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

February 22, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript for Episode 127

Segment 1 Episode 127 (00:30)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, David!

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

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

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

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

David: Absolutely!

Fisher: Oh, that’s nuts.

David: He remembered his true identity.

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: That’s right. [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Really?

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

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

David: Yeah, it is the truth.

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: What!?

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

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

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

Fisher: Wow! Insane!

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

Fisher: Right.

David: Well, they did have birth records.

Fisher: In England, yep.

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

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

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

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

David: Talk to you next week.

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

Segment 2 Episode 127 (25:20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Fisher: Wow.

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Gen: Right.

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

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

Fisher: Super 8.

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

Fisher: Right. Convert it.

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Glen: Cemeteries do, do that kind of thing.

Fisher: A perpetual care fund.

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Right.

Glen: And they were founded in 1864.

Fisher: Right.

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

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

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

Fisher: Oh that kills you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Segment 3 Episode 127 (44:45)

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

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

Ann: I live in Centerville, Utah.

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Sure.

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Yep.

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

Fisher: Hello.

Ann: Thomas family cemetery

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: Yeah, that would be helpful.

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

Fisher: Uh, oh.

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

Fisher: Oh that’s crazy [laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: Oh boy.

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

Fisher: Okay.

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Oh my gosh!

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

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

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

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

Ann: That’s right!

Fisher: Thank you for coming on the show!

Ann: You’re welcome. Thank you!

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

Segment 4 Episode 127

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: Wow.

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

Fisher: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Segment 5 Episode 127

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

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

Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely.

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

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

Fisher: That’s right.

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

Fisher: Yes that’s right.

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

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

Fisher: And you got high school kids running it.

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

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

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

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

Tom: Sounds good!

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 125 – Handwriting Analysis on Ancestors’ Handwriting

February 8, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 125

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

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

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

Segment 5 Episode 125
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 122 – Collector Has Bradford Bibles From Mayflower / Collecting Ancestors Related Items

January 18, 2016 by Ryan B

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Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. They talk about the news of the discovery of the very spot in Salem, Massachusetts where the accused witches were executed in the 17th Century. Hear where you can see it! David then explains how the 5,300 year old Ice Man continues to make headlines. He apparently left a prehistoric GPS of his movements. Hear how scientists can now tell where he traveled in his life. And, the guys then talk about how the last survivor of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 has passed. Catch his survival story.

Next (starts at 11:40), Fisher talks with guest Brent Ashworth, a Provo, Utah man who collects items related to his family history. He offers great advice on how you might do the same. He also shares how he, as a Mayflower descendant, was excited to obtain one of the two Bibles carried by Gov. William Bradford to the New World on the Mayflower! (Are you kidding me?!)

(25:16) Then, Fisher visits with Ken Krogue, founder of InsideSales.com, who will be a keynote speaker during the Innovator Summit on the first day of the Roots Tech Family History Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 3. Ken offers sound advice on helping seniors get comfortable with technology to advance your family history efforts.

In the final segments, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, returns with thoughts on how to get the most out of the Innovator Summit, whether you’re there in person or following the events on line.

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

Transcript for Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 122

Fisher: Hello Genies! And welcome to another spine tingling episode Extreme Genes, Family History Radio, America’s Family History Show.

I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And we are in a countdown right now to Roots Tech, which is the largest family history convention in the world. It’s coming up in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 3^rd through 6^th. We are going to be there and it’s going to be so much fun!

In fact, one of my guests today that we’re going to be talking to later in the show is a keynote speaker at the Innovative Summit, which is the first day, Wednesday February 3^rd, talking about how to get your seniors comfortable with dealing with Facebook and other digital materials so that they can further your family history experience. So it’s going to be very valuable to hear what Ken Krogue has to say later in the show.

Earlier than that in about 8- 10 minutes we’re going to be talking to Brent Ashworth, he lives in Provo, Utah, and he happens to have the Bible of Governor William Bradford, of the Pilgrims. Yes, it was brought across on the Mayflower! If you’re a descendent of Bradford’s as many people are, or you’re a descendent of any of the Mayflower people, you’re going to want to hear what Brent Ashworth has to say about how he obtained it and what it means to him. Also, he talks about how to collect your ancestors, which is a great way to go.

But right now let’s head out to Boston, and talk to my good friend the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, David Allen Lambert, of course you’ve got AmericanAncestors.org as well. How are things in Beantown, David?

David: Well we’ve got little bit of snow and winter’s here but Beantown is doing pretty well. How are things out your way?

