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!

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Episode 130 – “Relative Race” Is Hot New Genealogy Reality Show/ Ireland Senator Talk Irish Records for St. Patty’s Day

March 14, 2016 by Ryan B

Relative Race

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 130

Segment 1 (00:30)

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

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

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

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

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

Segment 3 Episode 130 (44:45)

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

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 123 – Salem Execution Site Part II: Professor On How Site Was Confirmed

January 25, 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, lamenting a recent study showing one in ten young college grads believe Judge Judy sits on the Supreme Court. But that’s just the beginning! Hear what else they believe. Then, David talks about how Indian burial mounds in the midwest may soon be leveled to make room for development! Hear where this could happen and who’s behind it. Plus, 28,000 New England church records from 1641 to the mid-1800s are soon to be digitized. David shares the details. Plus… got a criminal relative back there? David tells you one way you might be able to own his or her mug shot! David also has another tech tip, and the free database from NEHGS.

Then (starts at 11:39), Fisher visits with Professor Emerson Baker of Salem State University, one of a committee of seven who recently confirmed the location of the execution site of the victims of the Salem witch trials. Learn the techniques they used to survey the area and how they all settled on one particular spot now found in a lovely residential neighborhood. Also, how will this area now be treated by the town, and how and should visitors get to the site? You won’t want to miss this segment.

Stan Lindaas returns to the show next, from HeritageConsulting.com, to talk with Fisher about terms you’ll find in old records that don’t mean what you might think they mean. Fisher gets quizzed. Listen to how he does.

Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com wraps up the last two segments of the show discussing the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and what wowy new technology is going to benefit the world of family history. Tom’s got the skinny!

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

Transcript of Episode 123

Segment 1 Episode 123 (00:30)

Fisher: Hello Genies! And welcome to another spine tingling episode of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. I am excited! We’ve got some incredible guests today as usual; the first one is one of the guys we told you about last week who helped confirm the location of the execution site of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. He’s going to talk to us about how they figured this out, the lines of sight, the technology that was used, it’s fascinating stuff! You are not going to want to miss my visit with Emerson Baker of Salem State University, coming up in about eight or ten minutes. Then later in the show Stan Lindaas from HeritageConsulting.com is back. He’s going to talk about terms you are going to run across in your research that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. It’s fun stuff coming up, plus don’t forget we’ve got Roots Tech coming up just around the corner in Salt Lake City, Utah. Hope you’re going to be there, I’m going to be there, I know David Allen Lambert from the New England Historic Genealogical Society is going to be there. We hope you’ll come by and say hello, and get ready for our cruise! Our family history cruise at of Boston to Nova Scotia in September. We want to get you signed up for that, it’s on our Facebook page, all the information you need for that, right now. Let’s go to Boston and find out what’s happening with David Allen Lambert the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. Hello David!

David: Greetings from Beantown, Fish, How are you?

Fisher: You know I am doing so well, I’ve already had so many amazing discoveries this year, for instance; I just recently found out that a third cousin to my dad had married a guy named William Deegan in New York City back at the beginning of the last century. It turns out that William Deegan was “Major Deegan,” Major William Deegan. The Major Deegan Express Way, that goes past Yankee Stadium?

David: Oh my goodness!

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: Well I think as a New York baseball fan, you must appreciate that greatly.

Fisher: Yes I did appreciate that greatly. I thought that was kind of a strange find, but you know, every year has something new that’s kind of unique.

David: Just two days ago I found the adoption from my wife’s great, great grandfather from Quebec, never had found that before, and turns out they’re not French-Canadian after all.

Fisher: Whoa!

David: They’re Irish.

Fisher: Who knew! And you have been looking for what, thirty years?

David: About twenty five.

Fisher: Twenty five, not bad. That’s a great find! So this is something that’s disturbing me; There’s a story out about a study they did of college grads. Twenty five to thirty four years old, and it turns out that 10% of them believe that Judge Judy sits on the Supreme Court!

David: Oh yeah I saw the same story. I think it’s the same one that says that only 60% of the college students say that Thomas Jefferson actually was the father of the Constitution.

Fisher: No that was the Declaration.

David: And I think another statistic said something about 20% of the students couldn’t identify what the direct effect of the Emancipation Proclamation was.

Fisher: Ooh that’s a little disturbing.

David: I don’t think I have to poll the listeners, all our listeners know that that was the end of slavery.

Fisher: I know they all know that. You know this is another reason why you want to get your kids involved in family history, because once they begin to identify and understand their connection back to these times, history has a greater meaning to them, and things like this will not be lost to your kids.

