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 134 – Ron Fox, Photo Expert, On Finding Rare Photographs on eBay / First Time Genealogist Breaks Open Ancestry Line That Baffled Experts For 20 Years!

April 11, 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.com, who is in England for the Who Do You Think You Are? Live! Conference. David shares the huge news that NEHGS is opening EVERYTHING, over 1 billion records, for guest users, free, through Wednesday, April 13. David then talks about Jewish tartans now available for Scottish Jews. He’ll tell you about their unique features. David also reveals that a Russian princess, living in England, has come out with a tell-all book. You won’t believe who she was set to marry at one time. (Think “large ears!”) Fisher and David then discuss a recently published and very narrow list of heirlooms you should consider saving for your children and grandchildren.

Photo expert Ron Fox then joins Fisher (starts at 11:39) to discuss the exciting new New York Public Library “Photographers Identities Catalog.” This remarkable index and biography catalog covers 115,000 photographers and others in the field dating back to the mid-1800s. How can you use this great new tool to learn about dating your antique photographs? Ron will tell you. Ron has lots of other great tips and advice for discovering rare and often valuable photos on eBay, as well as of individuals from families you are interested in. It’s a fascinating topic you won’t want to miss.

In the third segment, Fisher visits with Utah resident Carole Burr. Carole was a first time genealogist who decided her initial investigation would be to crack open a family line that experts had failed at for over twenty years! Guess what?! Carole will tell you about the case and how, with a little help from somewhere out there, she was able to make the breakthrough!

Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority drops by from TMCPlace.com to talk about recovering fading audio tapes, how to enhance the sound in the digitizing process, and some simple ways to maximize your family’s ability to enjoy your audio. You’ll be adding another awesome project to your list when you hear what Tom has to say!

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

Transcript of Episode 134

Segment 1 Episode 134 (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’ve got to tell you this show today is just covering a lot of ground! Coming up in about eight or nine minutes we’re going to be talking to photo expert Ron Fox, he is back talking about a new source that’s going to help you ID photographs and perhaps date them as well.

And later on in the show we’re going to talk to a lady who was a rookie researcher, had never tried to research her ancestors before and she decided to take on a challenge that had baffled experts for 20 years… and she broke it! How did she do it, what was the story? You’re going to hear that from Carole Burr, later in the show and just a reminder by the way, all of our shows are now transcribed, so when you hear something and you want to follow up on that all you have to do is search it with ‘Extreme Genes’ in brackets and you’re going to be able to find it much more easily than ever before.

Right now let’s head out to London, and my good friend David Allen Lambert, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. He is their Chief Genealogist.

David, what are you doing in London?

David: Well, right now I’m trying to get the best Wi-Fi signal possible to talk to you! [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So we can talk all about genealogy and the exciting ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Live!” Conference in Birmingham, England.

Fisher: And you’re going to be there for the next two to three weeks right?

David: I’m actually here for all of ‘Who Do You Think You Are.’ I’ll be doing a tour with NEHGS, we’re doing London, we’re going to the Society of Genealogists, the Public Record, the London Municipal Archives, and then I decided to take my comp days and spend an extra week in London touring the museums, going to the Tower of London where some of my ancestors met their own demise. Just having a great old genealogical time and going up to some ancestral places up in Cheshire, so I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a genealogist’s holiday.

Fisher: Oh it sounds like it. What a great time! And by the way, speaking of NEHGS, what an amazing announcement that’s out right now and it affects a lot of people if you haven’t gotten on it, you need to. Tell them what it is.

David: This is an amazing deal. NEHGS of course offers a free guest user database but if you register as a guest user now, we’re entitling you to a billion records.

Fisher: With a ‘B’?

David: A billion records is basically everything we have to offer!

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: And the thing about it is that you only have until April 13^th so take a peek at it, it’s kind of like test driving.

Fisher: Right, and by the way the link is on our Extreme Genes website and our Facebook page and of course I’m sure you’ve got that up on Twitter as well, and at NEHGS and AmericanAncestors.org

David: It’s amazing. There’s just so many stories I’ll be having for the next couple of weeks and potential new guests for you to interview on an international level. We’re exposing Extreme Genes on a level that’s never been done before and it’s really exciting, and I’m learning all these wonderful stories. I’ve seen some people in their tartans, the Scottish are rich in their tartans and their history. But now I heard the story that a gentleman by the name of Rabbi Mendel Jacobs, who’s a Rabbi up in Scotland, has authorized and has now got through the Scottish Tartan authority, an actual tartan for those that are Jewish.

Fisher: Really?

David: Yes. And the interesting thing about it because it has to meet kosher rules so it’s non- wool / linen mix that abides to Jewish law prohibiting the mixture of wool and linen in garments and it has navy and burgundy it’s quite colorful.

Other exciting news, a tell all book from a Russian Princess who was a potential bride for Prince Charles at one point before Diana, this lady who lives in England, her name is Olga Romanoff; she lives in an opulent 30 room manor house in Kent, called ‘Provendore.’ Her father was the eldest nephew of Czar Nicholas II of the Romanoff Empire.

Fisher: Wow! [Laughs] there’s a little there huh?

David: Exactly. You know I have some history I might follow, we always talk about photographs and I went through the last time I was in England was in 1986 and I was going into my senior year in high school and I’m in London for a lot of this trip and I found a few photographs, took a picture of them with my iPhone, I have them on my phone and I’m going to do a before and after picture.

Fisher: Yes.

David: And maybe I’ll share some of them with some of the visitors, I don’t know sometimes the after pictures are not as good as the before’s but it’s a fun picture I actually have curly black hair at that point of time!

Fisher: [Laughs] Well side by side pictures are fun to do not only in other countries and places you’ve but your old home, like I did recently with my house that I grew up in. It went on the market recently and we were able to take some of the MLS listing pictures and put them side by side with photos from 40 years ago, it’s just amazing.

David: Well that’s my tech-tip, so take an old photograph on your phone and the next time you’re on a vacation or even going down the street, do a before and after picture. Put them side by side on your social media. You know, there are so many things that people are showing me here at the conference, but heirlooms, I think we’ve had this discussion before. What is important to save? I mean right now in my jacket is my passport that is something that you would want to save. I even have my old one.

Fisher: It’s interesting you say that. There is a story out in the Huffington Post this past week, it talked some ideas of things that you might want to save as heirlooms and your first passport was on that list, in fact it was the first thing on it. Because it would show you when you were young and some of the cool places that you’ve been and show us what an adventurer you were. Then it lists things like your military discharge papers or one printed photo of your wedding. You know maybe there are lots of pictures but one printed photo.

David: Um-hmm.

Fisher: Something that belonged to the oldest living relative that they knew. A sentimental piece of jewellery, a receipt with a date on it that shows how cheap things were back in our time.

David: Year by year we can all as a family put together a time capsule- if you will. That represents the certain events that make the whole year what that year has been for you, the good, the bad, the indifferent and everything that happens to us. It is what shapes our story. That’s why I always thought journals were important but this adds another dimension to it. This is taking family ephemera into the picture.

Fisher: David, have yourself a great time, we’ll talk to you again next week. Where are you going to be next week when we talk to you?

David: I’ll be still in London, and at that point of time I’ll be heading up to Cheshire to a village called ‘Brereton cum Smethwick, where my family lived from the time of the Reformation all the way through to the 1890’s and then we go to our family farm, and going to go to church services where my family has not attended since 1874 like we did for over 300 years.

Fisher: Oh unbelievable! You have a great trip my friend and we’ll talk to you next week.

David: Thanks so much! Take care, Fish.

Fisher: And coming up next we’re going to talk to photo expert Ron Fox about a new source that’s going to help you ID photos and date them it’s good stuff on the way in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 134 (11:10)

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth with my good friend Ron Fox, the photo expert; we’ve had him on many times before. Ron, good to see you again!

Ron: Good to see you, Scott.

Fisher: And, I was thinking about this. A couple of weeks ago, we saw the release of a brand new index, it’s the New York Public Library Photographers index, 115,000 Photographers going back into the middle of the 19th century, and very significant thing, because this helps us in researching our photographs, maybe…actually, even identifying who somebody is, based on the age they may have been when the picture was taken, and that you can determine by the location of a photographer from this index. Let’s get into that a little bit.

Ron: Well, yeah, I mean it’s a great, great research tool, and it’s something that, you know, we had photography, it was introduced in 1839 came to the U.S. in about 1841, and then it was like wild fire. It was like Apple phones, you know, it just went crazy.

Fisher: Yes.

Ron: And, so, we had a lot of people develop it and our friend, Samuel Morse is the one that really caused it to happen in the U.S. He’s noted for the telegraph, but actually, he’s the father of photography, but the thing is, that is most important about this index is, if you find daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and even albumens or paper print photographs, at the bottom of most of your albumen prints put on cardboard or just photographs all the way up into the ’50s, photographers always put their stamp on them, because it was free advertising, and so, you’d have the opportunity to take a look at this index and see that this Photographer between a certain point in time, a certain year and another year was at that particular address.

Fisher: Right. The address is usually on the photo, obviously with their name.

Ron: Yes, and by so, you would know that, say, that the photographer Bogardus, for example, was in New York on Broadway between 1851 and 1856, and then he moved over to Park Avenue. So, you would know then a finite time in which he was using those particular photographic supplies to provide you with your photograph.

Fisher: Yeah, and that can help you then identify the possible age of the subject or give you another clue in the event you have an idea of who it might be to note that it’s in the right year range for the age that person should have been.

Ron: That’s correct, and there’s another book you can find in certain libraries, The Collection of Western Photographers, for the Western U.S. It gives you a small bio, but it also tells about his movements and where he was. There were photographers that went on railcars and would go to communities and people would come into the rail car and have their picture taken and then they get off.

Fisher: Really?

Ron: Absolutely. It was a big business, and Union Pacific who really used after the completion of the railroad, because it was another thing to bring people to the train station.

Fisher: Nice! I’d never heard that.

Ron: You pull over the boxcar onto the siding and advertise it a day before. It’s like the circus man, it was coming to town.

Fisher: And so, you’d get ready and dressed in your best and go get your photograph taken, and then, would they get that to you days later? Do they mail it to you? How would that work?

Ron: No, they would normally just be there for like two or three days, so you had an item that was there and you just had to go and pick it up, but those days, tintypes were the cheapest photograph that you could purchase. Sometimes there were tintypes, other times there were albumens, and even later, they had something called ‘cyanotypes’ which were kind of fun, because they’re very rare and they are valuable, but they are photographs that are all in tones of blue.

Fisher: I did not know that either. You’re always a fountain of knowledge, Ron, which is why we appreciate having you on. All right, let’s talk about some recent discoveries in the photographic world. You’re kind of the king of finding the ‘needle in the haystack.’

Ron: Well, there’s a lot of things that have been found in the last few years. There was a photograph that a friend of mine bought through a guy who was a picker, basically, in an antique store, and it was Fredrick Douglas speaking in 1841 to a group of abolitionists. Well, he got it for thirty-five dollars, a very famous star has offered him a million dollars for it and he won’t accept the money. He has it now resting in the Smithsonian, and they think it’s one of the five most valuable historic photos in our history.

Fisher: Isn’t that incredible for thirty-five bucks?

Ron: Yeah.

Fisher: From a picker, I wonder if the picker knows about this.

Ron: I doubt it.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Ron: I doubt it. It’s just like my eBay find. You know, that was a big find.

Fisher: Yes.

Ron: It was worth in excess of $100,000 which we paid couple of hundred bucks for, and it was just that you recognized the face and the name was not there. It was just phrase about the guy, how he looked like “an intelligent looking man,” but there are other photographs. Couple of years ago, there was a small CDV, which is basically like a baseball card size.

Fisher: And CDV is short for Carte de Visite

Ron: Correct. French term, and of course our friend, Louis Daguerre who was a main player in a process of coming up with photographs, but actually marketed better, and therefore had his name attached to it, but there was one found in Washington DC where they had a group of people standing outside the White House and they blew it up and recognized by measurements with geometry, it was President Lincoln standing out in front of the White House!

Fisher: Really!? When was this found?

Ron: Oh, about two years ago.

Fisher: And what’s the value of that one?

Ron: Oh, that would raise that picture probably to $10,000 – $15,000.

Fisher: Unbelievable, and it’s the only one of its kind?

Ron: Oh yeah. A lot of people will not recognize, like when they have a tintype of like, President Lincoln. Now, a ferrotype, which was a different process, but a tin type of President Lincoln which was probably again a baseball card size, but it can go up to an 8×10, this would be a full plate, they call it, but they used to put a wood, like a bees eye or a honeycomb, so each one of those little openings would go through the lens and take a picture, and therefore you would have like twenty tintypes of one sitting, of one photograph.

Fisher: Yeah, that makes sense, sure.

Ron: Then they would just take tin-snips and cut them up and of course, we always talk about tintypes, but they were actually steel, not tin, but those are actual photographs. When you get a photograph that’s a tintype unless it’s a photograph of a photograph that person stood in front of that piece of tin. So, Lincoln stood in front of that piece of tin.

Fisher: Well, that’s interesting.

Ron: Yeah, it’s not like a photographic negative where you can make multiple prints onto paper. No, a tintype is a one-only-type picture.

Fisher: And it’s always in reverse, is it not?

Ron: Yes, yes, and there are practices that were invented at one point, because the early daguerreotypes were all reversed, but then they had a reversing lens that was invented in Germany which they propagated over here later in the 1850s to reverse the reversed image.

Fisher: Now, I have looked for some time for a lot of photographs of my family, my wife’s family, by putting search terms, say, on eBay.

Ron: Um-hum.

Fisher: She came from a small town in Indiana, Crawfordsville, and so, I would put the family name and Crawfordsville or Crawfordsville CDV, because maybe there isn’t a name associated with the picture that’s put on eBay, but this is what a lot of families can do to actually find old photographs, family Bibles, things like this.

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: But you could go years also, without ever finding anything, and then all of a sudden, after looking every day for three or four years, suddenly you find something new.

Ron: That’s absolutely true. One of the other ones is that, you know, usually you’ll have that print and you’ll have that name at the bottom. Call the local public library or the University, and Universities and Colleges right now are spending 10s of 1000s of dollars a month on scanning old newspapers and photographs and those are going online increasingly. FamilySearch is another good source. I mean, in their first year of operation they had a million photographs.

Fisher: And now, I think it’s many, many times that.

Ron: Many times that, and MyHeritage is another one who have done a really great job of collecting these photos from their members and placing them on their websites.

Fisher: Well, you know, you think about it, some of the pictures that you and I worked on finding together and I finally found a photo of my great-grandfather after thirty years and now, I have three of them, because one was identified which allowed me to identify him in a different picture, which allowed me to identify him in the third. The other two were not marked, and as a result of that now, after all these decades, we finally have it available and you put it up online and it’s there forever, because all the other descendents will make copies of that or keep that or it will just remain up on the website.

Ron: That’s right, and here’s another issue. A lot of times you’ll have a photographer in a small town like Crawfordsville and you’ll have the name of that photographer and a lot of times, you can actually do the genealogy on the photographer and find the family and ask them, ‘Where did all the negatives go?’ I did this recently with one family in our state, and candidly out of it I found that the woman’s father who took pictures from the 1890s to the 1930s they’re up in her attic. All these glass negatives, all indexed, are up in her attic.

Fisher: Wow, and what an awful place for them!

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: All that heat and cold and all that.

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: So, what are you doing with all this?

Ron: Well, I’m trying to get her to sell them to me, so I can scan them or I can provide them to the state. In our case, the state loves this type of stuff and they will increase their archives to accommodate them. I mean, there are collections, like there’s one collection in like, 1925 in one of the major cities that has 22,000 glass negatives all identified, with prints as well as the actual negatives, and all you have to do is get online, put your name in and up comes grandpa, you know?

Fisher: Well, that’s true. I actually found my grandpa in one of those collections in a state archive. That’s right, my grandfather from Oregon, and by the way, he was out of state at the time.

Ron: Yeah. There’s also, as I said, these Universities, I know of at least one major University that I’ve dealt with that has over 2,000,000 photographs that they have not even scanned yet.

Fisher: 2,000,000?

Ron: 2,000,000.

Fisher: And see, what you’re doing right now is validating what I think, and that is, with as much stuff as we have online right now, there are still far more stuff that is not online, that’s still in archives, that’s still in libraries, in people’s private collections, in their attics, in antique stores, all over the place.

Ron: I really would encourage your listeners to take the opportunity to, get into that trunk and open it up and mark the photos that they who they are, because 90% of the time, people do not write, even today, on the back of a photo who it is, and one generation and it’s gone.

Fisher: You know that is the best advice of all. Ron Fox, great to see you again, thanks for coming on, always enlightening, always a pleasure to learn something more at your feet, and by the way, if you’re interested in that index from the New York Public Library of all the Photographers, dating back to the 1840s and ’50s, we have a link to it at ExtremeGenes.com and on our Facebook page. And coming up for you next, we’re going to talk to a rookie genealogist, one who said, “As my first project, I want to take on a line that’s baffled experts for twenty years.” And she succeeded! Wait till you hear the story that Carole Burr has to tell you, coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 134 (24:50)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Carole Burr

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. I am Fisher your Radio Roots Sleuth and I am very excited to be talking to Carole Burr, she’s on the line with us right now from Utah County, Utah.

Hi Carole, how are you?

Carole: I’m fine thank you.

Fisher: Carole had this idea in her mind that she wanted to find out about her husband’s ancestor, and Carole you’ve never done this before right?

Carole: Absolutely. It was new territory.

Fisher: New territory. I’ve been following this story and it’s just absolutely incredible. Now your husband had an ancestor that came out to your neck of the woods some time back in the 1860’s. Now what was his name?

Carole: Charles Berry.

Fisher: Charles Berry, and where did he go?

Carole: He went to Moab Utah, and that’s where my husband was born and raised.

Fisher: And so he had a lot of family members I would assume from that area? A large farming family as they spread out, so you probably had a lot of cousins who had worked on this line for some time.

Carole: Yes, and they were really eager to know more about him.

Fisher: So here’s the name Charles Berry and then he just kind of disappears into time. All these folks who worked on it and used stepped up and said “Hey let me try” and so who did you reach out to, to help you with this?

Carole: I have a wonderful cousin that is in Oregon and she does genealogy all the time and knows how the resources and how to do it and she is the one that helped and she basically was the one that led us to the right place.

Fisher: Let’s talk about this a little bit. It was a dead end for a reason. Obviously they couldn’t find anything that would link him. When you do genealogy you take what you know and you connect it with what you don’t know and there’s got to be some kind of connecting document, and nobody could ever find Charles Berry before he arrived in Moab Utah. What was the clue?

Carole: Well the clue for her was the name of ‘Bachrach’ and we had heard Bachrach, he just didn’t go by Bachrach.

Fisher: So this is something that had been passed down through the family?

Carole: That’s right, and so now this wonderful genealogist as she was, she found a listing on it and then she started searching for it, and then that gave me a lead also to start working on the same name.

Fisher: Okay. So what did she fine? And what did you find?

Carole: Well what I found, it’s hard for me to even believe, even though there were many families with that name, I did find the name of the right person, and interestingly enough it was in the library. There was just an old little book that they gave me and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in front of my eyes. I started crying my eyes out [laughs]. In the back of the book I found a whole Bachrach family and it was all names that we now could research even more. Without the blue book it would have been probably a dead end for all of us. But it was wonderful because it had so many Bachrachs and they did have this specific line in the book. My husband’s grandfather… this particular book outlined that he lived in Moab Utah.

Fisher: Wow.

Carole: So they were giving us details that were so tiny and it was talking about all the families, who they were.

Fisher: That’s unbelievable.

Carole: Everything else just kept verifying it over and over and over.

Fisher: And so you took this information and passed it over to your cousin who’s the expert, right? Who hadn’t been able to do this in twenty years, and what happened with her?

Carole: Well she was as excited as I was. At that point she really started concentrating on this particular line going backwards and going forward, and you see I am not that astute, so she would tell me what to do. We had a lot of people to connect now.

Fisher: Sure.

Carole: And so then we found out by our searching that there was a book written and it was ‘The Jews and Kestrich’ and it was by the Mayor, and I’ve learned that because in that Holocaust they were trying to reconnect all the Jews they could that were taken, and connect them to these towns and so this particular name is The Jews in Kestrich. So at that point we had his wonderful book that was so great that we not only found the family, we found our grandparents and the houses they lived in and even their dogs, and there was a picture I think.

Fisher: Wow!

Carole: It was so complete and so amazing to us and even into their cousins and the gravestones he had, and that’s very important because that’s more verification when you see those headstones with their names on them, you know. Also these picture of grandmas and grandpas and their houses and I just felt like all of a sudden we found this most amazing, wonderful family.

Fisher: Isn’t that something after all these years and here you are the newbie, you stepped into a family history library and pulls the book out of the shelf with a little help.

Carole: She was so much help. She would say to me, because she had all the knowledge, “Okay now you go to do that, and you ask somebody to help you do this.”

Fisher: Right.

Carole: And it was so exciting to me and it was so exciting to the whole family who had been searching, and believe me they were searching, and some of them had become very, very close to finding it and it wouldn’t have to have been in this particular method but I’m certainly glad it was my experience because now I feel very strongly about how much the feelings are when you can connect your family!

Fisher: It’s incredible isn’t it? Now there was a tie in one of your cousins found in Baltimore too, right? There was a museum that had posted a new book out?

Carole: That connected the name. It wasn’t necessarily connecting him. But we knew then that this was a Jewish name and then we also knew that there was a name which was such an unusual name and so that’s why she was hoping that she had really found that one family, but it didn’t matter because we ended up finding another family with the right name.

Fisher: Right, so it all tied together. So she basically discovered that this was a German-Jewish name and as a result of that, gave you a little bit more to work on and then you found the little blue book in Salt Lake City and suddenly you’re connected back to Germany where the mayor has written a book about the Jewish families that had once been in this little town. Unbelievable! How many ancestors would you say you have found now of Charles’s from that far back.

Carole: Oh at least four hundred.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

Carole: And then probably more. We wanted to do it right and we got all the connections all going forward and back, as far as we could do that, we even called a family reunion which I’ve never even been in a family reunion with genealogy before, and we made it very clear that it would be better for them to go by Bachrach or you’ll send someone down this goose chase again.

Fisher: [Laughs] Well you know that’s the thing, once you find stuff like this it lasts forever online, right?

Carole: That’s right. Thank goodness it wasn’t before.

Fisher: What a strange journey, Carole, but congratulations on your find, I’m sure it almost makes your life at this point.

Carole: And also all the people that had gone on before. We’re searching and the time was right for some reason, you know, and it was time. That’s all there is. There was no excuse, I have nine children, there’s no excuse!

Fisher: [Laughs] Well congratulations Carole, and enjoy the find, and I guess you going to get to know a lot of cousins now who are probably very happy with you.

Carole: Oh, they were so grateful and I keep saying ‘Get the name Berry off everything you have.’

Fisher: Exactly.

Carole: Even your checks for heaven’s sake.

Fisher: [Laughs] Oh, you wanted them to change their names back!

Carole: Oh without a doubt. A lot of people would be searching the next three generations are going to be searching Berry again.

Fisher: Well thank you for your time, and congratulations!

Carole: Well thank you and it’s a pleasure.

Fisher: What a rookie genealogy story that is. Nice job, Carole!

And coming up next; we’re going to talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, about what you do when you have old audio. Whether it’s reel-to-reel or a cassette tape that’s really difficult to understand. How can you enhance it and how can you make it even more useable. Tom’s got some great ideas on this and much more coming up for you in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

Segment 4 Episode 134 (37:10)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: You have found us, America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth and it is preservation time with our good friend Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Hello Tom, how are you?

Tom: Hello, super duper.

Fisher: I’m very excited to hear that you’re starting to get more people bringing in audio to be digitized.

Tom: Oh absolutely, it’s exploding. We get calls almost every day now, that their parents have passed away, they going through the attic and they find these cassette tapes that they didn’t even know existed, or they remember when they were little and listed to old reel-to-reel taped but they don’t know where they are until grandma and grandpa or mom and dad had passed away and they find them.

Fisher: Right. But some of these have got to be in pretty bad shape at this point.

Tom: Yeah, unfortunately like the ones I mentioned in the attic where it gets hot and cold and hot and cold, it can cause a lot of the tapes to start flaking especially the reel-to-reel, and don’t worry about it. If you see they are starting to flake, don’t throw them out. There’s a way that you can actually bake the tape and what it does is it softens the mylar just enough that the magnetic particles reattach themselves and then you can play it fine.

Fisher: Really?

Tom: Oh yeah, but you need to be careful because if you play the tape before that and all the magnetic particles are falling on the floor, there’s no way you can put them back together. It’s worse than having something that’s been shredded trying to paste the pieces back together.

Fisher: Boy and that’s going to be hard if you find an old tape. You’ll want to play to it!

Tom: Yeah, right.

Fisher: But you’ve got to resist that urge and make sure you get it to somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Tom: Exactly. Usually it’s forty, fifty sometimes even a hundred years of recordings. Its best just to be patient, get it to us or somebody else who is a professional in the field and then we can make your reel-to-reels and your audio cassettes come back to life. We just had a call the other from somebody who said “Oh I’m got this old cassette tape of great grandpa, the only recording we have of his voice and it’s very, very hard to understand what he’s saying, is there anything you can do?” Well fortunately there are several different things you can do; first off you want to get it digitized, that’s number one priority.

Fisher: Right and you can enhance the audio.

Tom: Oh absolutely. If you have a program like ProTools. ProTools is absolutely awesome and that’s what we go to for most of our ‘sweetening’ as they call it in the industry. However, sometimes the tapes are so bad it’s really, really hard. You got to get your ear right up to that speaker, you got to really, really listen to try and make out what they’re doing, and so the best answer for that is, what you want to do is go and transcribe it. Put it on to paper for two reasons, first off if somebody is reading along while grandpa is talking, even though it’s hard to understand, you’re reading the words and then it magically makes it like it’s more understandable when really it hasn’t changed.

Fisher: That’s true.

Tom: That way you’re hearing his voice, you’re reading the words and the neat thing about it is once it’s like in a PDF form you can go and look through it, you can type in the word ‘Martha’ and every time he mentions Martha then there it is. So if you fortunate enough that you have tons of tapes, you can go and type in your name and any time that he has said that or she has said that, whoever made the recording, it’s totally searchable you can find Martha, Martha, Martha, then go read those paragraphs and that’s why when he’s talking about you or other relatives you can type in a name and once you make that PDF searchable, which with any basic PDF program from Adobe, you can do that. It makes it wonderful.

Fisher: Yeah that’s a good point. You know I’ve done exactly that. I’ve got some tapes of a grandfather of mine who was born in 1886, he lived till 1975 and we have a couple of really lengthy tapes. Some of the material is really fun to listen to but a lot of it is ‘I don’t want to hear that part, I want to hear about this’ so when I’ve gone through and actually transcribed especially the more difficult parts to hear, it’s exactly as you say, I can read along with it and then I understand what I’m hearing so much better.

Tom: Absolutely. It makes a world of difference, and like you mentioned when you make it as a searchable document, which is easy, once you have a PDF all you have to do is open it with one of the Adobe programs that does the PDFs and there’s a little icon that you can click on that says ‘Make searchable’ or you just download the little typewriter and click on something and it will say ‘Do you want to make this document searchable’ and heck yes! Push the button and then it’s all searchable and you can look for what you want. You can go and maybe make it more understandable for the people later on.

Fisher: Give it some context.

Tom: Exactly and that is so important.

Fisher: All right, what are we going to talk about next?

Tom: We’ll go a little bit more into PDFs and see how you can make them even more searchable.

Fisher: Coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 134 (44:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are back for our final segment of Extreme Genes America’s Family History Show, talking with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority and we’ve been talking about preserving audio, Tom and giving it a little more context by not only digitizing it and enhancing it but making it more understandable by transcribing it, actually like we’re doing now with Extreme Genes.