Fisher: All right. Looking good, and you know we’ve got so much going on right now, we’ve got our cruise coming up in September, our family history cruise. It’s going to be out of Boston, going to Nova Scotia, and of course we’re going to be lecturing on there, talking about the history of the area, the Revolution, the patriots, the loyalists, you descend from both as I recall right?

David: Oh, I came on both sides of the battlefield that’s for sure. [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs] It’s going to be a lot of fun. Find out more about this of course on our Facebook page or ExtremeGenes.com, what kind of stories do you have to us for family histoire news for today, my friend?

David: Well, nearly 325 years ago the hysteria of the witch trial gripped Massachusetts, in the New England area and it took that long for them to finally pinpoint where Gallows Hill is.

Fisher: Really?

David: Yeah! Some exciting news out of Salem, there’s a project called ‘The Gallows Hill Project’ and seven scholars spent the past five years using maps, and research and ground penetrating radar and over a thousand documents where the execution of the Salem witches occurred, and they now know where it is. Proctors Ledge is conveniently located near a Walgreens.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So if you need to get film when you’re going to go photograph your selfie at Gallows Hill you can go around the corner.

Fisher: Right.

David: The thing that identified it was a crevasse essentially in the glacial rock formation that basically is where they buried the witchcraft victims and it’s hard to know what lies in the ground but I’m sure archaeologists are going to tear into it as soon as the ground isn’t frozen up here, to see what might be there.

Fisher: Wow!

David: So that’s exciting news.

Fisher: Oh it is. You know, so many people have ties to the Salem Witch trials. I run into them all the time, “Can we go there? What’s there to see?” You have ties to it, my wife has ties to it, I have ties to it, and I’m sure many, many people listening right now do, whether they know it or not.

David: You know, I have ancestors on both sides, I have accusers, I have an accused and I also have an ancestor whose brother was a judge.

Fisher: Wow!

David: And one of the people at RootsTech, one of the keynotes, Doris Kearns Goodwin, I did her genealogy a couple of years ago and sure enough, she has two people including my ancestor Mary Bradbury who was accused of being a witch as well as Roger Toothaker, who unfortunately died in prison after being accused of being a witch. So that’s exciting and I’m wondering when she is going to have some curiosity to go up to Salem to see the site as well.

Fisher: That’s going to be fun.

David: You know this time of the year people get the stomach bug and they’re not feeling quite well, so it’s interesting to know how long lasting that will be. I talked about doing diaries but the iceman who dates back to 5,300 years ago, found back in the early 2000’s they’ve dissected his stomach and done the genealogy, if you will…

Fisher: Oh boy.

David: … of the stomach bug by the parasites that are in his stomach and they can trace human migration based upon this.

Fisher: [Laughs] So they know where he lived and where he moved.

David: Exactly. They don’t have his mailing address yet.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: [Laughs] But it’s interesting to think what you carry with you. If you become an archaeological treasure some day it might tell your descendents what you had for lunch or what ails you. It’s really fascinating to know that this man had so many problems with him; he had gum disease, heart disease, gall bladder stones, lime disease and now including parasites. But because he was frozen they’re using the stomach bug to trace ancient human migration.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

David: Shocking news is, we lost somebody from a time that you wouldn’t even think would be anybody. An infant by the name of Bill Del Monte, 110 years ago as an infant, escaped with his family on a buckboard wagon, out of the burning streets of San Francisco, has just died. 110 years old Bill is the last survivor of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Fisher: That is just crazy. My grandfather was in that as well, he was on the Oakland side of things and then went into San Francisco to help with the recovery efforts, and it’s just amazing to think “Wait a minute there was a guy just of a week ago who was still living from that.” Incredible!

David: It really is amazing. Well I can tell you about some genealogy open source software you might be interested in. Recently I read on OpenSource.com a great little piece on three source genealogy tools for mapping your family tree. Essentially with open source you can manipulate the software and make it work for you in other than just a regular package software piece.

There are three of them available, one of them is called ‘HuMo-gen’, another one is called ‘Gramps’ and the third one is called ‘PHP Ged View and Webtrees’ and I’ll have all these hyperlinks available on the Facebook page for Extreme Genes, so check that out.

And of course talking about technology AmericanAncestors again is pushing your New Year’s resolution by helping you do genealogy, so try out our Massachusetts vital records, New Hampshire vital records and Vermont vital record databases I spoke about last week. All you have to simply do is go to AmericanAncestors.org become a guest user and check it out.

