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

May 31, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 141

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

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

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

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

Segment 5 Episode 141 (44:20)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And we are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It’s Preservation Time. We’re talking to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. And we’ve been talking thumb drives, because let’s face it Tom, historically they’re pretty trashy storage items.
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: And now finally some people are getting around to making some real good ones, and you didn’t mention in the previous segment, how much are these new ones going to set us back?
Tom: You know, this is what’s really surprising, is that they’re so inexpensive. In our store we carry 16GB, 32GB which are awesome ones and they’re under ten bucks.
Fisher: Wow! That’s great!
Tom: Oh yeah.
Fisher: And they’ll last?
Tom: Oh yeah. In fact, like I say we have a one year warranty on them, if anything goes wrong, I don’t care what it is, send it back to us and we’ll send you a new one.
Fisher: But how long do you actually expect it to last?
Tom: You know, just like you said in the earlier segment. I’ve got one that’s hanging on my keychain that I have had for at least ten years. And every time I think “Oh this is going to be the day it goes away, this is going to be the day it goes away.” I back it up and everything and it’s still streaming along, I’ve never had a problem with it. And one thing you want to be careful with, we talked about different shapes, there’s one that’s like a credit card. The reason I would kind of say steer away from that one is because look at the credit cards in your wallet, they’re probably kind of half mooned by now.
Fisher: Right. Yes. [Laughs]
Tom: And so what’s that going to do to the circuitry?
Fisher: Yeah.
Tom: You know, a magnetic stripe isn’t as volatile as circuitry in a USB drive, so you want to be careful. And you talked about small ones. We had somebody bring in one the other day it’s about the size of your thumbnail. Not your thumb, but your thumbnail!
Fisher: Your thumbnail? Wow!
Tom: Exactly. She hands it to me and I’m sitting there waiting for her. She says, “What do you need?” I go, “Well here’s the cap, where’s the USB?” she says “That’s it!”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: There’s this little teeny cap on it, it’s a quarter of an inch. And you pop that off. I thought, “I wouldn’t have those if they were free!” How easy is that to lose or one your little kids could swallow it and there’s goes all your stuff!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: Stay away from those things! Think, “What am I going to use this for?” If it’s a onetime thing, you’re going to load something, send it off and you don’t care about it, that’s fine. But if you’re going to keep it, have something at least the size of your thumb. And make sure you don’t ever leave it in your pocket. We’ve had people send them through the washing machine and sometimes we’ve been able to recover them, sometimes we haven’t. That’s why I really, really like these new neoprene wrist kinds, they’re east to keep track of. If you’re out in the rain, it’s not going to ruin them. They’re just a great way to go. And they’re under ten dollars, so it’s absolutely amazing with them.
Fisher: Now, they’ll last longer if you don’t use them a lot, right? So if you wanted to store them, say you wanted to store some MP4s or MP3s and you load them up there and just put them on a shelf somewhere, those should last for quite a while, right, that way because you’re not using them?
Tom: Oh yeah. Oh absolutely! Yeah, that’s true. The biggest thing about using them is not just the using them, it’s as you know they slide in tight and you pull it off, so they don’t fall off. And so it’s just the pushing in and pushing out, pushing in and pushing out that’s a problem. And one thing I really want to emphasize a lot is, always make sure when you put them in your computer, don’t ever pull it out without shutting down your computer or making sure you’ve released it.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And whether you’re a PC or Mac, it’s come on and told you, “Okay, it’s safe to remove it now”. If you’re not sure, if you think, “Hmm I don’t know if this is released wrong.” shut down your computer and take it off, because that’s usually when they get messed up. Because you might be all done adding stuff to it, but maybe your computer’s still accessing it, because it’s looking for information or whatever and you pull it out right in the middle of one of those times, that’s where you’re going to totally corrupt all the stuff that’s on it. So most important thing is, careful putting it in, careful removing it. But these new ones are great. The neoprenes are great, because they’re a lot more water resistant than the other kind. And they probably have a better chance of going through your washer if that does happen.
Fisher: Ohh, don’t even talk like that!
Tom: It’s scary.
Fisher: Thanks for coming on, Tom. See you next week.
Tom: See you then.
Fisher: Hey that wraps it up for this week. Thanks once again to Dr. Tom Sederberg from Brigham Young University. He’s a computer sciences professor who created a little program called “Relative Finder” years and years ago. And they’re still improving it to this day. It’s a way for you to find out who you’re related to who’s famous or who you’re related to who lives just down the street! It’s a great interview. If you missed it, catch the podcast on iTunes, iHeart Radio’s Talk Channel and ExtremeGenes.com. Hey, next week we’ll talk to a man who, as a young Cub Scout got to visit the last living Civil War soldier. Wow, what was that about?! Find out next week on the show! Thank for listening. Talk to you again next week. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 140 – Genealogy Roadshow’s Mary Tedesco on Italian Genealogy/ What Does Fisher’s DNA Match Really Mean

May 23, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic and Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. Their “Family Histoire News” starts with the story of a World War II vet in his 90s who had a reunion with a man he rescued from Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II. You’ll want to hear their story. Then it’s talk about hair… long, beautiful HAIR! It was Thomas Jefferson’s. And it has sold at auction. How many strands? What did it go for? We’ll tell you! America’s oldest veteran has turned 110. Who is he and where did he serve? Listen to the podcast. David’s Tip of the Week concerns school photographs, but wait til you hear what Fisher did with some of his father’s. And of course David shares another NEHGS Tip of the Week.

(Beginning at 11:10) Mary Tedesco of the PBS series “Genealogy Roadshow” then joins Fisher to talk about their third season! Mary will tell you about what they’re up to on the show this year, and give you a little history of how she came to be one of the hosts. She’ll also share some tips on Italian genealogy and a great story about her Italian grandmother.

(Beginning at 24:47) Next, Fisher shares a genealogy breakthrough he just had after decades of effort. It was capped off with a DNA match to a sixth great grandparent couple. But Fisher is concerned that a match from that far back is something less than a confirmation. Enter Paul Woodbury, DNA analyst from LegacyTree.com. Paul and Fisher discuss the math behind when a match is most significant and when it’s not so much. How significant is Fisher’s match? Don’t miss this segment.

Then Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority, visits talking about the importance of knowing who your end users are going to be when deciding how to digitize your materials. He’ll explain why it can affect how you choose to format your materials, and how much money it’s going to cost you!

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

Transcript of Episode 140

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 140 (00:30)

Fisher: You have found us! 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. Great guests this week! Excited to have Mary Tedesco on the show. She is one of the hosts of “Genealogy Roadshow.” And the new season has begun and we’re going to get caught up on what cities they’re visiting this year, maybe get a little hint of some of the stories that they’re going to share with us through the course of the season. Good stuff coming up in about nine minutes. And then later on in the show we’re going to have Paul Woodbury back. You may recall he’s a DNA expert and just a week ago or so I had a little breakthrough after only, oh, thirty some odd years. And as a result of that breakthrough I added the names of some ancestors to my tree and wound up with a DNA match to the ancestors that I had connected to. Now the question is… how significant is a DNA match when you get back to, say, a sixth great grandparent level? Does it really make a difference in solidifying your research? We’re going to find out about that from Paul later on in the show. But right now it’s time to head out to Boston, Massachusetts, and my good friend David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. David, how are you?

David: I am doing great! It’s a nice sunny day here in Beantown and I’d say spring has definitely finally sprung. There’s a lot of news in the world that you know kind of want to change the channel, and kind of sad and depressing but I must say that the most heart wrenching story in the longest time with a historical twist. I don’t know if you heard about Sid Shafner? He’s 94, he was part of the American army that went in and liberated about 30,000 holocaust prisoners from Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany in 1945.

Fisher: Yes.

David: Well this story is amazing! The video is online where he meets with a 90-year-old gentleman by the name of Marcel Levy. Marcel was only 17 at the time, and he embraces this American vet and tells him that he’s basically responsible for him being alive, his children, his grandchildren and great grandchildren. I’ll tell you the old saying “Bring a tear to a glass eye.” This one is definitely worth the watch.

Fisher: Yes, I agree.

David: Being a child of a World War II veteran I know the emotional attachment we have with this generation that we’re losing more and more every day. But this is just a really great story. And I want to tell you, the next time that you go out to get your hair cut save a few strands of it because it might be worth some money some day.

Fisher: What?!

David: Yeah! Well have you heard Thomas Jefferson when he passed away 14 strands of the former president’s hair were saved by the doctor and these were just sold off at auction for $7,000, which comes down to about 500 bucks per strand.

Fisher: 500 bucks a strand. You know it’s a shame too because unless they pulled it out through the roots there’s no DNA to be had from that hair as I understand it.

David: And that’s a shame because he was dead it probably wouldn’t have hurt very much.

Fisher: No! Exactly!

David: Getting back to veterans again I couldn’t let this go by without wishing a happy 110^th birthday to America’s oldest veteran, Richard Overton, who actually attributes his longevity to his chain smoking cigars.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: A splash of whiskey in his morning coffee and a steady diet of catfish, butter pecan ice cream.

Fisher: Oh!

David: I tell you, I would say that I could live off of butter pecan ice cream, catfish isn’t bad, don’t smoke cigars, not much of a drinker.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: But I tell you something’s working for him. This veteran was with the 1887 Engineer Aviation battalion in World War II. This all-black military unit started up as a 1942 and he was stationed as a corporal in Hawaii, Guam and Iwo Jima. And he was a skilled sharp shooter, so happy birthday Mr. Overton, many more!

Fisher: Wow!

David: Well you know digging into history is one of my loves. I love genealogy and I love archaeology, and I think if we dig deep enough we’ll find our ancestors one way or the other.

Fisher: It ties in!

David: It really does. And while they were building a train station extension over in Italy they found an old Roman barracks.

Fisher: Wow!

David: Right near the Coliseum, and it housed Hadrian’s Praetorian Guard, and it[s a hundred meter hallway with over 39 rooms and many of them were detailed Roman mosaic floors. And that’s amazing to think that it’s just been there all that time.

Fisher: That is just absolutely incredible.

David: Well you know speaking of things that have been there all that time. I was going through some of my late father’s belongings and I happen to cross a school photograph and Dad unfortunately wasn’t archival minded if you know what I mean.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: A piece of it has silver masking tape to hold it together.

Fisher: Ooh.

David: And this group picture is in great shape except for the picture of good old George Lambert who has a circle in pencil around his head because he wanted to mark where he was probably when he was a child. I love school pictures! It’s the only one I have of my Dad. In fact it’s the only one of two pictures I have of him as a child. You must have some of your mom and dad that you’ve come across.

Fisher: Oh well absolutely! And it’s interesting because a few weeks ago you brought up reaching out to schools to see if they had old yearbooks.

David: Correct.

Fisher: And I did this. And I actually called my Dad’s elementary school which is still an elementary school in Bogota, New Jersey. It was actually built in 1909 I think. And so I called to ask how old their pictures might be that they had or yearbooks and they say said, oh they didn’t have anything like that. I said, “Well you know I have pictures of my Dad’s classes from Bogota from the early to mid ‘20s, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade. The 3^rd grade pictures are actually marked with the names of all the classmates.” She said, “Oh! Could you scan those and send them to us?”

David: [Laughs]

Fisher: And so we did and I just heard back from them that they’re setting it up as a display at the school! So hopefully some of the descendents of some of these kids will get to see their parents in these photographs from way back 90 some odd years ago!

David: That’s really great and it just kind of leads to the Tech Tip. If you have school photographs from when you were a kid, identify the people in the picture because you never know, you could be giving a genealogical clue to somebody down the road. I mean many of the ones of me back in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, I know who they are. Will my kids know? No.

Fisher: That’s right.

David: Well at NEHGS we always have a free guest user database, this week is no exception. So on AmericanAncestors.org sign up for a free guest user subscription and you can get Caribbean, birth and baptisms from 1590 to 1928. Marriages from 1591 to 1905 and deaths and burials from 1790 to 1906. I’d say, I’d like to go there and actually do the research myself.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: But this is a nice way to actually visit the Caribbean from home.

Fisher: All right David, thanks so much. We’ll talk to you again next week!

David: Take care, my friend.

Fisher: All right and later on in the show we’re talking about DNA, the significance of DNA matches. How much do they matter when you get far back? And coming up next we talk to Mary Tedesco from Genealogy Roadshow on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, in three minutes.