Tom: Oh exactly! It makes it so neat, we have people that call or write us an email and say “Hey, you were talking about such and such, what exactly did you mean?” so now they can go to Extreme Genes PDF’s and they can actually read what we were talking about and say “Okay!” and take notes and write down things. It makes it so much easier. So with your own family history this is something that you want to be doing also. So when you finally get grandpa or your parents tapes transcribed and transferred and all these fun things, on the CD’s that you’re going to make or the mp3’s however you want to do it.

What you want to do is go and add some of your own context because you know what was going on. You can explain, “Hey, grandpa was talking about this, we used to go there every summer… da-da-da-da.” And the neat thing about that it sets up the context for when people are reading this it’s not like something foreign to them but something they understand.”Oh grandpa used to live here.” And the neat thing about doing PDF’s is you can go and get a Google Map, “Oh this is what he’s talking about and this is what it looks like now.” And so when he’s describing our old farm if there are cows or goats you can say “Wow, it’s a Mc Donald’s now!”

Fisher: Yeah [Laughs]

Tom: But sometimes the houses have been restored. If you have old photos you can put those in the PDF’s as well and like we mentioned in the earlier segment, you can make these so searchable and it makes them so much nicer when they’re personal. It’s not just somebody rambling on, they’re sitting there “Oh this is grandpa talking about where mom was born.”

Like I have this story about my grandfather, in the old days they didn’t have incubators. In the early, early 1900’s. So they brought him home in a shoe box, they opened the oven door, turned on the oven and set him on the door of the oven for warmth when he was a baby.

Fisher: [Laughs] You’d go to prison these days for 30 years for something like that wow.

Tom: Exactly! But they didn’t have incubators, he was premature, he was so small he could fit in a shoe box. They didn’t have central heat back then so they turned on the oven. I’m sure it was on low! And set him on the door just to kind of keep the heat.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: He was not in the oven, he was on the oven door that was open to keep him warm, and he survived and lived a great happy life. But stories like that are just so neat and when you can put pictures to them, when you can go in and say “Hey, this is what happened, this is kind of what grandpa’s talking about.” Because most people when they’re telling their family history they know what they’re talking about so they leave out some details and maybe you’re going “What did grandpa mean by this, what did grandma mean by this?”

But you being the son or the grandson or the granddaughter add in some nuances to make it understandable.

Fisher: And keep in mind, you’ll have a tape where the interviewer has also passed and doesn’t identify himself/herself. You’ve got to say who the person is actually asking the questions and that’s been the case for me and so I’ve gone through and actually digitized tapes and then added an introduction at the beginning when this tape was made, who did the questions, how old the people were at the time of it and the context of that era.

Tom: Oh exactly! That’s what’s so important about making them searchable and like I mentioned once you go and make them searchable you can actually add brackets ‘( )’ with context. There’s some software that are called ‘Heritage collector’ which is neat software, you can take all these different pictures and make all kinds of cool things in them and it helps it a lot, you can do the PDF’s but it’s so important you do these brackets and say “Hey, see picture such and such on another document or look at the VHS tapes we had transferred or the film we had transferred it’s over here, it’s over here.

So they can go “Oh I’m really interested in this I want to go see that movie clip that talks about this.” So you can pull out your DVD and pop it in or if you used ‘Heritage Collector Software’ you can just type in what you’re looking for and it’s totally searchable.

Fisher: All right, great stuff, Tom! Thanks for coming on. We’ll talk to you next week!

Tom: Sounds good, we’ll see you then.

Fisher: And, if you have a question for Tom Perry, email him at AskTom@TMCPlace.com Well that wraps up the show for this week. Thanks once again to Ron Fox our photo expert for talking about the incredible new index for photographers that can help you date your old time pictures. Incredible stuff! And to Carole Burr, the rookie genealogist who broke open a line the experts couldn’t solve in 20 years. If you missed any of it, catch the podcast and search through the transcript. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice… normal… family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 132 – Michigan Woman Follows Up Father’s Dying Confession, Finds Unknown Sibling in Europe / Nathan Dylan Goodwin and the Genealogical Crime Mystery “The America Ground”

March 28, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. Fisher announces the new searchability of Extreme Genes shows and podcasts through transcript. David then talks about a story that is being investigated that says something is missing from the crypt of William Shakespeare. What is it and why is it missing? David will explain. Next in “Family Histoire News” David will tell you how a family heirloom has survived the destruction of a home by tornado. The item is a treasure and its journey through the air and back to the family it belonged to is nothing short of miraculous! There’s a new place for your remains, should you go the route of cremation… a recording disk! Who is making this possible and for how much? David Lambert has all you need to know about getting into the recording business. Post mortem. David then shares his Tech Tip, and another NEHGS guest user free database.

Fisher next interviews Nathan Dylan Goodwin, an author living in England. Goodwin’s unique niche is the “genealogical crime thriller.” Fisher says he couldn’t put down the one he has read, Nathan’s latest, called “The America Ground.” Nathan has authored several books and explains the challenges of finding unique stories from the past and somehow making them relevant in the present. Want to take a crack at writing a genealogical crime novel? Nathan Dylan Goodwin will have some great advice for you.

(Starts at 25:16) We are firmly in the present for the next segment when Fisher visits with a Muskegon, Michigan woman, Jessica Fairbanks, who took notes when her estranged father gave her a death bed confession. He had had a son while living in Germany that none of his American family knew about. Jessica went to work to find her unknown sibling. Catch the full story on Extreme Genes!

Then, Tom Perry answers listener emails on preservation. If you have any eight track tapes from decades ago, you’ll want to hear this.

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

Transcript of Episode 132

Segment 1 Episode 132 (00:30)
Fisher: Hello America! And welcome to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com.
I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. Very excited to tell you that we’re actually transcribing all of our shows now, so that when you hear something and you want to find out more about it, our shows are entirely searchable, and of course, you can find out more about that at ExtremeGenes.com.
Guests today coming up in about eight minutes; this guy from England, he gets in touch with me and tells me he’s got a genealogical crime thriller that he has written, would I like to read it? Well, okay. So, he sent it and it was incredible! And so, we’re going to talk to Nathan Dylan Goodwin today about how he took some history from his area and took Genealogy and tied this whole thing together into an incredible genealogical crime novel.
We’ll be talking to Nathan from England, and then, later in the show, we’re going to be talking to Jessica Fairbanks. She’s from Muskegon, Michigan, and not long ago, she took a death bed confession from her dying father, and took that to find an overseas sibling she didn’t know she had. Right now, let’s check in with Boston and our good friend, David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. David, how are you?
David: Well, the snow has disappeared and it’s starting to look a little bit like spring each day, and we have some exciting news here at NEHGS.
Fisher: Which is?
David: Well, one of our listeners from Extreme Genes who lives out in Utah, Yvette Beaudoin is now working as a researcher remotely for our research service. Now, what’s kind of neat about this, besides her being a listener of Extreme Genes, is that, this is the first time in nearly a century at NEHGS – we’ve been around since 1845 – has had an offsite researcher. We had the late Henry Fitz Gilbert Waters in England, transcribing probates. Yvette will be at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, being our researcher on the ground there, helping us out with our research service. We’re very excited about it.
Fisher: Well, it’s about time, David. That’s great news!
David: Yeah, we’re very excited! So, a shout out to Yvette there in Utah! This next news story, I don’t want you to lose your head about it, but it’s got a lot of historian’s shaking their heads. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the great bard, William Shakespeare’s death. Do you know that in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the Holy Trinity Church, they’re now doing ground penetrating radar exams of his tomb? Want to know why?
Fisher: Because…
David: It’s head’s missing.
Fisher: Oh no. Now wait a minute. How do they know that?
David: Well, back in 1879, an article in the magazine mentioned that his skull was taken by trophy hunter, Dr. Frank Chambers, who lifted the stone, dug up the grave and stole Shakespeare’s skull. There may be something to it, because from the surveys they’re doing, it looks like there’s been some disturbance on the stone over his grave. Now, it’s interesting that one would want to do that. Have you ever heard of the warning that Shakespeare’s tomb has carved upon it?
Fisher: No.
David: And I quote, “Good friend for Jesus sake forebear. To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be ye man thy spares these stones, and cursed be he thy moves my bones.” I would not want to be the person that has that as an artefact in their China cabinet.
Fisher: Right, right. So, they knew who the guy was and they never pursued this as a case at that time?
David: That’s a real cold case. Maybe you know, you’re so good at this thing, maybe you can track down the skull. That would be a perk for the show.
Fisher: Stop it, stop it.
David: Okay. Well, this news just kind of blew in from across the Mississippi River. A girl by the name of Jill Stewicki who got married in 1987, she wore the dress of her mother from 1958. Now a lot of people recycle wedding dresses but she’s very lucky. Did you hear what happened?
Fisher: This is insane. Go ahead, tell us.
David: There was a twister that hit her house out in Ohio and the dress was found across the Mississippi River intact, in the pristine and plastic box. Somebody posted it online and now it’s back with the rightful owner.
Fisher: Isn’t that great though? I mean, if you’re going to get something back from your house being totally destroyed, why not a family heirloom?
David: Exactly. Well, you know, I see a lot of things where people have heirlooms. Sometimes it’s that urn with grandma in it, well, here’s a chance to put a new spin on your family’s ashes. A company in England called, andvinyly, and andvinyly.com offers for £3000 the effort of making up to thirty records for you, pressed from your own ashes.
Fisher: Oh, stop it! Wait a minute, record? You mean like a vinyl record? Like a thirty-three or a forty-five or something?
David: Well, they didn’t say anything about forty-fives, but LPs, twenty-four minutes of news from you. You can do your last will and testament, you can make shout outs to all your loved ones or you can make your final wishes known, and they can press these records. They can be handed out at the funeral, but guess what? They’ll even go one step further. They have something called FUN-erals where they will actually organize your funeral. They’ll send off the records, they’ll play your record there, they’ll speak to your guests, crack jokes and even generally make people dance, and that only costs £10,000. So, if you’re going to go off, this is a new spin to your death. One of the options is that you can hear the cracking and hissing sound of a record that would be considered the sound of the cremation. A little mid tone, but…

All right, the next is my Tech Tip. And this goes out to the burials overseas for American World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam vets. What you may not know, is there is a free database from the American Battlefield Monuments Commission. Their website is simply, www.ABMC.gov, but what you may not know, you can search this database for free, find out the name, the date of death, the serial number, where the person’s buried. If you are a immediate family member, you can request a free photograph, and they’ll make it up as a lithograph for you and mail it for free, eight to ten weeks after your request online. So, I think a real nice fitting thing to get a remembrance.
Fisher: That’s awesome.
David: Speaking of databases, NEHGS and AmericanAncestors.org every week, offers a free guest user database, this week is no exception, where we introduce Barbados, baptism, marriages and burials from the 18th century through 19th century, and this is in conjunction with our partnership, with FamilySearch.org, and it has over 210,000 baptisms, 90,000 burials and 31,000 marriage records that occurred in Barbados. Well, that’s all I have for this week from NEHGS. I’ll be reporting soon from, “Who Do You Think” Live in Birmingham, England in a couple of weeks, and look forward to giving you all the news from across the sea.
Fisher: Thank you, David. And coming up next, we’re going to be talking to Nathan Dylan Goodwin. He’s the author of the ‘genealogical crime thriller’, “The America Ground”, in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 132 (25:20)

Fisher: And, Welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
It is Fisher here, The Radio Roots Sleuth, and it wasn’t that long ago that I got an email from a listener in England that said “Hey, I want you to read my book!” you know, once in a while people on radio get these and it’s like “Okay…” So he sent the book and it’s a “genealogical crime thriller” and it was just killer!
It’s just a terrific book! And so, I’m excited to turn around and say we’ve got a really good book to talk about here with its author from England, Nathan Dylan Goodwin.
Nathan, welcome to Extreme Genes, nice to have you on!
Nathan: Hello, yes thank you, thank you for having me!
Fisher: First of all, as something of a writer myself, and I consider myself more of a historic writer than somebody who could do a piece of fiction like this or an historical novel as this is. One of the things that I look at is, “What’s the formula for this? How do you go back and make something that happened a150 years ago or longer, matter now?”
And you figured out how to accomplish that, let’s talk about how somebody might write an historical novel, and let’s talk about The America Ground.
Nathan: Okay. The America Ground, is my fourth book in a series which features Morton Farrier, he’s a modern day genealogist, and he basically has to look back and in each book he has to solve a crime, usually a murder that’s happened in the past, and as you said in the America Ground, this crime happened 180 years ago.
It’s kind of a detective formula I guess, oh and Morton trying to work it out as he goes along, to try and figure out the ending. But he uses genealogical resources that any genealogist would also use, and so basically the formula is a bit of a tricky one really. It’s got the detective element to it, each book cuts back from the modern day setting with Morton looking in archives and repositories and going to church yards, and using Ancestry and so forth online and it cuts back to the past so in America Ground, that’s 1820s in Hastings, in southeast England.
So, he’s got to try and solve this crime but there’s also in each book there’s a sinister element if you like, in the modern day section whereby somebody wants to try to stop him from doing his research, and that’s the part of it that’s quite tricky because as genealogists we always come up with stories in our tree. Thinking “Oh it would be really good fictional story!” and that’s great but then I have to look for something which makes it still relevant today, that someone would say “Hang on a minute, I don’t want you to research this case from a 180 years ago, whatever it is.” So that’s the tricky part I guess.
Fisher: Yeah that is the tricky part and that’s what I was trying to figure out, and that’s really frankly your genius in this.
Nathan: Thank you.
Fisher: And, I love the fact that you go back and forth from the modern era, and Morton’s working on the case to what was actually going on back then, it’s almost like a parallel universe kind of thing happening.
Nathan: Yeah.
Fisher: And it’s very fun for him to visit the places that you’ve just been talking about in the previous section and where those spots used to stand, and obviously you’ve done a lot of research because The America Ground is an actual place.
Nathan: Yes that’s right. I come from Hastings. I was born in Hastings, and lived there for the first 19 years of my life and yet I’ve never heard of this area of land which is in Hastings, called The America Ground. And basically what happened was, it was kind of like four acres of land that was yielded up from loads of storms that happened in the 1300s and there was this huge area of land that gradually settled and in 1800s rope makers started to use it to stretch their ropes out.
Then some labourers started to live there and gradually, gradually and gradually about two hundred homes sprung up on this land, about a thousand people were there, and the town of Hastings had no jurisdiction over it, they felt they couldn’t tax the people for living there, they couldn’t impose laws. So there was kind of this lawlessness going on there, and so basically they then tried to impose law and these people who lived on this ground revolted and said “Nope, we’re not going to have your taxes and your laws,” and they declared themselves an Independent State of America.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Nathan: Which you know was really a surprise and so they called this ground “The America Ground” and they called themselves the Americans, and I don’t know where they got it from but they raised the stars and stripes and they held out until an official enquiry was held and the crown felt that the land belonged to them and they eventually turfed off.
Fisher: I would think when the crown decides that they want that land, that’s probably the settling point right?
Nathan: Yes it was, yes. But now you would ride through Hastings and it’s just another area of the town where there are streets and houses and shops and it’s a big part of the main town. So in my book, in all my books I try to use some element of real history in there. So the story of the America Ground, my fictional story I used that real historical background and it’s set in a pub that was on the America Ground land back in the 1820’s which really was there.
But my characters and storyline itself is fictional. But coming back to your point about me needing to do the research, I really do. I make sure that I do exactly what Morton does. So if he goes to church yard then I go to a church yard. If he looks for a record online, then that record has to exist. I don’t just make up the records it’s all real genealogical detail.
Fisher: Unbelievable! So let me ask you this, what is your background first? Are you an historian first or a genealogist or a writer?
Nathan: [Laughs] that’s a tricky one to answer. At university I did radio, film and television studies and then went on to become a Primary School Teacher, and while I was doing that I did a Masters in Creative Writing. But my genealogy I think would be the starting point. I’ve been doing it for a long time now, coming up for 20 years. So I guess that would be my starting point and I just always… when I was doing my own family tree research, I would come across stories and things and I just used to think “This would be an amazing fictional story.” It’s real but it’s unbelievable and it would make a good story. So I guess I’ve pulled all those things together, you know I did before the fictional book I did some factual books on Hastings.
So I guess all those elements have come together, you know my background writing factual books, my genealogy background, and also my Masters in creative writing have all kind of pulled together into this series.
Fisher: I’ve got to think there are a lot of people who like you have come across amazing stories and like myself, and say “wow this would be a great fiction novel.”
Nathan: Yeah.
Fisher: And I’ve actually been involved with genealogy in a crime situation myself. So I know that is done like you say… the trick is linking it to the present day or to another situation, another timeline.
At what point did you figure it out and say “Wait a minute, here’s how it can be done.” What clicked in your mind that said “This is the key?”
Nathan: That is a bit of a tricky one to answer. I don’t really know the answer to that. I’ve come up with a lot of stories that have been based in fact and I’ve thought “This could make a good story.” But then I’ve thought “That would just become a kind of standard mystery story.” You know going through the process of solving a mystery or a crime that happened a long time ago, and I think it was reading other genealogical crime mysteries and I thought “That’s the thing that’s missing in my mind.”
It’s having that element of the modern day aspects to it if you like where there’s a threat to the modern day part, there’s a reason that someone wants Morton to not do it because it just adds that extra layer of mystery to it I guess.
Fisher: Well you have a lot of twists and turns in there, there’s no doubt about it. What would be your number one tip to somebody who would be thinking of doing something along these same lines?
Nathan: I think it would be to really make sure you get the genealogical aspect of it correct, because my biggest readership are genealogists and I know full well that they like the fact that it’s real and I get a lot of people saying “Wow I didn’t realise that record was out there, or I didn’t think about looking at this problem in such a way.” So I think you need to get that right but also to make sure you have your fictional story in there too so it doesn’t become too genealogical.
Fisher: [Laughs] right. It’s got to be entertaining first, right?
Nathan: Yes. Exactly!
Fisher: This is not a how-to in genealogy and it’s not telling your family history. This is a genealogical crime novel. It’s brilliantly put together, and where can people get a copy of this?
Nathan: So, it’s available from most bookstores like Barnes& Noble and it’s available online in paperback and indoor on Amazon, so yeah just your normal outlets.
Fisher: And it’s called “The America Ground,” a Genealogical Crime Mystery. And what are the other ones?
Nathan: So the first book in the series is called “Hiding the Past” then the second book is called “The Lost Ancestor” and then between The Lost Ancestor and The America Ground there’s a short novella story called “The Orange Lilies” and in that one Morton is researching his own family tree, at last.
Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah that’s right, there’s an actual genealogy interest going on in this thing too. I mean you’ve included everything. I think the thing I was most impressed about was the detail relating to his travels, the places he visited, the history of the area, and how you made that all live. That was the most impressive thing to me. It’s like “Does that man have a life?” how does he have time to know all these things, and to research it?!
Nathan: [Laughs]
Fisher: You must spend a lot of time just in libraries anyway.
Nathan: I do yes [laughs] in fact tomorrow I’m going to the Sussex Record Office just outside Brighton, to do some more research for the next book in the series. I’m about half way through. So I do make sure I do the work first before he does, and lots of things come up from that, rather than mix it from my computer, kind of making it all up. It’s so much more fun and realistic and so many more things you come across just by going to that record office, or that library, or that church, so yeah, it’s a very important part of the process.
Fisher: And do you have another one coming out soon?
Nathan: Yes, I’m working on the next one now; it’s about half way through so that should be out in some point this year. That’s been quite a tricky one to write. It’s taken an awful lot more research than the rest. I won’t give too much away, but Morton develops more of his own family tree answers as well. He finds some answers there, so that’s good.
Fisher: Alright, great stuff. He is Nathan Dylan Goodwin, the author of “The America Ground,” a genealogical crime mystery. It’s great stuff, I’ve read it, and you’re going to enjoy it. He is from near Canterbury England.
Nathan thanks for your time, and thanks for the book, too, by the way, enjoyed it very much.
Nathan: You’re welcome, thank you very much. Glad you enjoyed it.
Fisher: And coming up next; we’ll talk to a Michigan woman who got a death bed confession from her estranged father, about a sibling she didn’t know she had overseas, and she found him! You’ll hear the whole story coming up for you next in about five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

Segment 3 Episode 132 (44:45)
Fisher: I love death bed confessions. That’s a whole other source.
Hi, it’s Fisher, and you are back with Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com and I am talking to a woman right now who actually has had that experience… a death bed confession that has led to the discovery of a whole other branch of the family. Jessica Fairbanks is on from Muskegon, Michigan.
Hi Jessica, welcome to the show!
Jessica: Hi, thank you!
Fisher: I am absolutely astonished by your ingenuity and your determination to find out what the death bed confession led to. Let’s start with that whole story. This came from your dad, and from what I’ve read, you didn’t have much of a relationship with him.
Jessica: I didn’t. Our dad, he was in my life until I was about thirteen years old, and it was rough, he didn’t lead a very good life. He was into drugs, he was abusive, and it wasn’t a very good situation. When I was around thirteen, my mom finally got full custody of us, then me and my brother Brian we had never seen him again after that for about seventeen, almost eighteen years.
Fisher: Wow, how sad. Then something changed, you got a little bit of news?
Jessica: Yeah, we got a phone call from our uncle, who is the brother of our biological dad, telling us that our father was in the hospital. He had congestive heart failure and he was dying, and just kind of giving us the option to go and see him and talk to him one last time.
Fisher: And you were willing to do that?
Jessica: Yeah. A few years ago if you had asked me if the situation ever came up would I have gone to see him, I probably would have said no, probably not, but for some reason when it was actually presented to us, my brother and I both decided yeah we’re going to go, we’re going to go see him one more time.
Fisher: And how did that go? Was there some tenderness there from his part, a little kind of an apology?
Jessica: A little bit, more so to my older brother. When we first walked in it was hard to recognize him. He looked very, very different. He had still been in the same lifestyle, so he was not looking very good, plus being sick and dying. So it was kind of surprising for us. There were a little bit of tears, he was surprised and I think probably glad to see us. We kind of made a lot of small talk, tried to say “Hey here’s where I’m at now. You know I have this family,” not a lot of deep, deep talk there, but at that time he did talk with my brother a little bit and told him that he was sorry for things in the past.
Fisher: So he went on from there and told you one big secret that you had no idea about.
Jessica: Yeah. This was actually the second visit or the third visit that I had. I had to go back to the hospital because I had to fill out some legal paperwork and things for his care because we were next of kin, so I went back another time by myself and sat and talked with him again. I said to him, “So what have you been doing all these years? Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything I should know about before you die?” And immediately, the first thing that he brought up was “Well, you need to know about your brother in Germany, you have a half brother.”
Fisher: [Laugh] What was your initial reaction to that?
Jessica: I think I was kind of shocked for a minute, and then I quickly grabbed whatever random thing I could find in my purse, it was an envelope to a card I had gotten and I grabbed a pen and I said “Well, do you remember anything about him? A name, anything?”
Fisher: [Laughs] Try to remain calm, right?!
Jessica: Trying to get all the information, I wondered how much was accurate because of his current condition, but I wrote down everything he said.
Fisher: Wow, so then you went to work on it?
Jessica: He actually was still alive in a hospice facility when I decided to actively search for my brother. I had decided to use social media, just figured things travel so quickly on the internet. First I initially just tried to Google my brother’s name by myself and see what popped up, but that was all just dead ends. Then I decided to go buy a big poster board and write down all the information I had gotten from our father, which was basically his name, place of birth, where they were in Germany at the time, our father’s name, and then what my dad believed to have been his birthday, actually ends up being a couple of days off but the month and the year were correct.
Fisher: Okay.
Jessica: I wrote it all out on a poster board, than I made a special email address because I didn’t want to put my personal one on there.
Fisher: Sure, right.
Jessica: I didn’t know what kind of response I would get, and I had my husband snap a picture of me holding this poster and then I just posted it on my personal Facebook page and asked everybody to share it.
Fisher: Well I’ve seen the picture, and it’s a charming picture. It’s very welcoming and I think it’s a disarming picture, because you just look very happy and hoping to have this reunion. So talk about how quickly this thing moved, Jessica.
Jessica: Well, immediately all my personal Facebook friends I noticed, they started sharing it, probably about a hundred of them. But also I would notice in their shares, they were tagging maybe somebody that they knew that either knew people in Europe or in Germany or they were tagging people that they actually did know in Germany and saying “Hey spread this around over there” you know “This is my friend Jessica” or “This is my cousin,” whatever, and so I did not know how many times it was shared, for some reason I couldn’t see that information, I could only see my friends who shared it, but I came to find out later that it was shared about 3000 times.
Fisher: Wow!
Jessica: And this is only in a day and a half period of time.
Fisher: That is unbelievable, and in a day and a half what took place?
Jessica: Well the very next morning… I posted it on a Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning I had a message from a German newspaper in that part of Germany that he was born in, and it just said that, you know, “We saw your post on Facebook and we’re very interested in helping you find your brother, and we’ll talk about this at our meeting on Monday and we’ll get back to you.” So the rest of Sunday I didn’t hear much of anything else, kind of a few more people shared it, then Monday morning when I woke up, I had another message from that newspaper saying “Congratulations you found him! You’ve already been in contact we heard! We just talked to him.” So initially I’m looking at it like “Oh, okay.” You know, someone is messing with them. Somebody is tricking them. I haven’t found him yet. And then, because it was so early in the morning, I’m half asleep thinking “Hello, check your email address!” Well, I log into that and I’m shaking and I get in there and I have a message from Steven Beckman. So I opened that up and I read it. He just had a couple of questions about maybe if the birthday could possibly be this date instead of the one I had posted, and what part of Germany our father lived in. I wrote him back everything that I knew and that I was told, and very quickly we both found out and realized that this was legitimately him and I was looking for him and we had found each other!
Fisher: In a day and a half. What a world, huh?!
Jessica: It was less than 48 hours from the time of the original post till the time I was in contact with Steven.
Fisher: So Jessica, how has this changed your life and how has it changed Steven’s life?
Jessica: Well the first day we talked, Steven talked with me for a while and I talked to his son… I have a nephew… and on that day he said “I’m usually not very emotional, but I just need a little bit of time, you know, I need to go to bed or something.” I think he was so overwhelmed, because here I had had a couple of weeks from the time my father had told me this information till the time I had made the original Facebook post, it had been almost two weeks probably.
Fisher: You had processed it by that time.
Jessica: Exactly. I had a little bit of time to think it through and prepare myself for what I may or may not find, and here we just kind of burst into Steven’s life. All of a sudden he has siblings and this whole connection to a father he had never known or met. Now since then we talk all the time. Mostly we communicate on Facebook messenger. He knows some English, I know no German at all, so if we are typing something to each other, we can kind of put that into a Google translate or something like that so we can translate the difference in the language. But we talk all the time. We’re getting to know each other. We talk about our families; we send pictures to each other. It’s just really neat getting to know each other now.
Fisher: Well Jessica I wish we had more time [laughs] we just don’t, but what an incredible story. Congratulations on your successful efforts, and it’s got to be a wonderful blessing for you and your family.
Jessica: Thank you very much, it really is. I’m looking forward to meeting him soon.
Fisher: Amazing work, from death bed confession to success.
Coming up next; we’re going to talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority, and answering your emails, in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 132
Host Scott fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It is preservation time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He’s the Preservation Authority, and Tom, we’ve got a lot of emails here, a lot of questions. So, are you ready to give some answers?
Tom: Absolutely.
Fisher: All right. Let’s start with this one from Kathy Craig. Kathy writes, “Hey Tom. I’m helping flood victims recover their photos. One Kodak picture CD is messed up. Can you help me figure out how to recover the data? This is a part of a group of gift certificates that are being given to the flood victims here in Columbia, South Carolina, using my service to help them. Pro bono time, so any help you can give is greatly appreciated. Thank you! Kathy.” All right Tom, what do you say?
Tom: Hey Kathy. That is awesome that you’re going this extra mile to help these people. That’s just absolutely wonderful. Okay, unfortunately, based on the photos that you included with your email that showed the picture of the disk, it appears that your disks have what they call ‘pinholes’. Pinholes are what we actually talked a little bit about last week, which has allowed water to penetrate the disk itself and has actually separated the laminate from the dye, in effect, resetting the dye back to neutral vs. carrying the binary codes which we talked about, the zeros and the ones, which is required to operate.
So, basically, it just messed it up. It’s not like it’s turned it back to zeros. It doesn’t even know, is this zero or is it a one? And so, unless you have a major over scan computer, it’s going at look at that and freeze up, because it will have no idea what to do. So, the only way I have ever seen a disk recover from this type of damage is to attempt to duplicate the disk in a professional duplicator, not in your home computer. I mean, you can try it, but when you’re doing stuff in your home computer, I consider it a copy. It’s not a true duplicate, because you have software that’s interfering, you have all kinds of things that are going on, whereas if you go to a professional, like ourselves, and I’m sure they’re ones in your area, they use a duplicator. There’s no software involved, and what you want to do is, when you go in and talk to them or send it to us, say, “Hey, I want this duplicated at 1x speed”. And people will think, why would you want it at 1x speed? Because there’s less chance for error, like if you do it at 8x speed, that means it going through your disk 8x as it normally would… 16x.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: And most things nowadays are 16x and even ahead, but you want to go to 1×1, which means, if it’s a two hour disk, it’s going to take two hours to duplicate, however, it’s going to write each zero and one very slowly and very carefully , and so, you have a better chance of recovering the disk this way. I’ve had people bringing disks to us and say, “Hey, I can’t play this anymore”, and we did this, we put it in 1×1 and duplicated it and it worked.
Other times it hasn’t, another thing I’ve heard people try, and I’ve never done myself is, if you have these little pinholes, sometimes if you get black finger nail polish and on the label side, cover up where that spot is, and then, when it reflects up, it will hit the black, and hopefully it will at least see it as a zero vs. a one, whereas before it doesn’t see anything at all. Another thing you can do is if you have a disk that’s got the larger marks in it, you can try getting something metallic which you would go to like a car dealership and buy these, they’re about the size of a fingernail polish that has like a metallic kind of paint in it, a silver metallic. Those are two things I’ve seen on the internet that worked to try to solve that problem.
So, that’s what I would do first, but be really, really careful with your disk, because if it starts to delaminate, if you look at the disk and you can see bubbles in it, be very, very careful, because just twisting the disk a little bit will make that expand, because water is really, really bad. We have in one of our stores a great, big, huge salt water tank, and I put some disks in there just to show people – that we had custom printed to show them what we could do – and they started to dissolve. It totally blew my mind. It actually, the disk delaminated itself and all the silver stuff went away. It was really strange.
Fisher: Are you sure the fish weren’t eating them?
Tom: [Laughs] Nope. There were no shark teeth marks in it at all, so I think the disks were okay
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: But it’s funny you say that, S.T. who is our shark, he likes to play with them, but you know, he’s not strong enough to delaminate, but the salt water actually damaged it. So, you want to be really, really careful. If they’ve been through a flood, get them dried out as fast as you can. Keep them flat. Put like some newspaper on the top and the bottom and take care of them that way. And then, after the break, we’ll get some more questions.
Fisher: All right, good stuff. Coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 131
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are talking preservation at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com
Fisher here with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, and we’re answering emails that we’ve received at AskTom@TMCPlace.com
This one Tom, comes from Kevin Henry, Marilyn Heights, Missouri, and he says “Tom, do you still have the ability to transfer eight track tapes to compact disk?”
Tom: Oh absolutely! In fact, eight track tapes are one of the things you either love or hate, why they ever came out, who knows.
I think the problem is the etymology to eight track tapes is, you’ve been in the radio business for so long, and the old days when you had commercials they put them on what we call carts.
Fisher: Yup, cartridges
Tom: Yeah, they were eight track tapes. They just had little 30 or 60 second commercials on them. You’d push the button and it would play the commercial. Now everything is digitized on a hard-drive. That’s how they came up with eight track. They actually had turntables in cars.
Fisher: No!
Tom: Oh yeah, some of the nice Studebakers, they actually had turntables in cars, and obviously they didn’t work very well and so they thought “What can we do? What can we do?” I think they were actually in the process of developing cassettes but hadn’t got all the bugs worked out of it and they go “Hey, they’re using these carts in studios, why don’t we take this, put more tape on it and then we can get an hour’s worth of music on it.” And they thought “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea”
Now, we can see it wasn’t very brilliant at all. You have all kinds of problems with the eight track tapes, they’re basically what they call “endless tape.”
Fisher: Right.
Tom: So the two ends are actually welded together
Fisher: As carts were.
Tom: Exactly!
Fisher: Radio carts.
Tom: Exactly the same way so they would just go endless. So when you pick track 1, 2, 3 or 4, all the way up to 8, they’re all right next to each other. Just like if you look at an audio cassette and it plays stereo both ways, that’s the essence of four track tape because it’s reading two track going one way and then two tracks coming the back way. Eight tracks were the same thing they had eight tracks so they’re all in parallel.
So if you had a problem with one track or a beep or somehow somebody sat on top of your great big monster speakers in the old days, it would make an erase mark on it and so you were going to have this problem on all eight tracks at that spot but the problem is the glue they used back in those days wasn’t very good.
Fisher: No. In fact a lot of the old broadcast cartridges would fall apart on us all the time or they’d break.
Tom: Oh absolutely. Just the labor to fix them is incredible, and so what happens is that glue comes off and then you need a replacement and fortunately some of the carts if you flip them over they have these little grab-pins on them so you can open them, go in and fix them but a lot of them don’t. A lot of people back in the days, back in the 60’s they actually recorded on eight tracks just like we did on cassettes. So they’ve got Grandma’s funeral on it or family history things on it, the tape disappeared into the cartridge.
Fisher: Oh wow.
Tom: So what happens is we have to open it and if it doesn’t have those tabs, if it’s the kind that’s sonically glued together
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: We have to actually surgically open the cartridge so we can get to the tape and then we can’t glue it back together, so we have to find a donor shell.
Fisher: Oh boy.
Tom: So we have to go find some old obscure music that nobody cares about and I’ve gone to stores for eight tracks for about $5 a piece but I don’t care what’s on them I just want the shell.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: So I find the shell, that way I’m able to go and fix it for the customer so that they’ve got their eight track again. In fact, one of these days I want to actually videotape with my “Go Pro” how to fix one of these and put it up on the website.
Fisher: Oh we’ll have to do it! That would be really fun to try. [Laughs]
Tom: Oh it is. It’s time consuming that’s why it’s so expensive to fix but once you have them done they’re going to be better than they were before, and every time I have one come in to fix I ring all these teenagers and these kids that are even in their twenties and thirties and say “Hey, come look at this thing.” And they’re going “Huh! Why did they ever design or build that?” and I say “I have no clue.”
Fisher: So the bottom line is, yes you can put it on a CD.
Tom: Yes we can absolutely put it on a CD in fact we actually even make eight tracks for people that have collector cars.
Fisher: Good stuff. Thanks so much Tom!
Tom: Thank you!
Fisher: And if you have a question for Tom Perry, you can AskTom@TMCPlace.com
Well, what did we learn today?
 We learned that Shakespeare’s head may be missing!
 We found out about a woman who in less than two days found a half sibling she didn’t know existed except for the deathbed confession of her father!
 We found out about genealogical crime novels, we didn’t even know people did that. I mean it’s been a great show.
If you’ve missed any of it, catch the podcast at ExtremeGenes.com, iTunes or iHeartRadio’s Talk Channel.
I’m Fisher, talk to you again next week. Thanks for joining us! And remember as far as everyone knows we’re a nice, normal, family!

