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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host Scott Fisher

Segment 1 Episode 136

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

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

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

Segment 2 Episode 136

Host Scott fisher with guest Samuel Roukin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam: That’s true!

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

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: Yeah.

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

Sam: [Laughs]

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

Sam: The good one is ‘Wood-hull.’

Fisher: Yes! [Laughs]

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

Fisher: Yes.

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: Yes.

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

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

Sam: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam: Wow.

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

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

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

Segment 3 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Sam Roukin

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

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: Yeah…

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

Fisher: Um-hum.

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

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

Fisher: Right. They’d occupy.

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

Fisher: [Laughs] Right.

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

Fisher: And it’s written by the winners.

Sam: That’s right.

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

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

Fisher: Yes, he’s fabulous.

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

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

Sam: It’s a great write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Segment 4 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

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

Tom: Super duper, thanks.

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

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

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

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

Tom: [Laughs]

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

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

Fisher: [Laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

Fisher: Hello!

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

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

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

Fisher: Wow! So, this is exciting stuff.

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

Fisher: The audio was a problem.

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

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

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

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

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

Tom: Let’s talk about some color correction.

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

Segment 5 Episode 136

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

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

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

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

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

Fisher: Right.

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

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

Fisher: Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Good to be here.

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

by

Relative Race

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Transcript of Episode 130

Segment 1 (00:30)

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Segment 3 Episode 130 (44:45)

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

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

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

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Episode 129 – Genealogy Gems’ Lisa Louise Cooke on Mobile Genealogy and the Genealogy of a House!

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Fisher and David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.com, open the show with news about a recently discovered World War II mess kit that has united a family.  Then David shares great new for Midwestern researchers at the Allen County Genealogical Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  David and Fisher then talk about finding your ancestors in the diaries of people who were involved in their lives… like ministers and doctors.  Wait til you hear what David found for someone recently in a minister’s diary!  Then David shares another Tech Tip, and this week’s NEHGS free guest user database.

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Fisher then welcomes to the show, for the first time, Lisa Louise Cooke, host of the long-running “Genealogy Gems” podcast.

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Lisa has written a book on Mobile Genealogy and shares some tips on how to maximize your research experiences while away from home.  You won’t want to miss what Lisa has to say!

Carolyn-Tolman-photo-Legacy-Tree-Genealogists-15011

Next, meet professional genealogist Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com.  Some time back, Carolyn relocated with her husband to Pennsylvania where they moved into an old house.  Wanting to know more about it, the house’s “genealogy” turned into a whole new adventure!  You’ll want to hear how Carolyn did what she did, and what the result was!

Then, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, joins Fisher for the final segments.  Tom talks about a turn-of-the-last-century photo brought Tom at Roots Tech.  It’s the earliest “selfie” he’s ever seen, and he coveted it!  He’ll explain how it was done, as well as how to salvage a picture with “outlaws” (former in-laws!) in it.

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

 

Transcript of Episode 129

Segment 1 – Episode 129 (00:30)

Fisher: Hello America! And welcome to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com
I am Fisher your Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out.
Exciting guests today! I’m really delighted to have Lisa Louise Cooke on, and if you’re not familiar with Lisa, she is the host of a podcast called “Genealogy Gems” and she’s put together a book called “Mobile Genealogy” so this is kind of a way to help you when you go do research on your family history somewhere where you don’t have to be transferring things from one computer to another, and she’s got some great tips for you coming up in about eight minutes.
Very excited to have Lisa Louise Cooke on the show!
Plus, later on from our brand new sponsor Legacy Tree Genealogists, Carolyn Tolman is going to be here and she has a great story too. She moved into a house some years ago in Pennsylvania and what a house it turned out to be! Some incredible history, it was going to be removed and she went to work to save it. With a history on a house, how do you do a genealogy on a house and what would that mean to you? Carolyn Tolman will tell you about that later on.
But right now let’s check in with Boston and our good friend the Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAnsestors.org
David Allen Lambert, how are you sir?
David: Things are wonderful in Beantown. How are things with you Fish?
Fisher: All right. I’m excited we have a long list of things to cover here today. Let’s get started on it right away. First off in our “family histoire news,” there’s a mess kit that’s caused a lot of attention.
David: It did. And actually it’s amazing. Metal detectors are always finding amazing things on battlefields but this thing reunited a family. The mess kit for Hudson Funk of the 83rd 330th infantry who was over at Normandy and as you probably saw in the story the unfortunate thing, he lost part of both of his legs and never talked about the war to his children. But this mess kit simply had HLF, his initials and part of a serial number but it was enough to catch the imagination of the metal detector to start searching for it. He found the family out in Pennsylvania, in a town called Roxborough where his sons and one of his brothers have now been reunited with this wonderful artefact and it’s brought a family together.
Fisher: They came from all over the country, they hadn’t been together in years, and they’re celebrating, there are pictures of them toasting this thing and holding this mess kit with a big dent in it with their relative’s initials in it. In fact, the brother is still living at 95 years old.
David: That’s wonderful, it really is. But in Allen County Public Library out in Fort Wayne Indiana, I give a hats off to Curt Wicher and his staff. They have just finished a quarter of a million dollar renovation that has helped in creating both their Life Story Center, where people can come in and do oral histories and they also now have a new auditorium that seats over 240 people on a theatre style amphitheatre.
Fisher: Isn’t that great. The Allen County Library is the second largest library in the world and serves largely the Midwest, so this is a big move for them. Very exciting.
David: It really is. An interesting thing happened here in our library in Boston, I had a lady come in and she was looking for her ancestor but she had a specific question “Where was his diary?” Do you have any diaries of your ancestors?
Fisher: I don’t. I have like one paragraph of an autobiography by my great grandmother and that’s about it. But I do have a second great grandfather who hand wrote five pages of his autobiography by about 1905. I have that original but no diaries.
David: They’re great things when you can have it. But I don’t have one from any of mine. However, I can tell you that the brother of my ancestor was a judge at the Witchcraft Trials. Samuel Sewall, and he published a diary for decades but also lots of details.
Fisher: Wow!
David: But getting back to this lady’s query, I could not find a diary for her ancestor but I did find a diary for the minister in her family’s town.
Fisher: Oh, wow!
David: And the minister had some peculiar things to inform.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: About good things and also the confessed sins.
Fisher: Oh! The naughty and nice list!
David: Exactly. So you just never know when doing genealogy what things you might find and will get you an interview on Extreme Genes.
Fisher: Now wait a minute, were the sins very specific in this diary about the ancestor?
David: Oh yes! They were very specific!
Fisher: [Laughs] All right. So the minister had a diary on the ancestor, anything else?
David: The other thing I told her is “Look for doctors.” Couldn’t find one for her but the town in Maine where my family came from, Westbrook, Maine, there was a doctor in town who actually recorded the birth of all the children he had attended, and I can tell you that my great, great grandmother in 1822, cost a dollar twenty five when she was delivered first thing in the morning.
Fisher: Really? I have never heard of something like that. Of course also there are a lot of the stores that kept a record back in Revolutionary times of people who came through and bought things and how much they paid for it and what they bought, and I found material there that’s really interesting.
David: A couple of years ago one of our members gave us the family store account books from Roxbury, Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War, that gave things that were sold to the British troops and the American troops.
Fisher: Wow!
David: I want to give a shout out to the followers of Extreme Genes and myself DL Genealogist on Twitter, and because I participated in my first ever hashtag “Gen Chat” it happens every other Friday. This coming week they’re talking on Civil War research, but it’s free, you’re on Twitter #genchat it’s a great tech-tip to go in and network and follow a genie as I say, on Twitter. What I am investigating hopefully for the next show or the show after, is the company in Provo, Utah called ‘Research Ties.’ They offer for free a basic version of their research log which you can create right online. They also sell a version for 30 dollars annually which has 3 logins and it has 10 GBs worth of space. Basically you have a research log. Fish, you can go check at any time. You can print it out, you can add to it, you can create certain criteria, great stuff.
Fisher: Wow.
David: And speaking of databases, for the guest users of AmericanAncestors.org, we are very excited to have the Annals of Barra Island which is the Robert O’Dwyer papers of the 3 volumes of the studies from the Barra Peninsula in West Cork Island that covers from 1776 to 1992.
Fisher: That’s all free, of course?
David: Free exactly from the AmericanAncestors.org. One of the many guest user databases we do. Well that’s all I have from Beantown, catch you next week. Fish, have a good one.