Segment 2 Episode 140 (11:10)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Mary Tedesco

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth. And I’m very excited, it’s the first time I’ve gotten Mary Tedesco to come on the show. She is of course of one of the hosts of Genealogy Roadshow. And the new season is underway. It’s the third season. It’s exciting. This is a new opportunity for you!

Mary: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to be here, and on my second season of this wonderful show, Genealogy Roadshow.

Fisher: Well, for those who aren’t familiar with it, Mary, fill people in on what you do and how it works, because it’s a great program.

Mary: Great. So I’m one of the three hosts of Genealogy Roadshow, along with, of course, Kenyatta Berry and Joshua Taylor, which I’m sure that everybody knows. Well, Genealogy Roadshow basically is the acclaimed PBS TV series that features participants from around the country with unique family claims and histories. So we also get to have a lot of fun researching these, along with our research team and collaboration with our producers. It’s just a really great time. We have a great season in store for you. I know many of your viewers probably saw the episode last Tuesday we have another great one for you this week.

Fisher: Right. Now you were in Albuquerque last week, and you’re off to, what is it, Miami this week?

Mary: Sunny Miami.

Fisher: Tough work.

Mary: [Laughs]

Fisher: You know I worked in Miami at one time in my life, and it is a lovely place.

Mary: It was a fantastic place. Rich with culture. We have some great stories for this week. One of my stories… a lady came to us and she wanted to know whether she was related to Pocahontas. Just to give you an example.

Fisher: Ah! And was it a DNA thing? Or how did this work?

Mary: Well, Fish, I can’t tell you how we did it, yet.

Fisher: [Laughs] You’re holding back on me! You’re holding back on me. Come on, give me something. Throw me a bone, Mary!

Mary: Just a little bit. Well, let’s just say that other folks that may have similar claims to Pocahontas or another historical figure may be able to benefit from this in terms of research technique and other things. And is this Florida woman related to Pocahontas? Well, you’ve got to tune in on Tuesday.

Fisher: That sounds like an interesting episode. You know, that’s the thing that’s so fun about genealogy… it doesn’t matter if it’s your ancestor or not, because you can relate to the stories, and then you can learn from the research techniques to apply to your own efforts.

Mary: Exactly. As a host on the show Genealogy Roadshow, I learn a lot about new documents myself because, as genealogists we’re always learning. And we hope of course, that the folks at home can also benefit from seeing new document types or new research techniques or different ethnic groups. It really rounds us out and makes us all better genealogists, which is something that I really love about this show.

Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. And we feel that here too. A lot of people benefit from the stories of other people’s ancestors on Extreme Genes, and it’s a lot of fun. So do you actually ever get involved with DNA testing on Genealogy Roadshow?

Mary: Yes, Fish. Though some of our stories this season and past seasons do incorporate DNA into the stories and sometimes use it as a technique to solve the family mystery at hand.

Fisher: I’m really looking forward to seeing the show. What other cities are you in this year?

Mary: In this season we’re in Albuquerque of course as you saw, Miami this coming week. Houston, Boston, Providence, Los Angeles, and we have an episode, Fish, with some of our favorite stories from the past couple of seasons.

Fisher: That sounds great. You’re going to be all over the place.

Mary: Coast to coast, Fish, just like we like it.

Fisher: Let’s talk about how you got in the show, Mary. This is an unusual thing. I mean, you’re a genealogist, as are Kenyatta and Josh. What brought this whole thing together and how did you become a part of it?

Mary: It’s a great story actually. So, the first season of course, as folks know there were two hosts, Josh Taylor and Kenyatta Berry. So for the third they were looking for a third host to be part of the show. And I’m very honored and flattered of course to say that Josh and Kenyatta recommended my name to interview to be a part of the show. So basically I auditioned for producers and PBS executives, and I was invited to join the show as one of the three hosts. And not a day goes by that I don’t realize and understand what a wonderful decision that was, and I’ve never looked back. It’s been a great experience and a pleasure to be honest.

Fisher: Boy, what a great opportunity for you, that’s right. Now you’re an Italian specialist in your research. Tell us a little about that.

Mary: That’s correct. So Fish, I run a research firm called Origins Italy. Now we specialize in Italian and Italian American genealogy research. So we deal with cases like dual citizenship. Like folks needing documents or assistance getting dual citizenship.

Fisher: Sure.

Mary: And also we really include in-depth Italian American and Italian research projects. And what I mean by in-depth, Fish, is that we go fly to Italy and we get to the bottom of the story. We not only concern ourselves with names and dates, but we dig into other records like notary records, military records, etc. to really paint a full picture of your ancestors. So it’s a pretty unique approach, but we try to go so far beyond names and dates to really tell the whole story, something that I’m so excited about.

Fisher: You know that’s really true. If you don’t get the stories, then you really can’t know the ancestor, and you know, you can’t love them. That’s the bottom line, right?

Mary: Exactly.

Fisher: There’s no relationship to be had with just a name and a date. You have to dig. How long have you been doing this?

Mary: So, I first got exposed to genealogy just about ten years when a colleague loans me a login to a big name genealogy site. Now of course I’ve since gotten my own login very soon after that.

Fisher: Well, that’s good! [Laughs]

Mary: [Laughs] I need to practice by that. And then I was exposed to these early records in my research like passenger lists from my grandparents. That really inspired me, Fish, to want to know more, to explore more. And at the time, ten years ago, there weren’t a lot of resources for Italian genealogy so I was self taught. And I went out there. I went to Italy to dig up records on my ancestors, which is a great way to learn.

Fisher: Isn’t that funny how we’ll go about this work you know, which so involves helping other people how to find their roots and dig up these stories. And then, when we want to take a break, we research our own doing exactly the same thing as a respite.

Mary: Exactly. Those of us whose passion is also their profession have got to keep ourselves in check.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Mary: Because it’s really easy to just get carried away. I know you and I were talking about that on the phone recently, but when we get fixated on an ancestor, we cannot stop, you know. Us genealogists – we genealogists are up until two or three in the morning trying to track down an ancestor. Pretty normal stuff I would say. Wouldn’t you?

Fisher: Oh yeah. My wife was out of town visiting grandkids in Nebraska and we were having rain all through the weekend, so I was just – it was great, the cat was away.

Mary: Right. Right, and the mice, they danced….

Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah, it was a great time. All right, so let’s talk about some of the things you found in Italy, and what people could actually expect to find if they went over there and attempted to do some of the things you’re doing.

Mary: So, the church and the city hall are great places to delve into your Italian genealogical research first. Now with the city hall you can find birth, marriage, and death records, and also some demographic records. And you can write to the city hall from home. From Italy. You can start tonight in your pajamas which is pretty exciting!

Fisher: Nice. By the way, how far back do those births, death, and marriages typically go?

Mary: So it really depends, Fish, where your family is from in Italy. So for example, in Calabria, which is in southern Italy where my grandfather was from, civil records start from the early, early part of the 1800’s. Whereas if you’re up in Rome for example, Italian civil registration would start in 1871 when that area became part of Italy. So you have to look to history first, Fish, in order to determine where those records begin. So before civil registration, there’s also church records which could take your family back into the seventeen, sixteen, or even fifteen hundreds.

Fisher: Wow! And that’s typical?

Mary: That is pretty typical. Now, of course, there are records that are missing. That were destroyed either by natural disaster or war. But until you have that information that’s missing, you can assume it’s there and then confirm with an email or a phone call to that local repository, and I’m sure they’ll be able to stir that up for you.

Fisher: Well, and of course, anytime you take a genealogical trip you’ve got to do your homework beforehand, because your real currency on a trip is time.

Mary: Exactly.

Fisher: And you want to spend as much of it at home first getting ready and figuring out where you’re going to go and what you’re really looking for and trying to accomplish some of that before you get there. You talked a lot about some of the stories that came out of the record, what other records might yield some great fruit?

Mary: So some other records in Italy to be aware of are some notary records, which could usually be found at the Archivio di stato system. Notary records could have things like marriage contracts between a couple or land transaction, things to help you paint a picture of the socioeconomic status of your family. You can also find military records which are great. Now, Fish, on military records, Italian military records, you could find potentially a physical description of your ancestor. Including height, hair color, nose, etc; it’s a pretty fascinating thing.

Fisher: Okay, Mary, so you know that any time somebody comes on the show, they’ve got to have one killer story for us. So what’s yours?

Mary: So growing up, my beloved grandmother often spoke about her father Mario. And he was from Trentino, Alto Adige, in northern Italy. So my grandmother mentioned many, many times that her father was very handsome, very tall, over six feet. Photographs seem to confirm this, Fish. She also says that he served in World War I for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Now remember, northern Italy, this part of northern Italy was part of Austria at the time. So I said, I’m a genealogist, I need to go and prove this. I need to see how tall Nono Mario actually was.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Mary: So I tracked down my great grandfather’s military records from Innsbruck, Austria and discovered that he was, how tall? How tall? Just 5.5, Fish!

Fisher: 5.5! Well no wonder he survived. Nobody is going to hit that little guy.

Mary: Exactly. Exactly! So I brought this information home, I reported it to my family members, and my grandmother in her classic Italian accent, “Oh really? He seemed a lot taller to me!” [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] I love it!

Mary: You know, I still have an aunt, Fish, that doesn’t believe this. You know and I’ve shown her the original records and she says well it might be wrong, you know. Such is the power of family law.

Fisher: Right. Such is the power of family law. Yeah, that can’t be right, you know, because my aunt told me! Oh my goodness. Well, Mary Tedesco, it’s been a delight having you on, and I’m excited about the new season of Genealogy Roadshow. It’s on PBS Tuesday night, eight, seven central, right?

Mary: Correct.

Fisher: And I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with this time.

Mary: Thank you so much, Fish, it’s been a sincere pleasure to be on.

Fisher: And coming up next, it’s a personal story about a breakthrough on one of my lines, and DNA match that may confirm it. But how reliable is that match? We’ll talk to DNA expert Paul Woodbury next, on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 140 (24:50)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Paul Woodbury

Fisher: In the course of your research, you have had a DNA match, how significant is that really? Hi, it’s Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. And I just had a breakthrough a couple of weeks ago. My wife was out of town. I stayed up late just researching in my underwear till the middle of the night on a sixth great grandparent. Somebody I’d had a long struggle with. She had married her husband in Vermont in 1765. And the question was where did she come from? Whose family did she belong to? She died at age seventy seven in 1816, late 1816, pretty much placing her directly into 1739 as a birthday. Well, there was only one person named Olive Hill born in 1739 in that area. And she was born to Asa Hill and his wife Sarah, in Sherborn, Massachusetts. Way to the east, the eastern side of Massachusetts, 160 miles away from Pownal, Vermont, where my Olive Hill married her husband Josiah Noble. So I had a real difficult time saying, “Well this must be the same person. Because how do you get them in the same neighborhood at least to get married?” Well a little traditional research yielded that Asa started moving west. He fought in the French and Indian war. He was wounded. He escaped from a fort. I mean all kinds of great military stories going on there. And as a result, he was awarded the land grant for 200 acres in what they now call “The Berkshires,” Washington, Massachusetts. And that actually took him and placed him and his family halfway between Olive Hill’s husband where he was from in Southwick, Massachusetts and Pownal, Vermont. She was now just thirty miles away. And so it seemed to me pretty obvious when you look at the population charts from back around 1739 when she was born, there were only 900,000 people in the entire country at that time, which is roughly the population of Delaware today. So I put this father and mother combination onto the chart as parents of Olive Hill, and some grandparents and the like, just to see what happens with DNA matches. And wouldn’t you know it a few days later, in came a DNA match for a seventh cousin under “Asa Hill!” The father, Asa, and mother Sarah. And so the question came up, “Well, how significant is this in proving that this is the correct relationship?” So that’s why I wanted to get my good friend Paul Woodbury on. He’s a DNA analyst for LegacyTree.com. Hi Paul, how are you?

Paul: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Fisher: I was going through all the math here over the weekend. Spent a lot of time mapping out how this works. And I guess it’s kind of interesting when it comes to DNA matches. When we start out, the first four, five generations, there aren’t that many couples. For instance my second greats… we all have eight second great grandparent couples, right?

Paul: Exactly.