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Episode 131 – Advances in Irish Ancestry for St. Patrick’s Day & The Freedom Bureau Project Advances African American Research

March 21, 2016 by Ryan B

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Fisher opens this week’s show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, talking about the genealogy of the fictional Crawley family of “Downton” Abbey fame. It’s received a lot of attention on the Extreme Genes Facebook page. David then talks about another incredible discovery, by a tourist no less, of a coin dating back to the early second century AD. Who found it and where is it now? David explains. David then gives the history of St. Patrick’s Day. (Bet you didn’t know St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish!) Hear David’s quick summary on the man for whom the holiday is named. David’s Tech Tip is an ancestral “longevity chart.” What is it and how does it work? Listen to the podcast to find out. David also shares this week’s guest user free database from AmericanAncestors.org.

Next up (starts at 25:16) is guest Judy Lucey, also of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Judy and an NEHGS colleague are currently working on a handbook for Irish research. The good news is (as we learned from Ireland Senator Jillian Van Turnhout last week) Irish records are hitting the internet in record numbers right now. So while Irish research in the past has been very difficult, things are dramatically improving. Judy will have some specifics and stories from the “Old Country” in this segment of the show.

The good news keeps coming in the next segment, with Thom Reed of FamilySearch.org. Thom is immersed in the Freedman Bureau Project which began last June. These records give the first extensive account of the freed slaves in the years immediately following emancipation. (And because the destruction of the South was so overwhelming, many poor whites sought services from the government and are included as well.) Thom explains how these records are breaking down the walls in African-American research and fills us in on the present status of the indexing project. Where can you find these records and how can you help the project? Thom has the answers.

Then, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com talks preservation. This week, Tom does some myth busting. For instance “disks are going away.” Not so, says Tom! Hear his explanation. He’ll also explain how salvageable many disks really are. (You won’t believe the damage he’s seen!) He then takes aim at the myth that thumb drives are a great permanent storage solution. Tom tells you why, when it comes to thumb drives, you should be afraid… VERY afraid!

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

Transcript for Episode 131

Segment 1 Episode 131 (00:30)

Fisher: Welcome back to another spine-tingling episode of “Extreme Genes,” America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com!

I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And I’m very excited once again of course this week with our guests because we’ve got Judy Lucey on the show, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She’s going to be talking about how to research your Irish ancestors, and there has been huge changes going on with that. You know, in the past it’s been very difficult because of burned census records and the like.

Judy’s going to bring us up to speed on what’s happening with Irish research. As we celebrate, shall we just say, the weekend following St. Patrick’s Day. And then later in the show we’re going to talk to Thom Reed, from FamilySearch.org. He’s been involved heavily with the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, and what this is is an indexing of the records of four million slaves and poor whites from the South, who between 1865 and 1872 needed a little help, and the project is making great progress.

We’re going to catch up with him on that, and find out what you might be able to do to help bring this thing to completion. It’s going to be great for African-American researchers in particular. We will catch up with Tom at half past the hour, but right now let’s go to Boston and talk to my good friend, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historical Society in AmericanAncestors.org, David Allen Lambert. Hello sir!

David: Hello! Greetings from “Beantown” in post St. Patrick’s Day celebrated Boston.

Fisher: Yes! I bet you that was quite the party there. I’m kind of going through this withdrawal right now David, from “Downton Abbey,” my wife and I have watched this of course for six seasons. We didn’t catch up with it actually until about the third season and then followed it faithfully all the way through to the end. And the other day, I found online, trying to figure out exactly how all the family members of the Crawley Family tied together…

David: … exactly…

Fisher: … there’s a Crawley Family Genealogy online.

David: Oh my goodness!

Fisher: Yeah it goes back; remember at the end the third cousin once removed? We had of course Matthew and all these different branches of the family and of course the children, now the grandchildren, and the new husbands in all this.

So, I posted it on our Facebook page with Extreme Genes. It has been reposted countless times, viewed thousands of times now, it has gone absolutely nuts because everybody loves Downton Abbey.

David: Well, I love Downton Abbey now too, but I must say I’ve only been a fan since Christmas time where I sat down, we watched season 1, binged watched in about two months the entire series and watched the very last episode the night before it actually aired on TV. So, I’m caught up with the clan completely

Fisher: What a great show it was, and I’m looking forward to what Julian Fellowes comes up with next because he’s got a deal with NBC for a show called “The Gilded Age” which is going to talk about New York City in the 1880s and it’s going to be on network television.

David: Oh that’s going to be wonderful.

Fisher: Coming out next year.

David: Well there’s gold found everywhere, if it’s not on TV it’s out in the Eastern part of Galilee. I don’t know if you saw the story about the two thousand year old Roman coin?

Fisher: Yes!

David: That’s amazing! Laurie Raymond, while out hiking, looked down and found this coin that dates to around 107 AD of the former Emperor Traygen, which was an image that was in honour of him by the then-current Emperor Augustus. I mean, I was a metal detector kid, I still use it occasionally. I’ve never found anything a thousand years old just lying on the surface.

Fisher: No.

David: But a very lucky lady.

Fisher: Incredible.

David: Yes, so something washed out of a wall or something.

Fisher: And it’s in great shape.

David: Amazing, and apparently it’s so very rare and I understand it is now in the possession of the Department of Antiquities in Israel. So it will be shared by all the people out there and that’s the great thing about archaeology, is that you just never know what the amateurs might find.

Fisher: Exactly.

David: Like the Anglo Saxon Viking hordes that we’ve talking about. Well, going back a little further west from Galilee, northwest actually we go, for a recap on St. Patrick’s Day history.

Do you realize St Patrick’s Day as a holiday didn’t start until 1631 and that was centuries after, in fact twelve centuries after the death of St. Patrick himself. It started as a church feast. But did you realize that St. Patrick really wasn’t from Ireland?

Fisher: No. I did not know that! Where was he from?

David: Yes! He was Roman. We should really be calling it St. Maywyn’s Day or Maewyn’s Day. His real name was not Patrick, it was Maewyn Succat they believe, and he changed it to Patricius which is a Latin term for “Father figure,” and of course because he was a priest and is well known for converting the Druids to Christianity. And the American side of this holiday, well it didn’t come over with the Pilgrims.

The first celebration in America that they can see occurred in your great old state of New York in 1762, and the idea of wearing green doesn’t go back to the Leprechauns. It actually dates from about 1798 during the Irish rebellion.

Fisher: Wow!

David: Gave me a little bit of a wakeup call of what I knew of my own Irish heritage.

Fisher: Well, Happy Maewyn’s Day

David: Exactly! Well, you know I’ll tell you we’re talking about things trending on DL Genealogist on Twitter and I’ve got a lot of followers and I follow a lot of people follow back. But this tech-tip that I came up with on the back of a Post It note actually was to create a “longevity chart.” Well it’s trending and being re-tweeted all over the place.

It’s a simple idea as I told you. I just took a regular Genealogy chart or a Pedigree chart as some people would call it, and instead of putting in the names, I put in the age at death of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great, great grandparents and you look at it and realize how different of a focus we’re looking at genealogy and if somebody died like, they were shot, or killed in a war, or suicide, circle that number because that’s not a basis. But I look at it and I say “Oh my God! The average mean age that I could live to doesn’t look like I’m going to push 90.”

Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah right.

David: It’s a fun little tech-tip, it’s free, something to do and of course on AmericanAncestors.org, as a guest user you can get our free databases and the ones we’re highlighting this week include, Brooksville, Maine, and Farmington Maine, which are records from the 18^th and 19^th century of their births, marriages, and deaths.

That’s all I have for this week from Beantown. I’ll look forward to talking to you next week!

Fisher: Alright David, great stuff as always and have a Happy St. Maewyn’s Day!

David: The same to you Sir.

Fisher: And coming up next, another member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society team, Judy Lucey, is going to be talking about your Irish research coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Extreme Genes, Segment 2 Episode 131 (25:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Judy Lucey

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes at ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here and I’m talking to Judy Lucey with the New England Historic Genealogical Society, one of our friends there we’ve had on before and Judy is in the process of working with a colleague on a handbook for Irish Genealogy. And Judy, welcome back to the show nice to have you again!

Judy: Well, thank you Scott. It’s great to be here.

Fisher: Have you been wearing green around the office this past week, did people get pinched, what was the story?

Judy: Well, actually, I’m wearing a bit of green today. Yes, this is the time of the year where the color green is very popular. A lot of my colleagues and myself are wearing our little green outfits or little buttons that say, ‘I’m Irish for the day.’

Fisher: [Laughs] So no pinching is allowed?

Judy: Not in the library, no.

Fisher: Right. That would be improper.

Judy: Yeah. [Laughs]

Fisher: Yeah, we can’t have that. Well, this is exciting, last week on the show we had Senator Jillian Van Turnhout from Ireland on. Talking about all the things the government is doing to improve Irish research over there for Irish Americans. And, of course, they’re doing all they can so that they’ll get more tourism out of it.

Judy: That’s exactly what they want to do.

Fisher: Yeah, and so, as a result of that, I would imagine as you work on this handbook, things are changing really fast, what do people of Irish ancestry need to know as things are evolving?

Judy: Well, first of all, things are evolving very rapidly and I think when we look in the context of time, from say, the last few years when nothing of Irish records were really online, very little, to today, there’s just been this huge explosion, and then in the last two weeks the biggest thing to come online has been the Roman Catholic Parish Registers.

Fisher: That is so huge. I mean, people have waited for that forever.

Judy: Oh, they have! And I remember when I first started out in Irish. I had to physically go to Ireland to use those records.

Fisher: Yes.

Judy: They were on microfilm at the national library in Dublin, and last year the national library scanned those microfilm images, and now they’re online, but Ancestry and Find My Past have taken it one step further and have indexed those records.

Fisher: Wow! And so, this is now all available. It’s interesting because you know, you would think about the cost of actually going to Ireland, and I think many of us wouldn’t hesitate to do it, but sometimes the cost of actually paying to get these records online we would hesitate.

Judy: I know exactly. And if they are both on subscription websites so you do need to pay to use them. However, I think Find My Past is now going to offer that index to the Parish Registers for free permanently.

Fisher: Wow. Wow.

Judy: So that will be a great plus for people who just want to go through and look at them and see if they can find their Irish ancestors.

Fisher: Now, for people who aren’t familiar, the issue with Irish research has to do with the fact that the Irish actually burned their censuses records back in the day.

Judy: Yes they did. Back in 1922 during the Irish Civil War there was an explosion and fire at the public record office in Dublin, which was in the Four Courts building. At that time they housed the Irish censuses there. And the censuses from 1821 to ‘51 pretty much went up in smoke. There are some fragments, and it’s really a shame because the Irish census records were probably the best censuses in the world at the time. It listed everyone in the household, and I’ve seen those fragments, and one wants to cry at the loss. And in the latter half of the 19th century, they were destroyed by the Irish government.

Fisher: Yes, and what was their reasoning behind that?

Judy: I’m not quite sure if it was bureaucratic bungling, but it’s simply I think they used some of it for pulp or paper during World War I. They’re such precious documents, but I don’t think it was thought of at the time and I don’t think it was intentional, I think it was accidental. I think they thought there was another copy available, but I’m not really sure of the historical details.

Fisher: Boy, talk about bungling huh? Unbelievable!

Judy: Absolutely.

Fisher: So what else has come out that that people have to be aware of?

Judy: Well, in addition to the church records, there are some Protestant records online, although they’re mostly transcriptions, and again, those are in subscription websites. A lot of the other records, the 1901 and 1911 censuses which are the first full censuses for Ireland, they are online and are free at the National Archives of Ireland. If you have really interesting ancestors, the Irish prison registers have come online. And I have found a few of my own ancestors in those. So, those are very interesting.

Fisher: What were people in prison for mostly in those times?

Judy: Well, I think the British were trying to keep a very tight rein on the Irish, and so, the slightest infraction, you could be arrested for. So, whether it was for stealing your neighbours chicken, or breaking a window. In my case, my own ancestor, my great grandfather assaulted a local police constable in his town and was sent to the jail for two weeks.

Fisher: And so, you were able to find that record. That’s awesome!

Judy: Yes, and then two months later he was on a boat to America, so, now I know the reason why.

Fisher: [Laughs] Wow! That had to be great find then. Yes, that would tell you a story right there, wouldn’t it?

Judy: It really was. I mean, I had heard about my great grandfather in stories from my grandfather and my father, but sometimes it’s hard to separate fact from fiction, but that certainly tells a little bit of a tale about the Irish rebel that he was.

Fisher: Was the grandfather and your father, were they aware of this story?

Judy: I don’t think they were aware of the prison record. I think they were aware that he had some difficulties in Ireland, some trouble, but no one ever really talked about what it was, and then, I discovered that when the prison registers went online. I happened to go through them thinking that, well, you know, it might be an interesting source to see if I could find anything, and lo and behold! There he was, in County Cork in the city jail for two weeks.

Fisher: That’s awesome. What a great find.

Judy: It’s a great find.

Fisher: Now, you mentioned land records as well. Those are recent releases?

Judy: Those have been online for a bit of time, probably in the last couple of years, and the land records, particularly what’s called, Griffith’s Valuation. It’s a land and tax set of records that were done during the time of the famine, and they serve as a census substitute, really. Now, because of the loss of the census records and what it can do for 19th century research, it can actually identify the piece of property that your ancestor was on. It was a sort of a valuation of the property and the occupiers of each lot of land in Ireland.

Fisher: So, whether they owned it or whether they were just renting there.

Judy: Right. So, whether they owned it and primarily, most people in Ireland did not own land. They were either tenants at will or they leased their property.

Fisher: That’s exciting stuff. So, you could actually find the exact location where your ancestors lived, and go over and visit it.

Judy: And I had people do that, and then they shared their photographs in front of the ancestral home or what was left of the lot, and have sent me their photographs. That’s really the fun part of helping people with their ancestry; it’s when you have something like that.

Fisher: Yeah, that really gets personal, doesn’t it?

Judy: It really does. And for Irish-Americans, I think that a really important part of discovering your Irish ancestors’ origins is being able to go over there, and to stand on that little lot of land where your ancestors once lived.

Fisher: And isn’t it exciting that the government over there is recognizing it’s a good thing for them too, so they’re helping us.

Judy: I know, and it’s great. Nothing like this I don’t think would ever be possible 15 or 20 years ago when I was starting out, and I think it’s just fabulous, what not only the Irish government, but the Irish people, there’s been a real renewed interest in Irish Genealogy.

Fisher: Now Judy, what about probate records in Ireland?

Judy: Well, probate is interesting. A lot of the pre-1900 probate records were destroyed in that great fire in 1922. Indexes survived. People can certainly use the indexes, but for the most part, a lot of wills were destroyed. There are some that have survived, and those are in Northern Ireland. In Ulster, for example, the public record office of Northern Ireland, Belfast has taken and indexed 1858 to about the 1920s or 1930s probate records and put those online. They’ve indexed them, and then they’ve, if there’s an image available, they’ve scanned the image and put them up. It’s just an abstract of it, not the actual will, but it just an abstract.

Fisher: Yeah, that’s helpful though.

Judy: It is. It’s extremely helpful. I recently helped someone find one online just last week, here in the library. It was really exciting.

Fisher: So, tell me one of your greatest Irish stories from your ancestry. You mentioned to me off-air that your father’s line is full Irish. What have you found that just blew your mind?

Judy: Well, I had always thought most of my Irish came over either during the famine or afterwards, and it wasn’t until I was working on my grandmother’s line. My grandmother wasn’t born in the United States. She was born in Atlantic, Canada, and when I decided to research her line, she was from Newfoundland, and what I discovered was that my Irish ancestors through my paternal grandmother actually arrived in North America, probably sometime in the late 18th century or early 19th century, and that they were part of a group of Irish families that had helped found and discover this little fishing village in Newfoundland. So, my Irish roots actually go very deep in Atlantic, Canada, which I was very surprised about.

I had no idea of any of this, because my grandmother never spoke of her background. So, that was very exciting for me, because I think we typically think of Irish coming over in the famine or after the famine years, but a lot of Irish were here in the 17th century. Here in Boston, we can find plenty of examples of Irish in the records. So, for me to find those kinds of deep Irish roots, long before the famine here in North America was very exciting for me. I actually went up there and visited the place and stood on the piece of land where my grandmother was born.

Fisher: How’d that feel?

Judy: It was bitter-sweet. You know, it was a small village. All of the people made their living through fishing, and I kind of understood why they had to leave, because of the economic downturn, and also just that life must have been very hard for them. So, it was exciting to see it. I had heard about it through my grandmother and her sisters, but to go there was really…I was very glad that I did it.

Fisher: How far back do you think a typical person could expect to go with their Irish research if they’re just getting started today?

Judy: For Irish Catholics, probably maybe about 1800. For people with Protestant, it might be about the same. You know, a lot of people want to get back further, it’s just going to be depending upon the place where your ancestor is from and the records, and how far back they go.

Fisher: She’s Judy Lucey from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She’s working on a handbook for Irish Genealogy. It’s going to be out when, Judy?

Judy: Late spring.

Fisher: Thank you so much for your time and coming on and sharing all this with us.

Judy: Well, thank you, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Fisher: And, coming up next, The Freedmen’s Bureau records are behind schedule when it comes to indexing. This has to do with all the freed slaves and many others. We’ll talk to Thom Reed from FamilySearch.org about it, coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Extreme Genes, Segment 3 Episode 131 (44:45)

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and you know it is so exciting always to be talking about all these different ethnicities and backgrounds as people try and find their ancestors.

We’ve talked Irish today and we’re going to talk African-American right now with an incredible project that I think is going to be life changing for a lot of people looking for African-American ancestry. And on the line right now from FamilySearch.org is my good friend Thom Reed. Hi Thom! How are you? Welcome to the show!

Thom: Hey! Thank you for having me. I appreciate being on today.

Fisher: Tell me about the ‘Freedmen’s Bureau Project.’ This is a very big deal.

Thom: Very, very, very big deal. It’s monumental for those who are searching for African-American roots because the project aims to take records from the period between 1865 and 1872 that were kept by the Freedmen’s Bureau, or the Bureau of Refugees ‘Freedmen and Abandoned Lands’ were their official name, and take these records that have been in the national archives for years, were converted to microfilm in the 70’s and then again in 2000, and make these records now searchable online for anyone who has family members so that they could type in the information and actually pull up documents.

For years in the African-American community, as you’ve done family history research, you run into what’s called ‘The Brick Wall’ which is the 1870s census. The first time that African-American’s were documented in federal records besides the bureau records,

Fisher: Right.

Thom: the records that we have online. So now you can trace your genealogy typically back to 1870, but once you get there, it gets kind of that dark period where it’s hard to find records. There’s nothing for your family. But these records provide that bridge and just bring light for millions of Americans. At the time of Emancipation there were nearly four million slaves. They became free and they needed services. They needed things like schooling, and healthcare, and education, and the Bureau documented all this. They wrote for the first time ever, names of individuals. They weren’t just tick marks in the 1850 census, but now they were actually names, and they had family relationships, and they had occupations associated with them, and where they lived, and when they were married. This provides a treasure trove of information that’s invaluable for those doing African-American family history research and the projects just aims to take these digital images, transcribe and index them, and make them freely available and searchable for anybody who wants to do this research.

Fisher: Now you’re working on the indexing project right now and I know when we ran into each other at Roots Tech you were saying “Oh my gosh, we’re behind!” because you’re working in a partnership with the Smithsonian, right?

Thom: Yes. Since we launched on June 19^th 2015 which is actually a significant day in African-American history because it’s Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, back in 1865 when the slaves found out they were finally free. So in 2015, the 150^th anniversary of June-teenth, we announced this project in partnership with this Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American history and culture and the Afro-American Historic and Genealogical Society, and those two groups have been helping us have events around the country, walking through their societies or with different organizations to actually get people together to volunteer and index these records.

The challenge though is, these records are not simple to index, unlike maybe your traditional censuses or death records, one that’s handwritten a lot of times in cursive, older kind of arcane language in some regards.

Fisher: Right.

Thom: It makes it so much tougher, so we struggled a little early on with the project in getting all these records digitized kind of according to our timeline. Our goal is to have all the records indexed and readably available by June 19^th, and then it takes a few months after that to publish all the records and get them online because on September 24^th the Smithsonian’s opening the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC, and as our gift from FamilySearch.org to them as a partner we want to give them this database complete, ready, searchable for them to use.

Fisher: And even before that though it will be available online, yes?