David: We know. You mentioned things about getting lost, one of my first family histoire news stories for you is some sad and scary news out in Madison, Wisconsin, that all those earth and burial mounds of the Native Americans shaped like bears, deer, birds and people etc. are in jeopardy now.

Fisher: Really?

David: There’s actually a bill, Fish, that’s before the legislature, that actually may cause it to perhaps be built upon, they could be dug into, and pot hunters, which is a term we use in archaeology, I could go in there looking for burial remains and grave goods. I would hate to think that 500 years from now, the colonial graveyards of our ancestors are going to be besieged by metal detectors or pot hunters!

Fisher: Wow!

David: It’s bad.

Fisher: It’s really not only a horrible thing for those affected, obviously the Native Americans, they’re Americans! First and foremost, what are these people thinking? I mean that’s insane.

David: It is… the first Americans. Well in the idea of preservation, I am happy to announce that NEHGS in conjunction with The Congregational Library, The Archives, The Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum and the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, I received a grant of over 200, 000 dollars to help preserve and digitize 28,000 pages of church records, different diaries, and pastoral records dating from 1641 to the mid 1800’s. That’s exciting because a lot of vital records are available online, but a lot of the details of the church records of Colonial New England are not.

Fisher: Right and that really was the vital record archive of New England.

David: It absolutely was, so hopefully there are some new discoveries waiting to be found in this 28,000 pages that are being worked on right now, so that’s exciting. You know sometimes your discoveries don’t have to be in archives, they can be on eBay. We all have a black sheep in the family and myself not excluded, and it’s scary to think that I can search for a particular relative on eBay for his or her mugshot.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: I have seen countless dozens upon dozens, from 19th century mugshots right down to ones that were taken in the ‘50s and ‘60s that were basically deacquisitioned from police departments like Scranton Pennsylvania. If any of the listeners have family from there and have a black sheep in the family, go on eBay, I’ve seen dozens of pictures right now.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: In technology there’s a company called ‘Live Stream’ that’s releasing this month something called ‘Movi’ and what it will do is, it’s a camera that you can shoot from multiple angles. So say for instance you have a family reunion and you want to catch all those cousins and the kids running around or get multiple people being interviewed at the same time, this little device for about 200 dollars or less will allow you to do that. That’s brought to you by Live Stream.

Of course NEHGS every week offers a free guest user database and this is the final week of our January release for the three big databases. We offer just to become a guest user of AmericanAncestors.org and that includes Massachusetts vital records of 1841 to 1910, New Hampshire vital records to 1937 and Vermont vital records from the earliest time right through 2008. From NEHGS for our listeners and signing off from Beantown, see you in a couple of weeks at Roots Tech.

Fisher: All right. Thank you so much David! And coming up next; I’m going to talk to Professor Emerson Baker of Salem State University, about his contribution in identifying and confirming the location of the execution site of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. That’s coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 123 (25:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Emerson Baker

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

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and of course, last week, we were talking with David Allen Lambert, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society about this amazing confirmation in Salem, Massachusetts, about the location of where accused witches were actually hung, and I’m very excited to have on the line with me right now, Emerson Baker. He’s a Professor at Salem State University. He’s one of the people who was part of the team that made this confirmation. How are you, Professor?

Emerson: Good! Glad to be with you, Scott.

Fisher: I sure appreciate you coming on, and I know we have so many people who descend from some people, lots of individuals associated with the Salem Witch Trials. I know I’m one of them, David is one of them, perhaps you do too, but I run into them all the time.

People who descend from the accused, the accusers, the judges, the juries, it is just amazing how far reaching that particular incident is, and for you as a historian, this had to be quite a fun thing and exciting thing for you to be a part of. To finally confirm what has been known for some time, but you’ve actually added some new scientific leverage to it, to confirm where these people met their ends.

Emerson: I really wasn’t prepared for how powerful it would be, the reaction we got from people. That we’ve had such an overwhelming and amazing response, in particular from descendants, and yes, you’re right, I’m a descendant as well. I actually am a descendant of Roger Toothaker who died in prison. He never made it to the gallows actually. He died while awaiting trial.

Fisher: Were any men actually hung in this situation?

Emerson: Oh, yes absolutely! I believe actually like five, including of course, the most famous, Reverend George Burroughs.

Fisher: Yes.