Fisher: And I placed mine at the average time of birth, somewhere around 1815. So roughly I’m thinking, okay, nine million people in the country at that time. But some of my couples may not have been born within the country, right? And of course of the nine million people in America in 1815, only some of them lived in the area that my people were from. So bottom line, though if you had a DNA match for one of your eight second great grandparent couples, that’s pretty significant because it’s a very small number of couples out of a very, very large population. As you go back of course, we see this thing double every generation until you get to what I’ve been talking about, 128 couples at the sixth great grandparent level. So the odds of actually finding a match get better and better the further you go back, except that we all don’t inherit the same DNA from the same ancestors. And some ancestors, we don’t get any DNA at all, right?

Paul: Exactly.

Fisher: So the question is… how significant is this DNA match that I found in confirming the paper research that I’ve done?

Paul: Well, I think the key in this is that you are incorporating this DNA match as part of your traditional genealogical research. That is, you’re using it to confirm information that you’ve been able to ascertain through your own traditional research. It’s important that as we’re evaluating some of these more distant cousins and some of these more distant matches that we need to evaluate their entire family trees for other possible origins of that shared DNA. Another element that you mentioned briefly is that eventually there will be a point in our own family trees where we will not have inherited significant amounts of DNA from many of our own ancestors.

Fisher: Right.

Paul: And we kind of call it the difference between genetic trees vs. genealogical trees. And at the point of around seven to eight generations is where your ancestors begin to fall off of your genetic tree. Around 10 generations you’re only going to inherit significant portions of your DNA from about half of your ancestors. So it’s important as you’re evaluating some of these more distant matches that you also make sure that you have genetic matches for the intervening generations.

Fisher: I guess the idea is… what you’re saying is… it helps to prove that there is some DNA flowing from that far back, right, because we don’t obtain DNA from everybody?

Paul: Yeah. And DNA is not going to skip generations.

Fisher: Right. [Laughs] Good point. So it’s amazing, though when you crunch the numbers on this… I mean, what the population of our country was back in the day. Like in 1650, we had all of 50,000 people here. That’s about the population of today’s Northern Mariana Islands.

Paul: Yeah.

Fisher: In 1740, we had what is today the population of Delaware. And in 1770 just before the Revolution, 2.1 million, which is today’s population of New Mexico, so in a really small population but they’re spread out. So we’re not even dealing with populations that large. And then of course, many of the people in the population of that time were children or single individuals or even couples that didn’t have children, right?

Paul: Exactly. And so because of that, we really want to make sure that we analyze all of the entire tree for each match to make sure that they don’t have other lines of their ancestry from the same small pockets of populations. So that we can lend greater credence to the fact that this common ancestral couple that we have identified for this distant cousin is most likely the common source of that shared DNA.

Fisher: Right. Only in the most recent generations going back to, say second, maybe third great grandparents, are those DNA matches exceptionally significant, yes?

Paul: Yes.

Fisher: When you go back beyond that, then it gets more and more challenging to really place significance on it.

Paul: Yeah. And part of the challenge of that is, that with the closer generations we have distinct levels of DNA sharing that we expect for different levels of relationship. But once you get back to the level of fourth cousin to fifth cousin, sixth, seventh, eighth cousin… you know, an eighth cousin may have exactly the same chance of sharing and given amount of DNA as a fourth cousin. And so it’s a little bit harder to say, “Yes, this is the common ancestral couple that gave us this DNA.”

Fisher: Yeah, it’s fascinating to try to put this all together and figure out, “Okay, here’s a person who shares some DNA with me to some level. And we share this ancestor on this chart, but is that really important?” Great insight as always, and always great to have you on the show!

Paul: And let me add before we go that these genetic cousins that are more distant can be significant for your research. But it may be necessary to identify additional cousins that are also shared in common that also have the same segments of DNA that you share in common. And if you don’t have those, then it could be a good idea to begin searching out additional descendants of that ancestral couple to see how they fit into the known network of genetic cousins that you’ve already established.

Fisher: He’s DNA analyst Paul Woodbury, from LegacyTree.com. Thanks, great advice, Paul.

Paul: Thank you.

Fisher: You’ve got to love the science of family history these days. Love that DNA.

All right, coming up for you next, of course preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, he’s our Preservation Authority. And we’re going to talk about the importance of knowing who your end users are going to be when you decide how you want to digitize your materials. It’s going to save you a lot of money, so listen up. It’s coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 140 (37:10)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It’s Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and it is Preservation Time. Tom Perry, our Preservation Authority, is in the house. And Tom, we were just talking off the air here a few moments ago about people who come into your store and they don’t really know the end game of what they’re trying to do in terms of digitizing. And I’m sure this happens in places all over the country, and they wind up buying a Cadillac when really all they need is a Mini Cooper.

Tom: Oh that is so true! I mean it’s like buying a car, a lot of times when you go to buy a car they say, “How much do you have to spend?” not “What are your needs?” And we’re just the opposite of that. We want to find out what somebody’s needs are, and whether you send stuff to us, bring it in to us or use one of your local players. You need to be careful because some people will charge you as much as they can get away with, and there are a lot of real good honest people out there that will do what’s right. But you want to make sure what, like you used the word “endgame,” is going to be. And that’s a perfect word. What do you ultimately want to do with all your slides, your photos, your old reel to reel audio, your film/ video all these kind of things? What do you want to do with them? Let me give you an example. We had a gentleman come in the other day that had probably about two or three dozen VHS tapes and he wanted them all on BluRay. BluRay is a little bit more expensive to do than DVD and MP4s and so we tried talking him out of it saying, “Hey, you know we’re happy to do BluRays for you if that’s what you want, however DVDs are going to be just as good.” Because when you’re working with something that’s already electronic like a video tape or an audio tape, whether you go to BluRay or whether you go to MP4s or DVD whatever, it’s not going to change the content. The only reason you go to a BluRay is because you want to go to BluRay, there’s no reason for it. If you go with DVD you accomplish several things. It’s going to cost you less, they’re going to be done faster they’re going to be more compatible with friends and neighbors, and relatives that you’re going to send them off to. And you’re not gaining anything at all. Some people say, “BluRays have the ability to play better.” That’s true. However, if you have a BluRay player and you play a DVD in it most BluRay players will up-convert your videos anyway. So if you have, whether it’s an old Disney DVD, whether it’s a VHS that you’ve turned into a DVD, if you play it in a BluRay player it’s going to actually look better than if you played it in your old DVD player just by the up-conversion that it does for you naturally. So I mean, if somebody says, “No, I want BluRay, period.” That’s fine. However, we want to educate people, let them know, “You might not need BluRay.” So if your only interest is to get your VHS or whatever, (I’m just using VHS as a generic term almost), to get your items preserved. If you’re just going to want to email them to people you’re not going to make a whole bunch of copies, then I’d suggest you go to MP3s or MP4s, because they’re small enough. But they’re really good quality that you can actually post them up on your Facebook page, you can put them in Dropbox or whatever kind of cloud device you want to use and get people to link to it. You can actually email them, they’re small enough and then they have access to them immediately. They don’t have to wait for the disk. Some people you know actually want to have a physical disk and that’s fine. A lot of the older generation they want to have that physical disk they don’t understand, “When I download this to you know, my thumb drive, and I plug my thumb drive into my TV.” They don’t understand that. But if everybody in your family understands technology, just go with MP3s or MP4s and it’s always nice to have a backup as a CD or a DVD because as we say on almost every show, we always recommend you have everything, all your memories backed up on a disk, whether it’s DVD or CD or an MDisk or BluRay, you have it on your hard drive and one or two Clouds. Whether you use Google Cloud, whether you use LightJar, whether you use Dropbox, it doesn’t matter; you want to get up in at least one Cloud and possibly two. And if you don’t have a ton of stuff you can usually get the free ones that’s good you know, for so many like maybe a terabyte or such. And if you have a whole bunch, it’s not that much more expensive. I mean, we use tons and tons of that and we pay $100 a month for you know, a lot, a lot of stuff, and after the break we’ll go in and talk a little bit more about how you can best determine what you need.

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

Segment 5 Episode 140 (44:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back! Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, we’re doing preservation here with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Tom, we’ve just been talking about the challenge of knowing the end use of what you’re doing as you digitize. And how to save money and how to get the most bang for your buck with what you’re trying to do. How do people determine what their end use it?

Tom: The best thing is to listen to our shows and especially since they’re searchable now with the PDFs. You can go and type in a topic and possibly find one of our episodes where we have addressed something. Another way to do it is even if you want to stay local that’s fine, we’re here to help you in any way we can. Just send your question to AskTom@TMCPlace.com and say, “This is what I have, this is what my end use is. What should I do?” And we’ll let you know. And if you want to take it to a local place you know that’s great. We actually want people to support their local people but if you want to send it to us we’re happy to work with you as well. So basically let’s talk about what we call “Boxes” whether you’re talking about MP3s, MP4s, DVDs, CDs, BluRay, MDisk, BluRay… all these different things. Look at them as different size of luggage or boxes because they all pretty much can do the same thing. For instance a thumb drive doesn’t care what kind of data you put onto it.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: You can put audio, you can put video, you can put actually video games whatever you want to put on it. So you need to understand what you want. The majority of time when you want audio, like old reel to reel tapes or cassette tapes or dictaphone whatever you have, we usually transfer those to CDs and MP3s because a CD you have that physical thing you can save and put away. You’ve got your MP3s you can put on your iPhone, your Android, whatever you want. If you have video then we suggest MP4 and DVD so again, you’ve got the physical disk to hold.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: But then you also have an MP4 that’s on a flash-drive, you can email them, you can distribute them anyway you want real easy. And then the next step up you’re looking at what we’ve mentioned DVDs and CDs you can put audio on a DVD, you can video on a CD you just limited with the size of the box. So most people when they’re say DVD they thinking video, when you’re saying CD you’re thinking audio.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: So when we’re doing slides and photo we usually do those as JPEGs or TIFFs and so we can put them on a CD, we can put them on a thumb drive, and we can put them on a DVD, and the only thing that determines what we put on them is how much stuff you have.

Fisher: Sure.

Tom: You know like if you’ve got a two thousand square foot house, you know a hundred square foot carpet isn’t going to fill your house. If you have a two hundred square foot house, a thousand feet of carpet is overkill. You need to know what you need. You don’t need a DVD with four pictures on it because the problem is you’re not filling the whole disk and you say, “Well so what? They’re not that much more expensive.” However, if someone you’re going with only has access to a CD reader they’re not going to be able to play your DVD, so you want to check on that. And then BluRays are awesome! They’re a good way to store your stuff, you can get almost twice as much as on a DVD plus there are several sizes of BluRays. You can get ones that are two and a half terabytes; you can get all different sizes. So you figure out “What my needs are.” Don’t buy the dump truck if all you need is a Ram pickup.

Fisher: So not to confuse people through when you talked earlier about, if you don’t need a BluRay don’t pay $5 extra for it. That’s because it serves a different purpose.

Tom: Exactly! The only time you absolutely positively want to go with BluRay is if you’re using something optical, like we talked earlier about magnetic VHS tapes there’s no difference. If it’s magnetic DVD 9 out of 10 times it’s going to be fine for you. And then they also have BluRay MDisks now.

Fisher: I still think that’s the best way to describe all these storage devices Tom, like little boxes or big boxes. Thanks so much for coming on!

Tom: Good to have been here.

Fisher: I cannot believe we are done for another week! Thanks once again to Mary Tedesco for the PBS series Genealogy Roadshow. They’re back for a third season right now, you can catch it Tuesday nights. Check your local listings for times. And by the way if you wanted to catch some of the things Mary had to say about Italian research, make sure you check out the podcast through iTunes and iHeartRadio and ExtremeGenes.com. Thanks also to Paul Woodbury, the DNA expert from LegacyTree.com, for coming on and talking about the significance of DNA matches for ancestors further back than two hundred years. You’ll love to hear what he has to say. Don’t forget to “Like” us on Facebook. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 136 – Sam Roukin, “Simcoe” of TURN: Washington’s Spies Talks Revolutionary War and Playing A Historic Figure

April 25, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with Family Histoire News talking about the upcoming season of Genealogy Roadshow. He discloses which cities the Roadshow team will visit this year. He then talks about the amazing discovery of the remains of a Roman villa underneath a barn in England. Hear how it was discovered and what is happening to the site now. Fisher then shares the sad tale of the 1838 sale of over 230 African slaves by Jesuit priests in Washington DC. Here why they were sold, and which well known university exists today because its debts were paid by the sale. Also hear about why major efforts are being made to find their descendants.

In segment two (11:09), Fisher visits with actor Sam Roukin who plays Captain John Graves Simcoe in the AMC series “TURN: Washington’s Spies” talks about his development of this despicable character, based on a real historic figure. Sam also talks about his immersion in the history of the Revolution.