Thom: Absolutely. So as we come across records we do these kind of indifferent groups of records and for example, since June 19^th last year the Freedman Bureau field office marriage records have now been indexed and published on FamilySearch.org that’s where all of these records will reside and as we complete other projects, for example we’ve completed recently, hospital and patient records, we’ve done some court records, applications of rations issued, those kinds of documents. We finished the indexing and we are just in the publication process right now so we look forward to seeing those records online here in the next few weeks, and then as we complete more and more projects they’ll be published online with the goal of completing all the indexing and arbitration by June 19^th and then having everything published and ready available by September this year.

Fisher: Boy that’s exciting stuff. And you know, it’s not just the 4 million slaves that had been freed there, there are a lot of impoverished whites as well. Now what’s their involvement in this?

Thom: Well you know, at the time during the Freedmen’s Bureau era, many were displaced by the armies during the Civil War and they came to the Bureau seeking help as well, so there are families, not only African-American, but white families who are documented in these records. So it provides a lot of historical context and a lot of detail that maybe would be lost if we didn’t have these records that had been preserved so carefully by the National Archives, and then FamilySearch was able to acquire.

So a lot of times people say “Is this project just for African-Americans?” No, it’s for all Americans. It’s anybody who’s researching their family and anyone can be involved. You don’t have to be African-American, you don’t have to be of any kind of faith background or genealogical expertise, you can participate in this project by helping us index, and then who knows, you may be like me, searching for family who are in these records where their line stops in the 1870 census and hopefully somebody will index these records, the name of your ancestors specifically, so that in the next couple of months you’ll be able to type in that name and find that Tom Banes in Montgomery County Mississippi, that’s my ancestor that I’m looking for in these specific records.

Fisher: Wow.

Thom: So we’re happy to have anybody and everybody who wants to participate involved in this project.

Fisher: So these were freed slaves back from 1865 getting actually registered for the first time during this Freedmen’s period. Thom, how long have you been looking for them?

Thom: Well for my people specifically, I’ve been looking for them for probably the last two or three years. I’m still kind of new to Genealogy Research myself, but once I got that 1870 census, I’ve really been wanting and thirsting to get into these records and find my family who I knew were most likely born into slavery and received services during this period of time from the Bureau, and I’m just one of many.

Fisher: Sure.

Thom: I know there’s Doctor Cece, in Los Angeles who I helped with some of his family history research, runs into the same thing. You hear some of the famous genealogists who are on TV talking about this ‘Brick Wall’ that everybody faces, and so it’s so important that we find the names of these individuals, but we can only find them if individuals help us finish the indexing in this project.

Fisher: Now so far you are almost two thirds done though two thirds of it is not yet available on FamilySearch.org but hopefully by June we’ll be seeing all of it, which is very cool. Where do people go if they want to be part of the volunteer effort?

Thom: If you want to get started with volunteering with this project, you can go to our website DiscoverFreedmen.org that’s DiscoverFreedmen.org That’s Freedmen (MEN) and you can click on the ‘Get Involved’ button and volunteer now. It takes you through the steps. You can see the progress of the project there as well as we have kind of a calendar. As of today it’s 63% but maybe when this airs we’ll be much closer to our goal.

Fisher: Great stuff. We’ll make sure we have the link for that on our Facebook page and on ExtremeGenes.com

Thom: Thank you.

Fisher: That’s Thom Reed, from FamilySearch.org. Thom, thanks for coming on and we can’t wait to hear of the completion and the rollout of all the records as a whole. That’s going to be a great day.

Thom: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Fisher: And coming up next it’s Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He’s going to be talking about some interesting myths that come up concerning preservation, that’s in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Extreme Genes, Segment 4 Episode 131

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

Fisher here the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He is our Preservation Authority, and today we’re doing a little “Myth Busting.” Tom, because we have some people that are “misunderstanding” some of the instructions that you’ve been sharing over the last couple of years.

Tom: And I try to do all my instructions in English, so I don’t know what the problem is.

Fisher: [Laughing]

Tom: One of the biggest things, we just did a tradeshow this last weekend, people would come up and say “Hey, I don’t want anything on a disk because disks are going away. Everyplace I read they’re not going to have disks anymore.”

That is a huge “myth”

Fisher: Yeah, exactly.

Tom: This is not like VHS or Beta where there’s a war and somebody’s going to be victorious and somebody else is going to die. Just like BluRay, when they had BluRay with Warner Brothers and Sony, Sony won out and Warner Brothers went away. Disks are here to stay. The reason is, people learn from past mistakes. If you buy the newest, latest BluRay player they will not only play BluRays, they’ll play your old DVD’s, they’ll play your CD’s, they’ll play anything.

So they’re learning to be backwards compatible so you shouldn’t have a problem. The only time you’ll have a problem is if you get some of weird after-market disk that for some reason doesn’t play on certain machines then that’s usually because it’s such an old disk, it’s got problems with it, the foil’s starting to go away. Because people don’t understand it’s not a rock except of course the course one which we’ll get into so they will go away.

Disks, whether they’re CD’s, DVD’s, BluRays are actually burned with a laser, what we call the one off disk. The ones you’d use at home to duplicate. The most duplicating centers would make for you; they’re actually done with a laser like a red laser. The new ones are going to be a green lasers and what it does is it takes dye that’s in there, it’s like an LCD watch and turns it on or off, so it’s either a 0 or 1, and since it is a laser, laser is light and I’ve had people that have left their CD’s on their dashboard upside down.

Fisher: Oh boy, yeah.

Tom: And they’ll say “Well, no it’s not warped everything should be fine.” Well, basically the sun is a giant laser and it erased your entire disk!

Fisher: Some people are thinking of it like an old record.

Tom: Exactly!

Fisher: A 33.

Tom: Right. If it’s not warped it should play. That’s not the case.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: So I mean, you could leave it on your window sill, you can have it on your kitchen drain-board and if the sun happens to come through part of the day and shine on that, there’s a chance you could erase your disk.

Fisher: Argh!

Tom: So, two things are; don’t put it where the sun’s going to pass. Make sure that the dye side is down so the label side is up because then you have a less chance of damaging it.

Fisher: So essentially, put it where the sun don’t shine.

Tom: Exactly! [Laughs] can we say that on the air?

Fisher: I think we just did.

Tom: Okay, so basically and this is a thing we need to get back to, we haven’t talked about in a long time. People are confused how a disk is actually made up. Even though the laser reads it from the bottom, your information is closer to the label on the top.

Fisher: Huh!

Tom: It’s just a way the way that a disk is made. There’s a big piece of polycarbonate on the bottom for the laser to go through to read the zeros and read the ones. But actually that layer is very close to the top. So I’ve told people this and I’ve had people bring us in a disk that needs to be resurfaced because it got scratched or they tried cleaning it with toothpaste and all kinds of weird things.

You can scrape a paper clip on top of even a Disney DVD, any kind of a DVD and scratch it, and its toast. Or you can take a knife on the under-side which is where the laser reads from and make a big gouge in it and I can still fix it and it will still play.

Fisher: Really?

Tom: Because I haven’t gotten into the foil layer. So as long as you don’t hit into the foil layer, you’re fine, and if you’ve got that’s facing up and you’re looking at it and it’s clean, there’s no dirt on it but it’s still skipping the best thing to do is hold is up to a light, with the label side towards the light and see if you can see little pin-holes coming through. Because what that’s telling you is that some of the foil has been damaged. It can be like a long line where it’s actually expanded and cracked like your sidewalk would do.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: It could be pin-holes and this is really funny, we get ones that have teeth marks in them where kids have actually bit the disk!

Fisher: [Laughs] wow.

Tom: And depending where they are on the disk, usually they’ll still play up to that part because disks are played from the inside out. They’re not like vinyl played from the outside in. So after the break we’ll go into some more details about different things you can do to protect your disks and ways to store.

Fisher: All right, coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Extreme Genes, Segment 5 Episode 131

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We’re back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show; we’re talking preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com and we’re doing a little “Myth Busting” today because it must be kind of interesting for you Tom to have people come into your store and say “Hey, I heard you say this” when you didn’t say this.

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: “I heard you say that.” when you didn’t say that. We were just talking about people who believe that disks are going away.

Tom: Exactly.

Fisher: Now you had another one too.

Tom: Right. A lot of myth busting is about “thumb drives” we’ve talked a lot of about thumb drives on the air and I’ve always said “That’s not a good place to keep stuff permanently.”

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Because they’re volatile. The biggest thing you want to understand about thumb drives… I have one in my pocket that I’ve had for about probably at least five years. You told me off air that you have the same situation.

Fisher: Maybe seven or eight.

Tom: Yeah, never had a problem with it. The thing is you have to realize that thumb drives are like cars. You can have a Yugo thumbdrive which is what they pass out at the tradeshows, home shows and different fairs because they so inexpensive, because the silicone that they use is really cheap. The components they use are really cheap, so all these things cause problems with volatility on them. This is a good example of “What you pay for is what you get.”

Fisher: Right.

Tom: If they’re handing them out to you for free, yeah they’re okay to use around your home to transfer from one computer to another but I wouldn’t put my permanent stuff on them and expect them to last because they won’t, and a lot of times what they do is when they make these thumb drives that they hand out at trade shows, they permanently put a little ROM-Chip on them that has information when you plug it in your computer it automatically opens up your computer to the internet and goes to their website as an advertisement.

Sometimes they just have like quick time movies on them that come up and play on your computer, it’s not going to hurt your computer, it’s just that this thing is on a ROM-Chip so it might say it’s a 15MB or GB or whatever size you’re looking for and since they have a ROM-Chip which is read-only memory, then the RAM which is read-write and erase is going to be so small and they don’t have to use very good components because the ROM is the main thing that’s all they care about is to show you the advertisement.

Fisher: Sure yeah.

Tom: So we have them around for little things if we need to transfer something off from one computer to another. “Scan Disk” is good but it might not be as good as the other ones. Just go and read the reviews on them. Make you buy a decent one and like I say “If the price is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”

Fisher: Right.

Tom: There’s a lot of information, Video Maker which we talk a lot about on air, they’re always reviewing things. They’ve got a lot of reviews where they’ve gone in and studied thumb drives. You can just go online and type in Google “Thumb Drive Reports” and you won’t believe the pages that come up, that these people… it’s like they have nothing better to do, they just sit and test all this stuff.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: They just sit and run this thumb drive… do this to it and that to it… and see which ones fail, what caused the problems. But if you look at big places like Facebook, they store all their stuff on BluRay disks they don’t use thumb drives. They can do whatever they want because they’ve got the money but they use BluRay disks because it’s the less volatile media.

But like I say, even if you get a really good thumb-drive like we have, I still back it up. I put stuff on it whether it’s calendar or whatever and immediately do what we teach everybody to do, the trifecta is, you want something on a disk a good Taiyo Yuden disk that’s going to last forever, you want it on a hard drive and you want it on two Clouds and make sure your two Clouds aren’t related, as we talked about.

Drop Box is great, I love Drop Box. We have our own that’s called Light Jar which is basically piggy backed on Google. We take the Google frame, put it on top of it so you don’t want to say “Oh, I‘ve got Light Jar and I’ve got Google.” because really you don’t. They’re both on the same server.

Fisher: Yeah right.

Tom: So even though Google has them all over the country, if Google ever went down we’d probably be in a nuclear war so it really doesn’t matter anymore.

Fisher: Wow that’s frightening.

Tom: I know. So you want to be careful. Remember, Hard Drive, Disk, Cloud, Cloud and you’ll be good and everything will be taken care of, and use your thumb drive sparingly.

Fisher: Thanks, Tom.

Tom: Thank you.

Fisher: Hey, that’s a wrap for this week. Thanks once again to Judy Lucey from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and Thom Reed from FamilySearch.org for filling us in on what’s going on in their world. If you missed any of it you can catch the podcast at iTunes, iHeart Radio’s Talk Channel, and ExtremeGenes.com

Hey, and don’t forget we’re getting close to the time you’ve got to get signed up for our Fall Foliage Cruise on Royal Caribbean. David Allen Lambert and myself will be talking about The Revolution in Boston and the Loyalists who went to Nova Scotia. It’s going to be a lot of fun! Find out more on our Facebook page.

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 129 – Genealogy Gems’ Lisa Louise Cooke on Mobile Genealogy and the Genealogy of a House!

March 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.com, open the show with news about a recently discovered World War II mess kit that has united a family. Then David shares great new for Midwestern researchers at the Allen County Genealogical Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. David and Fisher then talk about finding your ancestors in the diaries of people who were involved in their lives… like ministers and doctors. Wait til you hear what David found for someone recently in a minister’s diary! Then David shares another Tech Tip, and this week’s NEHGS free guest user database.

Fisher then welcomes to the show, for the first time, Lisa Louise Cooke, host of the long-running “Genealogy Gems” podcast.

Lisa has written a book on Mobile Genealogy and shares some tips on how to maximize your research experiences while away from home. You won’t want to miss what Lisa has to say!

Next, meet professional genealogist Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com. Some time back, Carolyn relocated with her husband to Pennsylvania where they moved into an old house. Wanting to know more about it, the house’s “genealogy” turned into a whole new adventure! You’ll want to hear how Carolyn did what she did, and what the result was!

Then, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, joins Fisher for the final segments. Tom talks about a turn-of-the-last-century photo brought Tom at Roots Tech. It’s the earliest “selfie” he’s ever seen, and he coveted it! He’ll explain how it was done, as well as how to salvage a picture with “outlaws” (former in-laws!) in it.

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

Transcript of Episode 129

Segment 1 – Episode 129 (00:30)

Fisher: Hello America! And welcome to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com
I am Fisher your Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out.
Exciting guests today! I’m really delighted to have Lisa Louise Cooke on, and if you’re not familiar with Lisa, she is the host of a podcast called “Genealogy Gems” and she’s put together a book called “Mobile Genealogy” so this is kind of a way to help you when you go do research on your family history somewhere where you don’t have to be transferring things from one computer to another, and she’s got some great tips for you coming up in about eight minutes.
Very excited to have Lisa Louise Cooke on the show!
Plus, later on from our brand new sponsor Legacy Tree Genealogists, Carolyn Tolman is going to be here and she has a great story too. She moved into a house some years ago in Pennsylvania and what a house it turned out to be! Some incredible history, it was going to be removed and she went to work to save it. With a history on a house, how do you do a genealogy on a house and what would that mean to you? Carolyn Tolman will tell you about that later on.
But right now let’s check in with Boston and our good friend the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAnsestors.org
David Allen Lambert, how are you sir?
David: Things are wonderful in Beantown. How are things with you Fish?
Fisher: All right. I’m excited we have a long list of things to cover here today. Let’s get started on it right away. First off in our “family histoire news,” there’s a mess kit that’s caused a lot of attention.
David: It did. And actually it’s amazing. Metal detectors are always finding amazing things on battlefields but this thing reunited a family. The mess kit for Hudson Funk of the 83rd 330th infantry who was over at Normandy and as you probably saw in the story the unfortunate thing, he lost part of both of his legs and never talked about the war to his children. But this mess kit simply had HLF, his initials and part of a serial number but it was enough to catch the imagination of the metal detector to start searching for it. He found the family out in Pennsylvania, in a town called Roxborough where his sons and one of his brothers have now been reunited with this wonderful artefact and it’s brought a family together.
Fisher: They came from all over the country, they hadn’t been together in years, and they’re celebrating, there are pictures of them toasting this thing and holding this mess kit with a big dent in it with their relative’s initials in it. In fact, the brother is still living at 95 years old.
David: That’s wonderful, it really is. But in Allen County Public Library out in Fort Wayne Indiana, I give a hats off to Curt Wicher and his staff. They have just finished a quarter of a million dollar renovation that has helped in creating both their Life Story Center, where people can come in and do oral histories and they also now have a new auditorium that seats over 240 people on a theatre style amphitheatre.
Fisher: Isn’t that great. The Allen County Library is the second largest library in the world and serves largely the Midwest, so this is a big move for them. Very exciting.
David: It really is. An interesting thing happened here in our library in Boston, I had a lady come in and she was looking for her ancestor but she had a specific question “Where was his diary?” Do you have any diaries of your ancestors?
Fisher: I don’t. I have like one paragraph of an autobiography by my great grandmother and that’s about it. But I do have a second great grandfather who hand wrote five pages of his autobiography by about 1905. I have that original but no diaries.
David: They’re great things when you can have it. But I don’t have one from any of mine. However, I can tell you that the brother of my ancestor was a judge at the Witchcraft Trials. Samuel Sewall, and he published a diary for decades but also lots of details.
Fisher: Wow!
David: But getting back to this lady’s query, I could not find a diary for her ancestor but I did find a diary for the minister in her family’s town.
Fisher: Oh, wow!
David: And the minister had some peculiar things to inform.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: About good things and also the confessed sins.
Fisher: Oh! The naughty and nice list!
David: Exactly. So you just never know when doing genealogy what things you might find and will get you an interview on Extreme Genes.
Fisher: Now wait a minute, were the sins very specific in this diary about the ancestor?
David: Oh yes! They were very specific!
Fisher: [Laughs] All right. So the minister had a diary on the ancestor, anything else?
David: The other thing I told her is “Look for doctors.” Couldn’t find one for her but the town in Maine where my family came from, Westbrook, Maine, there was a doctor in town who actually recorded the birth of all the children he had attended, and I can tell you that my great, great grandmother in 1822, cost a dollar twenty five when she was delivered first thing in the morning.
Fisher: Really? I have never heard of something like that. Of course also there are a lot of the stores that kept a record back in Revolutionary times of people who came through and bought things and how much they paid for it and what they bought, and I found material there that’s really interesting.
David: A couple of years ago one of our members gave us the family store account books from Roxbury, Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War, that gave things that were sold to the British troops and the American troops.
Fisher: Wow!
David: I want to give a shout out to the followers of Extreme Genes and myself DL Genealogist on Twitter, and because I participated in my first ever hashtag “Gen Chat” it happens every other Friday. This coming week they’re talking on Civil War research, but it’s free, you’re on Twitter #genchat it’s a great tech-tip to go in and network and follow a genie as I say, on Twitter. What I am investigating hopefully for the next show or the show after, is the company in Provo, Utah called ‘Research Ties.’ They offer for free a basic version of their research log which you can create right online. They also sell a version for 30 dollars annually which has 3 logins and it has 10 GBs worth of space. Basically you have a research log. Fish, you can go check at any time. You can print it out, you can add to it, you can create certain criteria, great stuff.
Fisher: Wow.
David: And speaking of databases, for the guest users of AmericanAncestors.org, we are very excited to have the Annals of Barra Island which is the Robert O’Dwyer papers of the 3 volumes of the studies from the Barra Peninsula in West Cork Island that covers from 1776 to 1992.
Fisher: That’s all free, of course?
David: Free exactly from the AmericanAncestors.org. One of the many guest user databases we do. Well that’s all I have from Beantown, catch you next week. Fish, have a good one.

Fisher: Great stuff, thanks David. And coming up next in 3 minutes, we are going to talk to Lisa Louise Cooke, she’s the host of ‘Genealogy Gems’ the podcast about Mobile Genealogy, and why should it matter to you. On Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 129 (25:20)

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with a legend on the other end of the line. She is the host of Genealogy Gems, a podcast. It’s been around, what, about ten years now, Lisa Louise?
Lisa: Nearly. We started in 2007.
Fisher: Yeah, a long time ago, Lisa Louise Cooke, whom I’ve admired, well, from not too far a distance actually, over the last several years. She’s a great teacher, very knowledgeable in family history and coming up with little nuggets. I think those are the gems you talk about in the name of your show, Lisa. And I’m excited about your new book that you’ve got out, called, “Mobile Genealogy”. And this really kind of takes things into the 21st century. What got you started on this?
Lisa: Well, thank you for having me on the show. It’s great to be here. And what got me started on this was actually, several years ago, when the iPad first came out, I got my iPad and I was sitting there and my husband was looking at me and going, ‘Oh my gosh! Did you just buy the most expensive email checker in the universe?’ You know? Because that’s all I was doing. I said, ‘No! I’m playing Angry Birds. What else do you want me to do?’
Fisher: “I’m balanced!”
Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And he says, “Yeah, you know, well, you said you were going to do your family history on this as well, right? So, he set the challenge for me to say, I’ve got to learn more about how to use this device. How to make the transition from a laptop to going mobile with a tablet, and of course, our Smartphone is just a small version of a Tablet.
Fisher: Sure.
Lisa: So, my first book was, How to turn your iPad into a genealogy powerhouse. Because I had an iPad, that’s what I was focused on. And that one came about four years ago, of course, it’s already so obsolete.
Fisher: It happens that way.
Lisa: You know, technology moves so fast, doesn’t it?
Fisher: Yeah, it really does.
Lisa: So, Mobile Genealogy came out of, it was time for a new book, and I wanted to expand, because there’s Android, right? There’s Android, there’s Apple, there’s everything in between and the key here is that it’s all mobile. And so, the book addresses all the different platforms, all the different types of devices, and really digs ever further into, how to get the most out of them for family history, which is awesome if you don’t have to lug your laptop around, you’re in good shape.
Fisher: Well, that’s really true. You know, the thing is, I think, for a lot of people who have the time to do this, they haven’t necessarily come up in the age of the devices that we’re in right now. So, it’s a scary thing, isn’t it? And I think, part of the challenge for all of us, is not only for us to get comfortable with these devices, but to help other people to get there as well. And I’m sure you’ve had some people who are seniors particularly who are catching on to some of these things right now or having some success as a result of your teaching. Tell us about some of that.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for most of us, we didn’t grow up with all of this, and it can be kind of intimidating, but the way I kind of approach it is to say, you know, we have to get into what I call, ‘Tablet Mindset’ and stop looking at it as something that’s going to function like the laptop.
Fisher: Right.
Lisa: Because they’re two different animals. When we start with that in the book, that’s where they kind of make the mind shift and then I talk about how to then approach it so that you’re using it from a Tablet Mobile perspective, and we’re really focusing on the tasks. What are the tasks that you do in your genealogy research? And if you’re focused on that, then the right apps will come to you, the right functionality, you’ll know how to move around, but if you’re going at it, first and foremost, how do I duplicate what I was doing on my home computer on this Tablet? You’re going to get snarled up.
Fisher: Oh boy.
Lisa: So, I find that people really like that approach. I think it makes sense and then we just in the book, dig right into a lot of the apps, and what I’ve been hearing from folks, is that they like the fact that, as geeky as I am, I don’t write techno geek, you know?
Fisher: Right, and that’s important.
Lisa: It is. You know, way back in the day, well, I’m dating myself now, but way back in the day when the TRS-80 computer came out, I was one of the only women working at RadioShack of all places.
Fisher: Oh, wow.
Lisa: And we had to explain what a computer was. What this device was supposed to do, and so, I’ve been kind of doing that for a long time and you know, if you’re not in the mode of trying to prove how techno savvy you are and smart you are, but you’re just trying to help people, then it goes a lot better, and that’s certainly my goal. I want them to feel like they’re getting the most use out of their Tablet. So, one of the apps that really has jumped out and that is new to this edition of this book, Mobile Genealogy, is Chrome Remote Desktop, and I think this one is like, changing people’s lives.
Fisher: Totally.
Lisa: Yeah, because it means that those limitations that the Tablet or the Smartphone has, and I keep saying ‘Tablet or Smartphone’ because they’re just pretty much the same thing.
Fisher: Right, yes.
Lisa: The limitations that you run into, like, it won’t play my flash video. It won’t let me use this form or whatever it is that you’re doing, or this app is kind of stripped down version of the full blown website or software. Well, Chrome Desktop just unleashes the power of your Tablet, because it gives you access directly into your full blown computer at home, which you can have open on your desktop and sleeping, if you want to. You can ping it. And now, you’re running your entire computer right from your Tablet. So, you have no limitations. You are back to being able to do all the functionality of a laptop.
Fisher: I love that.
Lisa: I think that’s one of the main chapters that’s just been blowing people’s minds.
Fisher: Well, it’s also, you save everything back to your home computer which is so nice.
Lisa: Yeah, and you put it in another app which we really go in depth in the book which is Dropbox or any other type of cloud storage. We think of those kinds of apps as being kind of Grand Central Station for our files. So if we are accessing our home computer with the remote desktop, and we’re making new files, but we want to access them back on our Tablet, how do we get them there? But we don’t want to email them to ourselves, we save them to Dropbox and then they show up in our Dropbox app on our mobile device. What could be better?
Fisher: Boy, I’ll tell you! What a great tip just right there. That’s make the whole thing worth it. All right, so that’s one great app, Lisa Louise. What else do you have?
Lisa: Well, I think another thing that we’re struggling with as genealogists is when we face the relatives in our family who get that ‘glazed over’ look when we start talking about family history. Does that ever happen to you, Scott?
Fisher: Oh, no, no. They light up like a Christmas tree!
Lisa: They light up like a Christmas tree? You have a special family!
Fisher: No, I don’t. There’s like maybe one person out of 17 at the end of the table during the holidays, maybe that one person. Like you say the geeks, you know? But it’s funny how it works, because usually by the end of a vacation visit or a holiday visit, everybody’s saying, ‘Hey, what was that story? Go ask Scott.’ you know? And they always come back. So, they have a lot of fun at our expense, but at the end of the day, they love what we do, don’t you think?
Lisa: I think they do, and the trick is to talk their language, right?
Fisher: Yes.
Lisa: To share a compelling story or do something – share is the key here – as one of my daughters says, if it’s not shareable, it doesn’t exist.
Fisher: Yeah, that’s right.
Lisa: To the Millennials, you know? It’s got to be shareable and that’s what’s enticing. And so, here’s an app that I love that I have in my photograph chapter, and it’s called, Retype, R E T Y P E, it by Sumoing LTD and it costs, I don’t know, $3, but I love this, because it takes photos and turns them into what we call ‘memes’ right? These are really fun, shareable images on Facebook or whatever. We see them all the time. It’s so easy to create your own, so I kind of walked the family historian through, let’s take some of your family photos, your old family photos, add the text and they’re really cool…it adds kind of a really fun font, there’s zillions of them to choose from and you can either use the saying that they offer up or you can give it its own caption yourself, but I’ve been using this constantly, not only personally, but on my Genealogy Gems website to convey ideas in really fun, shareable ways.
Fisher: And so, all these apps are coming along to basically take your family history and turn it into some form of art, and that’s what’s exciting too, because art tells a story in a different way.
Lisa: Exactly, and in a really quick way, don’t you think? That you can look at something and you get it. You get what that concept is.
Fisher: That’s exactly right. Yeah, exactly, and that’s the joy, but what’s the name of that app again for people who missed it.
Lisa: It’s called Retype, and like I say, it’s about $3. You’ll find it in the app store, and I’ve got loads and loads of other types of exciting apps like that. So, you can see, this book is not just, ‘These are the Genealogy apps’, but I’m really focusing on what are you trying to accomplish? If you want to snag and captivate those people in your family, here’s the app for you. We got to get outside that genealogy box and we’ve really got to focus on what we’re trying to accomplish and get it done, and that’s what I’m hoping that people will find that the book will do.
Fisher: Well, that’s the end game, it’s to get everybody excited about it and sharing and preserving at the end of the day, and in a way that is useable by future generations, because we all want…it sure beats writing in a tree, right? You know, carving your name someplace, because that’s about all there is otherwise. She’s Lisa Louise Cooke. She is the host of Genealogy Gems, a great podcast. It’s been around for a long, long time now and of course the Genealogy Gems website with all kinds of great things there. I’m just delighted to have you on, Lisa Louise. What do you have coming up on your show in the coming weeks?
Lisa: Well you, sir, will be coming up on our show in the coming weeks and we’re also going to have one of the couples from the Relative Race on the show, which is the NUBY, kind of DNA amazing race of genealogy TV show that’s come out and lots of good stuff. And if people are interested in more on mobile genealogy, we have a YouTube channel, youtube.com/genealogygems. You can also get to it from GenealogyGems.com, our main site, but I’ve got a class the we did at Roots Tech and I saw you at Roots Tech. We did it in our booth. We recorded it and they can watch it for free on video.
Fisher: I love the way you think. Great stuff! Lisa Louise Cooke, thanks for coming on. It’s good to have you finally.
Lisa: Awesome to be here. Thanks Scott!
Fisher: Lisa Louise always has tons of things going on at GenealogyGems.com. Hey, and just a reminder by the way, coming up in September, it’s going to be our very first Extreme Genes cruise! Yes, it’s a Fall Foliage Tour, but a lot of history mixed in as well. David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, will be joining me, giving lectures on days we’re at sea. Talking about the history of Boston, the Colonial Period, the Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia, the area we’re going to be going to. So, if you want to find out more, go to our Extreme Genes Facebook page and you’ll see everything you’ll need to know. And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com about the “Genealogy” of a house. That’s in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 129 (44:45)