Emerson: The ex-minister of Salem. So, in most cases of witchcraft including Salem, about eighty percent of the accused are women, so it really is kind of a female crime and Salem sticks right to that as well too, but you talked about how many descendants there are. You’re so right. I wrote a book on the Witch Trials called, ‘Storm of Witchcraft’, and in it, I talk a little bit about the witch city and the whole phenomenon and why it’s so well known today, and to me, one of the reasons I think it’s so well known, is because there are so many descendants.

Fisher: Yes.

Emerson: I mean, if you think there were more than 150 accused, more than 200 accusing them, more than 200 defending them, more than fifty judges and juries and numerous other people involved. When I give a talk, I say, ‘you know, if you don’t have any ancestors who were involved in the Salem Witch Trials, the person sitting next to you probably did’.

Fisher: Right. [Laughs]

Emerson: You know it really is our event, our tragedy, a national tragedy, not just Salem’s, because, if you think about it, you know, you multiply those people and go out nine, ten, eleven generations, and that’s a lot of descendants.

Fisher: So, as you went about this, obviously it’s been known or at least strongly suspected for a long time that this area of Proctor’s Ledge in Salem was the location. What did you have to do to confirm this conclusion from the past, and who came to that conclusion some time back?

Emerson: Right. Well, we were really working on the work of the great Salem historian of the early twentieth century, Sidney Perley who, in 1921, had written an article where he really felt that even though people had placed it, there had been a kind of a collective amnesia, I think, as they’ve forgotten where the execution site was, and Perley would read all the facts, all the documents, no direct evidence, but a lot of, just sort of hints as to where it might be, and he was pretty sure that it was Proctor’s Ledge, which is actually on the lower part of Gallows Hill, and ironically, a few years later, in 1936, the city of Salem actually purchased a small piece of land there, specifically to build a memorial, but I think at the time, there were some people that were still hesitant about…who would rather bury this then remember it.

Fisher: Wow!

Emerson: And, nothing ever happened, and people continued to believe it’s the top of Gallows Hill, it’s this location as opposed to another, and we were brought together about five years ago, a team of us, of historians and scholars, to work with the city to see if we couldn’t come up with the actual site, and that’s what we’ve been working towards since late 2010.

Fisher: Now, you were on a committee of about seven, yes?

Emerson: Yes, and that include particularly where there were other historians who were expert in the Salem Witch Trials, Marilyn Rhodes, who’s written extensively about this, several books, Benjamin Ray of the University of Virginia, myself, and the other important scholar we had working with us was my colleague in the Geology department in Salem State here, Professor Peter Sablock, who used some of his remote sensing techniques as well. So, it really was kind of a team effort, using not only the traditional histories and the documents, but some other new things that Perley couldn’t have done.

Fisher: Well, tell us about that, some of the scientific things. What could you detect using modern equipment in that area of Proctor’s Ledge?

Emerson: Well, the most important thing was the work done by View Shed analysis, GIS work, with aerial photography that was done by Benjamin Ray and his people working with him at the University of Virginia. View Shed analysis is, simply put, as you can take an aerial photograph and determine with topograph features and determine what lines of sight people have, and we were able to figure out.

We know there were several kind of distant eye witnesses to the witch executions, and knowing approximately where they were, we were able to determine through View Shed analysis what parts of Gallows Hill they could or could not see, and indeed, many people have placed the top of Gallows Hill as the location.

We didn’t like that for a lot of reasons. I could get into it if you want, but the real clencher was the fact that, from where these people were standing, they could see the lower parts of Gallows Hill around Proctor’s Ledge, but they could not see the much more distant top of Gallows Hill which really helped us pin down the location.

Fisher: So, do you think that was the one thing that really kind of, to use an expression, ‘put it over the top’?

Emerson: Yes, it did, and I also think too, frankly, you know, Marilyn and Ben and I have studied the witch trials for many, many years, and for the three of us to all look at the documents which are now available online at the University of Virginia website, and to sort of, kind of independently arrive at that, and look at Perley’s research and then compare our notes and argue it out.

That was important as well, and the other piece too that was really important of course, once we determined as a couple of years ago, we were pretty sure, frankly, as sure as we’re ever going to be, we’re never going to have that direct evidence, I don’t think, but then, the next question we knew that people would logically ask is, “Well, what happened? Where are our ancestors who were the victims? What happened to the people?” So, that’s where Peter and his Geology students came in and did what we call, ‘Geo-archaeological Remote Sensing’, Soil redistributing, and particularly ground-penetrating radar, going over the ground at Gallows Hill to see was there any evidence of human remains that could lie buried on the hillside.

Fisher: Now, Gallows Hill is obviously misnamed, because you’ve concluded that there were no gallows involved, yes?