Fisher: All right David, take care, thanks for coming on! Coming up next; we’re going to talk to a man who somehow obtained the Bible of Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower. We’ll talk about his adventure in obtaining it, and how he collects his family history.

We’ll talk to Brent Ashworth, from Provo, Utah, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Brent Ashworth

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth.

Always excited to meet my guests and introduce them to you, and this is a man I became acquainted with several years ago, who is a world class collector, and many of the things that he collects has to do, not only with his own family but with many others, Brent Ashworth is on the line with me from Provo, Utah right now.

Hi Brent! How are you? Welcome to the show.

Brent: How you doing Scott?

Fisher: Just great, and I’m excited to hear some of the things you’ve got because I’ve never ever really gotten totally under the hood with everything that you have, especially the things relating to families. Now one of the things I know you’re into, your family has a lot of Boy Scouts in them, right? All of them were Eagle Scouts. Your grandfather, your father, yourself, your kids, tell us about that collection.

Brent: My grandfather, Paul Ashworth, was actually too old to be a scout, but he really wanted to be on a scout member committee about scouting in 1913, and received a Silver Beaver Award in 1947. So he was an early scouter, but more a leader. My father was a first Boy Scout in his troop to receive an Eagle. I received mine when I was thirteen, it was when John F. Kennedy was president back in 1962, and all seven of my sons are Eagle Scouts. We actually opened a Boy Scout museum in 2000. We named it after the oldest living Boy Scout who was living in Arizona at the time and was on the late show with David Letterman, wearing his Scout uniform.

Fisher: How old?

Brent: We opened it on his 102^nd birthday.

Fisher: [Laughs] So what do you have in this Boy Scout collection?

Brent: Well, we’ve got thousands of things actually. I probably have enough material to open a couple of Boy Scout museums. I’ve inherited some things from family such as the first US Jamboree. My grandfather had a set of the newspapers on the issue back in 1937.

I’ve got the journal of the very first Scout Master in Utah. The diary starts in the 1920s and runs up through 1935 when the first Boy Scout jamboree in the United States was to be held at the mall in Washington D.C.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: One of the neat things about it is, one of the pages he put a sticker from the jamboree that was never held. So it’s kind of a rare piece.

Fisher: Oh, fun [laughs].

Brent: They held it two years later in 1937 in the mall. I have a book signed by several of the local leaders that went back to that jamboree and took troops and so on with them.

Fisher: So it has particular meaning to you because of the Boy Scout connection that runs through how many generations, four right?

Brent: That’s right, all our family history.

Fisher: Or is it five at this point? Your kids are having kids.

Brent: We don’t have an Eagle Scout grandson yet, but he is fourteen and I think he is on his way.

Fisher: Pretty darn close. Now you have a Bible, a couple of Bibles in your collection that I’m aware of. One in particular that I think could be of interest to many people listening because he has millions of descendants in this country and that’s William Bradford, the Governor amongst the Pilgrims at Plymouth. You have the Bible that he brought across the ocean on the Mayflower.

Brent: Well, I have one of two, there’s one in Pilgrim Hall, which is his Geneva Bible, and I have his Calvin Bible which he brought. I have an ancestor that came over on the Mayflower too, John Oldham. I’ve always been interested in the Mayflower so this Bible came up for sale, oh, it’s been fifteen or twenty years ago at the Christie’s Auction House in New York.

Fisher: Wow!

Brent: In fact, it was a frontispiece of their catalogue, and I didn’t think I stood a chance at getting it. The history of this book pretty ironclad because, Bradford actually listed the books he brought over in his will which we still have.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: And that was published in Calvin on the Gospel as it was called, it’s a New Testament. Calvin and the notes are interspersed with the New Testament. I know the history of this book too. It was printed in Leiden, Holland, and that’s where they were, the Separatists, you know, the Pilgrims.

Fisher: Right. Are his family names in there?

Brent: No, he signed the book on the title page and then he signed it partly on the board. Back then the boards of the book were wooden, you know, they were boards.

Fisher: Right, yeah.

Brent: And so when I first got it, I got it at this auction, I was really shocked. It had been on display I found out at the New York Public Library in 1920. They did a big 300th anniversary for the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 at New York Public Library in 1920.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: Amongst the items that they had on display that they knew they could document was this New Testament that belonged to Bradford. The book itself has a history that we know a little beyond Bradford. One of the Separatists that was there, a friend of his, Jessie DeForest, actually owned this book originally. It was published there in Leiden, probably at a Pilgrim craft by some Dutch. It was published in 1602 and has Leiden on it, and it was all in Dutch and Jessie DeForest was going to bring it over but he was on another boat.