In segment three (24:47), Fisher continues his conversation with Sam Roukin. Sam talks about what responsibility he feels to the real man and how he squares the character he portrays with the man who did some very good things after the Revolution. Sam also reveals that, despite being very British and portraying a brutal British officer in the Revolution, he is likely to do something in the not so distant future that will please many Americans.

Tom Perry then returns, the Preservation Authority, to talk about some special programs he is analyzing for personal use in editing video and digitized home movies. Some of the things these programs can do could only have been done in Hollywood just a few years ago!

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

TRANSCRIPT of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Radio Show

Host Scott Fisher

Segment 1 Episode 136

Fisher: Hey, welcome to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. I am your congenial host, your Radio Roots Sleuth, Fisher, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. Do you have an interest in the American Revolution? Do you have ancestors who fought against or maybe on behalf of the King? Well, this week, Season 3 of AMC’s ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies’, about the Culper Spy Ring begins. The first episode is Monday night at ten o clock Eastern Time. This season takes us to the key moment of the Revolution, ‘The Betrayal of Benedict Arnold” and I’ve identified five ancestors who were actively involved in the Revolution in the northeast, and thirteen on my wife’s side, all from the south, mostly Virginia. Well, the guy who plays the very warped, the very evil, Captain John Graves Simcoe, an actor named Samuel Roukin, is going to join us in the show later today and we’re going to talk to him for two segments about what he’s learned about the history of the Revolution. The character that he plays, who was an actual person, in fact, he became the Lieutenant Governor of a province in Canada and freed slaves in 1791. So I’m very excited for you to meet Sam Roukin who plays John Graves Simcoe, on Turn, a little bit later on on the show. And of course Tom Perry is going to tell you about video editing and a video editing program that you can use for your old home movies and videos. It’s cheap, like free, and you’d be able to do things at home that only Hollywood people could do just a few years ago. That’s later in the show. Well, as you know, David Allen Lambert, the chief genealogist, for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org usually joins us on the show. He’s in London these days. We had him on via Skype the last couple of weeks. Well, this week he went to an area where we found out the wifi was just a little bit weak and so it just isn’t going to happen today, so I’m going to have to carry the whole thing myself. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. So we start our Family Histoire News with this:

Genealogy Road Show is returning to PBS, with its premiere for this season happening on Tuesday, May 17^th, and the cities they’re going to be visiting this year include: Albuquerque, Miami, Houston, Boston, Providence and Los Angeles. They kind of picked these places because they feel its representative of the cultural crossroads for diversity and industry and history. Deep pools of riveting stories, so it’s going to be interesting to see what Kenyatta Berry, Josh Taylor and Mary Tedesco come up with this season. Remember again, PBS, May 17^th. Well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if David Lambert wasn’t aware of this, there’s a rug designer over in England in Wiltshire named Luke Erwin, and he and his family wanted to convert a barn on their new property that they just bought. They wanted to convert it into a ping pong room. So they brought in the electricians to do this underground cable and put the barn in lights. Well, when the workmen began drilling into the ground, they hit this layer of mosaic tile, yeah, intricate red, white and blue. Well, this guy Erwin he knew the significance of this. He said that no one since the Romans had laid mosaics in Britain to use as house floors. So they were able to actually put an end to the work of the workmen before they actually started busting it up. Erwin called in archaeologists and they ran tests, and they found that this mosaic went back from sometime between 175 and 220 AD, and it was remodeled over several times since. But they determined it’s a Roman Villa courtyard! So there’s an actual artist rendition now to see what this thing looked like 1800 years ago. It’s from Smithsonian Magazine. You can see the link at ExtremeGenes.com. Well, here’s a story that’s been making a lot of news this week:

Georgetown University was founded centuries ago by Jesuit Catholic priests. Well, it turns out that in 1838 the university which was then a college, got into some financial problems. Well, they owned slaves, a lot of them, over 230 of them, and they decided the only way that they were going to get out of debt was to sell the slaves to the market in New Orleans. This is all very well documented and found within the archives of what is currently George Town University. Well the story is beginning to gain lots more traction as people have come to understand who these people were. There were families, there were babies, women, men, old, young, the ship’s manifest as they were sent off to New Orleans, really tell a story of great hardship. There’s one account from a Jesuit priest associated with this school, who didn’t approve of all this, as saying, that one woman was actually on the dock begging and wondering and asking what she had done to deserve this. Well, the university had obtained a lot of money as the result and wound up paying off their debts. Today, Georgetown University still exists because of the money they raised by selling their slaves down to New Orleans. Now the Catholic overseers of the school in Rome at the time disapproved of this move. It was made contrary to their orders. So now an effort is underway to identify the descendants of these 230 some odd slaves that were sold by Georgetown University and try to determine is there some way to make reparations for what was done to their people, and next week we’re going to talk to one of those descendants about this experience. She happens to be the president of a genealogical society in Washington. It’s going to be fascinating to hear what she has to say about her viewpoint on this incredible story from the 19^th century. You can read about it in the New York Times and find the link at ExtremeGenes.com. Well, good news from AmericanAncestors.org and the New England Historic Genealogical Society, their long running published quarterly The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, with over four hundred million searchable names, is now complete and in digital format in their databases. So you can log in now with your NEHGS membership or guest account and check out all this incredible information that’s waiting for you now. And just a reminder, all of our shows are now entirely searchable. Yeah, we transcribe them. So if you want to remember some of the things we talk about or find something further about it once you’ve heard it, just go to ExtremeGenes.com go to our podcast section and search the transcripts. And coming up next! We’re going to talk to the man who plays the very evil Captain John Graves Simcoe, on the AMC series ‘Turn: Washington Spies.’ The series is coming back for their third season starting Monday night at ten o clock Eastern. Samuel Roukin joins the show, coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com.

Segment 2 Episode 136

Host Scott fisher with guest Samuel Roukin

Samuel Roukin: My name is Captain John Graves Simcoe, and I’m your new commander, by orders of Major John Andre.

Fisher: And that is the voice of Sam Roukin, he plays Captain John Graves Simcoe on the AMC revolutionary series ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies’ the Culper Spy Ring. Hi, it is Fisher, and you’re with Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, and if you have followed our program for any time at all you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of this program and for some time now I’ve been working to get one of my favorite characters from the show on this show and Sam is on the line with us now. How are you Sam? Welcome to Extreme Genes!

Sam: Thank you! It’s good to be with you.

Fisher: I’m just absolutely astonished by your character, and has it changed your life a little bit? I’m sure you get an awful lot of comments because let’s face it, as you portray John Graves Simcoe, he’s bloodthirsty, he’s twisted, he’s ruthless, he has enemies on both sides, he’s fiercely loyal to the king, but he also needs love.

Sam: Yeah. He’s a complicated guy, and yeah it’s had a huge effect in my life, you know it really put me on the map here, and he’s such a divisive character and you know people have a really strong opinion about him. On the whole people are very nice. Usually the comment is that they just love to hate me, so I’m all right with that.

Fisher: [Laughs] But hey as an actor as long as they love you for anything that’s not a bad thing!

Sam: That’s true!

Fisher: And you were in ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as well. You were a snatcher in that, so obviously they have a tendency to bring you in for some, shall we say, ‘dark characters.’

Sam: Yeah. I’m going to start taking this personally. I don’t know what the problem is.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day from my perspective as long as the characters have some depth and richness to them, then I get excited about it and as far as it goes with the more nasty characters, generally they are a little more complex and usually get written in that way. So I’m cool with it really. I enjoy digging into these guys psyches and obviously I’m developing a bit of a knack for different types of characters.

Fisher: And speaking to you I’m sure a lot of listeners who are familiar with the show are noticing the same thing that I am, that you don’t speak like your character, you’re from a different part of England obviously, than Simcoe is. How do you work those accent differences?

Sam: Well you know, I mean, all of that stuff is so important like the costume and the hair and everything else. It’s the first thing we see and when he speaks it’s the first thing we hear. So I take those things really seriously. Because I think they’re a window into who the guy actually is or whoever you’re playing. So obviously basics are you know, ‘where’s this guy from? Where do we locate him in the world?’ and that’s one part of it, and then obviously my voice naturally is much deeper registered than his.

Fisher: Yeah.

Sam: And that only just came from discussions with Craig Silverstein, the show producer and when we originated the pilot, Rupert Wyatt, who directed it. We were talking about the kind of guy that this is, and I thought it would be kind of obvious to have this kind of brute which could easily have come out as, you know… they were obviously writing a villain in this character, and it would have been very easy to sort of just make him like a typically nasty piece of work.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: And I didn’t want to be typical with him because I thought there was something a little more interesting in there. So really it came about wanting him to have this kind of delicate touch and the question I asked myself was, ‘what would happen if this guy was really nice to everybody?’ So that it becomes about, you know, and then that sort of came out he had a lightness of touch in the way he spoke. So I thought it would be much more impactful if this guy is nasty because of the things he does rather than your initial impression of him, and that’s sort of how it started developing and then it just sort of took on a life of its own.

Fisher: Well let me ask you about this. One of the things I noticed in one of the early episodes is your over-pronunciation of names.

Sam: [Laughs]

Fisher: You talked about ‘Tall-madge’ and ‘Brew-ster.’ Where did that come from?

Sam: The good one is ‘Wood-hull.’

Fisher: Yes! [Laughs]

Sam: He has a love for language you know. John Simcoe, you know a lot of this is not just me having fun with it, there is some substance to it. You know John Graves Simcoe was a poet and in fact has the first recorded Valentine’s poem.

Fisher: Yes.

Sam: I was interested in his love for language. It wasn’t something I actually consciously did it just started happening you know.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: I realized that I wasn’t saying these names like everybody else and then it just kind of stuck. But you know I read ‘Wood-hull’ I didn’t read ‘Woodull’ or something, I was just saying what I saw really as a character and that’s how it came out. But yeah it does give him an individuality that hadn’t been planned for but obviously contributes to the whole thing you know, so, yeah, good observation!

Fisher: Oh, I loved it. I loved it when you came with ‘Tall-madge’ [Laughs] I thought it was great.

Sam: Yeah, ‘Tallmadge’ is a good one as well.

Fisher: Yes.

Sam: I just have to tell you, I really just was saying what I saw. I guess I was inside the guy you know and that’s how it came out.

Fisher: Well now that’s the question. Now this show is about family history and people who listen to it are also into history and my fascination with the program is the representation of how my ancestors may have lived under British occupation at that time.

Sam: Yeah.

Fisher: So there’s a tremendous realism, I mean you see the tavern wench emptying the chamber pot right outside the door of the place and then going in and serving food. [Laughs] I think, wow!

Sam: Yes. There was no health and safety department in Setauket. You know the great thing about it though is you know lots of great historical television and films that have come out, the reason why we care is because we realize, apart from knowing what our heritage is and learning how we came to be now and what came before us.

It’s also that you know, they were just like us you know, it’s a mind trick that we put the people in the past as almost like a different species and I think one of the beautiful things about portraying it in drama is that we have the opportunity to humanize history.

I think that’s a really key element to why we’re interested in it you know and when those human moments come out it’s really satisfying.

Fisher: Well I think you really hit it on the head. The fascinating thing is watching the challenges. I mean we’ve always thought in this country, of course, the Patriots are the good guys and you guys are the bad guys! And we’re seeing Abe Woodhull changing now, he’s becoming very much as blood thirsty as anybody else in this series. The evolution as he has to go through to fight to survive.

Sam: Yeah, that’s very true, and I think it’s really an indication of how war is a unique experience now and then and has a very unique effect on the people involved in it. And I think the optics in war are very different you know, and I think it has to change you, doesn’t it? You know if you’re being occupied, if you’re compelled to do something about that. I think people do things during war time that they would never have imagined doing in another environment.

So yeah it’s a really good observation and I think particularly in someone like Abe who was just a normal regular farmer doing his thing and getting on with his life to suddenly be put into this extraordinary situation and we see his change before our eyes.

I mean, I think that’s a very compelling thing. But you know equally I think all the characters go through that. You know even someone like Washington or Benedict Arnold, or any of these guys who you know, John Andre, everybody really could change.

That’s one of the great things about season three, I think, is that we’re really seeing the effects of the war on these people and how it’s changing them and changing how they go about their lives. It’s fascinating.