Emerson: There were no gallows involved, exactly, and in fact, actually Peter’s research, the good news was, first off, there’s really nothing that we could find on this piece of land. No evidence of any archeological features, no physical evidence of a gallows being constructed there, and in fact, actually there’s very little dirt on Gallows Hill, no more than a foot or so, most of it if you’ve seen the pictures is, just sort of naked ledge.

Fisher: Sure.

Emerson: So, kind of a relief to us was that there really doesn’t seem to be any evidence of any human remains on the property, and once we knew that, we knew we could really, responsible announce our findings. We didn’t want anybody running to Gallows Hill with their shovels ready or anything like that.

Fisher: Oh! Oh! [Laughs] Yeah, that would be disturbing.

Emerson: This is Salem, Massachusetts, right?

Fisher: Right!

Emerson: I mean it’s a different kind of place.

Fisher: Now, this is…

Emerson: I’m sorry, I kid about that a little bit, and I just met with a lot of the local tour guides this morning, and frankly, people here want to be very respectful and are very concerned about paying proper respect and not turning this into a tourist attraction, and that’s what this is about. This is about marking a site and seeing that it’s cared for. We don’t want it lost again, but this is not another tourist dot on Salem’s map. That’s really important to all of us.

Fisher: Right, right. Now, well, first of all, it’s a residential neighborhood now, is it not?

Emerson: Yes now see that is part of it. It’s not just being respectful to the deceased or not. We want to get just a simple monument there but it’s also literally in people’s back yard. It’s a postage stamp of a lot that’s probably no more than about a quarter of an acre, and you’re quite literally looking into about the back doors and windows of about a half-dozen homes.

Fisher: How do they feel about this?

Emerson: You know, it’s interesting, some of them have known about it for a long time and have been very protective and are pleased about that. One of the fellows who’s family have lived there for a couple of generations told me about proudly about how the day this big black limo pulled up and he was looking in the back window and see, Yoko Ono and then he said, “And that Beatle!”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Emerson: So, you know, they take great pride in that and they’ve kind of kept it safe, because they kind of knew that was the location, but some of the neighbors are genuinely concerned. It’s a narrow one way street, they’re really concerned about people parking there or coming in and disturbing the site.

So, we’re trying to be respectful of them, and the city is working carefully with the neighbors and any other interested parties, including the descendants in planning for the site, seeing whatever kind of light and fencing we might need to safeguard the neighbors, to keep the parcel protected, but at the same time, to be able to plan a site that’s respectful of the horrible even that happened here, and those brave nineteen people who refused to change their beliefs. It would have been so easy to say they were a witch and would have lived, because only the people who plead ‘not guilty’ were executed, but they refused to do that. So, this really is an important memorial to those people who were really Christian murders.

Fisher: Do you see perhaps a ceremony that’s done on a semi-annual or annual-basis, so that you’re not spreading it out throughout the course of the entire year?

Emerson: Well, the good news is, ever since the 300^th anniversary, we already have a really wonderful memorial in town. It’s administered by the Salem Award Foundation, who actually every year gives a major award for human rights activism in honor of the victims of 1692.

So, we’re trying to encourage people to go to that really wonderful memorial on a regular basis, but having said that, if people come – especially cross country – from Salem, we know that they may want to visit the site. I’ve already had a lot of descendents contact me that want to be there for when this site is dedicated. Also, too, in Salem, you may know this, there’s a substantial Wiccan community, and in the past, every year on Halloween, which is Samhain their high holy day of the fall solstice? They do have a ceremony up on Gallows Hill as well. They may well want to try to move that to this location, but again, it’s a very small spot, so it isn’t the kind of place where you can bring a couple of hundred people together very easily. So, it’s needs to be accessible to some degree and these are the kinds of things that we’re still working out, and again, only after we announce this can we start talking to the community and all the stake holders and see what the proper long term plan for this site is.

Fisher: How many people living in Salem right now are descended from people involved in this incident?

Emerson: Well, let me put it this way, I can’t give a lecture without a couple of people at the end coming up. I, in my book, I estimate, I’ll bet you there’s at least 100 million people who are around the world who had some relative involved in the Salem Witch Trials. I really don’t think if your family’s been in New England more than a generation or two, it’s hard not to have some connection to it, it really is.

Fisher: He’s Professor Emerson Baker, he’s the author of ‘A Storm of Witchcraft’ The Salem Witch Trials and The American Experience. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this amazing experiment that has resulted in a confirmation of a very unique place in American history.