Fisher: Great stuff, thanks David. And coming up next in 3 minutes, we are going to talk to Lisa Louise Cooke, she’s the host of ‘Genealogy Gems’ the podcast about Mobile Genealogy, and why should it matter to you. On Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 2 Episode 129 (25:20)

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with a legend on the other end of the line. She is the host of Genealogy Gems, a podcast. It’s been around, what, about ten years now, Lisa Louise?
Lisa: Nearly. We started in 2007.
Fisher: Yeah, a long time ago, Lisa Louise Cooke, whom I’ve admired, well, from not too far a distance actually, over the last several years. She’s a great teacher, very knowledgeable in family history and coming up with little nuggets. I think those are the gems you talk about in the name of your show, Lisa. And I’m excited about your new book that you’ve got out, called, “Mobile Genealogy”. And this really kind of takes things into the 21st century. What got you started on this?
Lisa: Well, thank you for having me on the show. It’s great to be here. And what got me started on this was actually, several years ago, when the iPad first came out, I got my iPad and I was sitting there and my husband was looking at me and going, ‘Oh my gosh! Did you just buy the most expensive email checker in the universe?’ You know? Because that’s all I was doing. I said, ‘No! I’m playing Angry Birds. What else do you want me to do?’
Fisher: “I’m balanced!”
Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And he says, “Yeah, you know, well, you said you were going to do your family history on this as well, right? So, he set the challenge for me to say, I’ve got to learn more about how to use this device. How to make the transition from a laptop to going mobile with a tablet, and of course, our Smartphone is just a small version of a Tablet.
Fisher: Sure.
Lisa: So, my first book was, How to turn your iPad into a genealogy powerhouse. Because I had an iPad, that’s what I was focused on. And that one came about four years ago, of course, it’s already so obsolete.
Fisher: It happens that way.
Lisa: You know, technology moves so fast, doesn’t it?
Fisher: Yeah, it really does.
Lisa: So, Mobile Genealogy came out of, it was time for a new book, and I wanted to expand, because there’s Android, right? There’s Android, there’s Apple, there’s everything in between and the key here is that it’s all mobile. And so, the book addresses all the different platforms, all the different types of devices, and really digs ever further into, how to get the most out of them for family history, which is awesome if you don’t have to lug your laptop around, you’re in good shape.
Fisher: Well, that’s really true. You know, the thing is, I think, for a lot of people who have the time to do this, they haven’t necessarily come up in the age of the devices that we’re in right now. So, it’s a scary thing, isn’t it? And I think, part of the challenge for all of us, is not only for us to get comfortable with these devices, but to help other people to get there as well. And I’m sure you’ve had some people who are seniors particularly who are catching on to some of these things right now or having some success as a result of your teaching. Tell us about some of that.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for most of us, we didn’t grow up with all of this, and it can be kind of intimidating, but the way I kind of approach it is to say, you know, we have to get into what I call, ‘Tablet Mindset’ and stop looking at it as something that’s going to function like the laptop.
Fisher: Right.
Lisa: Because they’re two different animals. When we start with that in the book, that’s where they kind of make the mind shift and then I talk about how to then approach it so that you’re using it from a Tablet Mobile perspective, and we’re really focusing on the tasks. What are the tasks that you do in your genealogy research? And if you’re focused on that, then the right apps will come to you, the right functionality, you’ll know how to move around, but if you’re going at it, first and foremost, how do I duplicate what I was doing on my home computer on this Tablet? You’re going to get snarled up.
Fisher: Oh boy.
Lisa: So, I find that people really like that approach. I think it makes sense and then we just in the book, dig right into a lot of the apps, and what I’ve been hearing from folks, is that they like the fact that, as geeky as I am, I don’t write techno geek, you know?
Fisher: Right, and that’s important.
Lisa: It is. You know, way back in the day, well, I’m dating myself now, but way back in the day when the TRS-80 computer came out, I was one of the only women working at RadioShack of all places.
Fisher: Oh, wow.
Lisa: And we had to explain what a computer was. What this device was supposed to do, and so, I’ve been kind of doing that for a long time and you know, if you’re not in the mode of trying to prove how techno savvy you are and smart you are, but you’re just trying to help people, then it goes a lot better, and that’s certainly my goal. I want them to feel like they’re getting the most use out of their Tablet. So, one of the apps that really has jumped out and that is new to this edition of this book, Mobile Genealogy, is Chrome Remote Desktop, and I think this one is like, changing people’s lives.
Fisher: Totally.
Lisa: Yeah, because it means that those limitations that the Tablet or the Smartphone has, and I keep saying ‘Tablet or Smartphone’ because they’re just pretty much the same thing.
Fisher: Right, yes.
Lisa: The limitations that you run into, like, it won’t play my flash video. It won’t let me use this form or whatever it is that you’re doing, or this app is kind of stripped down version of the full blown website or software. Well, Chrome Desktop just unleashes the power of your Tablet, because it gives you access directly into your full blown computer at home, which you can have open on your desktop and sleeping, if you want to. You can ping it. And now, you’re running your entire computer right from your Tablet. So, you have no limitations. You are back to being able to do all the functionality of a laptop.