Fisher: The Speedwell.

Brent: The Speedwell that didn’t speed so well, you know.

Fisher: Right [laughs]

Brent: They had a leak back there.

Fisher: Yeah it leaked well [laughs]

Brent: Yeah [laughs] It leaked well, and they didn’t have a lot of places for these folks aboard the Mayflower, they tried to take a few, but can you imagine, the Mayflower ended up with 102 people on board crammed on a deck. The ship was shorter in length than my home.

Fisher: Right, yeah, I mean it’s not the Marriott!

Brent: No, it was not [laughs]

Fisher: What did that feel like for you the first time you held it?

Brent: Well, I was thrilled. I was just ecstatic when I got the thing. It was expensive, I didn’t think it would make it but it did.

Fisher: Your wife okay with that? [Laughs]

Brent: She’s been a great support over the years. She really has. She allowed me to do this, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s something we kind of worked on together over the years, but she’s been a great sport.

Fisher: It kind of brings up a question I think a lot of people go through when they gather; I like to collect my family as well. I have a family Bible from the Fishers in the 1840s and I have a bunch of the daguerreotypes.

Obviously, most are not going to come across some of the things that you’ve talked about, but the Boy Scout thing, for instance, I think is typical for a family history interest. Do you have some advice for people who would like to collect their family in particular or around their family interest?

Brent: Well, I think there have been a lot of opportunities that have come up. I had just one recent example, family that you see once in a while, unfortunately mostly at funerals, you know.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: They wrote me an email a few months ago about a photo album that she’d seen that had come up for sale, and I don’t know if it was on eBay or where it was, I can’t remember exactly, and it had some photos that we didn’t know existed of our mutual great grandfather and great grandmother that we’d never seen before.

Fisher: Wow!

Brent: And this photo album was in perfect condition. The guy wanted a small amount for it, really wasn’t that expensive, and she said it to me and I immediately wrote on it and was able to pick it up. In fact, I haven’t shown it to her yet. I told her I’d make copies and I will for the rest of the family, but there were four or five photos in there of our great grandparents that we’ve never seen. They were young, and my great grandmother, there was even one before she was married, you know, when she was a young girl in her teens.

You know its fabulous buying, occasionally you will get tips from a relative or if you’re just on top of it yourself, you’ll see things that might have something to do with your own family.

Unfortunately, most of my family’s papers were, at least on the Ashworth side, were lost.

I located one little group that belong to another family now. They gave me permission to copy them, but because they are owned by a bunch of people that couldn’t agree on themselves to sell it.

Fisher: Right, yes.

Brent: At least I got the copies. On my mother’s side, it’s really my grandmother that I need to blame for my collecting because she saved just about everything. This is my mother’s mother, we called her Nana.

Fisher: Right.

Brent: She died a year after I was born so I’ve got a couple of pictures holding her, but I don’t remember her, but I feel like I know her because she was such a collector. She would save everything, a little invitation to a dance or this or that, and I guess that’s why the garage that we have is so full of materials. When she passed away in 1950, my grandfather, I remember him saying one day when I was a kid that he sure wished he could pull his car in the garage.

Fisher: [Laughs] Because she had that much stuff.

Brent: He didn’t have the heart to go through her things, and when he passed away in 1956, the family, the six children, including my mother who is the youngest, took all the stuff out of the garage and built a big fire outside and just started tossing everything in, and I was only seven years old at the time, and I remember thinking how crazy this is, because family history and all kinds of things are going up in flames. I can still remember my grandpa’s false teeth in the fire. That was weird. I asked my mother years later, I said, “Did you guys save anything of grandma’s?” And she says, “Yeah, there was one box.” It was up in the rafters of the garage, so when we move the next year, I’ll have your father go out and get it.” Then I pestered her until she let me go through it, and I found all kinds of family history.

Fisher: What do you do with it all? And what are you going to do with it all?

Brent: Well, good question. That’s the $64,000 question, we used to call it. You know, I’ve donated a lot of things to my church. There’s been 130,000 items I took up on two missions at our church archives and only kept about 33,000 or something.

I have them all together, including 9,000 documents. I’ve tried to give them to other libraries, university libraries here. As far as the core collection, we’re trying to find a home for it, honestly. I’d rather not have to go back to auctions and things, because I’ve got children that we’ve allowed to pick out favorite items.

Fisher: Sure.