Emerson: Oh you’re welcome, Scott! We’ll keep you informed as the process moves forward.

Fisher: Sounds great! And coming up next, our good friend, Stan Lindaas from HeritageConsulting.com, talking about terms you’re going to run across in your research that don’t mean what you think! It’s going to be a lot of fun, in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 123 (44:45)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Stan Lindaas

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

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth; always good to have my friend Stan Lindaas back in the house, from HeritageConsulting.com

Hi Stan, how are you?

Stan: I’m just great. Thanks, Fish, for having me.

Fisher: Now, I’m very excited about this topic because I think for anybody that’s ever researched, we’ve all run into something one time or another, whether we were a baby genealogist or an expert. When you look at a word in your research and you go ‘What does that mean?’

Stan: Exactly.

Fisher: Or I must be misinterpreting what I’m seeing here.

Stan: Right.

Fisher: And you’ve got a whole host of these things to share and this is really good stuff.

Stan: We’ve got a bunch to share, but I loved the way you phrased it when you were introducing me, was that you know, you asked the question ‘What does this mean?’ so many people don’t bother to ask the question. They just blow over the word and keep moving.

Fisher: Or they assume they know what it means and they interpret it as such.

Stan: Yeah, or as I did when I was a child learning to read, if I didn’t understand the word instead of going to the dictionary, I just kept going hoping I’d get it out of the context.

Fisher: Right. Sure.

Stan: But there are so many different aspects to this where you see something and you don’t understand it. That can affect and help you if you go and investigate, they can help you in your research. There are colloquialisms that are so geographically specific that can put you, let’s say into Southern Indiana.

Fisher: Right.

Stan: If you read something in a family history, if you don’t recognize or you think it is a rather quaint phrase that you’ve just read.

Fisher: Quaint?

Stan: Quaint. From Northern Illinois, it’s quaint.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Stan: There’s an example!

Fisher: What is that?

Stan: It’s something unique and interesting.

Fisher: Right.

Stan: If you heard that word you probably could assume that the individual came from Northern Illinois.

Fisher: Here’s one, when I lived in Ohio for a time, in the Cincinnati area, if people didn’t understand you they’d say ‘Please?’

Stan: Yeah.

Fisher: Now you don’t hear that anywhere else in America.

Stan: Yeah.

Fisher: But you did there. I remember when I first heard it, it’s like ‘Please what?’

Stan: ‘What did I do?’ or ‘What do you want me to do?’

Fisher: Yes exactly!

Stan: Well it can go so far as to delineate the difference between a soldier in the Union army or in the Confederate army.

Fisher: Hmm.

Stan: Names of battles.

Fisher: Right. That’s right.

Stan: I’ll give you the reason then I’ll give you a list of different battles and you’ll be able to more clearly figure out what side of the war these people were on.

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: The Union people ostensibly were more refined and citified, and so they were not so enamored with buildings and villages and structures, man made things, and so they named the battles after creeks, hills, topographical formations. The Confederacy on the other hand were rural country boys and supposedly they were more inclined and enarmored with the cities and towns. So they name the same battle after a town or a tavern, or a village, or a bridge, something of that nature.

Fisher: Interesting.

Stan: So I’m going to give you some names of battles and you try to tell me which side it came from.

Fisher: I’m ready, yes.

Stan: Um, Manassas.

Fisher: That was Bull Run I know that, so Manassas must have been the South.

Stan: Yes.

Fisher: But the North won, so we know it today as Bull Run, yes?

Stan: Yes, right. ‘Leesburg’

Fisher: Leesburg must have been the Southern term for something. Was that ‘Gettysburg’?

Stan: Uh, no. That was Balls Bluff.

Fisher: Balls Bluff, never heard of that one.

Stan: Yeah, that’s the Union term.

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: Guess who won?

Fisher: [Laughs]

Stan: Yeah, ‘Logan’s Crossroads’

Fisher: Uh, that would probably be the Union’s version of it.

Stan: Correct. The Confederate version is ‘Mill Springs’

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: ‘Elkhorn Tavern’

Fisher: That’s the Union.

Stan: Nope. That’s the Confederacy

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: ‘Pea Ridge’

Fisher: All right [Laughs]

Stan: That’s the same battle. ‘Gaines’s Mill’

Fisher: So that must be the Northern.

Stan: That’s the Confederate.

Fisher: Really?

Stan: Yup.

Fisher: Oh, because it’s a building.

Stan: It’s a building.

Fisher: I see, okay. I’m getting this.