Fisher: I love that.
Lisa: I think that’s one of the main chapters that’s just been blowing people’s minds.
Fisher: Well, it’s also, you save everything back to your home computer which is so nice.
Lisa: Yeah, and you put it in another app which we really go in depth in the book which is Dropbox or any other type of cloud storage. We think of those kinds of apps as being kind of Grand Central Station for our files. So if we are accessing our home computer with the remote desktop, and we’re making new files, but we want to access them back on our Tablet, how do we get them there? But we don’t want to email them to ourselves, we save them to Dropbox and then they show up in our Dropbox app on our mobile device. What could be better?
Fisher: Boy, I’ll tell you! What a great tip just right there. That’s make the whole thing worth it. All right, so that’s one great app, Lisa Louise. What else do you have?
Lisa: Well, I think another thing that we’re struggling with as genealogists is when we face the relatives in our family who get that ‘glazed over’ look when we start talking about family history. Does that ever happen to you, Scott?
Fisher: Oh, no, no. They light up like a Christmas tree!
Lisa: They light up like a Christmas tree? You have a special family!
Fisher: No, I don’t. There’s like maybe one person out of 17 at the end of the table during the holidays, maybe that one person. Like you say the geeks, you know? But it’s funny how it works, because usually by the end of a vacation visit or a holiday visit, everybody’s saying, ‘Hey, what was that story? Go ask Scott.’ you know? And they always come back. So, they have a lot of fun at our expense, but at the end of the day, they love what we do, don’t you think?
Lisa: I think they do, and the trick is to talk their language, right?
Fisher: Yes.
Lisa: To share a compelling story or do something – share is the key here – as one of my daughters says, if it’s not shareable, it doesn’t exist.
Fisher: Yeah, that’s right.
Lisa: To the Millennials, you know? It’s got to be shareable and that’s what’s enticing. And so, here’s an app that I love that I have in my photograph chapter, and it’s called, Retype, R E T Y P E, it by Sumoing LTD and it costs, I don’t know, $3, but I love this, because it takes photos and turns them into what we call ‘memes’ right? These are really fun, shareable images on Facebook or whatever. We see them all the time. It’s so easy to create your own, so I kind of walked the family historian through, let’s take some of your family photos, your old family photos, add the text and they’re really cool…it adds kind of a really fun font, there’s zillions of them to choose from and you can either use the saying that they offer up or you can give it its own caption yourself, but I’ve been using this constantly, not only personally, but on my Genealogy Gems website to convey ideas in really fun, shareable ways.
Fisher: And so, all these apps are coming along to basically take your family history and turn it into some form of art, and that’s what’s exciting too, because art tells a story in a different way.
Lisa: Exactly, and in a really quick way, don’t you think? That you can look at something and you get it. You get what that concept is.
Fisher: That’s exactly right. Yeah, exactly, and that’s the joy, but what’s the name of that app again for people who missed it.
Lisa: It’s called Retype, and like I say, it’s about $3. You’ll find it in the app store, and I’ve got loads and loads of other types of exciting apps like that. So, you can see, this book is not just, ‘These are the Genealogy apps’, but I’m really focusing on what are you trying to accomplish? If you want to snag and captivate those people in your family, here’s the app for you. We got to get outside that genealogy box and we’ve really got to focus on what we’re trying to accomplish and get it done, and that’s what I’m hoping that people will find that the book will do.
Fisher: Well, that’s the end game, it’s to get everybody excited about it and sharing and preserving at the end of the day, and in a way that is useable by future generations, because we all want…it sure beats writing in a tree, right? You know, carving your name someplace, because that’s about all there is otherwise. She’s Lisa Louise Cooke. She is the host of Genealogy Gems, a great podcast. It’s been around for a long, long time now and of course the Genealogy Gems website with all kinds of great things there. I’m just delighted to have you on, Lisa Louise. What do you have coming up on your show in the coming weeks?
Lisa: Well you, sir, will be coming up on our show in the coming weeks and we’re also going to have one of the couples from the Relative Race on the show, which is the NUBY, kind of DNA amazing race of genealogy TV show that’s come out and lots of good stuff. And if people are interested in more on mobile genealogy, we have a YouTube channel, youtube.com/genealogygems. You can also get to it from GenealogyGems.com, our main site, but I’ve got a class the we did at Roots Tech and I saw you at Roots Tech. We did it in our booth. We recorded it and they can watch it for free on video.
Fisher: I love the way you think. Great stuff! Lisa Louise Cooke, thanks for coming on. It’s good to have you finally.
Lisa: Awesome to be here. Thanks Scott!
Fisher: Lisa Louise always has tons of things going on at GenealogyGems.com. Hey, and just a reminder by the way, coming up in September, it’s going to be our very first Extreme Genes cruise! Yes, it’s a Fall Foliage Tour, but a lot of history mixed in as well. David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, will be joining me, giving lectures on days we’re at sea. Talking about the history of Boston, the Colonial Period, the Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia, the area we’re going to be going to. So, if you want to find out more, go to our Extreme Genes Facebook page and you’ll see everything you’ll need to know. And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com about the “Genealogy” of a house. That’s in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 3 Episode 129 (44:45)

