ones because there’s a lot of junky ones coming out of China, that you know, I wouldn’t take if they gave them to me for free. But this new technology that makes them better. Always check the warranty, like the ones that we sell in our store and we put like MP3s and MP4s on. In fact, some of them are like 18GB and 32GB, we can actually put entire DVDs on them.
Fisher: Isn’t that amazing?
Tom: Oh it’s incredible. And the ones that we have, have a one year warranty on them, so if anything ever happens in your first year which is usually when they’re going to go bad, they’re covered. And these new ones that I really like, they’re like the rubber wrist bands that you wear for like you know, “Be strong” or different things like that.
Fisher: Sure, for racing yes.
Tom: Yeah, all different kinds of little rubber bands. There’s one out there now that’s like that. It’s just when you plug it together it makes a wrist band. So they’re so convenient, they’re smart, you can put them on your key ring because they’ll snap together but like I say, they’re about the size of your wrist. And the technology on these ones is just getting so much better. However, we still want to give you the cover that you need to make sure if you’re using thumb drives, use it as a transfer system to go from something to something else. In fact, even if you have the best one ever created that’s never going to give you a problem, what if you lose it?
Fisher: Oh yeah, there’s no question. The thing is, it’s interesting, I’ve had one for years, the same one and it works great. And I use it for transferring material when I’m in a research center or a library and I can bring it home and it’s no problem. But it’s still all there. It’s never failed me. But I have seen so many of these cheap ones, you wonder why would anybody ever rely on a thumb drive as their permanent storage solution?
Tom: Oh exactly! Look at the big people like Facebook and people like that. They don’t store all their stuff on thumb drives, they store it on you know, BluRay disks and such. So what’s so convenient about these things is that they are so portable. Like we say, you always want to have stuff backed up on a disk, preferably a Taiyo Yuden disk or even an M Disk which are the ones that are a thousand year disks. You want to make sure it’s in the cloud and two clouds if you can afford it. Make sure both clouds are unrelated. Like for instance, Google drive and Apple or Dropbox or one of these kinds of things. If you use somebody like ours, we have our own, but ours is actually built on Google. So if you use LightJar which we have you know you don’t want to have LightJar and Google as your two, because basically it’s the same thing. We just built an infrastructure on top of it. So you want to make sure they’re not related. And you always want to put stuff on a hard drive, and the prices of hard drives are coming down, and down and down. I mean, you know I saw at Best Buy they had, I think it was a one terabyte hard drive for like fifty dollars the other day.
Fisher: No kidding, really?
Tom: It’s just amazing. And I remember when a 500 gigabyte was a hundred and fifty dollars.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: So the prices are coming down. And they’re small and they’re portable. And that’s a good way to store stuff. It’s an excellent way to ship stuff. If you want to ship stuff to us to have somebody work on it or ship it to somebody else, a family member. Those drives are so inexpensive, it’s a great way to store stuff.
Fisher: I never thought I’d hear you suggest maybe we could ship something to you on a thumb drive!
Tom: Exactly! Exactly! But you know, like I say things are changing. It’s you know, the way of the future. The nice thing about thumb drives like I say, they’re so small. But always back it up. Don’t send anything to us or anybody if you don’t have it backed up. You know if you think, “Oh I don’t need a copy of this, I’m going to send it to Aunt Martha.” No, you want to make sure you have a copy of it. We’ll go into a little bit more detail on some different hard drives and other storage devices after the break.
Fisher: All right, coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 141 (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. It’s Preservation Time. We’re talking to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. And we’ve been talking thumb drives, because let’s face it Tom, historically they’re pretty trashy storage items.
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: And now finally some people are getting around to making some real good ones, and you didn’t mention in the previous segment, how much are these new ones going to set us back?
Tom: You know, this is what’s really surprising, is that they’re so inexpensive. In our store we carry 16GB, 32GB which are awesome ones and they’re under ten bucks.
Fisher: Wow! That’s great!
Tom: Oh yeah.
Fisher: And they’ll last?
Tom: Oh yeah. In fact, like I say we have a one year warranty on them, if anything goes wrong, I don’t care what it is, send it back to us and we’ll send you a new one.
