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

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St patricks day

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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 18th and 19th 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 19th 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 150th 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 19th, and then it takes a few months after that to publish all the records and get them online because on September 24th 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 19th 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 19th 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 130 – “Relative Race” Is Hot New Genealogy Reality Show/ Ireland Senator Talk Irish Records for St. Patty’s Day

by

Relative Race

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Transcript of Episode 130

Segment 1 (00:30)

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Segment 3 Episode 130 (44:45)

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

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

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

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