Fisher: And Welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth.
I am very excited to have a new guest on the show, someone we haven’t had on the show before. She is with Legacy Tree Genealogists, one of our new sponsors. Carolyn Tolman is here, Hi Carolyn welcome!
Carolyn: Hi
Fisher: It’s great to have you. I’m excited about what you’ve written on a blog here recently about doing the genealogy of a house. Now I’ve gone through this recently where I saw that the home my Dad and Mom built when I was 3 and we were in for 20 years, recently went on the market for only the second time since we sold it. And so all the MLS listings had all the pictures of what it looks like today, and I was able to actually create some side by side pictures, photos of us back in the day and what it looks like now, and it’s so much fun. But you actually went through – you moved into a home that you had never been in before, never even been in the neighbourhood before, and researched the house. What a great experience. Talk about this a little bit.
Carolyn: Yes my husband had the opportunity to go to the U.S. Army War College which is on the Carlisle Barracks Army Post in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and because of the size of our family they assigned us to this old farm house that was on Post and no one could really tell me the history of it, and being a genealogist I just had to know.
Fisher: You just had to know. What year did it go back to?
Carolyn: We figured out that it was in about 1856, so before the Civil War.
Fisher: Wow, so Antebellum, yeah?
Carolyn: Uh huh.
Fisher: Wow!
Carolyn: And Confederate soldiers actually spent the night there, the night before they were called away to Gettysburg. They had invaded the town, and the mother in the home fed and sheltered them for the night.
Fisher: Now wait a minute, how’d you find that out?
Carolyn: There was a magazine that was from 1918, the author was the farmer at the farm house and he talked about a young woman visiting who had grown up in the house, who shared that story.
Fisher: So this was in the magazine, where did you find the magazine?
Carolyn: Okay, I found out that the house was going to be torn down and I visited the Cumberland County Historical Society, one of the great old historical societies in Pennsylvania, and they found out where I was living and they knew immediately that this was the Indian School Farmhouse and they brought out this magazine article and shared it with me.
Fisher: How cool is that.
Carolyn: Yeah. That’s what started the whole search.
Fisher: And so you decided you want to get into this a little bit more and see what had happened, because this place was going to be torn down after you left.
Carolyn: Uh huh. Once I visited the Historical Society, they said “Someone needs to document the history of this house” to convince the army that it does not need to be torn down.
Fisher: Well who better than a professional genealogist like yourself!
Carolyn: I felt like I was in the right place.
Fisher: So you started from there, you had a story from the very early years.
Carolyn: Yes.
Fisher: What did you find and how did you do it?
Carolyn: Well I noticed that the street behind the house was named Parker Springs, and there was also a big spring behind the house, so I knew I was looking probably for a Parker family. So I went to the land index and found a deed of an Andrew Parker selling his land to the army, selling his farm. So I knew that it was the family of Andrew Parker. I then went to the Cumberland County Courthouse, and for me, I’m used to going to the Family History Library and dealing with microfilms, but there they pulled out their big dusty books and let me look through them.
Fisher: That is special isn’t it, and just the smell of it, I like that.
Carolyn: It was all I could do to keep from rubbing my cheek on the page [laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs]
Carolyn: I was able to trace the owners of the house from the Parkers back to the farm owners. So I have this list of names and dates of owners. I then went back to the Historical Society who housed the tax records and because I knew who owned the house and where they were living, I was able to find those records and notice what the tax man wrote on them, and I found out that in 1855, the house on the property was a stone house.
Fisher: Hmm.
Carolyn: But in 1858 it was a brick house. So that’s how I figured out that they bought the property with a stone house and replaced it with the brick house that I was living in. So thanks to the tax records…
Fisher: So that’s how you got an idea of when the house was built, from the tax records.
Carolyn: Yes.
Fisher: That’s awesome.
Carolyn: Yeah. So normally a genealogist would use those to trace people coming and going in a county, but I used it to trace the house and the condition of the house.
Fisher: Fascinating.
Carolyn: Yeah.
Fisher: Absolutely amazing. So where did it go from there? Now you’re back just before the Civil War, you know what happens during the Civil War with the Confederates taking over and staying in there before they head off to Gettysburg, then what?
Carolyn: Well, that house was right next to the army Post and the Post needed training ground, and in 1879 they had been abandoned after the Civil War, the army wasn’t using it, and Richard Pratt who had been a soldier had been out fighting the Indians, and he realized in his dealings with them that they weren’t savages, they were humans, and he wanted to teach them. So he managed to get the Post as an Indian school.
Fisher: Wow.
Carolyn: So in 1879 the Indian School began and they wanted to teach these Indian students how to farm, so they needed a real working farm and they bought the Parker farm. So the farm house became a place where the Indian students would sleep and get their meals and then work on the dairy in the morning, and they also had classrooms in the house where they learned how to run a farm because they were teaching them how to compete with white men in white society.
Fisher: Wow. Now how long did that go on?
Carolyn: That school lasted until 1918 when the end of World War 1 required the Post to be used as a hospital. So the school shut down in 1918.
Fisher: What a history though. Civil War barracks to an Indian school, to a hospital for the military.
Carolyn: Yes, and then the Medical school used the farmhouse also to teach the soldiers occupational skills in going back into civilian society.
Fisher: Now how did you learn this? That it had become at this time a hospital?
Carolyn: I visited the library in Carlisle and every library has a local history room, and that’s a favorite place for genealogists.
Fisher: Yes.
Carolyn: And there was a history of Carlisle Barracks in that room and thanks to that history I was able to trace what was going on with the farm in connection with the Post which also meant I knew what was going on with the farmhouse.
Fisher: Wow, this is amazing.
Carolyn: Yes. The house continued to run the farm until about 1930 when the Post took over most of the farmland, and the house became quarters for soldiers. From that point on the connection that the house had to the Indian school became forgotten and diminished and it didn’t matter anymore. So that’s how it came to be on the list to be torn down. People didn’t realize the significance it had, the history that it had.
Fisher: Right. So you did all this work, you used tax records, I would assume some census records. Some land records to determine who the people were who’d been there.
Carolyn: Yes I did. I did use the census to trace the family and then the soldiers who lived in the house.
Fisher: And so now, you’re facing the potential of your work actually saving this historic home that you’ve come to love now as a result of this.
Carolyn: Very much.
Fisher: What happened from there?
Carolyn: Well I published the history on just a free website, I wanted as many people to see it as possible, I shared it with the army post hoping that they would realize that this was too valuable to tear down, and they were already very set in their plans to build new housing. But the word got out to the descendants of the Indian students and they started a partition and the local newspapers picked it up, and at the very last minute when the demolition was supposed to happen within just a few weeks, there was a conference of Native Americans on Post about the Indian School, and the army knew that they were there and they chose that time to have a round table meeting when they announced that they were not going to tear it down after all.
Fisher: What a victory!
Carolyn: It was.
Fisher: Now were you there for that?
Carolyn: I was.
Fisher: Oh wow.
Carolyn: I couldn’t miss that.
Fisher: You were probably answering a few questions too, weren’t you?
Carolyn: Yes, and interacting with these wonderful Native American people who cared very much about having a landmark. There are not a lot of Native American landmarks in this country, and that one serves as a great landmark because it’s where the Pan Indian movement began, it’s where the National Congress of American Indians got its start, so there’s a lot of significance to it.
Fisher: Using genealogy to learn the history of houses and save them from demolition, how cool is that?
Carolyn: That’s right.
Fisher: Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com. Thanks so much for coming on.
Carolyn: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for letting me share my story.
Fisher: And coming up next: He is our Preservation Authority, Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Talking about the oldest ‘selfie’ he has ever seen and how he coveted it! He’ll tell you all about it coming up next on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 129
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
It is Preservation time. I am with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority.