Fisher: And Welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth.
I am very excited to have a new guest on the show, someone we haven’t had on the show before. She is with Legacy Tree Genealogists, one of our new sponsors. Carolyn Tolman is here, Hi Carolyn welcome!
Carolyn: Hi
Fisher: It’s great to have you. I’m excited about what you’ve written on a blog here recently about doing the genealogy of a house. Now I’ve gone through this recently where I saw that the home my Dad and Mom built when I was 3 and we were in for 20 years, recently went on the market for only the second time since we sold it. And so all the MLS listings had all the pictures of what it looks like today, and I was able to actually create some side by side pictures, photos of us back in the day and what it looks like now, and it’s so much fun. But you actually went through – you moved into a home that you had never been in before, never even been in the neighbourhood before, and researched the house. What a great experience. Talk about this a little bit.
Carolyn: Yes my husband had the opportunity to go to the U.S. Army War College which is on the Carlisle Barracks Army Post in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and because of the size of our family they assigned us to this old farm house that was on Post and no one could really tell me the history of it, and being a genealogist I just had to know.
Fisher: You just had to know. What year did it go back to?
Carolyn: We figured out that it was in about 1856, so before the Civil War.
Fisher: Wow, so Antebellum, yeah?
Carolyn: Uh huh.
Fisher: Wow!
Carolyn: And Confederate soldiers actually spent the night there, the night before they were called away to Gettysburg. They had invaded the town, and the mother in the home fed and sheltered them for the night.
Fisher: Now wait a minute, how’d you find that out?
Carolyn: There was a magazine that was from 1918, the author was the farmer at the farm house and he talked about a young woman visiting who had grown up in the house, who shared that story.
Fisher: So this was in the magazine, where did you find the magazine?
Carolyn: Okay, I found out that the house was going to be torn down and I visited the Cumberland County Historical Society, one of the great old historical societies in Pennsylvania, and they found out where I was living and they knew immediately that this was the Indian School Farmhouse and they brought out this magazine article and shared it with me.
Fisher: How cool is that.
Carolyn: Yeah. That’s what started the whole search.
Fisher: And so you decided you want to get into this a little bit more and see what had happened, because this place was going to be torn down after you left.
Carolyn: Uh huh. Once I visited the Historical Society, they said “Someone needs to document the history of this house” to convince the army that it does not need to be torn down.
Fisher: Well who better than a professional genealogist like yourself!
Carolyn: I felt like I was in the right place.
Fisher: So you started from there, you had a story from the very early years.
Carolyn: Yes.
Fisher: What did you find and how did you do it?
Carolyn: Well I noticed that the street behind the house was named Parker Springs, and there was also a big spring behind the house, so I knew I was looking probably for a Parker family. So I went to the land index and found a deed of an Andrew Parker selling his land to the army, selling his farm. So I knew that it was the family of Andrew Parker. I then went to the Cumberland County Courthouse, and for me, I’m used to going to the Family History Library and dealing with microfilms, but there they pulled out their big dusty books and let me look through them.
Fisher: That is special isn’t it, and just the smell of it, I like that.
Carolyn: It was all I could do to keep from rubbing my cheek on the page [laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs]
Carolyn: I was able to trace the owners of the house from the Parkers back to the farm owners. So I have this list of names and dates of owners. I then went back to the Historical Society who housed the tax records and because I knew who owned the house and where they were living, I was able to find those records and notice what the tax man wrote on them, and I found out that in 1855, the house on the property was a stone house.
Fisher: Hmm.
Carolyn: But in 1858 it was a brick house. So that’s how I figured out that they bought the property with a stone house and replaced it with the brick house that I was living in. So thanks to the tax records…
Fisher: So that’s how you got an idea of when the house was built, from the tax records.
Carolyn: Yes.
Fisher: That’s awesome.
Carolyn: Yeah. So normally a genealogist would use those to trace people coming and going in a county, but I used it to trace the house and the condition of the house.
Fisher: Fascinating.
Carolyn: Yeah.
Fisher: Absolutely amazing. So where did it go from there? Now you’re back just before the Civil War, you know what happens during the Civil War with the Confederates taking over and staying in there before they head off to Gettysburg, then what?
Carolyn: Well, that house was right next to the army Post and the Post needed training ground, and in 1879 they had been abandoned after the Civil War, the army wasn’t using it, and Richard Pratt who had been a soldier had been out fighting the Indians, and he realized in his dealings with them that they weren’t savages, they were humans, and he wanted to teach them. So he managed to get the Post as an Indian school.
Fisher: Wow.
Carolyn: So in 1879 the Indian School began and they wanted to teach these Indian students how to farm, so they needed a real working farm and they bought the Parker farm. So the farm house became a place where the Indian students would sleep and get their meals and then work on the dairy in the morning, and they also had classrooms in the house where they learned how to run a farm because they were teaching them how to compete with white men in white society.
Fisher: Wow. Now how long did that go on?
Carolyn: That school lasted until 1918 when the end of World War 1 required the Post to be used as a hospital. So the school shut down in 1918.
Fisher: What a history though. Civil War barracks to an Indian school, to a hospital for the military.
Carolyn: Yes, and then the Medical school used the farmhouse also to teach the soldiers occupational skills in going back into civilian society.
Fisher: Now how did you learn this? That it had become at this time a hospital?
Carolyn: I visited the library in Carlisle and every library has a local history room, and that’s a favorite place for genealogists.
Fisher: Yes.
Carolyn: And there was a history of Carlisle Barracks in that room and thanks to that history I was able to trace what was going on with the farm in connection with the Post which also meant I knew what was going on with the farmhouse.
Fisher: Wow, this is amazing.
Carolyn: Yes. The house continued to run the farm until about 1930 when the Post took over most of the farmland, and the house became quarters for soldiers. From that point on the connection that the house had to the Indian school became forgotten and diminished and it didn’t matter anymore. So that’s how it came to be on the list to be torn down. People didn’t realize the significance it had, the history that it had.
Fisher: Right. So you did all this work, you used tax records, I would assume some census records. Some land records to determine who the people were who’d been there.
Carolyn: Yes I did. I did use the census to trace the family and then the soldiers who lived in the house.
Fisher: And so now, you’re facing the potential of your work actually saving this historic home that you’ve come to love now as a result of this.
Carolyn: Very much.
Fisher: What happened from there?
Carolyn: Well I published the history on just a free website, I wanted as many people to see it as possible, I shared it with the army post hoping that they would realize that this was too valuable to tear down, and they were already very set in their plans to build new housing. But the word got out to the descendants of the Indian students and they started a partition and the local newspapers picked it up, and at the very last minute when the demolition was supposed to happen within just a few weeks, there was a conference of Native Americans on Post about the Indian School, and the army knew that they were there and they chose that time to have a round table meeting when they announced that they were not going to tear it down after all.
Fisher: What a victory!
Carolyn: It was.
Fisher: Now were you there for that?
Carolyn: I was.
Fisher: Oh wow.
Carolyn: I couldn’t miss that.
Fisher: You were probably answering a few questions too, weren’t you?
Carolyn: Yes, and interacting with these wonderful Native American people who cared very much about having a landmark. There are not a lot of Native American landmarks in this country, and that one serves as a great landmark because it’s where the Pan Indian movement began, it’s where the National Congress of American Indians got its start, so there’s a lot of significance to it.
Fisher: Using genealogy to learn the history of houses and save them from demolition, how cool is that?
Carolyn: That’s right.
Fisher: Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com. Thanks so much for coming on.
Carolyn: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for letting me share my story.
Fisher: And coming up next: He is our Preservation Authority, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Talking about the oldest ‘selfie’ he has ever seen and how he coveted it! He’ll tell you all about it coming up next on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 129
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
It is Preservation time. I am with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority.

Tom, you were having such a good time at Roots Tech and its fun, I mean we have stories that go on for weeks from what happened over just a few days as people were bringing things to your booth and asking for advice on some of these items, but the one thing that really lit you up that I noticed, what was it, a 19th century selfie?
Tom: Oh yeah, it was like late 18 early 19 hundreds, I wanted it so bad.
Fisher: [Laughs] Now have you ever seen anything like that before?
Tom: Never.
Fisher: And explain what this was. Because I think when we talk about ‘selfie’ most people picture a long stick, a little modern camera there, the remote control and the whole thing, but obviously back then that wasn’t the case. Who is the person? How old? How did they set this thing up in those times?
Tom: Yes, a pretty incredible fact. One of the things that made it so cool to me, I remember back when I started my career in photography back in junior high school, I remember they had this big mirror when you walked through the front door, and I did the same thing, before I had eye contacts, and I had the tripod set up, smiling in the mirror and pushed a little button, and it’s like flashback a 100 years earlier and here is this kid wearing the type of clothes they wore back in those days, the tie, he had his tripod set up, had a little brownie camera on top of it
Fisher: You saw that in that picture?
Tom: Oh yeah. Because what he’s doing is, he has his camera and he’s looking into the mirror.
Fisher: Oh I see, okay.
Tom: Yeah. So this mirror is on, I don’t know what they used to call them back then, kind of like a bureau, you could see the drawers, you could see the sides, because it’s back far enough, but he not only got the mirror, he got part of the surroundings of it, and he’s just standing there with his little tie on and his little period clothing, and just standing there smiling and took this picture. It’s so cool, and the thing that makes it so cool is that it’s not just a selfie, but you can see it’s not a fake selfie because you can see the things on the outside, the old mirror that it’s sitting on, the handcrafting around the mirror, and that was a cool thing. I saw this and I loved it.
Fisher: So that’s a mirror image of himself though, right?
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: Which you could reverse and flip if you wanted to.
Tom: Exactly. So it was a selfie in the old fashioned way, because in the old days you didn’t even have timers on your camera so you couldn’t run and get into the picture, you had to have somebody else do it. So it truly was a selfie. Somebody took a picture of him and it was so cool, but then the one down side of the picture had a lot of spots on it, just from being old and wear and tear. The lady that brought it in told me the history that I believe, she said it was like an uncle or a grandfather.
Fisher: So it was a relative.
Tom: Right, it was definitely a relative and she told me a little bit about him, and this guy actually got into photography. There’s people who every once in a while do these selfie contests, send in your best selfie and they give away prizes and such. I told her “You need to make a copy of this and send it in because I guarantee this is going to be the oldest selfie anybody has ever seen!”
Fisher: It’s a winner.
Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely. But I wanted it so bad. It was awesome.
Fisher: What do you think something like that would be worth? Are you a collector? Do you collect photographs?
Tom: No I don’t collect stuff like that. I mostly just look for family things related to me, if I saw it on eBay and happen to run across it and it was a 100 bucks, I would have bought it without even thinking about it because it’s so special to me.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: So I tried to bribe the lady, I said, “Give me all your pictures let me scan them for you and I’m not even going to charge you, I just want to have permission to keep one of these pictures and be able to use it on our store, it’s so cool”
Fisher: Did she agree?
Tom: Oh yeah, she’s totally on board with it.
Fisher: Oh that’s fine. So what are you having to do to fix it?
Tom: What we’ll do first is, we’ll scan it on a really deep hue since it is black and white, and we’re going to scan in color like we talked about last week because it gives you more information. Most of the spots on it are about the size or a little bit bigger than a pencil led, so they’re not huge, and so we go into Photoshop which is a great program to do editing, once we get all these things done it will look like the guy just took the picture and it will look awesome.
Fisher: Well isn’t that great. And Photoshop Elements too, a cheaper version with all those same tools on it for anybody.
Tom: You don’t have to get the full blown Photoshop like mentioned, if you’ve got Elements that comes free with a lot of scanners, you’ll be able to rock and roll just fine.
Fisher: All right. What are we going to talk about next?
Tom: We’re going to talk about what if my pictures got torn up, what if I got an a line on my picture that I want removed.
Fisher: Oh, boy! Coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 129

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are talking Preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority on America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes. I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth. And Tom recently, of course we were both at the Roots Tech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, and your had a lot of people bringing things to your booth for evaluation, for restoration and recovery, and talk about some those other items that you saw.
Tom: Oh, exactly, and the thing is, some people don’t want to give up their stuff, even though they flew in they don’t want to leave it. I understand that, so one thing that you need to do too if you’re in the situation where you don’t want to do yourself. You don’t want to ship it, you want to fly it in. I’m sure there are people in your area that can help you with this, and one thing you need to really do is look outside the box.
If you just want to go to a trasher place and you don’t think, ‘Oh they’re not really into photos they don’t know what they’re doing,’ go to places that do billboards. Go to advertising companies with good references and they might be able to tell you, oh yeah, there’s a color correction place that does billboards, and take it to them and say, hey here’s what I need done, and they can usually scan it for you right while you’re there, because they have their equipment set up always, to do things like that. Scan it, you can take the photo back with you, and they can do it for you.
Fisher: They can take a little tiny photo and blow it up to billboard size!
Tom: Oh, absolutely. So, these people definitely know what they’re doing.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And if you still don’t want to leave it, that’s fine. Just have them scan it. And even if they say, hey, we don’t do photo restoration, but we can scan it for you at a gazillion DPI, then that’s fine. Have them put it on your thumb drive or a disk, take it home. You can email it to us or anybody and get a quote. And the thing is, if you email it to us and ask us for a quote, you don’t have to have us do it. You can just say, okay, this is what it would cost and then take it to somebody local. And if they’re in the same ball park, you know they’re being fair with you. So, we’re just more there to kind of help you out. We had one this person who brought us a photo that was torn.
Fisher: Right in half, huh?
Tom: Yeah, torn right in half. So, half the face was missing, however, we’re like detectives. We need to get as much information as we can, which we kind of alluded to, last week.
Fisher: So, part of it was missing? It was in two halves?
Tom: Oh, exactly. A whole part of the guy’s face was missing. Kind of like the thumb print we talked about last week, but not as severe, because, if you have a person’s face, you know they’re not asymmetrical. So, you can kind of take things and kind of know what you’re supposed to do. But anything you can give to us, like, type of clothing it was, other photos, even if they’re younger, or older, it helps our artist say, okay, this is when he was eight years old. Here’s a picture of when he was twelve, based on that, I can kind of do these things to fix the photo. So, be like a detective. Get us any information you can. If it’s a color photo that’s faded, let us know, oh yeah, so-and-so used to wear this colour. They had this. This is what their eye color was, so we can make sure we get everything right. So, you had a little sister that had green eyes, we don’t make them blue or brown.
Fisher: Right, Right.
Tom: We want to be as authentic as we can, so bring us this information. Even if it’s a black and white photo, get us that information, because you think, who wants black and white? Why do I need to know eye color? Well, in gray scale, blue eyes, brown eyes and green eyes are going to be different shades of gray scale. So, if you want to be authentic, get us as much information as you can, so we as a detective can recreate this picture and make everybody look right. Also, they knew that there was supposed to be somebody else in that picture that wasn’t there, because that half was torn and nobody knew where it was. So, if you can get us a picture of that person, close as you can to that age, we can make a new family portrait and put that person in.
Fisher: That’s incredible.
Tom: Oh, it’s amazing what technology will do now. We’ve even had people bringing us photos they had of “outlaws”, like ex-in-laws, there was such a bad situation that they wanted us to take them out.
Fisher: I’ve done that.
Tom: Oh, you have to. And we can take people out, even if they’re in front and blocking people, we can remove them, and rebuild people shoulders or arms or hands or whatever, to make it look like they were never there. And as we just mentioned, we can take people and put them in. We’ve had people that had lost a child that was really, really young and they still wanted the person to be in there, and so, we can either put him in at the age that they became deceased or if they passed away when they were fourteen and this picture was taken when they would have turned sixteen, we can put him in as a fourteen year old or even kind of age him and make him maybe sixteen.
Fisher: Really? You can do aging?
Tom: Oh, absolutely.
Fisher: Oh boy! Great stuff as always, Tom! Thanks for coming on.
Tom: Good to be here again.
Fisher: I cannot believe we’re done for another week. Thanks once again to Lisa Louise Cooke, host of Genealogy Gems. A great podcast at GenealogyGems.com, talking about mobile genealogy and why you need it. Catch our podcast at iTunes, iHeart Radio’s talk channel or ExtremeGenes.com if you missed it. Also to Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com, talking about doing “genealogy” on a house. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 127 – Storing Your Digital Material ‘Forever’ / “Genie” Leads Restoration of North Carolina Cemetery

February 22, 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 shares a story about a man who solved his own missing person case, and was proven correct through… wait for it… DNA testing! David then gives details on the upcoming Ontario Genealogy Conference… what a list of speakers they’ll have in June. It’s well known that we all have Neanderthal DNA, but now we know what medical conditions we may also have inherited from them. David will tell you what you can now blame on the Neanderthals! Finally, an amazing data storage breakthrough has happened at the University of Southampton in England. You won’t believe how long they say they’ll be able to digitally preserve the recorded treasures of the world. David then shares a genealogical pet peeve (Fisher says he’s right!) and shares another NEHGS guest user free database and tip.

Fisher then visits (11:39) with Glen Meakem of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founder of Forever, Inc., a company that may have solved our long term storage issues as individuals and genealogists, with security and data preserving upgrades as systems change. What does the model of a life insurance company have to do with all this? Glen will tell you and what his company is up to in this terrific segment.

Then (starts at 25:16), Extreme Genie Ann Allred of Centerville, Utah visits with Fisher about her long sought after discovery of her grandfather’s grave in North Carolina. But of course, that wasn’t the end of it… just a beginning. Talk about the ultimate “snowball” project. Ann’s story will inspire you.

Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, then joins the show and reveals some horror stories he heard about at his booth at the Roots Tech Family History Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, two weeks ago. Naturally, Tom will tell you how to avoid similar issues and how to repair some of the damage!

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

Transcript for Episode 127

Segment 1 Episode 127 (00:30)

Fisher: You have found us, America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com!

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, your congenial host on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out.

Hope you’re having a great research week. I want to give a little shout out to my third cousin, Elaine, who just found me this past week. And we’ve been exchanging photographs and documents, and it’s always so exciting to connect with somebody who’s just far enough away where they have a lot of things that you don’t and vice-versa.

We have a great line-up of guests today; one is the founder of a company called, ‘Forever’. And this is a brand new thing that could very well change the way we view storage of our data for the long term, and I’m talking about multiple generations on end. Wait till you hear this model. Glen Meakem, the founder is going to have that for you in about eight or nine minutes.

And then, later in the show, we’re going to talk to a lady who finally through the use of some technology found the burial place of her grandfather, an overgrown cemetery in North Carolina, and what stemmed from this discovery, an astonishing story from Ann Allred, a Utah woman, coming up later in the show.

But right now, let’s head out to Boston and talk to David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org

Hello, David!

David: Hey, Fish, Greetings from Beantown! How are things with you?

Fisher: Just awesome as always. You know, I’m kind of excited about this list of stuff we have to talk about today, because there’s a lot of news going on right now. Where do we start?

David: You know, sometimes we go to a place and we forget why we’re there. Well, Edgar Latulip has been reported missing for three decades. Apparently, this 21 year old, years ago was travelling on a bus to Niagara Falls, and because of an injury, ended up forgetting who he was.

Fisher: Wow!

David: So, all of a sudden, he has determined who he is. He had suffered a head injury, but now, police say the DNA results have confirmed that is who he is, and he will now be meeting up with his family for the first time in three decades.

Fisher: Now wait a minute! So, he’s in his fifties now and suddenly he remembered his own name?

David: Absolutely!

Fisher: Oh, that’s nuts.

David: He remembered his true identity.

Fisher: And the DNA test comes in as always. And yes, it works for living people as well, doesn’t it?

David: It really does, you know. And on that Canadian slant maybe he’ll be one of the people that will want to go up to the Ontario Genealogical Society Conference, which is coming up in June. This is a big conference, June 3rd and they have some national speakers like, CeCe Moore and Relative Race, and our good friend, Judy Russell, many of them who have been on our show.

Fisher: Right.

David: And it’s going to be great. Lots of technological brick walls and of course DNA, so who knows, maybe Edgar will go up there and find a little more in his family tree.

Fisher: Or give a little lecture about how it suddenly dawned on him who he was. Amazing!

David: You know, we’ve chatted before about the Neanderthal percentages that we all have. I found out about twenty-three Neanderthals that out of an average European, 2.7 percent of their DNA is Neanderthal, well, I’m 2.5.

Fisher: Right. So, you’re just a little below. I think I’m like 2.9, which explains my really furry eyebrows.

David: Well, that’s why we do radio, isn’t it? [Laughs]

Fisher: That’s right. [Laughs]

David: You know, it’s funny, I was reading an article, and I talked to you about it earlier this week, they’re saying that if you have a tendency to have more Neanderthal in your DNA structure, depression and also an addiction to nicotine.

Fisher: Really?

David: Yeah. I didn’t know they had cigarettes back then, thousands of years ago. And apparently, you know, these depressed Neanderthals were smoking, chain smoking.

Fisher: No, David, I don’t think that’s what they were saying, I think they were just saying, if they were around today, they would have a tendency for nicotine, but it is a funny picture, isn’t it?

David: Yeah, it is the truth.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: You know what? It’s funny, I don’t smoke, and maybe if my percentage was a little higher, maybe I would be the person that would be smoking.

Fisher: Who knows? Who knows? Fascinating find though!

David: It is. With DNA, it’s just amazing how more and more we’re finding out about our past. Do you know, we’re always thinking about how long our data is going to be around, and obviously, “Forever” is offering some wonderful solutions and a new technology, which isn’t commercially available yet, but the University in Southampton, England, has come up with a 5-dimensional data storage. Yes, 5-dimensional.

Fisher: What!?

David: Yeah. It saves on it 360 terabytes of data, and can be safe for – get this – 13.8 billion years!

Fisher: And they’ve tested that, huh? [Laughs]

David: Well, I think they still have some in the works, and maybe they’ve got a time machine that they’ve tested it out, but apparently, this data storage has already been used to save the Magna Carta, King James Bible, Opticks, by Isaac Newton and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So far, BluRay disks can store 128 gigabytes of data. A 5D disk can store 3000 times that amount. And again, it’s not commercially available, but just think of the possibilities of being able to store a complete library on one image.

Fisher: Wow! Insane!

David: It is. Now, when you are at the library, my tech tip or my pet peeve is that sometimes a genealogy program or when you’re writing up your genealogy and you’re looking at old English records, now, 1837 is when civil registration happened.

Fisher: Right.

David: Well, they did have birth records.

Fisher: In England, yep.

David: If you’re looking at a 1712 date, chances are it’s not a birth date, it’s a baptism date. So, do put ‘bapt’ or ‘bpt’ or ‘baptized’ or whatever you’d like to put down, and don’t put it in as the birth date. The child probably was not born the same day, but countless genealogies have listed it as a birth date, and nowhere does it say in the original that the child was born that day.

Fisher: That’s a good pet peeve and I’m with you on that.

David: Just be a little bit more detail oriented and it’ll save frustration future generations down the line trying to figure out where you got that from. NEHGS, or of course, American Ancestors has a guest user database. And one of the data bases that we have, and I mean, this is specifically for Boston. It’s a Boston 1890 city directory, but I can’t stress to all of the listeners how important urban directories from 1890 are. With the loss of the 1890 Federal Census, urban city directories, our poll tax was or County tax was for the year 1889 – 1891 could successfully pin point where your family is, where we don’t have the 1890 for the majority of the United States.

Fisher: That’s right. That’s right. Good advice, David.

David: Talk to you next week.

Fisher: All right. And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Glen Meakem. He’s the founder of a company called, ‘Forever’, and he may just have the long term solution that all of us are looking for in family history to preserving your records. Coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 127 (25:20)

Fisher: And, welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and with all that’s going on with Roots Tech we’re starting to examine all kinds of new products and services that are available, that are going to make our lives as researchers and preservers so much easier, and I’m very excited to have on the line from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Glen Meakem, who is founder of a company called Forever.com

His Glen, how are you? Welcome to the show!

Glen: Hey Scott, what a pleasure to be here!

Fisher: This is exciting stuff because people who listen to this show regularly know that we’re always fretting over all the challenges that preservation brings to us, especially in the digital realm, and you may have come up with the ultimate solution… this Forever.com

Tell us about this whole thing because this looks like it may be the solution.

Glen: Basically, I’m a successful Internet entrepreneur; I’ve been at this for 25 years now.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: I founded a company in the 90’s called “Free Markets” which was a very successful, and took it public and we did very well with it. But in more recent years… going back to the 90s early 90s, I’m a Gulf War Veteran, I got this before my whole internet career but I got back from the war and I spent some time that summer videotaping my then living grandparents, my wife and my grandparents.

We have six different grandparents who are still alive and we have incredible interviews and it was the best summer of 2012, and I’m trying to figure out “Okay, I’ve got these interviews,” and I had them on VHS when I first did them and I distributed them among all my family members but none of them know where they are anymore and of course I had the tapes and I was digitizing them and I was thinking “Really what I need is a permanent cloud storage solution.”

Fisher: Right.

Glen: Where I can store these and know that not only myself in 10-20 years but my children and my grandchildren and my great grandchildren could all access these, find them even if there’s a break you know even if there’s some smucky grandchildren who don’t care about family history and family memory preservation, hey the great grandchildren will. I need to put them in the cloud in a way that I know that they’re going to be searchable and findable. So I went looking for a service that provided permanent cloud storage and sharing but it didn’t exist.

In fact, any major service including Google+ and Amazon cloud, and Dropbox and everybody else explicitly said “Don’t trust us, we don’t preserve your stuff long term, we can shut you off at any time.” And all you’ve got to do is go look at their terms of service to know that they explicitly renounce permanence.

Fisher: Wow.

Glen: So I realized there was no solution on the market. You know I’m an entrepreneur I start things, I try to solve problems for people and I said “This is a huge opportunity.” So I started the company and I was able to buy the URL, the domain Forever.com and it was the perfect name for what I wanted to do. So yeah, we are Forever.com, we are the world’s first and only permanent sharable cloud storage site. Basically it’s your permanent digital home. We give people full digital rights. They own everything they upload to the site. They have their own sub-domain within the Forever domain where they can keep all their stuff. Right now it’s just photos, within the next couple of weeks we’re releasing documents so you can save all your documents, PDF documents there.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: And then we’ll be doing video and audio in the near future, I don’t have exact dates yet. But at this point we have thousands upon thousands of members already who are in fact… members of our service who are using Forever.com to store and share, and manage all their photos and soon documents and soon videos.

Fisher: This is very exciting because I’m thinking there’re also going to be changes in formats over time and I’m assuming that you’ve made some allowance for some of that, so that as things change just like you mentioned the old VHS, I mean people can’t even play them half the time anymore.

Gen: Right.

Fisher: There’s a way for you to deal with that upgrade to keep them relevant?

Glen: Right. For all of us you know, I’m in my young 50s so all of our age group know that “Okay you know the VHS to DVD is a great example of format change and of course before VHS tapes there were 8 millimeter video in your personal video camera.

Fisher: Super 8.

Glen: Yeah that was the Super 8 films. But even in the digital world we know that digital formats change. A great company was WordPerfect in its hey-day in the 80s of course it’s long gone. But if you’re like me and you wrote papers in college in WordPerfect, you can no longer access those files without very, very specialized software to kind of bring back to life old files.

Fisher: Right. Convert it.