Brent: But the collection is gigantic. We’ve over half a million items now in the collection.

Fisher: Oh my goodness!

Brent: Many of them are books. There’s 300,000 books alone in the collection.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Brent: So I’ve been trying to give away a lot of books and things. They don’t do much use in storage you know.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

Brent: So, we’ve really been looking for a location where it could be put to better use, and we’ve been donating to big libraries too. So we’re looking for an eventual home for it, it may have to eventually be sold off. I certainly don’t want it ending up in a fire or something.

Fisher: No. no, you don’t want it behind somebody’s home with grandpa’s false teeth! [Laughs]

Brent: Exactly! Yeah. So we’re trying to find a better location than that. It’s been a labor of love over the years. We’ve learned a lot about our family as a result of it.

Fisher: Brent Ashworth, thank you so much for your time. What an amazing story! What a journey and what a collection! How lucky are you to be able to have some of these things in your lifetime.

Brent: Well, I feel really blessed, you bet! Thank you.

Fisher: Absolutely! Thanks for coming on with us.

Brent: You bet, anytime.

Fisher: And coming up next, we’re going to talk to a man who’s an expert at helping you get your seniors comfortable with social media and other communication to further your family history.

He’s going to be a keynote speaker at Roots Tech. We’ll talk to him in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Ken Krogue

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

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, very excited to be in the countdown, the final weeks until Roots Tech in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the largest Family History Convention in America, and in fact, you’re going to be able watch it online or listen online.

There’s so much to follow there, and I’ll be one of the bloggers keeping you in tune with what’s happening, and I’m very excited right now to have Ken Krogue on the line with me right now. He’s going to be one of the keynote speakers there. Now, which day are you speaking, Ken?

Ken: You know, I’m going to be there the first morning, Wednesday morning, talking more to the business side of the crowd, those who are going to be digipeaters and so on, but I’m really excited, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Fisher: It’s going to be a great time and I know you’ve been to Roots Tech before because you are a family history nut even though you are a tech guy, in fact, you’ve written many pieces for Forbes magazine and I love your blog! I read about, for instance, how you mom passed this past year and all the things that she had taught you through the years, and the way you laid it out was very beautifully done.

Ken: Well thank you. Yes she’s my favorite cheerleader. [Laughs]

Fisher: Exactly! Well, let’s talk a little about this, because I think technology, especially for older people, is a very scary thing. In fact, I see a lot of people who, when I bring up the subject of just downloading an app for instance, they step back, “Oh no! I don’t do those kinds of things.”

So, I’ll often say, ‘You know if you really want to do this and you really want to be in tune with your kids, your grandkids, you need to learn how to do it, and stop being afraid and step up and learn!’ So, you have some great tips here on how to get involved in the technical side, to the social media side of advancing people’s family history. How do we get people comfortable with technology, just from the basics, Ken?

Ken: You know that’s one of my favorite topics, Scott. I love to start family history social media groups, and I’ll tell you what, those more senior folks who struggle a little bit, they’ve got the wisdom, they just don’t have the knowledge on the social site.

Well, the best place to do it is, go grab the kids and the grandkids and have them come over, shut the door and say, “Hey, I need some coaching here!” And I would say, start with Facebook. Get me on, help me try it and help me connect, first with my family and them help me reconnect with some of my old friends, and they just go to town.

I have found it never takes more than about an hour to at least get them started and feeling good about it, and here’s the key to all of social media in the family, and that is, have some fun content in the middle that they can use.

So, find some of the older pictures, have them pasted on there and then they can go out and start sharing that with family and friends, and what I’ve found is, the best way to build rapport is, find a picture with the other person you want to reconnect with in the picture with you.

What a fun way to get started and get people going! So, it’s family history but start with the current stuff, then work back, and that’s how I always get started.

Fisher: Right. Yeah, or you do it side by side. ‘Here’s how we were and here’s how we are’, of course, that might be too frightening for some of us, right? [Laughs]

Ken: Yeah, that’s true. [Laughs] I caught Chest of Drawer’s disease and it shows too much where my chest fell to my drawers!

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Ken: So, I don’t like the side by side.

Fisher: I understand that, yeah. I was listening to a blog that you were doing, an audio blog, and you were talking about 31 days to learn, and I really liked the concept of it. You know, I think many of us think of, ‘well, take a class!’ but really, since we can do so much of this now at home, putting aside a period of just, say, the entire month of March, and saying, this entire month I’m going to devote to mastering something. What do you think those 31 days would be best devoted to?