Tom, you were having such a good time at Roots Tech and its fun, I mean we have stories that go on for weeks from what happened over just a few days as people were bringing things to your booth and asking for advice on some of these items, but the one thing that really lit you up that I noticed, what was it, a 19th century selfie?
Tom: Oh yeah, it was like late 18 early 19 hundreds, I wanted it so bad.
Fisher: [Laughs] Now have you ever seen anything like that before?
Tom: Never.
Fisher: And explain what this was. Because I think when we talk about ‘selfie’ most people picture a long stick, a little modern camera there, the remote control and the whole thing, but obviously back then that wasn’t the case. Who is the person? How old? How did they set this thing up in those times?
Tom: Yes, a pretty incredible fact. One of the things that made it so cool to me, I remember back when I started my career in photography back in junior high school, I remember they had this big mirror when you walked through the front door, and I did the same thing, before I had eye contacts, and I had the tripod set up, smiling in the mirror and pushed a little button, and it’s like flashback a 100 years earlier and here is this kid wearing the type of clothes they wore back in those days, the tie, he had his tripod set up, had a little brownie camera on top of it
Fisher: You saw that in that picture?
Tom: Oh yeah. Because what he’s doing is, he has his camera and he’s looking into the mirror.
Fisher: Oh I see, okay.
Tom: Yeah. So this mirror is on, I don’t know what they used to call them back then, kind of like a bureau, you could see the drawers, you could see the sides, because it’s back far enough, but he not only got the mirror, he got part of the surroundings of it, and he’s just standing there with his little tie on and his little period clothing, and just standing there smiling and took this picture. It’s so cool, and the thing that makes it so cool is that it’s not just a selfie, but you can see it’s not a fake selfie because you can see the things on the outside, the old mirror that it’s sitting on, the handcrafting around the mirror, and that was a cool thing. I saw this and I loved it.
Fisher: So that’s a mirror image of himself though, right?
Tom: Exactly.
Fisher: Which you could reverse and flip if you wanted to.
Tom: Exactly. So it was a selfie in the old fashioned way, because in the old days you didn’t even have timers on your camera so you couldn’t run and get into the picture, you had to have somebody else do it. So it truly was a selfie. Somebody took a picture of him and it was so cool, but then the one down side of the picture had a lot of spots on it, just from being old and wear and tear. The lady that brought it in told me the history that I believe, she said it was like an uncle or a grandfather.
Fisher: So it was a relative.
Tom: Right, it was definitely a relative and she told me a little bit about him, and this guy actually got into photography. There’s people who every once in a while do these selfie contests, send in your best selfie and they give away prizes and such. I told her “You need to make a copy of this and send it in because I guarantee this is going to be the oldest selfie anybody has ever seen!”
Fisher: It’s a winner.
Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely. But I wanted it so bad. It was awesome.
Fisher: What do you think something like that would be worth? Are you a collector? Do you collect photographs?
Tom: No I don’t collect stuff like that. I mostly just look for family things related to me, if I saw it on eBay and happen to run across it and it was a 100 bucks, I would have bought it without even thinking about it because it’s so special to me.
Fisher: Sure.
Tom: So I tried to bribe the lady, I said, “Give me all your pictures let me scan them for you and I’m not even going to charge you, I just want to have permission to keep one of these pictures and be able to use it on our store, it’s so cool”
Fisher: Did she agree?
Tom: Oh yeah, she’s totally on board with it.
Fisher: Oh that’s fine. So what are you having to do to fix it?
Tom: What we’ll do first is, we’ll scan it on a really deep hue since it is black and white, and we’re going to scan in color like we talked about last week because it gives you more information. Most of the spots on it are about the size or a little bit bigger than a pencil led, so they’re not huge, and so we go into Photoshop which is a great program to do editing, once we get all these things done it will look like the guy just took the picture and it will look awesome.
Fisher: Well isn’t that great. And Photoshop Elements too, a cheaper version with all those same tools on it for anybody.
Tom: You don’t have to get the full blown Photoshop like mentioned, if you’ve got Elements that comes free with a lot of scanners, you’ll be able to rock and roll just fine.
Fisher: All right. What are we going to talk about next?
Tom: We’re going to talk about what if my pictures got torn up, what if I got an a line on my picture that I want removed.
Fisher: Oh, boy! Coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 129