Stan: That’s the same as ‘Chickahominy’

Fisher: Oh boy! Don’t even go there.

Stan: Yeah. We could go with the ‘Second Manassas’, can you get that one, or ‘Second Bull Run’

Fisher: ‘Second Bull Run’ right.

Stan: Yeah, um, let’s see ‘Boonesborough’

Fisher: So that’s the Southern version.

Stan: That’s the Southern version; the Northern version is ‘South Mountain.’

Fisher: I get the pattern here.

Stan: You get the pattern.

Fisher: So if you read a letter, you were to inherit a letter or find one on eBay written by a soldier, you could interpret which side they were on just by the way they refer to battles.

Stan: Yes! Precisely!

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: Another one, ‘Gone to Texas’ what’s that mean to you?

Fisher: It means I’m heading south.

Stan: That you’re heading south?

Fisher: Yeah.

Stan: During the Civil War there were two towns on either side of the Ohio River, one in Kentucky, one in Ohio, and as you might presume the one in Ohio was a Union sympathizing town and the one in Kentucky was Confederacy.

Fisher: [Laugh]

Stan: Well as the war dragged on.

Fisher: Yes.

Stan: Many of the young men who served in both the Union and the Confederacy decided that the war was not the place they wanted to be and they deserted, and so the various armies sent out agents looking for deserters and they would go to these towns and they would ask “Where is your boy?” Well, the answer was ‘He’s gone to Texas.’

Fisher: Right!

Stan: Well he hadn’t gone to Texas as you and I know it. There was an island in the middle of the Ohio between the two towns that the locals referred to as ‘Texas.’

Fisher: [Laughs]

Stan: And at one point there were 3,000 men on this island during the war.

Fisher: Wow!

Stan: And so the agents had no idea where to go, they thought they had gone to the State of Texas. We have some words. Words are really interesting and I think I referred to this in a previous episode. During the 1600’s. I was looking for and found a probate record and I was talking about a couple of women, Mary and Louise, and it said that they were gossips.

Fisher: Gossips, okay so they were talkative girls.

Stan: Talkative girls? (Buzzer sound) Wrong answer!

Fisher: Okay.

Stan: In the 1600’s a gossip meant that you were a friend of one another or a business partner.

Fisher: Did not know that.

Stan: In the 1600’s that’s a big deal for women because before discovering that’s what that meant, I just thought it was a little bit of color, that they were talkers you know.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Stan: They were the Gladys Kravitz’s of the neighborhood.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Stan: And so I could put that in, but now knowing that they could be business partners, I’m looking for records about them and I did find, and actually the word ‘gossip’ started out being used as one who was a sponsor at a baptism.

Fisher: Who knew! That’s crazy.

Stan: Yeah and you would never think of this.

Fisher: And you’ve been researching for how many decades? And this is new to you. It really kind of shows that we are all constantly learning when it comes to the research.

Stan: Yeah. Try ‘inmate’ what’s an inmate?

Fisher: An inmate to most people… see I know what this one is because I’ve run into it, but an inmate to most people means you’re locked up, you’re held against your will.

Stan: Right. Generally speaking in our day and age that’s exactly what it means.

Fisher: Right.

Stan: In the past what did it mean?

Fisher: In the past it meant that you were perhaps a patient in the hospital or an asylum, or something like that.

Stan: Uh, yes but even before that, it meant that you were likely one who was hiring a room from someone else.

Fisher: Interesting.

Stan: And it even goes further. It referred to a prostitute who frequently enters a house of ill-repute to practice her trade.

Fisher: [Laughs] That was an inmate!

Stan: Yeah that was an inmate!

Fisher: That’s a bad one to misinterpret.

Stan: Yeah you don’t want to do that.

Fisher: Yeah. Stan, so good to see you again, thank you for coming by! You’ve got a big event coming up in… when is it?

Stan: March 11^th and 12^th in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the Plaza Hotel, the Ulster Historical Foundation, from Belfast Ireland. Executive Director and Research Officer will be there teaching classes all day on the 11^th, and on the 12^th we have this British staff from the Family History Library and professional researchers who specialize in Irish research, who will help you learn how to discover where in Ireland this drunken Irishman came from!

Fisher: [Laughs] That’s good stuff! Where do they find out more about this?

Stan: HeritageJourneys.net

Fisher: All right, sounds great. Stan, good to see you buddy, thanks for coming on!

Stan: Thanks a lot Fish!