Ken: That’s what actually got me started. It was a guy who wrote “31 Days To A Better Blog,” when I started my blog way back when, and it starts with the very basics of making sure you get your name. In the early days, it was some handle, something you hide behind, but nowadays, it’s just, here’s my name, I’m Ken Krogue, and then you start filling out your profile. You move from profile to learning how to put your content out there which is your pictures and your write-up and your back story. That’s the human element, who you really are. That’s what people want to see, and then learn how to connect. Learn how to start a conversation through comments. A comment is where I make a comment on your site; a conversation is when you comment back.

Fisher: Right.

Ken: And that’s probably the biggest single milestone I have found, is when you finally figure out how to get people to respond, and here’s sort of the secret, just ask a question.

Fisher: Um-hum.

Ken: They’ll start responding and now you’ll have a conversation, and those are the basics, like the core of social media.

Fisher: Well, I think the old word would be interaction.

Ken: Yeah!

Fisher: Right? I mean, otherwise it’s just a one-way conversation.

Ken: Exactly! And you know that when you get people interacting and commenting, you’re now official on social media, and then it gets really fun.

Fisher: All right. Now, how about preserving some of the things that your grandparents or your aunts or uncles actually obtained from other relatives? Is there a way to do that that’s simple?

Ken: Absolutely! And, it’s pretty funny; people think they need fancy scanners and everything else. I say, pull out the smartphone and just take a picture and pop it out there. Whether it’s a sculpture or photos or old documents, and that’s my favorite place.

The start is just with fun content that others in your community will be interested in, whether it’s your family community, your old friends from high school or whatever. My favorite place for high school is, go grab the yearbook.

Fisher: Yes. [Laughs]

Ken: [Laughs] And go scan all those pictures with little comments that people wrote when they were a kid, put it out there and say, “Do you remember when you wrote that?” and they say, “I didn’t write that!” and you say, “Yes, you did. It’s right here.”

Fisher: Yeah, and then there’s the picture of it. I mean there’s no hiding from it, but it’s good to preserve that for the long haul as well. Maybe, actually even printing it out or saving it in a special folder on a desktop, transferring it from the phone, so that ultimately, you can create histories or some of our seniors can create them for us, which is really the ultimate goal, is to preserve their stories, because as the old saying goes, that when an individual passes away, a library is burned.

Ken: It’s true. We found that with my mother, so many great stories. We captured some of them, but we didn’t get them all. I wish we had.

Fisher: Well and how do you ever get them all, right? There’s always something else out there.

Ken: True. [Laughs]

Fisher: We have very large libraries in these heads. Then there’s some hidden rooms in the back too that I don’t think anybody ever accesses. [Laughs]

Ken: And some we probably shouldn’t. [Laughs]

Fisher: Exactly! So, how do you get people to follow what you’re doing? For instance, if you want to start a family history Facebook page, and you want to attract more people, do you work from just the surname or you’re trying to just find cousins who you know or you’re trying to extend to many that you don’t know.

What’s a simple way to get going with it and then expand from there?

Ken: I was pretty blessed to have a unique spelling of my last name, K-R-O-G-U-E, and it was changed several generations back from the original spelling. So, I grabbed the domain name Krogue.com and then I started a Facebook group called, The Krogue Clan, and I did everything. I looked for the early stories, the early content and then I just started searching on the last name ‘Krogue’.

I found people all over the Unites States that were direct descendants of our common ancestors that we had never met, never run across each other, and we pulled together a face to face event.

So, the basic strategies go from social media, to digital media, to remote conversations which is a phone call, to a live interaction event where you get together, and we got an extended family reunion at the old homestead around Bear Lake, Idaho.

It was so powerful! We found stories that were phenomenal, we marched up to the gravesite of our common ancestors, and it was one of the most beautiful events that I’ve had in my life.

Fisher: That is great advice. I think really, it’s always been that way, whether it was sending a letter to somebody back in the old days to introduce yourself, to the phone call, to the face to face, to these experiences, but it’s so much easier to do now if you just make the effort to learn how to do it.

Ken: It’s so true, and like I said, tap those younger generations and get a little bit of coaching and it won’t take very long.

Fisher: Hey, thanks for coming on, Ken! It’s been great having you.

Ken: Thanks so much, Scott. I really appreciate sharing some time with you.

Fisher: Ken is going to be such a great speaker at Roots Tech! I look forward to seeing him there and you as well. All right, coming up next in three minutes from TMCPlace.com, Tom Perry, our Preservation Authority talking about the Innovator’s Summit Day 1 at Roots Tech.