Fisher: We’re talking to Sam Roukin, he plays Captain John Graves Simcoe, on the AMC Revolutionary series ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies’ and Sam, I actually have an ancestor who is buried in the same church yard with Caleb Brewster, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Sam: Wow.

Fisher: Have you had the chance to go to some of these places that you’re portraying, have you been to Setauket yet?

Sam: I haven’t been to Setauket, no. I did actually… I lived in New Jersey for a while. Everywhere I would go you know I would see plaques and I started to become you know, a plaque hunter.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: And where we shoot the show in Virginia, there’s also some really key Revolutionary sites around here as well. In fact we keep coming across places where Simcoe and his troops were stationed at one point. They moved around so much, especially the Rangers. Just by accident in fact I’ve come across a lot of places. But yeah I do try to go to as many relevant sites as I can. You know I recently went to Washington’s headquarters in New Jersey, and where one of his camps was. It’s cool to kind of be standing where they stood. So yeah I have been to some. I actually haven’t been to Setauket. But funny enough we do have fans who are in Setauket, we often get messages from those guys and they’re really happy that their town is being celebrated, you know.

Fisher: Well you know the whole story was fascinating. In fact I read a book about this and then a week later I learned that your show was coming on, and I just couldn’t wait and it was very exciting. Hey, we’re going to take a break, and when we return we’re going to talk more with Sam Roukin, Captain John Graves Simcoe, from the AMC revolutionary series ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies.’ We’re going to talk about some of the real people Sam, and how those folks have affected your character and some of the other characters you work with, all right?

Sam: Sounds good, I’m looking forward to it.

Fisher: All right and before we take that break I should mention that ‘Turn Washington’s Spies’ returns for Season Three this coming Monday, April 25^th. It’s a new time slot, new day for Turn, and this season we’re going to see the actual evolution as we start moving towards Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, and it’s going to be a great season coming up on AMC 10 o clock Eastern, 9 o clock Central. Figure it out where you are. We’ll be back with our next segment with Sam Roukin from ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies’ in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Sam Roukin

Fisher: And we are back, America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, talking to Sam Roukin. He is Captain John Graves Simcoe on the AMC Revolutionary series, ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies.’ And Sam, I’ve got to tell you right now, my wife is totally creeped out by your character, and she says, “Why do you have to talk to the bad guy?” I said, “Well, because, I think they’re more interesting.” Because you try to figure out just what is it that makes these people tick. And I’m sure, as an actor, you have to kind of think that way yourself, don’t you?

Sam: I do. Your wife is a very smart lady!

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: [Laughs] I’m fascinated by human beings. I think most actors are, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re compelled to do it, you know? We’re very curious about the way people think and why people do what they do and the way that they do them. And so, it turns out that when you are dealing with, for example, sociopaths, we’re not like that in our normal lives, thankfully, so to make that journey and to go on that voyage of discovery, it’s kind of a really joyous thing for an actor. So, what, you know, we’re as compelled to access the brains of these people as the audience is hopefully to watch them, you know?

Fisher: Well, and so that brings us to the question, how much of the real John Graves Simcoe, who went on to become what, lieutenant governor, up in Canada? He was the guy who signed off on the first anti-slavery bill in 1791. I mean, he did a lot of really good things. Do you feel any obligation to him, [laughs] as you portray him?

Sam: Yeah, I think so. You know, it touches on what we talked about in the first segment when we were discussing this, which is, during war time I think people are changed, and I think they act in a way that they might not otherwise. And so, for me, you know, first of all, you know, the only evidence we have of what the man was like, his own memoires, which necessarily are favorable towards himself.

Fisher: Right.

Sam: And what he did, and the listed historical events and achievements that he was involved in. We have some, you know, we have his delicate, more literary side to go on, you know, his poetry and then we have the things he did after the war. So, that fact, you know, we have not met the man and we don’t know what he’s like, we just know the things he did in his life, which vary massively. And there’s no question that the Rangers during the war were a ruthless and very precise operation. You know, really the way to think of them is they’re like, the Special Forces…

Fisher: Yeah…

Sam: … of the army, you know? And they’re sent on very specific stealth missions and then carried them out really well and with great effect, and so, the answer to your question in a more concise way is that people are different during the war to afterwards.

Fisher: Um-hum.

Sam: As for me, you know, I can square away his behavior on the show with what he did afterwards, because I think, the more ruthless, more deadly you were during the war, the more you would want to appease that in your life afterwards. And I don’t think that we have portrayed what we do… portray a guy that is ruthless, does make impulsive, deadly decisions and that are not necessarily on the moral compass of everybody else in the world.

[Laughs] At the same time there is a soul there, you know? And there is some tenderness, and we see it comes out in various different ways and, you know, I think there is some compassion there too. It’s just, he’s a guy you don’t want to cross, because it will end very badly.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: But after the war, you know, I think it’s a different world and I think people adapt, and I think they vary experiences too and who’s to say that you couldn’t behave in an egregious manner during the war and then try to do better. Try to compensate for that. Even if he wasn’t quite as nasty as he comes across, sometimes on Turn, it’s fair to say that he didn’t do the things he did during the war after the war. We know that and so, that’s really how I personally square away with what we do on the show, you know?

Fisher: Yeah. That’s makes perfect sense and it’s interesting too, because when the show started, I was immediately going to the internet to go, ‘Okay, how much is this true? Did this happen? Did that happen?’ And I found the timelines were different. Abe Woodhull’s father was a patriot, not a loyalist, but obviously they were portraying this to show how families were divided and then, I was accepting of that. Yes, this is a historical novel brought to television. And it’s interesting to know that John Graves Simcoe actually brought the Queen’s Rangers in and beat up Abe’s dad to send Abe a message. In real life, that’s what really happened, because they had received word that Abe was a spy. A completely different scenario though.

Sam: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up, because that’s exactly the point I was making. So, you know, there is enough evidence to suggest that he did a few things that most people would say are egregious, and those are the things we know about. And you know, I also picked up on just a couple of, you know, a few things I’ve read in memoires, and I’ve read the diaries about the rangers and what have you, and a couple of things. There was a pattern that was developing, particularly in the third person with memoirs of Simcoe, which, they would arrive in a place and then they would stay in this house here and this house here.

Fisher: Right. They’d occupy.

Sam: Well, how did you get that house? Who was in it before you? And what happened to the people that were in it when you arrived? I’m sure you didn’t just say, ‘Would you mind if we stayed at home instead of you?’

Fisher: [Laughs] Right.

Sam: And so, things like that crop up, and I’m like, ‘Well, there has to be a story there that is just not being told.” And I feel like that gray area of history books is really interesting, and I think, allows for a little bit of poetic license. It doesn’t necessarily feel too farfetched, you know? So, we never know for sure, really, just what gets written down, you know? The truth changes a little bit as soon as it’s written down. So, yeah, I think there’s some leeway in that.

Fisher: And it’s written by the winners.

Sam: That’s right.

Fisher: Yeah. So, one last thing, because we’re running out of time here, Sam, but it’s interesting because… you cannot be killed! I mean, I’ve seen you get stabbed, I’ve seen you get shot, I’ve seen you get knocked out, you know, you are not allowed to die. But in the pilot of this show, you were killed, and then brought back to life. [Laughs] Talk a little about that.

Sam: Well, it was extraordinary, really. Yes, originally I auditioned for John Andre’s character and got so far down that road, and then obviously, J.J. Feild was offered the role and played it exceptionally well.

Fisher: Yes, he’s fabulous.

Sam: I’ve got so much respect for him, and so, I thought, ‘Well, okay, that job’s not happening’ and then they said, ‘We’d love you to do Simcoe. He’s kind of just in the pilot, but it’s a great part.’ And so I said yes, obviously, and then we did it and yeah, he died. He got shot as he came out in the wash, Caleb kicks him in the face, and then he goes, you know, then they torture him for a bit in their cell. But in the original pilot he shot him in the face, and that was the end of that. But AMC found the character compelling.

Fisher: Right.

Sam: And I think, you know, he also serves a really important function dramatically on the show, you know. We needed like a regular antagonist and so, Simcoe provided that quality and it was a real constant to what I brought to the character. I don’t think they quite saw it there originally, but I just kind of gave everything and you are supposed to be for longer then you’re not, but this was around… is kind of an extraordinary [Laughs] which I’m so very grateful for, you know.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: It’s a great write.

Fisher: Well, I don’t think we’d be in the third season of Turn if you were not in that role. No doubt about it.

Sam: Thank you! That’s a very nice compliment.

Fisher: Well, Sam Roukin, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for all you put into this character and bringing the Revolution to life for those of us who love it.

Let me ask you this, you said you lived in New Jersey. You’ve obviously been here for a little bit. Are you looking for dual citizenship?

Sam: Well, my wife is American, so I’m currently a permanent resident. I have a ten year green card. I’m very much, I think, I’m just about allowed to become a citizen, and I think I probably will, yes. I mean, I love America. This is my home now, so my family is here, and so, who knows? We’ll see.

Fisher: Awesome! Thank you so much. Sam Roukin from ‘Turn: Washington’s Spies’ on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

It is preservation time with my good friend, Tom Perry, from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority. How are you, Tom?

Tom: Super duper, thanks.

Fisher: I was thinking about how, over the last several months we’ve been talking periodically about a software called Cinematize that you recommend very highly, and it’s gone the way of the dinosaurs to some extent and if you can find it, great! Buy it!

It’s probably on the cheap. But now you’ve been looking for something to replace that, some new kind of software and what have you come up with?

Tom: Well, we’re working with some kind of software that we’re actually testing right now in our studio, and so far, it’s very, very promising. I don’t want to get into a lot about it until we actually get some of the bugs out of the way. But next week, we’ll be able to probably have some good information about it. We’ve been using it so far, it’s been flawless, but there’s a couple of other things I want to check. I want to check internet compatibility that will make it so you can share it with friends, it’s easy to use and if this software works out like we think, it is almost going to be the motherload of software. It’s very inexpensive. It’s under fifty dollars.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: There’s some certain software requirements, and if you have anything older than Snow Leopard, it won’t work with it. But it is amazing software; in fact, it will actually let you deal with MP3s, MP4s, outside of the Apple format.

Fisher: Wait! Wait! You are taunting us here! You’re telling us all the great things it does.

Tom: [Laughs]

Fisher: And you’re not going to tell us the name for another week or so?

Tom: Nope! It’s like the cliffhanger. At least it’s going to be this season.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: You don’t have to wait till the start of next season.

Fisher: All right. Can you tells us about another one you may have found that would be of use that you could tell us right now?

Tom: Absolutely! This is a great software, it’s called DaVinci Resolve 12, just like the famous inventor.

Fisher: Yeah, that guy, right. [Laughs]

Tom: Inventor, him and this is awesome software. I followed these guys from when they had DaVinci number 1.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: And it’s great. It’s got editing capabilities. It’s got color correction. It’s just absolutely incredible, and the neat thing about this is, they have a version right now that you can download for free. No charge.

Fisher: Hello!

Tom: Oh, it’s great! It’s just really amazing. So, people that want to kind of delve in to color correction, this is a good option to go and get, because you can play around with it. It’s non destructible.

Fisher: And we’re talking about moving pictures or we’re talking about stills or both?

Tom: This is for movies, I’m sorry. This is movie type stuff. In fact, they use this software in Hollywood for your big blockbusters, like Avatar and shows like that. So, it’s incredible software. This software’s so smart, people think, “Oh yeah, this is a high end software. I’m not into that kind of stuff. I don’t shoot in 4k.” Well, what’s neat about this software, you can set it up for different formats, whether you’re using standard definition from your old VHS tapes, whether you have one of those really cool 4k cameras, just about anything that you have, you can use it on this.

Fisher: Wow! So, this is exciting stuff.

Tom: Oh, it is. It’s great. You can do stuff, you can sync stuff. So, if you have some old movies that somebody shot in the old days, sometimes you’re shooting your 8mm camera and you have a side recorder. It’s not recording the sound on the tape, and they get out of sync.

People that do music videos, whether they’re for the family or whatever, that’s one of the biggest problems. And this has some sync capabilities that’s absolutely incredible. In the days when I used to do music videos, you had to do everything vocally.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: And you couldn’t see the vocal part. You can see picture and try to line align them up, but it’s really hard.

Fisher: The audio was a problem.