Fisher: And coming up in three minutes, we talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority. You know, every year he reports what he finds at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that applies to family history. Gets his latest report for this year coming up next on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

Segment 4 Episode 123

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth. It is time to talk preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, and Tom, you’re always up on what’s going on at the Consumer Electronics Show which just ended a few weeks ago, and did you find some things that relate to family history there?

Tom: Oh, they had a ton of stuff there that was absolutely incredible. One of the neatest things you can tie in to family history, it’s a monitor, but all it is is a sheet of glass, absolutely pure glitter glass.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: You could make a coffee table out of it, you could make a fireplace cover, in kitchens where you have the glassware, where you have your knickknacks, it looks like a regular sheet of glass, but then, when you fire it up, it becomes completely opaque and it’s 4k television!

Fisher: No kidding! Really?

Tom: It is the most absolutely incredible thing you have ever imagined. I mean, the uses for something like this is just amazing. In your kitchen, it just looks like it’s some glass in your window that goes out the back yard. You flip the switch, it goes opaque and you’re watching 4k television.

Fisher: Could you go Bluetooth with that?

Tom: Oh, I’m sure you can!

Fisher: Really!?

Tom: Oh, I don’t know why you couldn’t!

Fisher: So, you get a video from kids that are showing the grandkids, okay?

Tom: Oh, absolutely!

Fisher: Or you’ve got a video of your own kids and you want to fire it up from your phone and you could actually watch it in kitchen window while you’re doing the dishes? [Laughs]

Tom: Absolutely! Absolutely! Whether you’re doing FaceTime, whether you’re doing any of these different company things, talking to your boss, whatever, and you know, you’re just sitting there doing your own thing, and you could hook up a camera to it so it could be two-way communication.

Fisher: That’s insane!

Tom: Oh, it is, and like you say, it’s not like, oh, you’re going to be seeing things through the glass when the TV comes on. It becomes totally opaque. So, all you’re seeing is the television. So, you’re not seeing your backyard or whatever is in that window.

Fisher: But otherwise, it’s clear?

Tom: Oh, yeah!

Fisher: Nuts!

Tom: It’s just normal glass.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: There’s not like a weird thing, like a piece of polarized glass or something, it’s totally clear, which one day, I’m sure they’re somehow going to bring them into cars.

Fisher: Well, it would have to be a self-driving car, right?

Tom: Oh, exactly!

Fisher: Because you can’t be doing that.

Tom: Oh, they had those too! But I mean, like, on some of the cars, like the convertibles, you have this glass sheet that comes up between the front and the back seats, so you don’t get the wind whipping around. The guys in the back seat can be watching television behind your head.

Fisher: Yeah, maybe an Uber cab or something.

Tom: Exactly! Or limos, this would be perfect to have in limos.

Fisher: Sure! All right, what else did you see?

Tom: They have these 360 degree cameras now.

Fisher: Yes, I’ve heard about that.

Tom: It is amazing, and they’re small enough that you can put them on a drone. So, if you’re at a family reunion and you want to get some sky shots, you can do that. If you’re at the cemetery where a lot of your family is buried, you can take those up, and if you want to go and actually see a video that’s created, go to VideoMaker.com, which we talk about all the time.

If you have an old homestead that you lived on or an old home in the neighborhood, you could take these drones up with this 360 degree camera and shoot your old house, your backyard. It’s just amazing what you can do with these, and the prices have really come down a lot. When I first saw this, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh how many thousands of dollars is this going to be?’ They have some starting out as little as $400.

Fisher: No kidding!?

Tom: Absolutely incredible. In fact, there’s one that’s actually what they call a virtual reality camera, and it’s with all the whistles and bells, its $900.

Fisher: Wow!

Tom: I mean, I cannot believe the prices how these things are coming down, and one that’s about $400, it’s the re-invented Kodak. They’re the ones that make that, and it’s absolutely incredible. It’s called Pix Pro SP 360, that’s P-I-X P-R-O S-P 360, and you go to Kodak’s website, you go to VideoMakers’ website, but can you just imagine the things you can do? This is like 920 x 1080 video, so it’s good, high quality, in fact, it can be 4k capability.

For a 360 camera, it shoots at thirty frames per second, and one of the neat things about this which you can relate to, when you put it in still mode, it doesn’t just take one frame it takes several frames. So, in the instance where we transfer that old film for you that had you, your father, your uncle and your brother in the picture and you only found one where everybody was looking at the camera, this would do the same thing. So, you’re now taking the pictures saying, “Oh, Debby was looking away, Shaun was looking away.” You can see all the things together, it’s amazing, and after the break, we’ll go into some more detail on CES.