Segment 4 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He is our Preservation Authority.

Hi Tom, how are you?

Tom: I’m super-duper!

Fisher: I am excited because we’re looking right down the barrel at Roots Tech coming up February 3rd through 6th in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the first day of course is the Innovator’s Summit, and as a techy-guy like you are, I mean that’s a big day.

Tom: Oh, it is! Some of the neat things that they’re bringing out there you have the opportunity to see some things may be coming out. You know, immediately they’re almost ready for release. Some of them won’t be out for a while and some of them are what I refer to as ‘vaporware.’

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Because they just kind of evaporate. They never really show up.

Fisher: That’s right. A lot of them just don’t work out, but nonetheless, there’s some incredible ideas…

Tom: Oh, really!

Fisher: … that come up at the Innovator’s Summit, and we’re looking forward to that. That will be on the Wednesday of that week, and then on the 4th through 6th we’ll have all the keynotes, we’ll have the classrooms working and of course, everything on the show floor, and that is so much fun at the Salt Palace Convention Center, and of course, we will be there. You going to have a booth for your place, it’s going to be right next to mine hopefully.

Tom: Yeah, hopefully.

Fisher: For Extreme Genes and we look so forward to meeting so many of our listeners there. Now, speaking of preservation today, what do you have for us?

Tom: Okay, well one thing a little bit back on Roots Tech that we were talking about, one of the neat things about the Innovator’s Summit is, some of the stuff will actually be on the floor if you want to go and check out the stuff, see what’s available, and a neat thing about that also is, sometimes people like myself that go to these Innovator’s Summit, sometimes it triggers something, and you think, ‘Oh, hey, you know what… we can take that and do this with it and go do more and just knock the thing out of the park.’

Fisher: Yes, new applications.

Tom: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely, you really want to watch out and be careful, sometimes it’s like buying a new car, you see the shiny cool car and you don’t take it for a test drive. You say, “Oh, this is so cool! This is what I’ve always wanted!” You buy it and then you have buyer’s remorse.

Fisher: Yeah, that’s right

Tom: So, don’t be forced into stuff at Roots Tech. Don’t think, “Oh, this is what I really want! Oh, I better grab it right now because they say they’re almost out of them.” If they’re almost out of them, wait for the next run. Don’t jump in.

Fisher: They’ll make more.

Tom: Exactly! [Laughs] Exactly! And if they don’t make more, it’s good you didn’t buy one.

Fisher: Probably so.

Tom: So, just be real careful what you’re looking for and just always remember the basics, you know, like we’ve talked about on the show many times before. Your basics are, you want to take your old things, you want to find out how to preserve them, how to put them on disks, how to put them in the hard drive, how to put them in the clouds, different things like this.

You want to learn how you can start making memories for your family, for the people who are living right now to be able to extend into the future. So, you want to be really careful. You don’t want to get the cart before the horse.

You want to do things in order. The old stuff you have, let’s take care of those. Let’s get those things preserved. Let’s do what we need to with those, whether you want to buy a scanner, whether you want to buy something along those lines, that’s what we need to do. We need to take care of the old stuff first.

Fisher: Well that’s right, and the old stuff is going to be the rarest stuff, always.

Tom: Exactly!

Fisher: Especially because back in the day, we couldn’t just video everything everywhere and preserve it on a phone or some kind of device. Home movies, that was about it, and there’s a lot of junk associated with it too, a lot of bad shots, but things that you can actually edit down now and make into something very special.

Tom: You know, we’re just through Christmas, and Christmas is always crazy for us at all of our stores. People coming in, we just have tons of stuff. People find the bug, and then usually, January slows down, and as we’re going into Roots Tech, we’re not finding that out this year.

There are a lot of people that made New Year’s resolutions to, ‘Hey, let’s get this old stuff done.’ and they’re doing it, and it’s awesome. So, be really careful. Don’t leapfrog, like you said, over the old stuff and start just working on the new stuff.

You need to take care of that stuff, because your film is going to fade, your video tapes are going to wear out; they’re going to get dusty. If you live in a high humidity place, you can get mold on them, and there’s just so many thing that can go wrong. Get that old stuff and let’s get working on it now!