Glen: Right. So the problem we’re all going to have is today’s digital photo formats, today’s digital video formats are not going to be viewable by tomorrow’s devices, and so here’s what we do. When you buy permanent storage with Forever, most of the money you pay for that permanent storage up front goes into the Forever guarantee fund. We’re not just an internet company, a software company.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: We’re like a life insurance company. We’re like MetLife for your photos and your videos.

Fisher: Well, don’t cemeteries do that kind of thing as well?

Glen: Cemeteries do, do that kind of thing.

Fisher: A perpetual care fund.

Glen: Yeah. Yeah, so it’s a reserve fund, I like to think of it less as a cemetery fund and more like a long term life insurance fund.

Fisher: Sure.

Glen: We’re a privately owned company like a MetLife, in other words we’re private sector, and we’re not public sector like a university. So, like an insurance company most of the money goes into the Forever guarantee fund which is a restricted fund like an insurance reserve fund. In a diversified portfolio, stocks and bonds etc. It generates income every year that income is used to pay for the storage and also to pay for some bandwidth and to pay for the digital migration of the files, the maintenance of the files.

So over time part of our contractual commitment to our customers is that we will digitally migrate file formats so that your great grandchildren will really see all the stuff you’ve put together and all the stuff you saved.

Fisher: Down the line now what happens to your company? What happens is somebody just doesn’t want to maintain it anymore, how does it get taken care of?

Glen: Well, we all kinds of safeguards in place so with every single customer we have there’s a contract and that contract is available… just go to Forever.com and look at our terms of service and the investment policy for the Forever guarantee fund, it’s all publically available.

But with every single individual permanent member of our service there’s a contract with them and it says the money they’re putting into the Forever guarantee fund is restricted. It only can come out in these very small increments to pay for these specific storage and data migration and things like that. And we have thousands and thousands of these customers already, so basically the money that is in the guarantee fund just like if it was with MetLife, an insurance company. The money is restricted and it’s restricted by contract between the customers and the company, and if we go public, obviously I won’t live forever, I intend to be CEO of this company for at least 20 more years but there’ll come a point in time where you know there’s a management transition.

But the future management, no matter what, whether it’s public shareholders or private shareholders doesn’t matter whether we’re owned by another company eventually doesn’t matter. The new management will be restricted by the same set of contracts. You know at that point is will be millions of contracts with millions of customers and if any management ever tried to violate that there would be a massive class action lawsuit against them by all the customers.

Fisher: Sure.

Glen: So all these other storage companies have all these limitations and all the things they say they won’t do and they shirk responsibility, they shirk long term permanence. We embrace it all and we say yeah we’re taking on all those commitments. We do, and not only management today but future management would be taking on all those commitments and future management can’t walk away from those commitments because they’re contractual.

So, the secret to what we’re doing with permanent sharable storage is, yeah there’s a technology component but there’s also this financial component of the Forever guarantee fund and the way that’s managed like a life insurance company.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: And then, in addition there’s this whole contractual infrastructure which again is precedence setting. No one’s ever had these commitments for cloud storage before, so we give a guarantee. We say to our customers “You become a permanent member forever, you put money in the Forever guarantee fund as a customer. We guarantee that we will preserve and maintain your photos and your material, your information for your life time, plus a hundred years.

But then it’s not just a hundred years, our goal is many, many generations beyond the hundred years.

Fisher: Sure.

Glen: We can’t legally guarantee past that 100 years because there are some laws in place, it starts to be not credible to offer a guarantee that’s out more than a 120-130 years.

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Glen: Our goal is many, many generations beyond and I keep mentioning life insurance for a reason. MetLife is a fabulous company, fabulous advertising.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: And they were founded in 1864.

Fisher: Right.

Glen: If you do a great job building an institution, when I say you, if one, if a person, if a manager, if a leader, if an entrepreneur does a great job building a great institution and it has that long term funding mechanism like a life insurance company, like a MetLife it can last hundreds and hundreds, and hundreds of years, that’s what my team and I are doing.

Fisher: That is an astonishing vision and very exciting in so many different levels because it is the problem. I was just thinking about all this, when I was a kid in the late 60’s and early 70’s the oldest pictures within my own family that I’d ever seen were 80 or 90 years old and we’re going to have descendents who are looking back at images of us 2,3, 4 hundred years from now potentially! Assuming we don’t blow ourselves all up by then.

Glen: Great, assuming that but you know, I am an optimist humanity makes a lot of mistakes we all know nobody’s perfect. [Laughs] We are all flawed individuals, right, and collectively we’re flawed but with God’s help we seem to muddle through and I think we’re going to muddle through just fine. I think that our descendents will be there in 2, 3, 4, 5 hundred years. I actually think that… you know I like to kid that there might be a colony on a moon of Saturn. The internet is going to be there too it will evolve and everything technologically.

Fisher: Sure.

Glen: But your memories in a physical book on a book shelf, it’s going to get lost, it’s going to get burned, it’s going to get flooded. Most of our family memories never get organized and are thrown out in dumpsters when… I’ve seen it in my own family.

Fisher: Sure.

Glen: There are Civil War pictures; I have an ancestor who’s an Irish immigrant who then served in the union army in the Civil War. My father when he was alive remembered photos of this man and those photos don’t exist. Where did those photos go? They were lost.

Fisher: Oh that kills you.

Glen: The only way it’s going to be there long term is if you put it in a long term cloud storage solution.

Fisher: Right. I see where you’re going with it.

Glen: And we’re the first in the world to do it.

Fisher: I love it. Glen Meakem, he’s the founder of Forever.com. You’ve got to look into it. Thanks for coming on Glen!

Glen: Thanks so much Scott! Have a great day.

Fisher: And, coming up next we’re going to talk to a Utah woman who finally made the discovery of her grandfather’s gravesite after many years of looking and wound up with a whole new project. Wait until you hear what happened to Ann Allred, coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 127 (44:45)

Fisher: We are back! Extreme Genes America’s Family History Show. It is Fisher here, The Radio Roots Sleuth.

I’m always excited about finding your stories of discovery. The amazing things that happen on the journey to find your family history, and one of the people I found with an incredible story was at Roots Tech, Ann Allred. Ann where are you from?

Ann: I live in Centerville, Utah.

Fisher: All right, Centerville, Utah. You had a tale that went back to North Carolina, some time ago and all of a sudden it took on a life of its own. Get into this, how did it start and where did it go?

Ann: Back as a child, my mother and my aunt kept this family story alive, which taught me to continue and yearn and search for this sweet, great grandmother of mine. Her name is Marinda Ann Thomas, and her son Rudolph is my grandfather, and he was born and raised in Pink Hill, North Carolina. He died in 1967 and I was told that he was buried next to his mother in the Thomas family cemetery in Pink Hill.

Now fast forward, a lot of years we tried to figure out where that was, and in 2006 my sister-in-law made a trip to North Carolina. Through divine intervention she found this little cemetery which was in the middle of our family’s field, and it was an overgrown jungle. I mean I’m not exaggerating.

Fisher: Wow. Now wait a minute, when you say ‘Divine intervention’ what happened?

Ann: Well she asked all around town, she looked at the library and they said, “You know what, we’ve got to call so &so, he knows everything” and Mr so & so came and said, “Oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about” and he gave her some weird directions like over the river and through the woods, because this is how it is in the country and there are no directions to give for this.

Fisher: Sure.

Ann: So because of that he was able to find the place. But years later when I wanted to know exactly where it was, she said “I cannot tell you. I cannot retrace my steps.”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Ann: So now, fast forward again to 2014 Roots Tech and there was a booth called ‘Find-a-Grave’

Fisher: Yep.

Ann: And talked to the seller there and the gentleman says “We can find any headstone out there, provided someone took a picture of it” and I said alrighty, let’s put this to the test. I can’t find my grandfather’s headstone Rudolph Joseph Jefferson Humphrey. So I type him in, nothing, nothing comes up, and he said okay let’s put in someone else, so I said okay, he’s supposed to be buried next to his mother, Marinda Ann Thomas Humphrey, so I put in her name and voila! And included there was a picture of her headstone.

Fisher: Hello.

Ann: Thomas family cemetery

Fisher: Right.

Ann: But this is what was cool this time Mr. Fisher, there were GPS coordinates connected to that site.

Fisher: Yeah, that would be helpful.

Ann: It was very helpful. So this was in February, I excitedly call my daughter, Marinda, who lived in Springfield, Virginia, and she said, “Okay we’ll do it mom” and so April 11^th they drove to North Carolina. The next morning, using the GPS, they drive to this address. Well here they are on this country road surrounded by farms, and fields, and a few houses, and the GPS says “You have arrived”

Fisher: Uh, oh.

Ann: But where? You know. Here we are on this road. Fortunately my little grandson had to use the bathroom. They stopped the car, walked across the street and knocked on the door of a little brick house, and Mr. Ralph Cartel answers the door. Not only did he let my little grandson use the bathroom, but he was the man that they needed to talk to. He owns the land and knew exactly where that cemetery was, it was right in the middle of his cotton field!

Fisher: Oh that’s crazy [laughs]

Ann: So then he says “Follow me” he gets into his truck and just drives down the road. It was just a short distance, and sure enough they were close. They just didn’t think to go up to a field. They drove up a little lane, came to find out it was a cousin’s property, he had a pig farm, and then they walked across the newly planted cotton fields and there in the middle was a little tiny cemetery. It’s 85 feet by 60 feet, and it was indeed the Joseph Thomas Family Cemetery.

Now it was overgrown, so Mr. Cartel left them on their own, and my son-in-law climbed up and over, there a tinder block kind of a wall around it, he climbed up and over and ripped out the vines that had sewn the gate shut and tried to let the family in. Fortunately straight in, right in front of the gate, not too many feet, was an upright head stone of Marinda Ann Thomas Humphrey. The namesake of my daughter Marinda who’s there finding this, and they look around and she said “Mom, I could see headstones towards the back but the undergrowth was so thick I couldn’t even get back there.” and the children had on flip-flops and shorts and they were cut and bleeding from the thorns.

It was quite an ordeal. And after a little bit of time, I don’t know exactly how much time, they kind of just decided they were through but they couldn’t find grandpa. At the very last minute, my son-in-law Elijah, pulled out a wire which had been suggested he bring, and he started poking around in the ground and two or three pokes when all of a sudden ‘clink’

Fisher: Oh boy.

Ann: Digs, digs, digs, and under several inches of earth, there was the headstone of my grandfather Rudolph Humphrey. There he was, and Elijah continued to poke around and right next to him was his sister, my aunt Blanch, who I didn’t know was buried there. And as it turns out, there were five rows it turned out, of headstones and they were all children of Mary Susan Miller Thomas, who is the matriarch of this family. And the Find-a-Grave records had said there were 17 people buried there, or 17 headstones. All right. So this was in April. My daughter calls me and we are just rejoicing together as you can imagine, and I say “Okay I’m coming. I’ve got to see this place but, if you know me, I can’t just go and say, “There it is and yes it’s a mess.”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Ann: I knew I had to do something about it. So, although Ralph Cartel owns the land, he has a tenant who farms the land. And I got a hold of him and he said, “My cotton will be harvested mid-October and by mid-November, I will be planting winter wheat. So, there’s your window if you’re going to come in here.”

Fisher: Wow!

Ann: So, we had to wait, but in the meantime I read and studied about cemetery restoration, I talked to all kinds of people, I got in touch with an LDS ward there, called the Albertson Ward.

Fisher: Okay.

Ann: Alvin, spoke with the bishop and said, “Can you help me?” And they were so kind and gracious, this project never could have happened without them. And we were due to arrive October 29th. Saturday, November 1st we had a big work party organized, because I was bound and determined to clean this place up. Well, Mr. Gene, the man who I spoke with, called me a week earlier and said “There’s a big storm coming in, we cannot wait for you to come. If we wait we won’t get this equipment in there that we need to get these trees out of there.” And they were big trees that were pushing over these headstones.

Fisher: Wow!

Ann: Many of them were broke, cracked and tipped over. So the Saturday before I got there Gene and his work crew went in, they worked and worked I guess way longer than they had ever anticipated so when we arrived a few days later, it did of course not look like the pictures I had been given.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Ann: Because now the trees were out, I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, my initial thought was “Oh no! What have we done?” because it went from this neglected overgrown jungle to this barren lone and dreary world and I can never tell this story without feeling the emotion that I had as I stood there on the very ground that these people had walked on and I felt them, I felt them there with me and I sat down on the stumps and cried for about an hour and then my husband said “We came a long way and we’ve got to get to work.” Then we proceeded to clear the stumps and the underbrush and after we were done cleaning up… Find-a-Grave said there were 17 headstones… we found 37!

Fisher: Oh my gosh!

Ann: Those have all now been captured and Find-a-Grave now records it, there are 37 including my grandfather’s whose name was not even on the list.

Fisher: Ann Allred, what a great story! And what great service by the way, those people provided for you

Ann: Oh, Amen to that! Yes it could not have been done without their assistance .

Fisher: Thank you so much for sharing your story and I’m sure it’s going to inspire other people to think “Hmm I can do this too.”

Ann: That’s right!

Fisher: Thank you for coming on the show!

Ann: You’re welcome. Thank you!

Fisher: And, coming up next it’s Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority, with his stories of nightmares from Roots Tech, problems people came to him with at the booth, and he’ll tell you some of the solutions he gave. Coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

Segment 4 Episode 127

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It’s Preservation time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

It is Fisher here with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority, and Tom, I’m still just getting my voice back here after Roots Tech, trying to talk over the noise and fight a little bit of a cold, but wow what a time it was. What a party.

Tom: Oh yeah it was brutal. I was horse for a couple of days, which my kids loved because I couldn’t yell at them.

Fisher: [Laughs] All right, so let’s talk about some of the things we picked up there. A lot of people came to my booth wanting to go to your booth because they heard you on Extreme Genes, and one guy was talking about, “I’ve got everything taken care of for a long time because I listen to Tom and I put all my stuff, I digitized it on Taiyo Yuden disks” and I’m thinking, “Well, I know you say they’re the best ones out there” I guess the question is, how long will they last?

Tom: You know it’s really hard to say. I’m not a scientist by any stretch of imagination. I don’t play one on radio either, however, these disks, I’ve been using for twenty years as long they’ve been out, and no matter what you buy, you can buy Ferrari and you might get a lemon.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: I have never had one come back. We tell all of our clients, “If one of your disks ever fails, bring it back, we’ll do the transfer for you at no cost. If it’s a duplicate we’ll make you a new duplicate” and knock on wood, I have never ever had one come back. They say they’re a hundred year disk, but I mean there’s no way to know. Like I say, we’ve had them for twenty years, we know they’re that good and from what I understand from the Geek Squad, it’s some kind of an algorithm that they can figure out by the quality of the dye, they do testing, like they do with cars, real hot conditions, cold conditions, different things and see how the dye itself breaks down. So it’s just like the thumb drives you tell people, all thumb drives aren’t created equal, all cars aren’t created equal, so like thumb drives have the better circuit tree, the better chipboards on it, they last longer.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So the dye that they use on a Taiyo Yuden disk is a higher quality dye and that’s why it costs a little bit more because it’s more expensive to make that kind of a dye, and that’s where I really get confused why everybody doesn’t use Taiyo Yuden disks. Because we’re not talking about one disk is thirty cents and one disk is five dollars, we’re talking about thirty cents to sixty cents.

Fisher: Wow.

Tom: And when you buy a whole bunch, it’s even a smaller deal. So the only thing I want to tell our listeners is, get Taiyo Yuden disks! There’s no reason not to use Taiyo Yuden disks, absolutely none. However, if you buying them online make sure you are buying them from a reputable dealer because some of the stinkers out there they know that everybody wants Taiyo Yuden. Taiyo Yuden won’t sell to them for reasons I don’t know, so they either get off brands or something like that and say, “Hey these are Taiyo Yudens.” So make sure if you buy Taiyo Yuden on the internet, make sure they come in a cake box and they usually have a label on them that say Taiyo Yuden or GVC by Taiyo Yuden.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: And if it doesn’t say that, unless you totally trust the people, then it’s not a Taiyo Yuden disk. Sometimes a disk when we buy them, we buy them in such huge quantities they come to us shrink wrapped but we’re buying them from the main distributor so we know exactly what we’re getting. But if you’re buying ones or two’s in a hundred spindle, you need to make sure what you’re getting is really a Taiyo Yuden. You don’t want to be paying for a Ferrari and getting a Yugo.

Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

Tom: So another thing you want to do, there’s a couple of different levels of Taiyo Yuden, there’s the econo Taiyo Yuden, and the regular Taiyo Yuden. I use both. I’ve never had a problem with them. One thing that I would suggest if you have a lot of kids that are going to be playing with your disks, get the disks that have what we call a white flood on the top of it.

So when you buy the disk it’s actually white instead of being silver. The silver ones have a coating on them as well, but that little bit of extra white on the top side makes them a little bit less acceptable to have damage to them plus if they do start getting lightly scratched you will see it a lot quicker because the white paint will kind of be scratched or dirty versus trying to see it on a silver one. Because like I’ve said, and most people don’t know this, when we talk to people they go “Oh I didn’t know that” when you’re looking at a disk, the label side is where your data is. It reads it from the bottom but that’s where your data is, and in the next segment I’ll kind of go do a little bit more information on that and get back to some more Roots Tech information.

Fisher: All right so there’s so much to talk about that we took away from the conference. We’ll get back to it in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 127

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: All right… back at it, Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

It is Fisher here, The Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com He is our Preservation Authority, and we’re talking about Roots Tech, we’ve already talked about disks and one of the things I’ve noticed Tom, at Roots Tech now for the last several years is that more and more people are bringing things to Roots Tech, either to be scanned or in your case to be digitized and for other treatments that they might receive like with photographs. There was a photograph I saw that was entirely yellow. There’s a product out there, one click fixed it.

Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Fisher: It was an eighty year old picture. It was just absolutely astonishing. So people are bringing their things in to have work done on them, and I know you were telling me off air that you were getting horror stories being brought to your booth.

Tom: It’s really sad, and this is what I want to reiterate, my main goal is to help you get your stuff transferred. If you want to do it yourself that’s awesome, if you want to use a local company that’s great, if you want to send stuff to us that’s fine as well, you just want to be really, really careful and make sure you interview the people that are going to be doing your transfers, just like you would interview somebody if you were hiring to come work in your home.

Fisher: That’s right.

Tom: You don’t just say hey this is cool, yeah build me a new house or change my bathroom, you want to get references. You have to be really, really careful. A lot of people are really dropping their prices on transfers, and it’s like the old adjective, “If it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.” You need to understand that a lot of these ‘Johnny come latelys’ they’re doing transfers now. Are doing what we call a ‘high speed transfer’ so whether it’s your video tapes, your audio cassettes whatever they transferring, they not doing it in real time, they doing it in high speed. And they do it in high speed to a computer, because we’ve talked before on the show, computers are not made to turn stuff from analogue into digital.

Fisher: Yes that’s right.

Tom: They’re made to take digital content and rearrange it, do magic with it. So what’s happening is if you’ve ever, ever in your life used your computer and you’re moving your mouse and it stops moving for a second, I don’t think anybody has not had that happen.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So you understand that this tape is going through so fast, if that cursor freezes for even a second, you could lose a minute, two minutes of your video and you’ll never know until you look at it, and you might think “Oh I don’t have a video 8 camcorder anymore, this must be a glitch in my tape. No it’s not a glitch in your tape it’s a glitch in the people that were transferring it.

We had some people that brought us weddings from back in the sixties and seventies that are on VHS that got rejected by the big box stores they said something was wrong with it. We had one customer that brought us in a VHSC that half the tape was in a zip-lock bag that came back from one of the big box stores that said “Your tape is blank.” Well your tape is in a zip-lock bag, what do you mean it’s blank? In other words, they messed up. They have no idea how to fix a VHSC to go and try it again.

So they dropped that off, we’re going to re-spool that on to another one and try to transfer it for him. But these big box stores, you’ve got to realize that it’s an assembly line and they’re only charging you these cheap prices so they’ve got to figure out what their cost is. Hey we’re not going to look at this for more than a minute and if something doesn’t play, we’re going to reject it because we’re not going to charge you because there’s nothing on the tape.

Fisher: And you got high school kids running it.

Tom: Exactly. Like I heard somebody joke about somebody in the meat department, he’s kind of slow in the meat department today so they had him working in the photo place.

Fisher: [Laughs] Right, and that’s a problem

Tom: How important are your personal things? And I tell people you need to ask the right questions; is this done high speed? Do you go directly from tape to disk? Do you go from tape to computer to disk? How exactly do you do this? And if they don’t answer right, you need to walk away and find somebody else, whether it’s local, whether you do it yourself, don’t go to people that do high speed. If somebody is charging fifteen dollars to do two hours of VHS tape and you figure they’re paying some kid minimum wage, seven fifty an hour and they doing it in real time, that tape is going to cost them exactly what they charging you, not counting the disk, not counting making profit or anything, so if it’s too good to be true on the price, I guarantee you it’s too good to be true.

Fisher: All right, great stuff as always Tom. We will continue all of this about Roots Tech next week.

Tom: Sounds good!

Fisher: Wow! We covered a lot of ground today. Thanks once again to Forever founder, Glen Meakem, talking about his company that might be the storage solution that we’ve been looking for, for years on end.

Also to Ann Allred from Centerville, Utah, for sharing her cemetery restoration story and the story about how she discovered her ancestors there. Catch the podcast if you’ve missed it, at iTunes and iHeartRadios Talk Channel and ExtremeGenes.com. Talk to you next week and remember, as far as everyone, we’re a nice normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 124 – She Left Her High Powered Job To Find Her Chinese Ancestors and Kin!

January 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. They welcome new radio affiliate WFLN in Arcadia, Florida. David talks about his recent time in the spotlight working out the actual relationships of the Kardashians, which Fisher promptly brings to a halt! (Fisher insists EG be a “Kardashian Free Zone!”) David then talks about a woman who is well into her second century, and still chain smokes! Just how old is she? Listen to the podcast! The Canadians have just released digitized World War I military diaries, and is working on Army service records. David also shares his Tech Tip of the Week, and another free database from NEHGS.

Then, over two segments, Fisher visits with Paula Williams Madison, a former network executive at NBC, who left her high-powered job to pursue her ancestry! With Jamaican roots, she was raised in Harlem, New York, to a mother who was half Chinese. Paula’s quest to find her grandfather’s kin took her back to China faster than anyone could have imagined. How did she do it? Paula will tell you in the podcast. And where does her adventure go from here? Find out on this week’s show!

Then, Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, answers more listener questions about digital preservation.

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

(Photo used with permission of Paula Williams Madison.)

Transcript of Epsiode 124

Segment 1 Episode 124 (00:30)

Fisher: You have found us! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com

My name is Fisher, I am the Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out, and if you are new to the show, the whole point of this thing is to help you learn how to trace your ancestry, learn about your ancestors, your family history, your ethnic background and also to inspire you with some of the stories of discovery that some people have had and hopefully entertain you a little bit along the way as well, and of course, everybody right now is getting ready for Roots Tech, which is the largest family history convention / conference in the world.

It’s going to be happening this coming week in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’m going to be there, our good friend David Allen Lambert is going to be there, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and so is our guest from today, Paula Williams Madison.

She is going to be one of the keynote speakers there, fascinating background, an NBC executive who quit her career right at her prime in order to trace her family history. Raised in Harlem, African-American, Jamaican, but also has Chinese background, and wanted to find out about that, and she went to work and she did not fail. Wait till you hear her story coming up in about eight minutes or so.

We also want to welcome our friends at WFLN, NewsRadio 1480 in Arcadia, Florida to our network of stations. We’re so excited to be part of Joe Fiorini’s great weekend line-up in western Florida.

Right now, let’s head out to Boston and talk to our good friend, David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and AmericanAncestors.org, and David, before we even get started, what is this? I find you on Vice.com; you’re getting involved with the Kardashians research now. What’s that about?

David: Well, I tell you, it’s never quiet here in Beantown.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: You know it’s interesting; media looks at the entertainment field as sort of our ‘royalty’ if you will, of the American Royal Family. It’s really funny, but yeah, I had a reporter from Vice.com get a hold of me yesterday and they wanted to know; now Rob Kardashian and Kylie Jenner are step-brother and step-sister.

Fisher: Uh-huh.

David: Half-brother half-sister. Now, they are now dating the opposite person’s former girlfriend – if that doesn’t get confusing.

Fisher: I’m very confused.

David: So, I had to create a family tree verbally, then they had someone on their staff sketch it out.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: How Rob Kardashian and his new girlfriend Blac Chyna would be related to the opposite couple. So, you have to pay attention to this.

Fisher: No, no… I’m not. No, we’re not going there! This is a Kardashian-free show, and it’s always going to remain that way, and I apologize for even breaching the subject, because I did not want to go there and get the details, but I’ve had enough. Let’s just move on.

David: Okay, if they want to see more, just have them see the link to Vice.com and they’ll see the article.

Fisher: All right. What do you have for us in our family histoire news this week?

David: Well, I have some really old news and this involves a 112 year old Nepalese woman who has been smoking cigarettes for the past ninety-five years.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: She’s 112. She’s not giving up the chain-smoking habit yet.

Fisher: She’s been smoking since 1920?

David: Yeah, and she has a thirty cigarette a day habit, and she says that’s her way of doing things and she doesn’t care how old she is, and she wants to continue smoking.

Fisher: Now think about this. I mean, if she quit, she could live to be 140!

David: I know, exactly! Well, that being said, she isn’t quite the oldest person in the world, in fact, the oldest person in the world, goes to Susannah Mushatt Jones who’s an African-American lady who was born 1899 in Alabama and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Now she claims that she has never smoked, consumed alcohol, partied, worn make-up or dyed her hair. She’s now legally blind, but is living pretty comfortably at the ripe old age of 116 years old.

Fisher: Crazy. Born in 1899, right?

David: Yeah. It makes her one of two people, the last to be born in the 1800’s. Yeah, the other lady is in Italy, but our last American born in the 1800s is really closing a chapter of our grandparents’ generation that we know.

Fisher: Sure. Yeah.

David: So, that being said, my family, as you know, I’m dual-citizen with Canada. I’m always trying to toss in some Canadian news for our listeners with Canadian interest. The library and archives of Canada and Montreal have now put on the War Diaries for the First World War.

Fisher: Oh wow!

David: What it basically means is that the details that you want to find out about the day-to-day activities of your World War I Canadian soldiers, you can find out for free, and right on the archives website, I will send a link so the listeners can check that out. I’ve also learned the great news that in the next two years, they will have digitized all the service records for World War I soldiers. I think that’s a wonderful tribute to their service.

Fisher: Absolutely true.

David: War…talking about photographs and things of that nature that we collect in genealogy; I want to give a competition for Roots Tech.

Fisher: What?

David: Next week, I want our listeners to track you or I down, get a selfie, either with us and post it and then we’ll see at the end of the week who gets more selfies.

Fisher: Oh for Pete’s…okay, game on!

David: All right, and I don’t care what gimmick you have to use to get the picture, but I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Fisher: [Laughs] He’s got something in mind. You can tell right now. Okay.

David: Hmmm, okay. I want to toss out an interesting Tech Tip. Everybody is doing home movies, restoration and sharing it. Well, for my high school reunion a few years ago, I took our graduation from the 1980s and I posted the whole thing on YouTube for free.

Fisher: Cool!

David: So, I gave the link to all my classmates. I didn’t have to make thumb drives and mail them to everybody around the country. So, why not do that for your local historical society. Maybe you’re going to walk the cemetery, give a tour of a local building in your town or just have a family reunion. Share it with the world, and if you’re those veterans, there’s a great free service. YouTube will give you the space and just upload your videos.

Fisher: So you make your own YouTube channel.

David: You’ll have your own little extra.com. NEHGS every week has a guest user database. All you have to do is go to AmericanAncestors.org and sign up for a guest user account. This week we have more sketches in our early Vermont settlers to 1784 that were done by Scott Andrew Bartley’s research. This is a great way of finding your early Vermont, Northern New England ancestors, and if you have one that’s not listed, contact NEHGS, we’d like to know what you have and include it in an upcoming sketch.

Fisher: All right David, see you in Salt Lake City this coming week, looking forward to it.