Tom: Exactly! Trying to get them to line up was really, really tough. With this, they’ve got this way you can put the time code on the clips, then you can put it together. So, like if you’re using something from an old concert or wedding, if you have two camera interviews and you want to cut from person to person. For instance, say you’re interviewing grandma and grandpa, and you want to have a separate camera on each one of them, you can do this.

And this DaVinci software will allow you to go in and sync the two together. So, you can say, ‘Okay, here’s grandma talking, I want to use this part. Here’s grandpa talking, I want to use this part. I want to dissolve from here to here.’

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: So, you’re not sitting there doing one and then going back and figure out, ‘I need to do this.’ It makes it really nice.

Fisher: All right. And this is very good, by the way, for getting younger people involved with your projects if you get a little nervous about working with software like this.

Tom: That’s what’s neat about getting the kids involved with grandma and grandpa, you can do stuff as a family

Fisher: All right. What are we going to talk about next, Tom?

Tom: Let’s talk about some color correction.

Fisher: All right, getting to it in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: Hey, it is the final segment of our show for this week, Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, and we’re talking preservation with Tom Perry, from TMCPlace.com

By the way, if you have questions for Tom, you can always send him an email at AskTom@TMCPlace.com

And Tom, we were just talking about this great new software that you’ve discovered, that you recommended moments ago, the DaVinci 12, very exciting stuff and another one you’re working on. But you were mentioning color correction and, you know, this is starting to get, I think, above a lot of people’s pay scales. [Laughs] Just to think about some of this software.

Tom: And that is so true. I mean, we can just talk about five years ago. What has happened in the last five years is incredible. Color correction in fact, even a year ago, talking to, you know, consumers who walk in our door or send us letters or send us stuff from across the country, color correction wasn’t even an option for people to do.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: It was like, “No, if you want it color corrected, we need to do it for you. It’s not very expensive; however, we need to do it.” Now with this DaVinci 12 software, the color correction option it has is absolutely incredible.

It has a dynamic track. So, when you’re actually looking at it on your computer terminal on your monitor, you can actually, physically see the sound. It’s like 3D.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: So, you can see, “Oh, this is when, you know, the refrigerator kicks in, and I need to cut it off.” So, you go in and edit that out.

Fisher: You can edit that out. [Laughs] Wow!

Tom: Exactly! And when you’re doing the color correction, it’s the same thing. Everything is in 3D. It’s non destructible, so it’s not hurting your original files. You’re actually making a new copy of it. So, it allows you to go in and do VHS tapes, do your film, your movies, just anything that you have. Whereas in the old days, if you wanted a VHS tape color corrected, you were looking at a lot of money and it wouldn’t be worth it.

Fisher: Now, speaking of home movies, those would have to be digitized first, obviously before you could use it in this way.

Tom: Exactly! Everything has to be digitized as you mentioned, whether it’s your VHS tapes, your video H, your mini DVs, your super 8, regular 8, all of these have to be digitized first, into, we used to always go to hard drives, but now, we’re using MP4s a lot, because they’re convenient. We can get it to the customer faster.

Whether you’re in Dothan, Alabama or, you know, down the street from us, as soon as we’re done with the project, we don’t have to go and convert it to DVDs or Blue rays or AVIs or MOVs.

It’s really fast and easy to make it as an MP4, and then once it’s in MP4, we can drop it in a cloud. Whether it’s our cloud or Drop box or LightJar, whatever cloud you’re using, Google drive, any of those.

You can have it instantly, which saves you a couple of days and saves you a trip back to us and it doesn’t matter where you are.

And with this color correction, being able to go to the old VHS movies is so totally cool. Because a lot of time, when you have your old wedding movies, you might not have the first generation, and they’re kind of starting to look really, really bad.

Well, up till now what we had to do is, run it through kind of like a Procam and some different kinds of equipment, that basically, we could either correct all your stuff to make it lighter and add some certain colors in or make it darker, whatever your problem was.

However, it had to be consistent through the whole tape. So, we’d look at the first five minutes, set it up, and then run your tape.

But now, if you have dark areas, light areas, some places the color is correct, some places the color is not correct, you can go in with this Resolve 12 software and you can do it frame by frame, by section, whatever you want to do.

If you go and get fancy in it, start building certain kinds of filters that you can do and say, “Oh wow! This looks really cool here!” And run it. And then, fifteen minutes later in the tape, you’ve got the same problem again or on another tape, you’ve already made up those filters and so, you’ve got kind of these different things in your quiver, and then you just go apply them to whatever you’re working on.

Fisher: You can AskTom@TMCPlace.com Send him an email, and maybe you’ll hear your question answered on the show. Thanks for coming in, Tom.

Tom: Good to be here.

Fisher: Hey, that’s our show for this week. Thanks once again to Sam Roukin, the man who plays Captain John Graves Simcoe on “Turn: Washington’s Spies.” on AMC.

They’re returning for their third season, starting Monday night, April 25th at 10 o’clock Eastern time. One of my favorite shows, because it really portrays what life was like for our ancestors during the British occupation during the Revolutionary War. If you missed any of it, catch the podcast on iTunes, iHeartRadio’s talk channel and at ExtremeGenes.com, and of course, now we transcribe every show, so it’s entirely searchable. So, if you want to find a specific segment, go to ExtremeGenes.com, under podcasts. Take care, talk to you next week, and remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

February 15, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 126

Segment 1 Episode 126 (00:30)

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

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

Segment 3 Episode 126 (44:45)

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

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 125 – Handwriting Analysis on Ancestors’ Handwriting

February 8, 2016 by Ryan B

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Fisher and David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, open the show. They anticipate reviewing Roots Tech, the largest family history conference in the world, that is taking place over the weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. David then talks about a remarkable discovery of remains under a bus station in Harlem, New York! Just whose remains have been discovered and what is their history in New York? David will tell you. David then talks about another discovery in Yorkshire, England involving Roman gladiators. He’ll share the incredible numbers and what has been learned from these recently found remains. Black History Month is in full swing, too, and David shares a special database related to African-American ancestral information from NEHGS. Fisher then fills in David on a unique app he found that allows any face to be placed over yours in photos or videos. You can even put your ancestor’s face over yours and then tell that person’s story! Hear what that app is. David also shares news about an exciting new audio app coming from MyHeritage.com.

Fisher then visits, for two segments, with Nancy Douglas, a handwriting analyst with WriteMeaning.com. Nancy explains the various regions of handwriting and what they mean in learning about someone’s personality, and how she got started in this field. In the second segment, Nancy then reveals information on several of Fisher’s ancestors based solely on their handwriting samples.

Then Tom Perry talks preservation, and how to know about the formats of your current media, and how you can convert them for long term preservation.

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

Transcript of Episode 125

Segment 1 Episode 125 (00:30)
Fisher: And, Welcome to another edition of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com!
It is Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out, and this of course is our Special Roots Tech Edition! It’s going on while Roots Tech is happening, and if you’re not familiar with that, Roots Tech happens to be the largest family history conference in the world! Something like twenty five thousand people converging on the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City Utah, right now.
If you’re listening to this, no matter where you are, you can follow along and hear some of the talks, see some of the classes by going to RootsTech.org, they’ve got streaming video going on there all the time, so check that out, and then next week we’re going to tell you about some of the things we’ve learned, new technology, some of the things happening in some of the classes some of the exciting directions that family history is going in.
But right now in the studio with me, my good friend from Boston, Massachusetts, the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, David Allen Lambert.
How are you David? Good to have you!
David: I’m doing great! Well we’re going to have lots to talk about next week with Roots Tech, but I have some other exciting news for our listeners with Family Histoire News.
Fisher: All right! Where do we start?
David: Well, we’re digging deep right into the old bus station at 126 Street, in Harlem.
Fisher: Well that’s right in the heart of Harlem, isn’t it?
David: It really is.
Fisher: Wow!
David: They found over a 140 bones from an Old Dutch Cemetery, but this isn’t Dutch settlers, these are African-Americans that were part of the settlement. Probably some of them actually would have been slaves and these are from the 17th and 18th century, and with DNA and all this they found it in this decommissioned bus station that they had speculation there was a cemetery under there and started digging in.
Fisher: Voila.
David: And Voila!
Fisher: Wow!
David: There seems to be a lot of that because going across the pond over to Driffield Terrace, Yorkshire, England, they have now been analyzing over 80 skeletons of Romans that they have unearthed a few years back.
Fisher: I saw the digital pictures of this and they have each individual Roman skeleton laid out on a table, and you can’t describe it as anything less than creepy.
David: It is creepy. But the results are going to be very exciting. Using the inner ear bone to extract the DNA information and it’s really interesting. You’d think they’re all from Rome, not really. Their descendents are going to be surprised; they’re going to find that they have some descendents that match with people that lived in Wales, and also surprisingly enough one of the skeletons matches with someone from Palestine or the Saudi Arabia area because obviously the Roman Empire stretched all over the place.
The injuries are interesting. It looks like somebody was mauled by a bear or something like that. And the interesting thing is a lot of them were decapitated. Now was this…
Fisher: I don’t know what that means.
David: I don’t either.
Fisher: They say, they’re all under 45 years old and they’re very strong men, and they were Gladiators is what they are determining with these guys and we’re talking going back now 1800 years, we’re talking about 200 years after Christ. Unbelievable!
David: It is. And you know with everybody out there that’s had their 23 chromosomes done and their DNA work, who knows they may have dug up great, great, great, great, great, great, great Grandpa.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: Well you know we have exciting news in Boston to announce. It’s Black History month for the month of February, and we are always giving out a guest user database at AmericanAncestors.org and the one I want to talk about is the one that we have commemorating Black History month. So if you go onto our site, you can start as a guest user on AmericanAncestors.org and you can find rich content of an African-American study. We’ve gathered up databases that reflect African-American research and whether you’re of an African-American descent or you are a historian and journal and curious to what we have, take a peek.
I tell you, we get some interesting emails but the other day I got a video sent to me from President Nixon, how did you do that Fish?
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: That was kind of scary and creepy but I enjoyed it.
Fisher: [Laughs] All right for anybody listening who maybe doesn’t follow us on the Facebook page, there is a new app out and I didn’t even mention it in the page. I didn’t want to spoil it, but I guess I need to let the cat out of the bag. It’s something called ‘Face Swap Live’ its 99 cents you download it on your phone. And you can take anybody’s face and it can be put on yours.
So you know in my case because I do a lot of character voices and impressions and all that. I’d find famous people and I’d put their face on mine with this app and record something. In this case I recorded a thing as Nixon, and sent it on to David but it’s unbelievable. It’s better than a mask it looks like that person is still with us
David: Well you know for genealogists that like to really dig deep into their ancestry and get to know their ancestor, well guess what? Now you can become your ancestor.
Fisher: [Laughs] its true!
David: Get a great photo of Grandpa or great, great Grandpa and scan it and put it right into your phone and with this app all of a sudden voila! You are now talking to your ancestor or as your ancestor or something like that.
Fisher: Well, I was trying to figure out what the application would be for family history with this thing because first of all it’s so much fun you know for parties or just among friends.
David: Yup.
Fisher: It will also swap faces, so if you get two of you in a picture it will swap your face with somebody else’s face and you’ll be on each other’s heads it’s crazy. But when you do this other stuff you can actually record yourself using the face of your ancestor, for that ancestor to tell their own story. Now how cool and bizarre is that? [Laughs]
David: It really is and I can tell you that I’m going to really scare some of my family members in the next coming weeks with this app. When they have visits from people like former co-workers that they didn’t want to hear from.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: Or better yet, I have some co-workers back in Boston that might get some interesting messages sent from themselves. Stay tuned!
Fisher: Yes! Those things can happen and again the name of the app is ‘Face Swap Live’ it’s just 99 cents, you just download it onto your phone and it’s right there it’s very easy to use just play with it a little bit and you’ll get the hang of it very quickly. You can download pictures, you can take pictures to use, they have a little supply for you to play with to start with but you can do anything. In fact, I did a thing with the Captain of the Titanic and did an interview with him.
David: It looked a little frosty.
Fisher: [Laughs] it did, he looked very cold.
David: Well, I’ll tell you tech tips are wonderful and next week with everything with Roots Tech, you’re going to hear lots of them. One of the apps that I’m going to be talking about will obviously be the exciting new one by ‘My Heritage’ their audio app that’s coming out. It’s going to be really a neat way of saving your family stories with your genealogy program.
Fisher: Yeah that’s a great way to go anytime you can add audio and video it really brings it alive especially when you can preserve a voice.
David: Exactly. Or preserve a video of someone who really isn’t on a video because the camera wasn’t invented yet Fish.
Fisher: [Laughs] But I love the idea that even if you just have nice photographs you can run the audio over those and mix those together to create a nice presentation.
David: Wonderful stuff, and let me mention that I’m going to be reporting live for your listeners from Birmingham, England at ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ live in England, coming up in April.
Fisher: Oh that’s going to be fun!
David: It will. It will be nice to go across the pond where my grandfather was from there so I’ve got some genealogy to do as well. NEHGS is doing a tour of London afterwards so I’m sneaking in to do “Who Do You Think You Are’ a little early with a couple of our staff and we can’t wait, and we can’t wait to meet all the people that are attending and get some stories from the floor of the conference live for our listeners.
Fisher: Oh it’s going to be a lot of fun! All right David, I am very excited today because I have shared with our guest Nancy Douglas, the Hand Writing Analyst, hand writing samples of some of my ancestors to see what she can tell me about their personalities and what they might have been going through actually at the time that they wrote these samples. How cool is this, huh?
David: Sounds exciting.
Fisher: Yes! So we’re going to do two full segments with her today. We’re going to talk about how she can actually help you know the personality of your ancestors through their hand writing and then and then another segment talking about my particular people. I haven’t told her anything about them, then I will share what I know about them with her and see how much of these stories match up.
That’s going to be coming up in about three minutes, so stay close on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 2 Episode 125 (25:20)