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are talking Preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority on America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes. I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth. And Tom recently, of course we were both at the Roots Tech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, and your had a lot of people bringing things to your booth for evaluation, for restoration and recovery, and talk about some those other items that you saw.
Tom: Oh, exactly, and the thing is, some people don’t want to give up their stuff, even though they flew in they don’t want to leave it. I understand that, so one thing that you need to do too if you’re in the situation where you don’t want to do yourself. You don’t want to ship it, you want to fly it in. I’m sure there are people in your area that can help you with this, and one thing you need to really do is look outside the box.
If you just want to go to a trasher place and you don’t think, ‘Oh they’re not really into photos they don’t know what they’re doing,’ go to places that do billboards. Go to advertising companies with good references and they might be able to tell you, oh yeah, there’s a color correction place that does billboards, and take it to them and say, hey here’s what I need done, and they can usually scan it for you right while you’re there, because they have their equipment set up always, to do things like that. Scan it, you can take the photo back with you, and they can do it for you.
Fisher: They can take a little tiny photo and blow it up to billboard size!
Tom: Oh, absolutely. So, these people definitely know what they’re doing.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And if you still don’t want to leave it, that’s fine. Just have them scan it. And even if they say, hey, we don’t do photo restoration, but we can scan it for you at a gazillion DPI, then that’s fine. Have them put it on your thumb drive or a disk, take it home. You can email it to us or anybody and get a quote. And the thing is, if you email it to us and ask us for a quote, you don’t have to have us do it. You can just say, okay, this is what it would cost and then take it to somebody local. And if they’re in the same ball park, you know they’re being fair with you. So, we’re just more there to kind of help you out. We had one this person who brought us a photo that was torn.
Fisher: Right in half, huh?
Tom: Yeah, torn right in half. So, half the face was missing, however, we’re like detectives. We need to get as much information as we can, which we kind of alluded to, last week.
Fisher: So, part of it was missing? It was in two halves?
Tom: Oh, exactly. A whole part of the guy’s face was missing. Kind of like the thumb print we talked about last week, but not as severe, because, if you have a person’s face, you know they’re not asymmetrical. So, you can kind of take things and kind of know what you’re supposed to do. But anything you can give to us, like, type of clothing it was, other photos, even if they’re younger, or older, it helps our artist say, okay, this is when he was eight years old. Here’s a picture of when he was twelve, based on that, I can kind of do these things to fix the photo. So, be like a detective. Get us any information you can. If it’s a color photo that’s faded, let us know, oh yeah, so-and-so used to wear this colour. They had this. This is what their eye color was, so we can make sure we get everything right. So, you had a little sister that had green eyes, we don’t make them blue or brown.
Fisher: Right, Right.
Tom: We want to be as authentic as we can, so bring us this information. Even if it’s a black and white photo, get us that information, because you think, who wants black and white? Why do I need to know eye color? Well, in gray scale, blue eyes, brown eyes and green eyes are going to be different shades of gray scale. So, if you want to be authentic, get us as much information as you can, so we as a detective can recreate this picture and make everybody look right. Also, they knew that there was supposed to be somebody else in that picture that wasn’t there, because that half was torn and nobody knew where it was. So, if you can get us a picture of that person, close as you can to that age, we can make a new family portrait and put that person in.
Fisher: That’s incredible.
Tom: Oh, it’s amazing what technology will do now. We’ve even had people bringing us photos they had of “outlaws”, like ex-in-laws, there was such a bad situation that they wanted us to take them out.
Fisher: I’ve done that.
Tom: Oh, you have to. And we can take people out, even if they’re in front and blocking people, we can remove them, and rebuild people shoulders or arms or hands or whatever, to make it look like they were never there. And as we just mentioned, we can take people and put them in. We’ve had people that had lost a child that was really, really young and they still wanted the person to be in there, and so, we can either put him in at the age that they became deceased or if they passed away when they were fourteen and this picture was taken when they would have turned sixteen, we can put him in as a fourteen year old or even kind of age him and make him maybe sixteen.
Fisher: Really? You can do aging?
Tom: Oh, absolutely.
Fisher: Oh boy! Great stuff as always, Tom! Thanks for coming on.
Tom: Good to be here again.
Fisher: I cannot believe we’re done for another week. Thanks once again to Lisa Louise Cooke, host of Genealogy Gems. A great podcast at GenealogyGems.com, talking about mobile genealogy and why you need it. Catch our podcast at iTunes, iHeart Radio’s talk channel or ExtremeGenes.com if you missed it. Also to Carolyn Tolman from LegacyTree.com, talking about doing “genealogy” on a house. Talk to you next week, and remember as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

by

Paula William Madison

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and AmericanAncestors.org. They welcome new radio affiliate WFLN in Arcadia, Florida. David talks about his recent time in the spotlight working out the actual relationships of the Kardashians, which Fisher promptly brings to a halt! (Fisher insists EG be a “Kardashian Free Zone!”) David then talks about a woman who is well into her second century, and still chain smokes! Just how old is she? Listen to the podcast! The Canadians have just released digitized World War I military diaries, and is working on Army service records. David also shares his Tech Tip of the Week, and another free database from NEHGS.

Then, over two segments, Fisher visits with Paula Williams Madison, a former network executive at NBC, who left her high-powered job to pursue her ancestry! With Jamaican roots, she was raised in Harlem, New York, to a mother who was half Chinese. Paula’s quest to find her grandfather’s kin took her back to China faster than anyone could have imagined. How did she do it? Paula will tell you in the podcast. And where does her adventure go from here? Find out on this week’s show!

Then, Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, answers more listener questions about digital preservation.

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

(Photo used with permission of Paula Williams Madison.)

 

Transcript of Epsiode 124

Segment 1 Episode 124 (00:30)

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

My name is Fisher, I  am the Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out, and if you are new to the show, the whole point of this thing is to help you learn how to trace your ancestry, learn about your ancestors, your family history, your ethnic background and also to inspire you with some of the stories of discovery that some people have had and hopefully entertain you a little bit along the way as well, and of course, everybody right now is getting ready for Roots Tech,  which is the largest family history convention / conference in the world.

It’s going to be happening this coming week in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’m going to be there, our good friend David Allen Lambert is going to be there, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and so is our guest from today, Paula Williams Madison.