David: Same here.

Fisher: All right, and coming up next, one of the keynote speakers from Roots Tech, she actually found her Chinese relatives and what a story it is. Paula Williams Madison is coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 124 (25:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Paula Williams Madison

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

It is Fisher here your Radio Roots Sleuth, and the countdown is getting so close now to Roots Tech in Salt Lake City in Utah, the largest family history conference in the world! And I am so excited to have one of the keynote speakers who’s going to be speaking at Roots Tech online the line with me right now from Los Angeles, California, Paula Williams Madison. Hi Paula, welcome to the show!

Paula: Hi Scott, thank you so much for having me.

Fisher: It is so fun to talk to you. You have an amazing background, and I think if people have ever questioned what it is about family that drives people to dive into this and find out about their own identities, and backgrounds, and heritages, your story is incredible. You were an executive vice president with NBC just five years ago, still at your prime, still at the top of your earning powers, and you just said “Nope. I’m done. I’m going to follow this family thing I’ve been doing.” What was going through your mind at that time? Tell us about that Paula.

Paula: Well sure, that kind of started when I was probably around five or six years old and I somehow decided that if anybody was going to find my Chinese grandfather and/or his family in China, it was probably going to be me. I should start out by saying I am racially black. I am African-American, Jamaican-American, but I grew up with a mother who was bi-racially Chinese and African-Jamaican and we were born and raised in Harlem.

At six years old I knew I was going to have to find my grandfather. I just made up my mind that I would. When I started my work career and when I realized that in this work life that people retire at the age of sixty five, I said to myself “Okay, seven is my lucky number, if I subtract seven from sixty five, I’ll be fifty eight, I’m going to retire when I’m fifty eight and when I’m fifty eight I’m going to go find him.”

Fisher: Okay.

Paula: Once I learned the parameters of work life, sixty five, that’ll be too old! I’ve got to start sooner than that.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: So I figured that I would somehow work my lucky number in there and Scott, I am born in the year of the dragon, so you know in Chinese astrology, so I was born in the year of the dragon and 2012 was the year that I found my family in China.

For the Chinese people, they smile, they pat me on the back, they hug me, but then they say “Oh, you a dragon!”

Fisher: [Laughs] Is that a good “Oh!” or is that a bad “Oh!”

Paula: That’s a good oh! Because there is I guess, a characteristic attributed to dragons that they don’t fail. What they set their minds to, dragons will accomplish. So when I decided to do this, when 2012 happened, I had retired from NBC Universal in 2011. I took a few months to just do what people do which is decompress, walk around all day in a t-shirt and sweatpants because it just felt good.

Fisher: And figure out “Who I am” of course at that point too, right?

Paula: You just want to read everything.

Fisher: Sure.

Paula: So by around the winter time I had decided alright I’ve got to get busy. What I did was, I sent an email sort of an ‘All-call’ out to the African-Jamaican people in my family, my father’s relatives, and asked “Can anybody help me? Think about giving me tips at how I might find my Chinese-Jamaican relatives” and one of my cousins, who was probably in his mid seventies, he lives in Toronto Canada, and he said “There are a lot of Chinese-Jamaicans who live here in Toronto, let me ask around and see what I can find out.” So that was probably April of 2012.

I got back from him in a short amount of time a reference to a conference that he said happens every four years in Toronto and it’s an international conference of Hakka people, so the Hakka H-A-K-K-A the Hakka Chinese people. It’s a cultural minority group in China. Racially Chinese, but it’s a culturally minority group amounting to seventy to eighty million people now in China. That’s a minority group.

Fisher: Wow! Right, of course!

Paula: So he spoke to some of them and they said “Oh tell your cousin to come to this conference we have, we’ll be able to help her find her grandfather’s people.” So I thought wow.

Fisher: Wow!

Paula: I signed my brothers and me up by June 28^th of 2012 we were in Toronto, and there were probably about four to five hundred people at this conference, and we stood up and said who we were and our grandfather’s name. His western name was Samuel Lowe, and he had been a shopkeeper in Kingston, Jamaica and Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.

We were looking for information about him, looking for relatives, and people said “Oh, we’re going to help you.” Now the thing for me that was surprising was that, that was the very first time in my life that I had ever stood up in front of an audience of anyone and said that I am also Chinese because I present as African-American.

Fisher: Of course.

Paula: And this is the first time that people didn’t laugh. This room comprised of almost all racially Chinese. Nobody said “Oh my God really?” I didn’t have people go fall and laugh like that’s a big joke, no not at all. So ultimately what happened was they said “We’re going to help you find him.” The convener of the conference, the chair of the conference and one of the founders, his name is ‘Dr. Keith Lowe.’ He is the first Chinese-Jamaican I’d ever met who had the same name as my grandfather and my mother.

So I asked him had he ever heard of them, he said “No, I’m from Jamaica but I’ve never heard of them.” Well after about two or three weeks of gentle but persistent harassment, that a woman who ultimately became my producer and director, Jeanette Kong, she helped me pursue Keith because they only lived a ten minute walk apart in Toronto. She’s racially Chinese and he’s Chinese-Jamaican.

So she said “Keith we have to help her.” So Keith said “Okay, okay, let me find out from my nephew in Hong Kong. I’ll send him an email and ask him to ask the family in mainland China if anyone knows of a Samuel Lowe.” Dr. Lowe wrote this email. He included me on the email and he sent it. The next day a response came saying “My uncle says Samuel Lowe was his father.”

Fisher: Oh, wow! That fast!

Paula: That was it.

Fisher: In China, now you’re in China with a relative. How unbelievable was that. Now growing up in Harlem, Paula, you must have appeared different to your peers though, right?

Paula: [Laughs] Well, I probably blended in with just about everybody until my mother stepped outside.

Fisher: Oh! [laughs]

Paula: So when my mother would come outside to call us in for dinner, or my mother would show up at school for the parents meetings, then mouths would be agape. People would look I mean just heads spinning back and forth like what’s happening here?

Fisher: Sure.

Paula: And my mother would just stand waiting, almost daring “Just say something crazy.” And it would be “That’s your mom?” Yes! “Well, how is that your mom?”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: Trust me, that’s my mother.

Fisher: “It’s my mom,” yeah.

Paula: And then when my mother would open her mouth she had a heavy Jamaican accent, which was not again what people would have expected.

Fisher: Right.

Paula: So now I actually had people with my mother standing right there, as my mother would speak they’d say “Does your mother speak English?”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: That would send my mother off in barrage of patois laden Jamaican parlay that they really can’t understand.

Fisher: I bet that’s true.

Paula: Then I’d say “Mom slow down, slow down so they can understand you” she would sort of kiss her teeth, flip her head and walk away.

Fisher: Oh that’s funny.

Paula: But we were different. We did blend in for the most part, but we were different when she would show up and that difference today I think is shared by so many millennials. When I show my documentary and read from the book and talk about this –

Fisher: Right.

Paula: If there were young people present, it’s almost amazing to me how often they carefully will either raise their hand during the Q&A session or wait around afterwards to ask me “How do I stop people asking me ‘What are you?’

Fisher: Yeah,that’s a great question isn’t it? I mean, amongst any people whether you’re African-American, Chinese, European whatever, we’re all such a blend.

Paula: We are a blend and the question is phrased that way. You know I had one young lady who was just sobbing in my arms and I asked “It’s painful to you?” and she said “Yes because I’m me,” and I said “Then let me help you give some voice to that.” I said “Are your parents of different races?” She said, “Yes, and they don’t understand.” So the first thing I think I was to emphasize is when a couple has a child or children and the children are mixed race, the parent doesn’t share the experience.

Fisher: Right.

Paula: You are not racially the same as your children. And the question “What are you?” is in some ways kind of insulting and it sort of reduces you to a thing.

Fisher: Yeah.

Paula: That is not what you want to be or who you want to be. So I suggest to people that when someone asks you “What are you?” that you reply “What my racial background is, or what my racial heritage is.” And leave it at that. Ignore the ‘what are you?’ question because you will never answer that to anyone’s satisfaction and most especially not to yours.

I recall a few years ago Tiger Woods was asked what his racial background was and he said “Well I don’t describe myself as just African-American because to do so would be to deny my mother’s heritage and its Thai.” Now black people in this country, my experience is that so often we learn that nobody wants to claim us.

We’re the descendents of slaves. We ended growing up believing that we were the least appreciated people in the United States. And so when he said that, a lot of my friends who are black said “Oh he just doesn’t want to be black” and what I was insistent upon was “Why do you say that? When did he say that he doesn’t want to be black? He merely said that he is as much Thai as he is black.”

Fisher: Um-hmm.

Paula: So it’s not a simple answer to a question that the questioner might think is a simple question. It just isn’t. And importantly for the millennials, the fastest growing demographic group in the United States today racially, is mixed race.

Fisher: I’m talking to Paula Williams Madison, she’s a former executive vice president with NBC, the author of ‘Finding Samuel Lowe, from Harlem to China’ it’s in book form, you got it out in the film festivals, it’s going to be on TV I assume soon, Paula?

Paula: Yes, it will be on TV on the Africa channel in January 31^st and it’s available as a digital download purchase or DVD on Voodoo, Amazon and iTunes.

Fisher: Boy, and it’s a great story, in fact we’re going to continue with your story about what happened once you got everybody found in China, how that adventure continued. That’s coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 124 (44:45)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Paula Williams Madison

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

It is Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, talking Paula Williams Madison, she’s a former Executive Vice President with NBC Universal, and a keynote speaker at the upcoming Roots Tech Convention in Salt Lake City, and this is going to be so much fun to hear you in person Paula, as I’m going to be there. I know many of our listeners are going to be as well.

Paula: Thank you.

Fisher: And in our last segment we were talking about the route you took and how quickly you were able to find your Chinese ancestor who was in Jamaica via going to a conference to Toronto, while you had grown up in Harlem, what an astonishing thing to accomplish so quickly.

Paula: Well, yes it was reasonably quick, but I do want to explain that my oldest brother had back in the 70’sh… he was the overseas controller for the now defunct airline, TWA… and learned as we were shooting this documentary that when my brother went to Hong Kong in 1973, I thought he was going to hang out and have a good time. He told us during the taping of this documentary that he went to Hong Kong to try and find records on our grandfather. I had no idea.

Fisher: Ha!

Paula: And I say that because the swiftness with which I was able to connect with my family in China, started with a face to face meeting in Toronto and ended with an email confirming that this man whose name was Law Chow Woo, was my uncle, and he said yes Samuel Lowe, was my father.

Now we get to this point and I’m searching for more information about my grandfather, I’m trying to find as much as I can and I was able to do something that my brother wasn’t able to do which is go online and I researched a number of databases including ‘FamilySearch.org’ that’s how I came to the attention of Roots Tech, because as you know that is a website that the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints provides for free as you’re researching your history.

Fisher: Yup.

Paula: I plugged in Samuel Lowe, Kingston, Jamaica, Guangzhou, China, 1934 and within a few seconds up came a passenger list for a ship, the SS addresses in 1933 had Samuel Lowe, with him, his Chinese wife and his youngest two daughters, my Aunt Barbra and my Aunt Anita Maria who were racially Chinese, born in Jamaica and they were going to China.

Fisher: That had to be something that made your jaw drop.

Paula: I was breathless. I just could not believe it, tears welled up… The point I’m making here is that information that wasn’t available decades ago, information that wasn’t available weeks ago might be available today. Because these databases are being uploaded everyday onto the internet. So people shouldn’t give up and if you don’t find it that first time, just keep going back.

Fisher: I think the number on FamilySearch now is a million new pages a day being indexed and put up there.

Paula: Absolutely, and what you can find is fascinating. I found my mother’s naturalization papers when she became a citizen. I found the Pan Am flight list when she flew from Kingston to Miami in 1945 when she first came to the United States under the Chinese immigration quota. I mean there’s so much information on there that I just want to encourage people to, whatever you do, don’t be discouraged because you don’t find it now.

Fisher: Isn’t it crazy to actually find an airline manifest passenger list from those days? [Laughs] I found my mother flying back from Hawaii after she stowed away on a ship to there back in 1948.

Paula: Your mother sounds like my kind of girl!

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Paula: Wow.

Fisher: So those records are out there. So what happened now? You made contact with this uncle in China and you now have a little piece of the puzzle as you start to figure out where Samuel came and went to and from. You have names now.

Paula: Right.

Fisher: Where’s it go from there? You made contact. Did they want to see you?

Paula: Well, again I was mentioning earlier about being African-American and what the legacy of racism has been, and so my husband whose African-American asked me, “Paula, what are you hoping for when you find these Chinese people in your family?”

I was confused by the question, like I don’t know what you’re asking me. And he said “Well what do you want?” And I said ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He said ‘you know you’re black.’ [Laughs] And I started laughing hysterically. I said, ‘I know I’m black.’ I said, ‘why you’re saying that to me? I mean I don’t understand your point.’ And then it hit me, the point he was making was, you’re looking for Chinese people and you’re black. What if they don’t want you?’

Fisher: Hmm.

Paula: Now at that point when that question came you know, I was retired. I was doing whatever I was doing and I thought to myself ‘how could I have been so dense, why did I never think of this?’ So I called my two brothers. So the three of us are on this call and I tell them what my husband Roosevelt has said to me and they said ‘Well we never thought of that either.’ And I thought ‘how could we not have thought of that?’ And then I said, ‘Wait a minute. Ma looked Chinese. So the face of the woman who raised us and nurtured us and cared for us was a Chinese face.’

So when my uncle Chow Woo learned of me and I told the story that my mother explained, that when she was almost 16 years old, she went on a quest to find her father in Jamaica and learned from his two brothers who had migrated in order to run the businesses with him, that he had returned to China permanently just months before and wasn’t returning. So now it’s like, ‘All right that’s the end. That’s truly now the end of any hope my mother had of ever finding her father.’

What has subsequently happened was, not only when they learned of our existence my uncle Chow Woo said, ‘That’s odd because I know all of my father’s children and I’ve never heard of a Nell Vera Lowe. And I recounted that story and I said how old my mother was, the date of her birth and my uncle who I didn’t know was a retired accountant, in seconds did the math between my mother’s age, the year and when his father returned to China and said ‘That’s my niece, I need to meet her.’

Fisher: Oh. Haha wow!

Paula: So five weeks later I flew to China with one of my dear friends. I met my uncle Chow Woo, who was 87 at the time, my aunt Adassa, she was biracial, black and Chinese, grabbed my hand… strong for an old lady, and said ‘Bring everyone home to China.’

Fisher: Wow.

Paula: And I thought everyone? Do you know this is not down the street?

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Paula: So my two brothers gathered our families and twenty of us along with two cousins who were racially the same composition as we are. The oldest son that… my grandfather had remained in Jamaica and he had 10 children, and while searching for them I found evidence of that son… contacted his children, the oldest and the youngest accompanied us and so twenty of us Black-Chinese we went and met them, and there were 300 of my grandfather’s direct descendents that assembled!

Fisher: Oh my goodness!

Paula: A family that, by the way, had a documented history dating back three thousand years to 1006 BC!

Fisher: You have your line directly back that far?

Paula: Directly back that far, and the next direct one which is way too much for me to fathom but the linage is in a book. The Chinese keep it in legacy books called a ‘Jokbo’ and our Jokbo goes to 1006 BC. We have since connected with another Lowe clan and they are based out of Hong Kong and their Jokbo connects to ours and it back another 2500 years.

Fisher: We are out of time Paula; it has been a joy talking to you about this! Obviously once you got there you found out there really weren’t any concerns about how you would be viewed and welcomed.

Paula: Oh no. we all have a good time, we dance, we love, we party, we drink, we hang out…

Fisher: [Laughs] Well I cannot wait to hear your keynote address at Roots Tech in the coming week at the Salt Palace Convention Center, in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s going to be a great time. Good luck with your journey because I’m certain, already just having spoken to you, I know it’s not over yet, is it?

Paula: No, it’s not. I’ll be in China two days after you see me at Roots Tech, and we’ll be celebrating yet another lunar New Year with the Lowes, there’ll be about 200 of us gathered in Guangzhou.

Fisher: Unbelievable. Paula Williams Madison, a keynote speaker at Roots Tech, coming up this weekend. And on the way next… He’s our Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, Tom Perry, talking about how preserve your precious family heirlooms, next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 124

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It is preservation time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com

Hello, Thomas.

Tom: Hello.

Fisher: We have questions from AskTom@TMCPlace.com

This one, I have no idea who it’s from, because it says something like, R-C-F-M, whatever! Anyway, it says, “On a past episode of Extreme Genes, Tom talked about ‘Cinematize’ and how it is needed to transfer and create DVDs. Is there a better, more updated program available or is this still best, Tom?”

Tom: Well, listener, whoever you are, I have not as of date found a product as well designed as Cinematize. Cinematize is pretty awesome. I’m just sad somebody bought the technology and wants to use it for something different. I’ve been trying to get licensing rights, which is going nowhere unfortunately, but what I suggest is, go to eBay, Amazon, any place you can and if you can find a used version of it or a new version that’s just still in the box, go with it. Cinematize is just so much farther ahead than anything. If you can’t find that, the next thing that I have used is Handbrake, which is a good program.

The only problem is, its shareware, so it’s free, which is good. However, usually you get what you pay for, and that’s about the only other option. The problem with Handbrake is, it’s really, really slow and can take a long time to take your DVD’s and convert them to AVI’s or MOV’s. So, if you can find an old version of Cinematize, rock and roll! And if any of you listeners have run into something else, let me know, and I’m going to be looking at Roots Tech, see if something is available there, but as of right now, Cinematize is definitely the way to go.

Fisher: All right, thank you so much, Tom, and thank you so much for the question. Here’s the next one, this is from Theresa Elliot, she said, “Tom, I’m trying to make the light box for my iPhone you described on the Extreme Genes show. Can you tell me the dimensions you used and where you got the filters for the lights?” This was a fun episode! I remember talking about this. It’s quite homemade, I love it!

Tom: Oh yeah, it’s a great way to do your own scanning where you have three dimensional objects. You can use your iPhone or any kind of a Smartphone. You can use a regular camera too, like a good Nikon, but this is more made for the people that don’t have a camera stand, and they come out with their Nikon on, basically, what we talked about, let me just real quickly go over it again. Go back and listen to the episode if you can.

We’re building a box that’s five-sided, it doesn’t have a bottom obviously, because that’s where you’re going to put your watches or your rings or whatever you want to photograph, you know, old photos that are damaged, daguerreotypes and anything that you want that you want to actually scan that you can’t put it in a normal scanner or you have so few, you don’t want to go buy a scanner.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: You get your iPhone, you cut a hole in the top, you set your lens over there and then inside, if you’re going to put in lights, and I recommend LED lights. The email that we received, I’m a little bit confused some of the things, because she’s talking about filters, so, I’ll go over a couple of different options, and the best thing to build the box out of, is corrugated plastic.

You can get it at any art store, any sign store, it’s pretty reasonable pricewise, and I recommend you get white, because then it intensifies your light inside of it. The one that I built was a 24×24, because it’s a good easy size to use, you can get most things in it. You don’t want stuff too close to the sides or you’re going to get reflections.

So, I recommend 24×24 and anything up to 8×8 in a 24×24 is fine; you can even go a little bit bigger. If you have great, big, huge things that you need to scan, then I’d go bigger, 36×36, but whatever you scan, and you want to have at least two to four inches space all the way around it. It’s just better for your camera to focus and everything. Specifically on her question, she talked about filters, I believe what she meant is not, filters for the light, but filters for the iPhone.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: The kind of filter that I believe you’re talking about is, the filter for the iPhone. You want to get a polarizing filter, you want to make sure it’s the kind that spins, because what you do is, you turn the filter until all the glare is gone away from whatever you’re shooting and take the picture, ready to rock and roll! If you’re looking at actually physical filters because your camera isn’t white balancing properly, just always remember that daylight is blue, florescent lights are green and incandescent are yellow, but as long as you can white balance, you shouldn’t have to mess with any kind of filters on your lights. Use LED daylights, they are the best.

Fisher: All right. Thanks Theresa for the question! Hope that helps you out and we’ll get more questions from AskTom@TMCPlace.com coming up next when we return in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 124

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our guest, the Preservation Authority.

It is Fisher here, and Tom, we have another email here from Danielle Haiba Loveland, and she said, “I was listening to an Extreme Genes show last week. Tom indicated you should save videos and MP4s before backing them up. Going through some family videos that were already downloaded on my computer, they are AVI files. I don’t see anywhere even when I open it, like save as, to save the property type to MP4. Anyone know how to change them?”

Tom: You know, that’s an awesome question, because sometimes we’re misunderstood. So, you’re not actually taking your AVI files, you don’t have to take them and convert them to MP4’s. What I’m suggesting is, if you have a whole bunch of video files and you have limited space, MP4’s are great, because they’re really small.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So you can have a whole bunch of them, they’re universal; you can send them to anybody that can play an MP4. As long as you have a computer, you can play an MP4. In fact, some of the new smart phones will even play MP4’s now.

So, they’re great because they’re small, the quality is really, really good, you can also edit them. If you have plenty of storage space, there’s no reason to do a conversion, and one thing you want to remember when you’re doing conversions, the file that you have that’s now an AVI which is a good quality file, it’s very, very large, is when you convert it, you’re not losing the AVI, it’s not like pouring food coloring into water and now the water’s red.

Fisher: Right. [Laughs]

Tom: You’re actually taking that and doing, as you mentioned, a ‘save as’, so, you’ll still have your AVI file, and it’s just that the MP4s are so nice, because they’re small. You can email them to people; they’re awesome to work with.

Fisher: So, this is like converting a photograph of higher quality to a smaller one.

Tom: Exactly! That’s exactly what it is. Now, be careful on the quality, MP4s quality is really, really good, that’s how they’ve come along so much, in fact, we had an episode we talked about how everybody’s got Mp4’s because they’re so wonderful. So, back to your question; if you want to convert an MOV or an AVI to an MP4, there’s a good program that we’ve talked about before called, ‘Power Director’ and it’s really a great program. It’s only fifty dollars.

Fisher: Yes, I see it everywhere.

Tom: Oh, it’s awesome. You can download it from newegg.com, whoever you want to work with, and it’s a great program. You can take your AVI’s and MOV’s and convert them to MP4’s for the reasons we discussed earlier. One thing about that program, it’s only a PC program.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: If you have a Mac, then you’re going to need Final Cuts Pro and I believe the new version of iMovie will also do MP4s’. So, when you just click on, it’s not opening it as a program that you can convert, unless you actually go into Power Director or iMovie or one of these programs and then do the ‘save as’ or ‘convert’.

So, you know, just read your software, check up a little bit on it and find out what’s the best way to do that, but like I say, Power Director is the best way to go if you’re a PC user, and most AVI people are PC or Windows-based, if you’re Mac, you’re probably going to have them saved as MOV. So, there’s no reason to convert it, unless you want to save a whole bunch of them and you’ve got a ton of them, but like we’ve always taught, whenever you’re backing up, you want it on your hard drive, you want a disk of it and you want it in at least one cloud, if possible two clouds, and make sure the two clouds are unrelated. A lot of different people out there, such as ourselves, use Google because they have a great platform and then, we add software on the top of it to make it more user-friendly.

However, you want to make sure you use two different people. So, if you use us, don’t use Google. If you use Google, don’t use us. Get Dropbox or one of the other programs out there, like Apple, and make sure they’re saved on two different ones.

Fisher: So, the idea is, if somebody goes bad, you don’t lose both at the same time.

Tom: Exactly! Exactly! And people always say, “Well, what’s the chance of a cloud going down? It’s probably pretty slim.” You want to make sure that with cyber attacks and things like that, there’s so many crazy things going on, you want to make sure, if you can afford it, get two different clouds you can use, and a lot of them are free if you don’t have a lot of stuff, and if you have MP4’s, they’ll fit.

Fisher: All right, Tom. Great stuff, and if you have a question for Tom, you can always email him at askTom@TMCPlace.comThanks for coming on, bud!

Tom: Good to be here!

Fisher: And that, as we say in the biz, is a wrap for this week. Thanks once again to Paula Williams Madison for coming on and sharing a real extreme journey, talking about tracking down her Chinese ancestor who came to Jamaica back in the day and how she located all her family in mainland China, the reunions, if you missed it you’re going to want to catch her keynote this coming week in Salt Lake City. Take care, and remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal, family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 118 – Same Docs/Different Views & Baseball Hall for Woman’s Ancestor?

December 21, 2015 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. The two talk about using the “Skywalker” family tree as a great teaching moment for children. Fisher & Lambert then talk about the Christmas traditions of England’s Royal Family. (Just what do you give the Queen?!) David then discusses the oldest remains found showing evidence of tattoos. You won’t believe how far back we’re talking! Plus, hear the value of those ancient coins found on British farmland this past October. David will also have another Tech Tip and the NEHGS free database.

Next up, Fisher visits with renowned genealogical blogger, “The Legal Genealogist,” Judy Russell. Judy has some terrific year end observations on dealing with various views of the same documents and how you can avoid misinterpretations. She’ll also discuss the genealogical trap best known as an “obituary!”

Fisher’s next guest is a Connecticut woman named Marjorie Adams, a descendant of Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, a baseball pioneer who played for the New York Knickerbockers in the mid-1800s. Most importantly, Doc was the man who led the way to standardizing rules by which we know the game today. Listen to hear which rules Marjorie’s great-grandfather fought to standardize, and why she thinks he should now be part of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Tom Perry of TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, then talks about the challenges of conversion of digital video files. What do you need to know to save, view, or edit your files? Tom’s got the answer… as usual!