Fisher: But how long do you actually expect it to last?
Tom: You know, just like you said in the earlier segment. I’ve got one that’s hanging on my keychain that I have had for at least ten years. And every time I think “Oh this is going to be the day it goes away, this is going to be the day it goes away.” I back it up and everything and it’s still streaming along, I’ve never had a problem with it. And one thing you want to be careful with, we talked about different shapes, there’s one that’s like a credit card. The reason I would kind of say steer away from that one is because look at the credit cards in your wallet, they’re probably kind of half mooned by now.
Fisher: Right. Yes. [Laughs]
Tom: And so what’s that going to do to the circuitry?
Fisher: Yeah.
Tom: You know, a magnetic stripe isn’t as volatile as circuitry in a USB drive, so you want to be careful. And you talked about small ones. We had somebody bring in one the other day it’s about the size of your thumbnail. Not your thumb, but your thumbnail!
Fisher: Your thumbnail? Wow!
Tom: Exactly. She hands it to me and I’m sitting there waiting for her. She says, “What do you need?” I go, “Well here’s the cap, where’s the USB?” she says “That’s it!”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: There’s this little teeny cap on it, it’s a quarter of an inch. And you pop that off. I thought, “I wouldn’t have those if they were free!” How easy is that to lose or one your little kids could swallow it and there’s goes all your stuff!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: Stay away from those things! Think, “What am I going to use this for?” If it’s a onetime thing, you’re going to load something, send it off and you don’t care about it, that’s fine. But if you’re going to keep it, have something at least the size of your thumb. And make sure you don’t ever leave it in your pocket. We’ve had people send them through the washing machine and sometimes we’ve been able to recover them, sometimes we haven’t. That’s why I really, really like these new neoprene wrist kinds, they’re east to keep track of. If you’re out in the rain, it’s not going to ruin them. They’re just a great way to go. And they’re under ten dollars, so it’s absolutely amazing with them.
Fisher: Now, they’ll last longer if you don’t use them a lot, right? So if you wanted to store them, say you wanted to store some MP4s or MP3s and you load them up there and just put them on a shelf somewhere, those should last for quite a while, right, that way because you’re not using them?
Tom: Oh yeah. Oh absolutely! Yeah, that’s true. The biggest thing about using them is not just the using them, it’s as you know they slide in tight and you pull it off, so they don’t fall off. And so it’s just the pushing in and pushing out, pushing in and pushing out that’s a problem. And one thing I really want to emphasize a lot is, always make sure when you put them in your computer, don’t ever pull it out without shutting down your computer or making sure you’ve released it.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And whether you’re a PC or Mac, it’s come on and told you, “Okay, it’s safe to remove it now”. If you’re not sure, if you think, “Hmm I don’t know if this is released wrong.” shut down your computer and take it off, because that’s usually when they get messed up. Because you might be all done adding stuff to it, but maybe your computer’s still accessing it, because it’s looking for information or whatever and you pull it out right in the middle of one of those times, that’s where you’re going to totally corrupt all the stuff that’s on it. So most important thing is, careful putting it in, careful removing it. But these new ones are great. The neoprenes are great, because they’re a lot more water resistant than the other kind. And they probably have a better chance of going through your washer if that does happen.
Fisher: Ohh, don’t even talk like that!
Tom: It’s scary.
Fisher: Thanks for coming on, Tom. See you next week.
Tom: See you then.
Fisher: Hey that wraps it up for this week. Thanks once again to Dr. Tom Sederberg from Brigham Young University. He’s a computer sciences professor who created a little program called “Relative Finder” years and years ago. And they’re still improving it to this day. It’s a way for you to find out who you’re related to who’s famous or who you’re related to who lives just down the street! It’s a great interview. If you missed it, catch the podcast on iTunes, iHeart Radio’s Talk Channel and ExtremeGenes.com. Hey, next week we’ll talk to a man who, as a young Cub Scout got to visit the last living Civil War soldier. Wow, what was that about?! Find out next week on the show! Thank for listening. 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 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!