She is going to be one of the keynote speakers there, fascinating background, an NBC executive who quit her career right at her prime in order to trace her family history. Raised in Harlem, African-American, Jamaican, but also has Chinese background, and wanted to find out about that, and she went to work and she did not fail. Wait till you hear her story coming up in about eight minutes or so.

We also want to welcome our friends at WFLN, NewsRadio 1480 in Arcadia, Florida to our network of stations. We’re so excited to be part of Joe Fiorini’s great weekend line-up in western Florida.

Right now, let’s head out to Boston and talk to our good friend, David Allen Lambert, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and AmericanAncestors.org, and David, before we even get started, what is this? I find you on Vice.com; you’re getting involved with the Kardashians research now. What’s that about?

David: Well, I tell you, it’s never quiet here in Beantown.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: You know it’s interesting; media looks at the entertainment field as sort of our ‘royalty’ if you will, of the American Royal Family. It’s really funny, but yeah, I had a reporter from Vice.com get a hold of me yesterday and they wanted to know; now Rob Kardashian and Kylie Jenner are step-brother and step-sister.

Fisher: Uh-huh.

David: Half-brother half-sister. Now, they are now dating the opposite person’s former girlfriend – if that doesn’t get confusing.

Fisher: I’m very confused.

David: So, I had to create a family tree verbally, then they had someone on their staff sketch it out.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: How Rob Kardashian and his new girlfriend Blac Chyna would be related to the opposite couple. So, you have to pay attention to this.

Fisher: No, no… I’m not.  No, we’re not going there!  This is a Kardashian-free show, and it’s always going to remain that way, and I apologize for even breaching the subject, because I did not want to go there and get the details, but I’ve had enough. Let’s just move on.

David: Okay, if they want to see more, just have them see the link to Vice.com and they’ll see the article.

Fisher: All right. What do you have for us in our family histoire news this week?

David: Well, I have some really old news and this involves a 112 year old Nepalese woman who has been smoking cigarettes for the past ninety-five years.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: She’s 112. She’s not giving up the chain-smoking habit yet.

Fisher: She’s been smoking since 1920?

David: Yeah, and she has a thirty cigarette a day habit, and she says that’s her way of doing things and she doesn’t care how old she is, and she wants to continue smoking.

Fisher: Now think about this. I mean, if she quit, she could live to be 140!

David: I know, exactly! Well, that being said, she isn’t quite the oldest person in the world, in fact, the oldest person in the world, goes to Susannah Mushatt Jones who’s an African-American lady who was born 1899 in Alabama and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Now she claims that she has never smoked, consumed alcohol, partied, worn make-up or dyed her hair. She’s now legally blind, but is living pretty comfortably at the ripe old age of 116 years old.

Fisher: Crazy. Born in 1899, right?

David: Yeah. It makes her one of two people, the last to be born in the 1800’s. Yeah, the other lady is in Italy, but our last American born in the 1800s is really closing a chapter of our grandparents’ generation that we know.

Fisher: Sure. Yeah.

David: So, that being said, my family, as you know, I’m dual-citizen with Canada. I’m always trying to toss in some Canadian news for our listeners with Canadian interest. The library and archives of Canada and Montreal have now put on the War Diaries for the First World War.

Fisher: Oh wow!

David: What it basically means is that the details that you want to find out about the day-to-day activities of your World War I Canadian soldiers, you can find out for free, and right on the archives website, I will send a link so the listeners can check that out. I’ve also learned the great news that in the next two years, they will have digitized all the service records for World War I soldiers. I think that’s a wonderful tribute to their service.

Fisher: Absolutely true.

David: War…talking about photographs and things of that nature that we collect in genealogy; I want to give a competition for Roots Tech.

Fisher: What?

David: Next week, I want our listeners to track you or I down, get a selfie, either with us and post it and then we’ll see at the end of the week who gets more selfies.

Fisher: Oh for Pete’s…okay, game on!

David: All right, and I don’t care what gimmick you have to use to get the picture, but I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Fisher: [Laughs] He’s got something in mind. You can tell right now. Okay.

David: Hmmm, okay. I want to toss out an interesting Tech Tip. Everybody is doing home movies, restoration and sharing it. Well, for my high school reunion a few years ago, I took our graduation from the 1980s and I posted the whole thing on YouTube for free.

Fisher: Cool!

David: So, I gave the link to all my classmates. I didn’t have to make thumb drives and mail them to everybody around the country. So, why not do that for your local historical society.  Maybe you’re going to walk the cemetery, give a tour of a local building in your town or just have a family reunion. Share it with the world, and if you’re those veterans, there’s a great free service. YouTube will give you the space and just upload your videos.

Fisher: So you make your own YouTube channel.

David: You’ll have your own little extra.com. NEHGS every week has a guest user database. All you have to do is go to AmericanAncestors.org and sign up for a guest user account. This week we have more sketches in our early Vermont settlers to 1784 that were done by Scott Andrew Bartley’s research. This is a great way of finding your early Vermont, Northern New England ancestors, and if you have one that’s not listed, contact NEHGS, we’d like to know what you have and include it in an upcoming sketch.

Fisher: All right David, see you in Salt Lake City this coming week, looking forward to it.

David: Same here.

Fisher: All right, and coming up next, one of the keynote speakers from Roots Tech, she actually found her Chinese relatives and what a story it is. Paula Williams Madison is coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 2 Episode 124 (25:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Paula Williams Madison

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

 

It is Fisher here your Radio Roots Sleuth, and the countdown is getting so close now to Roots Tech in Salt Lake City in Utah, the largest family history conference in the world! And I am so excited to have one of the keynote speakers who’s going to be speaking at Roots Tech online the line with me right now from Los Angeles, California, Paula Williams Madison.   Hi Paula, welcome to the show!

 

Paula: Hi Scott, thank you so much for having me.

Fisher: It is so fun to talk to you. You have an amazing background, and I think if people have ever questioned what it is about family that drives people to dive into this and find out about their own identities, and backgrounds, and heritages, your story is incredible.  You were an executive vice president with NBC just five years ago, still at your prime, still at the top of your earning powers, and you just said “Nope.  I’m done. I’m going to follow this family thing I’ve been doing.”   What was going through your mind at that time? Tell us about that Paula.