Fisher: Absolutely! That is great advice, and once again, it’s coming up February 3rd through the 6th in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the Salt Palace Convention Center. Roots Tech is the largest Family History Convention in the world by far, and of course, you’re going to be able to follow it online. There’s a lot of streaming video, from the keynote addresses and some of the classes as well. You can go to RootsTech.org and find out more about that. All right Tom, more when we return in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 122

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with our final segment with our Preservation Authority Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. We’re kind of getting you ready for Roots Tech, coming up February 3^rd through 6^th in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s the world’s largest family history convention, and there is some prep that goes into going to this thing because you’re going to be hit from all sides, right Tom?

Tom: Oh absolutely.

Fisher: From all the booths and all the new products that are out. Give us some more advice here.

Tom: Okay, one thing you really need to be careful no matter kind of tracer you’re going to, you need to have a plan of attack. Like we go to the CES show every year in Vegas and it just gets bigger and bigger.

Fisher: Yes.

Tom: And it’s physically impossible to get around to it. You need to put together a game plan. See what’s the most important thing to you, do you have some old cassettes that you need transferred, do you have some old VHS tapes, do you have some photographs, do you have them already digitized and you want to see how to put them together, how they are best to distribute them to your friends and family?

There are so many different things you need to put together, a game plan saying ‘This is my first priority, this is my second, third, fourth, however many priorities you have.” And then within each one of those get more specific, like say “Hey, I have thousands of slides, I want to do it myself.”

Great, let’s do that. So you want to say okay your priority is you want to scan your slides, so you need to say “Okay, what’s my budget?” you’re going to run into prices that are $200, you’re going to run into prices that are over $2000 so you need to see what your budget is and one thing that will help, you can call us, you can call other transfer places and say “Hey, this is what I have, what would it cost if I pay you to do it?”

And if you come back and find ‘Okay I can transfer all my slides for a $1000 and I’m done with it, and for me to buy a good scanner, I’m looking at, at least $1500” it’s probably not a good thing to do unless you’re going to pass around to other people in your family.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: Or you want to rent one. Like the people we’ve talked to as guests on the show before, they actually rent them out to Florida, and you might think that might be a good way.

Fisher: EasyPhotoScan.

Tom: Yeah EasyPhotoScan. Stop by their booth and look what they have to offer, then you have all these things ‘Okay this is what it’s going to cost if I send it out to either TMCPlace.com or one of these other places and this is what it’s going to cost if I rent the thing. This is what it’s going to cost, this is my time frame.’

If I buy it, this is what it’s going to cost. If I get my family to invest in it to help us out, then you know what your budget is so when you go in there you’re not looking at something that’s… spending time talking to somebody about a $3000 scanner, you’re just wasting your time.

Fisher: That’s right. Good point, yes.

Tom: You want to be really careful, and then another thing on your scanner too ‘quality versus price.’ We have people that come into the store and say “I don’t care what this costs, I want the absolutely best high definition X, Y, Z, I can get.”

And that’s fine we’re happy to do it. Sometimes it’s overkill, so you need to find out what you want and if you don’t know give us a call and we can explain to you the differences what we think is the best way for you to go and then you make the decision on what’s going to be best for you.

Because that will take you like from the $700 price range, the $1500 price range to the $2000- $3000 one. We had a guy in our store the other day that came in and picked our brain, and he’s going to go out and buy one of those real nice scanners that do the slides and he’s going to pay about $4000, and it’s great because he enjoys sitting down scanning them, playing with them.

Where we have the other ones we mentioned that come in and say “Hey, my son’s been telling me he’s going to do this, for three years nothing’s happened. I want is done and I need it at a reasonable price. Here’s what my budget is.’ And then we work in what’s best for them.

Fisher: Right. There’s so much to really consider when you’re looking to invest in a product like that, the various price ranges, the quality and of course the quantity of material you have to work with, in fact some people don’t have a lot of stuff.

Tom: Oh exactly! And you know an important thing too is that you also want to look at ‘what’s your end goal?’ Do you want to put them in your cloud, do you want to make MP4’s, MP3’s, how do you want to do this?

So you make sure you get the right equipment so you don’t go at the end of it “Oh I got this cool software, I’m going to make MP3s and MP4s” and that software doesn’t do it. So do your homework.

Fisher: Great advice Tom, as always. Thanks for joining us.

Tom: Good to be here, and hope to see you at Roots Tech.

Fisher: I cannot believe how fast our time goes on this show! That is it for this week. Thanks once again to Brent Ashworth, from Provo, Utah, for talking about his experience in collecting his ancestors and for sharing with us the story of how he obtained the Bible that came across on the Mayflower with Governor William Bradford.

And to Ken Krogue, one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming Roots Tech convention, catch the podcast if you missed any of it. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice normal family!