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

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

by

Paula William Madison

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 28th 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 31st 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!

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