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

Transcript of Episode 118

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert
Segment 1 Episode 118
Fisher: And welcome genies to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And I’m so excited, Christmas is about here! I’ve got guests at the house in fact… my daughter, son in law, three grandkids showed up three days early this morning, and so I was like, “Oh! Well, we don’t have everything wrapped. We don’t have all the beds made. There’s so much to be done.”
But we have some awesome guests today; Judy Russell is back, the Legal Genealogist, with some great genealogy observations in about nine minutes. Then later, I’ll be talking with Marjorie Adams, a great granddaughter of the man who back in the nineteenth century set many of the rules we know in the game of baseball. She wants him in the Hall of Fame.
David Allen Lambert’s on the line with us from Boston, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. How are you, David?
David: I’m doing fine! My shopping’s practically almost done. So, greetings from a happy guy in Beantown!
Fisher: Oh, and I’ve got to give a shout out to a couple of people I heard from this past week… crazy stuff… Mary Williams in South Australia, listening to Extreme Genes. Mary, thanks so much for reaching out and saying hello. Love to hear from you. And from Ukraine, Miroslav Caban. I was just shocked to hear from him and so excited to know that they’re listening to us in all the four corners of the universe. Well at least the world.
David: Hello to them from Beantown.
Fisher: Yes, and let’s get into our family histoire news for today. Where do we start, my friend?
David: I think we need to start in a galaxy far, far away.
Fisher: Of course. [Laughs]
David: Well, in the latest Star Wars, one of the things that I thought to myself, I said, ‘You know, the movies are a little confusing. They come out four, five, six, then one, two, three. Now we’re doing seven!’
Fisher: Right.
David: So, we need a family tree and I thought to myself, I said, “Let me just do Google.” So, I did a simple Google search “Star Wars Genealogy” and on the Wookiepedia…
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: That’s the first hit. I kid you not!
Fisher: Wookiepedia!
David: There is the genealogy of the Skywalker family. So, if you ever wanted to know who Darth Vader’s kids really are without a DNA test, go there. [Laughs]
Fisher: Well that’s great and you know what’s fun about that? In keeping what you talked about last week, about inspiring kids to be interested in family history. What a great tool!
David: Absolutely is!
Fisher: Hey, speaking of people on a different planet or at least a different world, the royal family, have you heard about this?
David: Oh my goodness, yes! The gifts exchange?
Fisher: Yeah, the gifts exchange. The Royal family in England, Queen Elizabeth has set a budget limit. Because you know, you don’t want to break the budget on exchanging gifts when you’re worth how many billions of dollars. And apparently, there’s a tradition that was set, back in the nineteenth century by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, of course. What would they be, grandparents or great grandparents to our current queen? At least greats, right?
David: I believe it is her great grandmother.
Fisher: Yes.
David: Great grandparents.
Fisher: Well, they set it up where the gift exchange with the royal family is always on Christmas Eve, and so, they’ll be doing that this year, and Princess Kate apparently, is interested in making homemade gifts, and she has been making jam for each family member to give out. Isn’t that fun?
David: That’s amazing, and by the way, it is actually her great, great grandmother.
Fisher: Great, great, okay.
David: Yeah, I had to visualize the family tree in my head.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: [Laughs] Well everybody today if you walk around and there’s so many people with tattoos and facial tattoos.
Fisher: It’s like twenty five percent now.
David: Yeah, it’s amazing, but it’s not a new thing. I mean, obviously we can’t look at bones and say, you know, who had a tattoo. But Smithsonian had to settle an argument, who is known to have the oldest tattoo, and if you remember the alpine glacier that receded, and the iceman that showed up out of it?
Fisher: Yeah, Otzi.
David: Yeah, Otzi. Otzi is our man. He has sixty one tattoos across his body.
Fisher: Wow!
David: On his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso and he dates back to dying around 3250 B.C.
Fisher: Wow!
David: That’s a long time to make a mistake on a tattoo.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: And have it preserved for posterity.
Fisher: [Laughs] Good point!
David: [Laughs] Well, you know, I’ll tell you, every so often, especially when you’re shopping, you reach in your pocket, you drop something like money or in this case maybe loose change. If you do it all together and you bury it in your yard, and some metal detector guy comes, it could be a millionaire.
Fisher: Right. That’s true.
David: So, think about burying a little time capsule in your back yard for future metal detectors. Like the gentleman in Oxford, New England, who back in October came out with a metal detector on his sixtieth birthday, went out and found over 180 coins.
Fisher: Right.
David: Bracelets and pieces of gold dating back to 870 AD from the time of Alfred the Great. The values out on the coins for instance, one of the Alfred the Great silver coins alone, are commercially valued at $2500 apiece.
Fisher: And how many does he have?
David: Over 180.
Fisher: Ohh!
David: So, needless to say, this is going to be split between the landowner and metal detector or whatever deal that they struck, and of course, the British museum find them.
I mean they find these Saxon hordes and Viking hordes once every so often, but it’s amazing when they find them and they’re just not found by archeologists.
Fisher: Right. All right tech-tip. What have you got?
David: The tech tip, well, I’ll tell you. I did see the new movie, “In the Heart of the Sea,” liked it very much. And then I thought to myself, “My own great grandfather was the inspiration for my genealogical interest.” If you might remember from the episode, I talked about him, was on a whaling ship. I have a copy of the whaling log and I thought, “How fun!” After watching the movie to plot where my great grandfather went from 1871 to ’73 with the longitude and latitude in the book, and I thought to myself, “Well I really don’t have mapping skills to do this. I don’t need that.” Google maps, I can either click on a place and it shows up as a location. When they went to the port and get the longitude and latitude and then follow it day by day by the longitude and latitude that’s recorded in the log book. I’ve done the same thing for my grandfather. In the 1920s when he was on the USS Galveston, in the 1920s and trapped for three years, where he was all over the Caribbean and Central and South America. It’s fun stuff and it’s free. So, if you have a person who is sea worthy in your family tree and you want to know where they were and you get some longitude and latitude, you can visually show your kids where your family was.
Fisher: Great stuff.
David: And of course, NEHGS and American Ancestors brings you a guest database every week and this is no exception. For the holidays, we have for you this week, the New York Evening Post death notices from 1801 to 1890.
Fisher: Saw that!
David: 100,000 death notices. And that’s right up your genealogical alley. So, hopefully you’ll find a couple of family members.
Fisher: Yes. Found one the other night. Very excited about it!
David: Genealogical gifts for Christmas. Got to love it! Merry Christmas my dear friend and a Happy New Year! And I’ll talk to you soon. Ho Ho Ho.
Fisher: [Laughs] Thank you, David! Talk to you soon. Coming up next, she’s the Legal Genealogist, and she’s got some great observations to wrap up the year. Judy Russell talks to us in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

Segment 2 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Judy Russell
Fisher: Well, here we are getting ready to wrap up as we approach the end of the year, and I am so excited to get my good friend Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, back on the line.
Because she’s always got some interesting observations; Often things I just would never have thought about before.
Judy is in New Jersey with us. How are you Judy? Happy Holidays!
Judy: Happy Holidays Scott. Although I have to tell you that we are having such a heat wave here, it doesn’t feel like December at all!
Fisher: Well, go to the malls you’ll see, you’ll feel it.
Judy: You see it, yes. When you walk out to your car and its 65 degrees, it’s a little hard to be feeling like December.
Fisher: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Well I’m so delighted that you’ve come on, and you know I was looking at your site the other day and you have so many unique observations.
Part of it I’m sure is because you have a background in law and ethics, but I love some of your observations, for instance, the thing you did about different copies of the same records and how they appear in different websites. What made you think, “Hey wait a minute, this would make a nice column”
Judy: Well in fact what happened in that particular instance, Scott, was that I got a reader question about one column on a passenger record, for her ancestor who had come into the United States very early, and everybody else on this passenger record, the country that they were a citizen of pretty much matched the hometown.
Fisher: Um-hmm.
Judy: But with her record, the town said Schonwald which is Germany, and the country said Russia. So I popped on over to FamilySearch to look at the document myself, and it was quite clear to me, on the FamilySearch record it said Prussia, and not Russia.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So it’s Germany not Russia.
Fisher: Yeah, a little bit different.
Judy: Well, except when you look at the records she looked at, the exact same underlying document, but a different microfilming on Ancestry, it absolutely does look like Russia. It was even indexed as Russia, on Ancestry.
Fisher: Wow.
Judy: But there was a much clearer, probably newer microfilming done by FamilySearch, and on FamilySearch there was no question at all, it was Prussia not Russia. So that just reminded me of all the circumstances, I have come across in my own research.
Fisher: Umm hm.
Judy: Where, depending on where you find the document, you may really come to different conclusions. So when we as genealogists get told and boy we are told over and over and over, you’ve got to cite your sources.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: And that includes saying what website you saw it on. There are a lot of people who say “Well I don’t need to do that that’s not important.”
Fisher: Right.
Judy: Oh but it is. Because if you’re looking at it on Ancestry, you say this family came from Russia.
Fisher: Sure.
Judy: But if you look at it on FamilySearch you see that they were really German.
Fisher: And you gave a demonstration of that. You showed illustrations of both pieces from both sites, and there’s no doubt, it says Russia on one and Prussia from the other. But it’s the same record, the same underlying original record. It was really quite an eye opener.
Judy: Yeah, and the other example that I used out of my own family research, there’s an entry in the 1850 census of my family in Mississippi, and looking at the census record everywhere I’ve ever been able to find it. I was never entirely sure how old the second child was. It could have been three months, or five months, or six months, or eight months, because the outline of the top number over the slash and then the twelve just wasn’t clear.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So I was in Mississippi in June, had a chance to go out to the libraries in the local areas and somebody had actually done a physical photocopy, printed, believe it or not, not digital. You could hold it in your hands…
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: … of the original census record and it was crystal clear, it was five months. No room for doubt at all. So, getting as close to the original document as possible. Looking at all possible websites, checking any source, and checking to see if perhaps there’s a newer version of the microfilming, can make all the difference in the world.
Fisher: Right. Don’t you think it’s also true and maybe of even greater value to recognize that people index them differently? There have been different indexing efforts on the same records and people come to different conclusions. Even though you’re supposed to have all these people double and triple checking what the original person came up with. It’s amazing to me that you can look in one record of census indexing for instance and not find who you looking for and then go to a completely different place and find exactly what you looking for, quite easily.
Judy: Absolutely. I mean, start with the fact that a lot of the older census records were indexed by local genealogical societies.
Fisher: Yes.
Judy: So they knew the people in their community. They knew the families that were there. They’re not going to misread Catullus Cattrall; they’re going to get it right.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: Then you have some of the commercially prepared indexes. The 1910 index on Ancestry for example, I think was outsourced to China or some other place where clearly they didn’t speak English.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: It is brutal in the number of mistakes. The only time you get the double and triple checking realistically, is the crowd sourced indexing at FamilySearch.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So yeah, lots of different possibilities on the indexing, which is why we don’t rely on indexes got to get to that underlying document if it exists.
Fisher: It’s funny sometimes to look at that original and go, “How in the world did they ever come up with this?”
Judy: Exactly. You look at it with a, “That’s a joke. You can’t possibly be serious.”
Fisher: [Laughs] Exactly.
Judy: It happens.
Fisher: All right, what else do you have that’s on your mind? I saw this thing about obituaries… an incorrect obituary. That kind of lit me up because it’s so true.
Judy: We have to understand, and I do really understand, that obituaries are often written or the information is provided by somebody who is grief stricken.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: Not focusing. Giving the best information they have on the spot, but it just turns out to be wrong.
Fisher: Umm hm.
Judy: And the example that I used is a first cousin of my mother’s. So a first cousin once removed to me. It’s a perfectly lovely obituary they ran in two or three South Dakota newspapers after she passed away there. Some of the information was terrific, and some of it was just totally wrong. It had her born in the wrong state. It had her born in the wrong year.
Things that you would think people would get right, and they were simply 100% wrong.
Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah, birth years off, birth dates off, age.
Judy: It happens.
Fisher: It does happen all the time. You know we had an ancestor on my wife’s side, he was a cattle rustler. He ran off with his farmhand’s wife and then he actually absconded with twenty five thousand dollars under the guise that he was going to buy more cattle. But he kept the money then sold the cattle he had for more money. Changed his name, set up house with this woman and then got caught. Well 28 years later he was an upstanding member of the community when he died and he’ll be missed and mourned and it’s like, “Really, you’re kidding?”
Judy: You just have to love it.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: The fact of the matter is that it’s the winners that write the history or the survivors who tell the story the way they want it to be told.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: And that I think is the key to some of the mistakes and errors that are in obituaries.
This is where we tell glowing stories of people where everyone who knew them looks at it and says, “Are we talking about the same person?”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: But it’s interesting that errors like that, because I think either of grief or because of just not knowing creep into even records that we tend to think of as “Take it to the bank accurate.” Case in point: death certificates;
Fisher: Yes.
Judy: We all, particularly when we’re baby genealogists we think, you know, “If it’s in the death certificate it’s got to be right.” The problem is what has to be right in a death certificate is the identity of the deceased, the date and cause of death. Those are the legal attributes of a death certificate that you know, whoever signs that death certificate better be right or there’s a possible penalty of perjury. Everything else is up for grabs.
Fisher: Right and you know really what we’re talking about here Judy, is the idea of, “Are we going to be name collectors or are we going to be real name detectives where we take all the clues and analyze it and come up with our best conclusions.” Don’t you think?
Judy: You are absolutely right! You know we talk about the elements of the genealogical proof standard and the one that is the most important is reasonably exhaustive research.
Fisher: I love that. Yes.
Judy: And then we go on to the analysis and correlation once we have all of the evidence pieces. But if you took my father’s death certificate, you’d have his father’s name wrong. You’d have a misspelling of the city in Germany, where he was born. You’d have his mother’s maiden name wrong. My stepmother simply didn’t know those facts. So when she put in the information she put in what she thought. Fortunately I also had a chance to get his original birth certificate from the city of Bremen.
Fisher: Yup.
Judy: So I know what all the details are. We need to broaden our horizons and keep in mind that no one record is always right.
Fisher: You know this is the thing Judy… we’ve got to help people to understand we don’t want to be just name collectors. We want to gather everything and analyze it and really it’s much more fun this way.
Judy: Oh it is so much more fun! If it were easy, why would we do it?
Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Well said. Hey my friend, have a great holiday season! Thank you so much for coming on the show! She’s Judy Russell the legal genealogist. Go to LegalGenealogist.com. You will see insights there that you don’t see any place else. Thanks Judes!
Judy: Thanks Scott! Take care.
Fisher: And coming up next, her great grandfather basically made baseball what it is today! We’ll talk to Marjorie Adams about her quest to get Daniel “Doc” Adams into the baseball Hall of Fame, coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 3 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Marjorie Adams
Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show
Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and always excited to talk to people with a fascinating family background, especially when it affects them to this very day after generations.
My next guest fits that bill to the “t.” Her name is Marjorie Adams; she’s in Connecticut, not far from my old stomping grounds where I grew up in south western Connecticut. Marjorie, welcome to the show!
Marjorie: Thank you so much Scott, it’s nice to be here!
Fisher: Well Marjorie, a few years back, within the last 10, started getting involved with her family history because you grew up with this story in the background and you didn’t even know that lots of other people were aware of who your ancestor was. Let’s talk about him a little bit Marjorie, what was his relationship and what was his name?
Marjorie: His name was Daniel Lucius Adams, MD.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Marjorie: He was my great grandfather. He was born in 1814 and died in 1899.
Fisher: And as in “MD” that’s where he got the nickname “Doc…” Doc Adams.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: And Doc had an interesting side passion, and what was that?
Marjorie: That was baseball, in New York City.
Fisher: And that’s really where baseball originated, with the New York Knickerbockers. Especially creating the game and creating the excitement around it that drew lots of crowds and eventually led to professional baseball and to this day the major leagues.
Marjorie: Well yes. Except I need to clarify baseball in some form existed long before his team.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: There’s so much evidence of a form of baseball being played in New Jersey.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: Before that in Massachusetts, where it was sort of a different form.
Fisher: Town ball.
Marjorie: There are even prints from France, in the middle ages of people hitting a ball with a stick.
Fisher: Uh-hmm.
Marjorie: So it’s really a very old game. But what Doc’s team did was make it really important.
Fisher: Yes that’s right and he made it popular, and he also took the rules from their little league and made it kind of the standard for the game and this is what makes him very important. And let’s go through what some of these rules are Marjorie.
Marjorie: Sure. Well first of all he created the position of “Shortstop.”
Fisher: Wow! Derek Jeter, are you listening?
Marjorie: Yes I hope so, and a whole lot of other people.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Marjorie: Yes, he created the position of shortstop. It first shows up in the team records in late 1849, and he made all the balls for the team as well. But the balls were very light so you could hit it quite a distance but you couldn’t throw it very far.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: So the shortstop position became a “relay position.” And as the equipment improved, the shortstop position moved in where it is today.
Fisher: Right, an extra fielder other than the basemen.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: Got that. Okay what are some of the other rules he created?
Marjorie: He was the first head of the first three rules committees in New York City. Starting with his own team in 1848 and then three other conventions that were held between 1853 and 1858, and he was the one that set the bases at 90 feet, he did that calculation.
Fisher: [Laughs] Wow! He’s the genius we all always heard talked about, “Wow, whoever came up with 90 feet was perfect!”
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: It was Doc Adams.
Marjorie: That was right. That was Red Smith back in the 1950’s said that.
Fisher: Um-hmm.
Marjorie: 90 feet between bases is the closest man has ever come to perfection.
Fisher: That’s right.
Marjorie: And that was Doc.
Fisher: Yup.
Marjorie: He did preside over the convention that passed the rule for 9 men, 9 innings. He was an advocate for that, a very early advocate for that. He also tried very hard to change the game to exclusively a fly game.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: In those days an “out” would be counted if a ball was caught on the first bounce.
Fisher: That’s right.
Marjorie: He didn’t like that. He didn’t think it was very manly.
Fisher: In fact, there were certain games, particular games that were played just with what they called the “Fly Rule,” as an exception from the usual rule which was one bounce.
Marjorie: Yes and the two rules existed side by side mid to late 60’s. It did not pass while he was involved with the game, and he always was very sorry about that. And he did predict in his last speech before the convention to the rules committee that eventually that fly game would pass, and it did.
Fisher: It did, and it’s the standard to this very day.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: All right. Now let’s talk about your involvement. You grew up knowing the stories about him. You have some of his memorabilia, some letters. You have pieces of his uniform. Did that mean much to you as you were growing up?
Marjorie: Hmm, yes and no. I love American history so from the American history stand point, yes it meant a great deal. But I never really delved into it until four years ago. We do have an essay that my grandfather, Doc’s youngest son, wrote in 1939. His memories of his father. And in 1980 you might recall someone by the name of Nelson Doubleday purchased the New York Mets.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: And that brought the Abner Doubleday myth to the surface again.
Fisher: Which is just that a myth.
Marjorie: It is a myth indeed, and my nephew Nathan Adams Downey who was about 12 years old at the time and he wrote a long letter to the New York Times. Completely dispelling the Doubleday myth and quoting from this essay my grandfather had written, and God bless the New York Times they published the entire letter.
Fisher: And that kind of brought Doc into the public knowledge at that point.
Marjorie: Yes, that was probably the real kickoff. But then it sort of lay dormant at least as far as we were concerned. Then in the late 90’s I went to a vintage baseball game here in Connecticut, with my late mother and my nephew Nate and I met these two lovely baseball historians and they knew all about Doc Adams. I was astonished!
Fisher: I’ll bet. [Laughs]
Marjorie: I didn’t know anybody would know the name. I didn’t think anybody would care.
Fisher: Yeah, I understand. Baseball people though are unique as I know you know now.
Marjorie: Oh, I do!
Fisher: Yeah.
Marjorie: They’re wonderful.
Fisher: Yes.
Marjorie: Particularly those who play vintage baseball.
Fisher: Well because they understand the ancient history, the 150 years ago thing. Well, let’s talk really quickly here about the Hall of Fame thing. Doc was up for a Hall of Fame vote, just a month or so ago if that.
Marjorie: A week and a half.
Fisher: He needed 12 votes out of 16 and he wound up with 10, which to me as a baseball fan was very disappointing because I feel he should be in the Hall of Fame.
Marjorie: Well thank you, Scott, so do I. So do a lot of other people but it was his first time on the ballot and he got more votes than anybody.
Fisher: Yes, that’s right.
Marjorie: So I’m very grateful, but believe me in 2018 when this committee meets again, he’s going to get more than the 12!
Fisher: Well Doc Adams was born in 1814, it is now 201 years later and you are still out there talking about your ancestor. He’s changed your life. Talk a little about that.
Marjorie: It’s all I’ve done over the last four years, is study Doc Adams. I’m very blessed that my great aunt, Doc’s eldest daughter, transcribed all the letters written to Doc by his father. We have very little in what Doc wrote in response, almost nothing. But you can learn a lot about the man by the letters that his own father wrote him.
Fisher: Right. And that has been a wonderful resource for understanding the man… learning what he was about even though I have almost nothing written by him.
Fisher: Yes.
Marjorie: I’ve spent the last four years reading and re-reading those letters.
Fisher: And promoting Doc for the Hall of Fame.
Marjorie: And promoting Doc any chance I get.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Marjorie: And I’m positively shameless about it.
Fisher: And you know what Marjorie? God bless you. I’m sure he’s up there looking down on you and saying, “Go get them Marjorie!”
Marjorie: Well he was not a man to promote himself. But it’s the right thing to do because Doc should be in the Hall of Fame.
Fisher: He absolutely should be. What a delight it is to chat with you and I wish we had more time to get into this not only for the family history side of it, but you know I’m a big baseball nut myself.
Marjorie: We have a website, DocAdamsBaseball.org
Fisher: And baseball aficionados can check that out, and Marjorie, good luck with your quest to get him into the Hall and we’re going to be keeping an eye on this in the years ahead.
Marjorie: Thank you Scott, so much. I appreciate it!
Fisher: And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, he is our Preservation Authority. Talking about how you can preserve your precious heirlooms on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. And every week, we do a segment on preservation, so you can figure out how you can preserve your old videos, your old home movies, old photographs, pretty much old anything. And so, we have a really old guy here to help us out! His name is Tom Perry with TMCPlace.com, he’s our Preservation Authority. Hi, Tom, how are you?
Tom: Hi. I was fine, but now, I don’t know!
Fisher: [Laughs] Well, we got a listener email, Tom… a little confused about some advice you gave in recent weeks, talking about MP4s and MOVs and AVIs. And he said, “I’ve got all my stuff in AVI. I want to convert it, but I don’t see any button I can push to convert it to MP4s.” What do you have to say about that?
Tom: There’s a lot of different options. If you want a free program, you can go to download.cnet.com and they have one that’s really highly rated. They’ve had over half a million downloads and it’s like five stars, so it’s really, really high rated, and it’s free.
Fisher: Wow.
Tom: So, that’s one that you can use there and it says on the website that it’s a Windows version, but generally, when there’s a Windows version, there’s also a Mac version. So you can try that. If you want to do something that’s a little bit more robust, they can give you more options. There’s another place called MOV AVI, but it’s spelled kind of weird. It’s M O V A V I.com, and they have PC versions and they have Mac versions. They’re really inexpensive. They normally list for forty dollars. However, if you use your tablet or your iPhone and go and order it that way, they do a half off special, so you can get it for like twenty bucks.
Fisher: Wow!
Tom: So, for the twenty dollars, it’s a really good program. I would suggest going to that. There are some other options that it gives to you, is you can edit all kinds of file formats. So, if you want to go the opposite, if you want to go AVIs to some other kind of form, like MOV, because you want to send something off to a family member and they want to edit it on their Mac, you can do that. One of the biggest problems when people want to turn stuff from AVIs to MOVs to MP4s and they keep going through all these changes, the quality goes down.
Fisher: Oh, okay.
Tom: So, they need to edit it this way, the quality goes down, they send it off to somebody else, and after it’s gone through so many incarnations it’s starting to look like your old VHS tapes. You make a copy send it out, Aunt Martha, she makes a copy, sends it to Uncle Ted and they get really degraded. They have a program that’s called “Super Speed Conversion” which you can get for like twenty bucks and this will allow you to do some basic editing without doing a conversion, which makes it really, really nice. So, if you want to end up with an MOV, however you want to burn it at the end, its fine but you’re not having to change between all these different formats while you’re editing. You can edit it in its existing format and then when you’re all done, say, “Okay, now I want an MOV or an AVI or an MP4.” or a whole bunch of other kinds of things. So, all you need to really worry about most of our people are, your AVIs, your MOVs and you MP4s. And like I say, things have changed so much; it used to be AVI was like saying PC. MOV was like saying Mac. MP4s was like saying, “What? What’s that?”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: But they’re all good in their own way. So, just remember, do what you want to do. Like one of the programs that I’ve talked to people about that’s a real good editing program is called Power Director. The only disadvantage is, it’s only a PC program, but it’s really, really good. It’s only fifty dollars. You can do some pretty major editing and in that you can use MOVs, AVIs, MP4s, so if you don’t have that and you do a lot of editing. I’d really suggest you get that if you’re a PC user and if you go and download Power Director, you can go to NewEgg.com or whoever you like to buy things from and just download Power Director and it’s a great program and for fifty bucks, it’s really, really inexpensive. And the thing is, whenever you get shareware programs, not always, but generally you get what you pay for. So, a lot of those programs are going to drive you nuts trying to figure them out. They don’t have tech support. So, you kind of figure out what’s more important to you, if you have all kinds of time to sit and mess around with the program, then fine, save a few bucks. If you’re really tight on time, the money’s important, but not as important as your time then get something like Power Director. Because it’s easy to use, it’s rated really well. And by the time you’re done editing, the other people on their freeware programs are still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Fisher: That makes sense. Good stuff. All right, what are we going to talk about in our next segment?
Tom: In the next segment, we’ll go over a little bit of other ideas to help you with your editing. You can get all this stuff and start putting it together.
Fisher: All right, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: We are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. All right, Tom, what have you got?
Tom: I just got a text about MP4 editing. And he talked about, “Hey, I’ve got all this video on my iPhone, on my iPad, what can I do with that?” Well, almost the same thing. That software that we were talking about in the earlier segment, which you want to go to M O V A V I.com. They have programs, also, where you can take your iPads and your iPods and take the video and edit them, put them in a cloud or whatever you want to do, which we highly recommend. Whether you use Drop box, whether you use Google, whether you use LightJar, whatever cloud you want to use, it’s a good way to store and some people have also said, “Well, I have AVIs, I have MOVs” like we talked about, “Do I need to MP4s also?” You know what, if you’re going to do a few videos, AVIs and MOVs are fine to put on the cloud, however, they’re so big, especially AVIs, AVIs are really huge. So, the nice thing about converting them to MP4s is, you’ve got them safe and secure, but they’re so small, they’re not going to fill up your cloud. So, keep the AVIs and MOVs on your hard drive, have BluRay disks, DVDs, so you always have your disk, your hard drive and at least one cloud. So, that’s the best way to do it, however, I wouldn’t be putting all your AVIs and MOVs up in the cloud because of the size, unless you have like I said, a very few of them. Do them as MP4s, because they’re really good quality. If something happens, you lose everything you can still view your MP4s and do some basic editing. So, that’s a good way to go. You need to figure out exactly what your goals are, because you’re looking at all the stuff. You might have hours and hours of Thanksgiving stuff you’ve shot, Christmas things that you’ve compiled. Maybe people sent you videos, gave you DVDs and you’ve got this two hour DVD with ten seconds on your family.
Fisher: Right and maybe an interview with grandma and grandpa.
Tom: Exactly! So, what you need to do is, sit down and look at these DVDs and the best way to do this, this is what we tell people in our store is, put them in your DVD player or your BluRay player and hit display. Because when you hit display it’s going to show you up at the top how many minutes you are into the segment, what chapters you’re at. So, what you want to do is, get a legal pad and start writing down, “Oh, here’s Aunt Martha’s interview, I want to keep this.” “Oh, here are my kids at a birthday party, I want to keep this.” Write down what parts you want and then get a good program like we’ve mentioned before and just extract these segments and make your own DVD. Keep it on your hard drive. Put it in the cloud. Don’t wait till, “Oh, I’ve got everything done. Now I’ll make disks. Now I’ll put things in the cloud.” Don’t do that, because everybody procrastinates unfortunately.
Fisher: Right and then you could lose a lot of stuff.
Tom: Exactly because you never know when you’re going to get hit by an earthquake, a tornado, or a hurricane, whatever. There’re so many options that can come out there. So, what you want to do is, every day backup, like I have a backup drive on all my computers. Every night when I’m done, I close down my computer, I unplug the hard drive and I put it in a fireproof safe. So, worst case scenario, if something happens, I’ve got my hard drives in my fireproof safe. I’ve got this stuff on my cloud. I’ve got stuff on DVDs and BluRays which I’ve sent out to family and friends. So, don’t wait till a project’s done to take care of it. Take care of it in every step that you’re going through, and don’t assume, “Oh, Aunt Martha has it, everybody else has is, I don’t need to worry about it.” Trying to get stuff from people is like trying to get your nephew to finish editing your videos for you.
Fisher: [Laughs] Right. Yes.
Tom: We have so many people come into the store who say, “Hey! My nephew has had this for almost a year now. He’s supposed to edit it for me. I don’t want to deal with that anymore, I just want to get it done and be able to enjoy it.”
Fisher: Yeah, I go through that with members of my own family.
Tom: So, just everyday as you do stuff, you know, just take a few minutes, back up to the cloud. In fact, there’s a lot of programs that you can get that will do the backup for you automatically. You walk away from your computer to go have dinner, and when you come back, it’s already backed everything up to your hard drive or to your cloud and the neat thing with these small drives, they’re so tiny. Pop several of them into a fireproof safe, something happens to your computer, you buy a new computer, you plug that in and it puts all that stuff on your brand new computer just like it was your old one, magic!
Fisher: I love it! Thanks so much, Tom.
Tom: Thank you.
Fisher: See you again next week.
Tom: Sounds good.
Fisher: Well, that is it for this week. Thanks so much to the Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell, for coming on the show this week with some of her yearend genealogy observations, great stuff as always. And to Marjorie Adams great granddaughter of Daniel “Doc” Adams, who created many of the key rules that have standardized the game of baseball and her quest to get him into the Hall of Fame. If you missed it, catch the podcast. Merry Christmas all! And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice… normal… family!