Fisher: And, you have found us! America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
My name is Fisher, the Radio roots Sleuth, and I’m very excited to have on Nancy Douglas. Now Nancy has a website called WriteMeaning.com, which has to do with analyzing the hand writing of your ancestors, and I’m sure there are other uses for this as well Nancy, but I’m certain that’s one of the emphasises that you like to place on what you do.
Nancy: Yes. That’s correct Scott.
Fisher: Now, how long ago did you start this whole thing?
Nancy: I started this when I moved to Utah, from 2007 and I moved in across the street from a woman whose best friend was a handwriting analyst, and I’ve always had a fascination with handwriting ever since I was little. I remember people by their handwriting and this girl had a series of courses that she offered and I took those classes and then I apprenticed with her for 4 or 5 years.
Fisher: Wow!
Nancy: Through that process I realized it could be one aspect of the services that I provide would be to provide personality profiles for people who happen to have ancestral writing. So it’s been something that has been very well received and successful.
Fisher: Now, you left Utah, for California some time back and you set up business there. What kind of applications have you applied other than the family history side of it?
Nancy: It’s for living people. Just general personality profile, personality insight. From a work perspective I offer employment screening for people who are looking for employees with certain personality traits. I can help them screen the people who have applied for those positions and get people into positions who most closely fit the profile of who they’re looking for. That’s been very successful as well. It’s an excellent way to make sure that people get fit into the correct position and it reduces employee turnover. I can also do team building, something similar to the ‘Myers-Brigg Type Indicator’ but using handwriting, where handwriting will reveal to your co-workers more about who you are and the ways that you can work together when you have this personality profile.
Fisher: Now, I was talking to a friend of mine once who was dating somebody she knew, she actually had his hand writing analyzed by somebody who actually does this work for criminal cases where they can actually determine if somebody has a past. Now, do you do things like that?
Nancy: I don’t do specifically forensic analyzing, that’s what that’s called when you do that for the court system. There certainly are many analysts who have this what they specialize in. but I do, do compatibility screening so whether it’s a business partner, if you want to make sure you’re going into business ‘will we be compatible as partners?’ or if it’s someone who you’re looking to have as a life partner. I can do compatibility screenings and talk with the people about the traits in each of their personalities that would be beneficial or not.
So in addition in this day and age of online dating and online profiles where you really don’t know somebody, it’s a good idea to get an idea of who they are and their handwriting is very revealing about that. So if you’re doing online dating and you really want to know, send me a sample of their writing and I can tell you if you if you should just run as fast as you can or if you should stick around. [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] That is amazing. Well this has been very fun to talk to you about as we set up this interview because I did send you some samples of some of my ancestors handwriting for you to take a look at, just go ahead as to which ones you think are most interesting from the top and we’ll kind of go through them.
Nancy: Okay. That will be fine, I want to get this little bit of quick background on areas that we look at with someone’s handwriting.
Fisher: Sure.
Nancy: Just so your listeners have an idea. We look at the slant of someone’s writing and that is based on what is called the upper zone letters. So in the handwriting there are three zones… the upper zone, which will be for example an ‘l’ or a ‘t,’ lower zone letters, for example ‘g’ or ‘y’ and middle zone letters, ‘i’ ‘m’ ‘n’ those types of letters.
Fisher: Sure.
Nancy: And each of those zones has something to do with your personality; so upper zone letters represent everything going on in your head:
• Your philosophies
• Your ideas
• Your creativity
• Your imagination
• And your intellect.
Middle zone letters represent those reflect:
• The day to day
• The here and now
• What’s going on in someone’s life,
And the lower zone letters represent all things physical:
• Your physical drives
• Your desires around acquisition of money
• Your sexuality
• Your desire for change
• Level of restlessness
Those types of things show up in the lower zone. So we look at that, we look at the slants like I said, we look at the baseline and we look at individual letter formation and we look at how letters are connected together. Those are just a few of the things that we look at. Those are just a few of the things we look at there are many more things but I just wanted to give a little background to your listeners on that.
So, for you and your ancestors; you sent me basically four samples of writing and the first one I think you said is your second great grandfather?
Fisher: Yeah, actually there are a couple of second greats in there.
Nancy: Okay. So this is the small sample it’s from the Bible of John Hardy.
Fisher: Okay, yes.
Nancy: And, he was a person who was very driven and that shows up in the letter ‘t.’ He was a very restless person, he liked change. He liked to do rigorous things. He had very good leadership skills. At the time of this writing he was feeling a lot of personal pressure.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: And he was feeling very squeezed with everything that he had to do in his life at that time. He was very geared towards the physical aspects of life, like I said that lower zone. His lower zone really pops out being much more emphasized than the middle zone and upper zone in his writing.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Nancy: And so, someone whose very driven by material acquisition. Wants to make sure that he’s taking care of himself and his family from a monetary sense, those types of things and that’s also where the restlessness shows up as well. The other thing that jumped up again was he was a very tenacious person and again going back to that drive. That shows up in the variety of ways that he crosses his letter ‘t.’ So that’s a little bit about that grandfather.
Fisher: All right. Let me tell you a little bit about what I know about him. He was born in the area of Nottinghamshire, England, in the early 1800’s. He was married briefly to a woman who died that young, he lost a child and then he married my great, great grandmother and they came to America. He was what they called a boot-closer and they came to New York City and settled there. And at the time that he wrote that, they had just lost a baby girl and so inscribed this Bible to his wife at that time, obviously in my mind just based on the date, to give her comfort.
Nancy: Um-hmm. Very good, one of the things, this is a photo copy of that so I couldn’t see all the levels of details but it’s interesting that he also appears a little bit tired at this time.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Nancy: The up strokes on his lower zone letters, I don’t know if you’re looking at the sample with me at the same time.
Fisher: I’m not.
Nancy: The up strokes on the lower zone letters are much lighter. The down strokes are easy to make you’re going with gravity but when you’re pushing up against that if you don’t have enough sort of vital life energy when you’re doing that it will show up as much lighter and that’s a typical sign of someone whose feeling tired at that time. So it’s an interesting reflection of what he was writing about.
Fisher: Yes. Okay great, who else do you have there?
Nancy: The next sample that you sent was also out of a Bible.
Fisher: Uh-hmm
Nancy: Family Bible of the Fishers, and you’d have to look specifically at this, the smaller writing at the bottom of this but what’s interesting to know is that this is a great example of slants. So the person who wrote the top part has a very vertical to reclined slant.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: Slants tells us about how you go about making decisions. Are you an emotional decision maker or are you a logical decision maker? People with vertical writing are very, very logical they’re what we call the ‘head over heart people.’ They’re good to have around in a time of crisis, so they don’t let emotions run away with them and they don’t crack under pressure. So who’s that writing at the top?
Fisher: That would be Robert Fisher, who was another second great grandfather and he was raised by a stepfather whose name he took. At least I believe that’s the case, I’ve never been able to prove it but there’s a lot of reason to believe that was the case, and it doesn’t appear that he had much of a relationship with him so I think he grew up being a tough guy emotionally, became very involved with the Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, founded a church there, was part of it. He wasn’t clergy but he was very involved in that and I think he was a very stern father with his children.
Nancy: Um-hmm, I can see that in here. So we do have like I said this vertical writing too interestingly reclined and when you’re writing begins to get reclined its people who withhold emotion.
Fisher: Yes.
Nancy: And so he would not have been a very warm and giving person with other people. In that sense he was very reserved, emotionally reserved.
Fisher: All right. We’re going to take a break and when we return we’re going to talk more with Nancy Douglas, the handwriting Analyst from WriteMeaning.com and she’s going to look at some of the signatures of, shall we say, one of my more colorful ancestors, when we return in five minutes on America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes, and ExtremeGenes.com