Fisher: All right, exciting stuff coming up on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 123

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we’re into our final segment, on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show, talking about preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority.

It is Fisher here, and Tom, we’ve been talking about the Consumer Electronics Show which wrapped up in Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and all the different electronic devices that could apply to family history and so far, you’ve given us a couple of amazing ones. What else do you have?

Tom: You know, it’d take us a year of shows just talking about CES to get through everything, so the best thing to do, like I say, go to magazines like VideoMaker, go to CES.com and check out some of the new technology like we were talking about in the earlier segment, about these cameras that shoot virtual reality, they shoot 360, and whenever you think of something like that, you think of something big, but it’s not, these are teeny, teeny cameras that you just hook on your drone like we said. Or you’re going to go shoot your old home that you grew up in, look what the backyard looks like now, how the house is outside. One thing that you mentioned which I’ve never thought about for family history is, look at MLS listings of your old house.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: And you’ll be able to see what they’ve changed on the inside.

Fisher: Yeah, I just did that a few weeks ago.

Tom: So, it’s absolutely incredible how you can put these things together, kind of put a timeline together, and just see, you know, what’s happened to your old place, but the Ricoh that we’re talking about is a great camera to look at, the Kodak is a good camera to look at, and like we mentioned, go to VideoMaker.com, you can see some videos that they have and the awards that they’ve won. Another thing that’s coming out, it’s not actually released yet, this is a new imager. Right now, the difference between your iPhone and a good Nikon, there’s a gap there, no question about it.

Fisher: Sure.

Tom: But there’s a new imager coming out that’s called Quantum Film. It’s going to be small, it’s going to be less expensive, but it really, really tightens the difference between what your iPhone is going to be able to do and what a good quality Nikon is going to be like.

The colors are so much better it’s going to be set for smart phones. The light performance is amazing. That’s one thing I’ve had a problem with my iPhone, is sometimes when I’m shooting video, the light doesn’t come on and so it’s going to be too dark. With this new imager, you can shoot stuff in pretty much dark without having any kind of light whatsoever.

Fisher: It corrects itself?

Tom: Oh, it does, and whether it comes out next year, two years or three years, whatever, as fast as Apple moves, I think it’s going to be pretty quick. It’s professional quality. It’s just absolutely incredible technology. The shutter’s so much faster, so you don’t get the kind of blur that you get sometimes with the other cameras.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: The image sensor that produces the color is incredible; the dynamic range that you get from your solid blacks to your pure whites is amazing. Your real blues look like blues. Your real greens look like greens, because lots of times you take a picture and it’s like, ‘Well that’s not really what that color is. I have to go into Photoshop and fix it.’ With this new image sensor, it is just incredible what it can do.

Now, moving on from that, there’s another new camera that’s out that is really, really cool and it’s perfect for family reunions, it’s called the Panasonic HCWXF991. Again, go to VideoMaker.com to get more information about it, but the neat thing about this is, it’s almost like a camera in a camera.

Fisher: How’s that work?

Tom: You have your main camera then it’s got like a secondary camera which is on a swivel. So, if you’re narrating, like through a family reunion, you turn it around on yourself. So, you’re shooting the main picture, ‘Oh, this is Aunt Margret’, and you can be shooting yourself too as the interviewer, and then, when you actually go and burn it, you can keep the picture in the picture or you can make the picture in the picture go away. So, it makes it great for doing interviews.

Fisher: Well, you could probably use this then in the editing process for cuts, yes?

Tom: Oh, absolutely! That’s what makes this so unique. The picture in the picture of course, isn’t going to be the same dynamic range as the main camera. It has a 1920 x 1080 image and its full 4k. So, get on CES’ website, get on VideoMaker’s website. If you have specific questions about any of that stuff, you can always email me at AskTom@TMCPlace.com and I’m more than happy to help you.

Fisher: All right, Tom, always good to have you on and we’ve got to catch up on more of this stuff, maybe next week?

Tom: Yeah, next week we’ll do some more CES.

Fisher: All right, thanks for coming on.

Tom: Good to be here.

Fisher: Hey, that wraps up our show for this week. Thanks once again to Professor Emerson Baker from Salem State University for coming on and talking about his role in confirming the location of the hanging site for the Salem witches, those sixteen who were accused back in 1692, plus to Stan Lindaas for coming on and sharing some terms you’ll run across in your research that you might not quite understand exactly what they mean. Yeah, languages are always changing. Take care, we’ll see you next week, and remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal, family!