Segment 3 Episode 125 (44:45)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Nancy Douglas
Fisher: You know, a radio person once asked me if there was really enough material out there to talk about on a family history radio show every week. Well now on our third year of Extreme Genes, I think he knows the answer, and this visit with ancestral handwriting expert Nancy Douglas is a perfect example of how many different aspects there are to talk about.
So before we get back to the analysis of the writing in my 19th century Bible, let me ask you this Nancy, can you tell male from female hand writing?
Nancy: No. And that’s one of the interesting things about handwriting analysis; it’s a very neutral way to see someone because you don’t know if they’re male or female. There are masculine tendencies and traits and feminine tendencies and traits so you sort of just make a guess but really it’s just a guess.
Fisher: So my guess was that, on that Bible the top handwriting was male and the smaller hand writing at the bottom was by a female.
Nancy: It could be or not I really couldn’t tell you.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: Honestly there’s no indication. Now you’ll notice that the bottom writing slanting more to the right.
Fisher: And smaller.
Nancy: Yes it’s smaller but I wasn’t sure if there’s more information here. She or he, the writer had an area that they had to fit the writing into so I’m not sure I mean it is smaller but I don’t know if it’s an accurate reflection of the size.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: And the size of writing does absolutely say something about people as well. The interesting thing that I’ve noticed on this writing that I saw is the lower zone, the lower zone letters have what is called the ‘dumping stroke.’ What that means is people who feel extremely overwhelmed at the time of the writing and they just really need to get rid of responsibility and the writing is downhill and I think their health was not very good when they were writing this.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: Downhill writing is a sign of someone who is either extremely fatigued, not feeling well or emotionally depressed, and there’s other signs of this writing that shows there is a lightness like a lack of vitality, a lack of life vitality this time. But it’s also a person who had been balanced, very clear thinking but they were feeling overwhelmed at the time of this writing.
Fisher: Now see I believe that’s the widow of Robert Fisher, who wrote that. I don’t know for a fact because I don’t have any handwriting to compare it to but she would have written it just analyzing when the dates and when the hand changed within the Bible. There were five different people that wrote in this Bible. This was later in her life probably in her 80’s that she wrote this. Now all this seems to fit beautifully.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah and then the last sample that you gave me is a series of signatures of your great grandfather. Is that right?
Fisher: Yes. Great grandfather Andrew (Fisher) the fireman and his wife Jenny.
Nancy: Very interesting and the thing that grabbed me right away was that she signed her last name like his. In particular where the word breaks so she does ‘F’ and a break and then ‘i- s.’ Then a break, then ‘h-e-r.’ And she does that very similarly because that tells me there is a level of maybe tradition in there following her husband.
Fisher: Okay.
Nancy: She is an interesting person. Both of them had a very similar slant. Which might have made them hard to be around because their slant is what’s called ‘very inclined’ which means a high level of emotional decision making, and so people who have that kind of a slant introduce a lot more emotion into their decision making and they can tend to overreact when faced with a crisis they don’t handle that too well and I mean, he’s a fire-fighter. That’s very fascinating to me.
Fisher: Yes. There’s a lot more to him too. [Laughs] Keep going.
Nancy: Yeah. He also has these very interesting hooks on his capital letter ‘A’ and those hooks are something that shows that he was hooked on something in the past or something he couldn’t let go of, and he also has a hook on the end of his letter, on the letter ‘r’ and that hook in its best form can be someone that’s very tenacious and worst form, someone whose extremely opinionated and could be sometimes cruel and sarcastic with others. So that was very interesting to me both of those hooking. He was a very analytical person, he had a great deal of personal pride, and he could be very sensitive to criticism.
Fisher: I believe all these things, absolutely! He was into politics; he actually ran for office at one time, he did not make it. He was a merchant with his brother but he was the junior merchant between the partners, and he had…. shall we say a lot of relationships. [Laughs]
Nancy: Okay. Interesting, interesting he was definitely a talker as well. He leans on the letter ‘d’ he leaves the belly of the ‘d’ open from the stem which indicates someone who liked to talk, and in many of these samples there’s a lot of what I call ‘pressure points’ which means that he was feeling like he was under pressure when he was writing these. There’s a very sharp angular quality in his writing which can indicate him being not in particular warm and fuzzy with other people.
Fisher: I think that’s true too. He was also the head of the Veteran Fireman’s Association, for the retired guys at one point. So we see a lot of newspaper quotes from him, he was very talkative.
Nancy: Interesting. Yeah and he also was an intuitive person. The way that he breaks up his letters in his name, they’re not connected. If you go back and look you’ll see that he writes the ‘A’ and then there’s the ‘n’ and then there’s a space, then he puts the ‘drew’ together and he does the same in his last name too, and when you have those disconnects in the writing it means that you are someone who rather than being a person who has to logically step through step by step by step you’re more of an intuitive seeker, so you think about many things at one time and can’t put puzzle pieces together.
And then, in contrast to that, your great grandmother Jennie, she was a softer person, softer than him, she probably had to be a counterpoint to his sort of sharpness. She was a cultured woman, I wondered if she might have been a musician, she had a great imagination and she was much more open and friendly to other people than Andrew was.
Fisher: Yeah, one story about them got passed down in oral tradition that came through my family that one day a neighbor came to Jennie in New York City, this would have been in the 1880’s probably, and said “I saw Mr. Fisher come home in the great cab last night and assisted into the house. Was he ill?” and she said “No. He wasn’t ill. He was just dead drunk!”
Nancy: [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] so you know, I can see the softness of her just accepting the situation and I can see the hard living of this man, very interesting.
Nancy: Yeah. So that’s just a little bit about your folks, and when I do an analysis depending on how big my sample size is I should say it could take me a day’s work to actually…
Fisher: Oh I bet.
Nancy: … go through the writing and really understand. There’s a lot of variation, a lot of subtlety, it’s a science and it’s crossed referenced as a science in the Library of Congress. But there’s also a level of art to it, it’s classified under the same system as psychology is, so there’s bold aspects to that. So when I look, I almost inhabit the person and really try to get a sense of who they are and the feedback that I get from folks… nobody gives me free information because I never want that, I always get post information and its really exciting to see how stories match up and particularly if there are still ancestors who are alive who knows the person that I was analyzing. So that’s always fun to see.
Fisher: Well, all the folks you talked about lived and died in the 19th century. So it’s very fun to get that insight that you couldn’t get any other way.
Nancy: Right exactly, and the interesting thing is you can see in your own self are there personal traits that you inherited and that will show up in that person’s writing.
Fisher: Right.
Nancy: and that’s always a fun aspect of this as well.
Fisher: Well, this is great stuff Nancy, thank you so much for your time, your insight, fascinating! I know listeners are going to want to know more about this and they can go to your website WriteMeaning.com, all your contact information is right there, and by the way for people who have been listening to this segment who want to see these samples of the hand writing, I’ll have them posted on our Facebook page so you can check it out.
Nancy: Okay that’s sounds great. Well thank you Scott so much for your time! I appreciate that.
Fisher: All right, great stuff. Nancy Douglas from WriteMeaning.com, and coming up next Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority joins us to answer a couple of great listener questions about digitizing old photo albums and why a flash-drive works showing a video in a computer but not in a high def. TV, find out what Tom’s got to say about these issues coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 4 Episode 125
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And we are back! America’s Family History Show Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com
It is Fisher here the Radio Roots Sleuth. It is preservation time with our Preservation Authority Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com
Hello Tommy,
Tom: Hello, it’s wonderful to be here again.
Fisher: Yes! And we do have a question here that has been emailed to AskTom@TMCPlace.com It’s from Lisa Sorensen. It doesn’t say where she’s from but Lisa asks “I’m interested in having a very old photo album digitized, two old albums actually. Do you work with very old photos and what would the cost be to have this done?”
Tom: Oh absolutely! You bet. We do photo albums. You know photo albums are really generic it’s like saying photograph. There are different kinds of albums, I’ve seen ones with the garrets types in them, I’ve seen ones that have the old glass plates, and we’ve seen ones that are torn, that are faded, all kinds of things. It’s going to depend on what condition your photos are in, how old they are, if you want any changes with them.
For instance we had someone who brought in a photo album that we were digitizing and then they called us and said “Hey, my mother’s just passed away we need a good photo for the obituary and my favorite photo of her is the one with her and me at my wedding. However I’m in the picture too and I don’t want to be in an obituary and if I just cut myself out I’m going to have to cut off her shoulder and it’s going to look really bad. What can you do?”
So what we did, we actually had our artist go in and remove him, rebuild her shoulder and then it looked just like it was a single picture, it looked wonderful.
Fisher: Yes.
Tom: It’s just amazing what you can do with apps, what you can do with PhotoShop, and different kinds of software. So the biggest thing is to figure out exactly what you want. If you want them just digitized and you want to do all your work with them, it’s pretty inexpensive to do photos whether you have us do it or a reputable place close by, you just make sure that wherever you get it done that they do it in house.
I hear all kinds of horror stories where somebody sends them off to India or something like that to save some money, there’s no way I would do that. There’s no way, so try to find somebody local. If you are going to ship it, I always tell people make sure you double box everything and put a label on both boxes just in case the worse case happens. We’ve been doing this for over 40 years and fortunately we’ve never lost anything in any transit one way or another and you might want to go back to one of our older episodes that are available on the podcast, a free podcast where we tell you actually how to make a box, the best way to do it.
Fisher: Yes. That’s right, that’s a good point, and you know when they use the term ‘old,’ an old photo album. What does that mean? You know maybe to Lisa, old is the 1960’s.
Tom: Oh absolutely.
Fisher: To me it’s the 1920’s and maybe to somebody else it’s the 1870’s.
Tom: Oh yeah exactly! We have people call us all the time and say “Oh I’ve got this film; it’s so old can you still transfer it, it’s from the 70’s?” and it’s just like “Okay.” [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: I mean we have stuff that’s playing in our store for instance that’s back in the old black and white days, the early 1900’s where you see these 1920 Model A Fords drive past.
Fisher: Really, you actually went and digitized some of those?
Tom: Oh yeah we’ve got them playing in our store. The customer gave us permission to play them. We had people that had to want to colorize black and white, we had people that want to go and take outlaws out of their home movies. All kinds of things just like this photo album.
Fisher: Wait a minute. You can actually colorize black and white home movies?
Tom: Oh absolutely!
Fisher: Really?
Tom: Oh yeah it’s not cheap and I wouldn’t do it. I mean I’ve got some old black and whites that my dad shot and I wouldn’t want to colorize them because that changes the whole thing. Just like some of the old ‘I love Lucy’ movies I watched them when they were black and white. I don’t like seeing them in color.
Fisher: Right. No I agree with you. I don’t like it for instance when they colorize something like ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’
Tom: Exactly!
Fisher: It’s not right.
Tom: Right. Because you’ve got to understand when that show was done and they cast it and they got the costume directors etc. they knew it’s going to be in black and white so they used colors that looked good in black and white. They would complement each other not clash. When you take those and turn them into the colors that’s not what the producer had in mind, that’s not what the continuity people had in mind, and to me it’s just not comfortable.
Fisher: Right. But you can do it! I mean that’s the fun part.
Tom: Oh absolutely! We had a customer that has an ex-son-in-law, we had to edit him out of all the photo albums, we edited him out of all their movies, everything. So you see this water skiing and he was at the back of the boat so you see this water skier and just as it gets to him we’d have to cut, this time-lash thing is kind of lost. If you can imagine it we can do it.
Fisher: That’s absolutely astonishing! All right, we’ve got another question coming up, we’ll take a break. We’ll be back in three minutes with more from Tom Perry on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 125
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: You know I don’t know why Tom, we get people who write in and give us their name but not where they’re from and then other people who tell us where they’re from but not their name. [Laughs]
Tom: [Laughs] Exactly. That’s the case…
Fisher: … with this next question. Hey, it’s Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, with Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth and Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, answering questions about preservation.
This one’s from Santa Ana, California, asking about flash-drives and he says if you plug it into the back of his computer everything’s great. But if you put it into a flat-screen TV, nothing… what’s the story with that Tom?
Tom: Okay there can be several different things there. We had a customer the other day that actually stopped in our store and she said “Oh, I’ve got this flash-drive, I need these photos.” I take it and look at it, and what it is, is actually a USB adapter with a Micro SD Card into it. So she just thought it was a normal flash-drive but it’s not, it has a removable SD card in it.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: So there’s all different kinds of things out there but the way they work the normal cliché so to speak is all the same.
Fisher: Okay.
Tom: So what you need to do is know what format it is, a lot of times we ask people when they call in or write in, what format are your files? And they go “Huh?” so what you’ll want to do is take whatever kind of format you have, whether it’s a USB drive, whether it’s a disk it’s irrelevant, put it in your computer and if you’re a Windows user for like a PC, what you want to do is once you see the icon on your desktop, you double click on just the icon you don’t want to open up anything inside that.
So that will expand the window and you’ll see all your files. Then you’ll want to go to the top of your screen and tell it to sort by ‘Properties’ that will show you the file name, the file size, if it’s an MOV, if it’s a PDF, no matter what file it is, and a lot of times if you’re going to have us do work or you don’t know even what these files mean. Do a screenshot on your computer and then you can email that to us or have it in front of you when you’re talking to us.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: Okay. If it’s a MAC, you don’t have to search under properties. The same thing you put the disk in or USB drive, double click so it opens the folder and then it will automatically on a MAC give you all that stuff generally and then you’ll do the same thing “Oh I have MOV’s, I have AVI’s, I have X, Y, Z whatever they happen to be and there’s all kinds of weird things out there and if you want to research them, all you’ve got to do is the dot (.) Whatever it is type it into Google and it will tell you what it is.
If you don’t want to deal with that give us a call we’ll find out which ones can be transferred to video, what ones are executable files so they’re not really something that you’d want to watch on a DVD, they’re more of a brain to tell something else what to do.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: So once you get those to us then we can figure out “Okay, it’s this size, it’s an MP4.” So you can take normal software like ‘Power Director’ and edit your MP4 or do whatever you want to do with it. You’ll take that file and say “Okay, I’ve got this, this and this.” And I can say okay well you’ve got an MOV, your TV doesn’t play MOV’s, and most TVs only play MP4’s generally.
So the best thing to do is get out your owner’s manual if you lost it just go online, Google it and you can find your owner’s manual anyplace and find out what kinds of format it takes so when you call us you can say “Hey, my TV takes this, it takes and this, or it only plays MP4’s.” so when we transfer it for you or tell you how you can transfer it yourself, you’ll make sure you end up with the correct file that will play on your TV.
If your TV plays Mp4’s and we make you a QuickTime, you’re out of luck and vice versa.
Fisher: Yeah, not going to work too well.
Tom: Exactly. And so now be careful too, we had somebody that came in and had us make 300 flash-drives for him and we needed to find out what format you want it, people are going to be doing this, this, this and this. If you get a big enough flash-drive you can put an MOV on it, you can put an MP4 on it and you can put a QuickTime so no matter which computer or TV they have it will play on all of them.
Fisher: So you need to know some of this information before you get started.
Tom: Exactly. Just like when we teach you when you’re transferring films or videos, what is your end point?
Fisher: We’re talking fundamentals here and its great stuff. Thanks so much Tom, see you next week!
Tom: Thank you! We’ll be here.
Fisher: And that wraps up our show for this week. Thanks once again to handwriting analyst Nancy Douglas, from WriteMeaning.com, for coming on the show and talking about the personalities of my ancestors and she was able to determine it from old Bible records and I’m sure she could do some of the same for you. Hey, and don’t forget next week we’ll be talking about all that’s gone on at Roots Tech. It’s going to be a great show! Talk to you then, and remember as far as everyone knows, we are a nice, normal, family!