Paula: Well sure, that kind of started when I was probably around five or six years old and I somehow decided that if anybody was going to find my Chinese grandfather and/or his family in China, it was probably going to be me. I should start out by saying I am racially black. I am African-American, Jamaican-American, but I grew up with a mother who was bi-racially Chinese and African-Jamaican and we were born and raised in Harlem.

 

At six years old I knew I was going to have to find my grandfather. I just made up my mind that I would. When I started my work career and when I realized that in this work life that people retire at the age of sixty five, I said to myself “Okay, seven is my lucky number, if I subtract seven from sixty five, I’ll be fifty eight, I’m going to retire when I’m fifty eight and when I’m fifty eight I’m going to go find him.”

Fisher: Okay.

Paula: Once I learned the parameters of work life, sixty five, that’ll be too old! I’ve got to start sooner than that.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: So I figured that I would somehow work my lucky number in there and Scott, I am born in the year of the dragon, so you know in Chinese astrology, so I was born in the year of the dragon and 2012 was the year that I found my family in China.

For the Chinese people, they smile, they pat me on the back, they hug me, but then they say “Oh, you a dragon!”

Fisher: [Laughs] Is that a good “Oh!” or is that a bad “Oh!”

Paula: That’s a good oh! Because there is I guess, a characteristic attributed to dragons that they don’t fail. What they set their minds to, dragons will accomplish. So when I decided to do this, when 2012 happened, I had retired from NBC Universal in 2011. I took a few months to just do what people do which is decompress, walk around all day in a t-shirt and sweatpants because it just felt good.

Fisher: And figure out “Who I am” of course at that point too, right?

Paula: You just want to read everything.

Fisher: Sure.

Paula: So by around the winter time I had decided alright I’ve got to get busy. What I did was, I sent an email sort of an ‘All-call’ out to the African-Jamaican people in my family, my father’s relatives, and asked “Can anybody help me? Think about giving me tips at how I might find my Chinese-Jamaican relatives” and one of my cousins, who was probably in his mid seventies, he lives in Toronto Canada, and he said “There are a lot of Chinese-Jamaicans who live here in Toronto, let me ask around and see what I can find out.”  So that was probably April of 2012.

I got back from him in a short amount of time a reference to a conference that he said happens every four years in Toronto and it’s an international conference of Hakka people, so the Hakka H-A-K-K-A the Hakka Chinese people. It’s a cultural minority group in China. Racially Chinese, but it’s a culturally minority group amounting to seventy to eighty million people now in China. That’s a minority group.

Fisher: Wow! Right, of course!

Paula: So he spoke to some of them and they said “Oh tell your cousin to come to this conference we have, we’ll be able to help her find her grandfather’s people.”  So I thought wow.

Fisher: Wow!

Paula: I signed my brothers and me up by June 28th of 2012 we were in Toronto, and there were probably about four to five hundred people at this conference, and we stood up and said who we were and our grandfather’s name.  His western name was Samuel Lowe, and he had been a shopkeeper in Kingston, Jamaica and Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.

We were looking for information about him, looking for relatives, and people said “Oh, we’re going to help you.”  Now the thing for me that was surprising was that, that was the very first time in my life that I had ever stood up in front of an audience of anyone and said that I am also Chinese because I present as African-American.

Fisher: Of course.

Paula: And this is the first time that people didn’t laugh. This room comprised of almost all racially Chinese. Nobody said “Oh my God really?” I didn’t have people go fall and laugh like that’s a big joke, no not at all. So ultimately what happened was they said “We’re going to help you find him.” The convener of the conference, the chair of the conference and one of the founders, his name is ‘Dr. Keith Lowe.’  He is the first Chinese-Jamaican I’d ever met who had the same name as my grandfather and my mother.

 

So I asked him had he ever heard of them, he said “No, I’m from Jamaica but I’ve never heard of them.” Well after about two or three weeks of gentle but persistent harassment, that a woman who ultimately became my producer and director, Jeanette Kong, she helped me pursue Keith because they only lived a ten minute walk apart in Toronto. She’s racially Chinese and he’s Chinese-Jamaican.

 

So she said “Keith we have to help her.” So Keith said “Okay, okay, let me find out from my nephew in Hong Kong. I’ll send him an email and ask him to ask the family in mainland China if anyone knows of a Samuel Lowe.” Dr. Lowe wrote this email.  He included me on the email and he sent it. The next day a response came saying “My uncle says Samuel Lowe was his father.”

Fisher: Oh, wow! That fast!

Paula: That was it.

Fisher: In China, now you’re in China with a relative. How unbelievable was that. Now growing up in Harlem, Paula, you must have appeared different to your peers though, right?

Paula: [Laughs] Well, I probably blended in with just about everybody until my mother stepped outside.

Fisher: Oh! [laughs]

Paula: So when my mother would come outside to call us in for dinner, or my mother would show up at school for the parents meetings, then mouths would be agape. People would look I mean just heads spinning back and forth like what’s happening here?

Fisher: Sure.

Paula: And my mother would just stand waiting, almost daring “Just say something crazy.”  And it would be “That’s your mom?”  Yes! “Well, how is that your mom?”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: Trust me, that’s my mother.

Fisher: “It’s my mom,” yeah.

Paula: And then when my mother would open her mouth she had a heavy Jamaican accent, which was not again what people would have expected.

Fisher: Right.

Paula: So now I actually had people with my mother standing right there, as my mother would speak they’d say “Does your mother speak English?”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Paula: That would send my mother off in barrage of patois laden Jamaican parlay that they really can’t understand.

Fisher: I bet that’s true.

Paula: Then I’d say “Mom slow down, slow down so they can understand you” she would sort of kiss her teeth, flip her head and walk away.

Fisher: Oh that’s funny.

Paula: But we were different. We did blend in for the most part, but we were different when she would show up and that difference today I think is shared by so many millennials. When I show my documentary and read from the book and talk about this –

Fisher: Right.

Paula: If there were young people present, it’s almost amazing to me how often they carefully will either raise their hand during the Q&A session or wait around afterwards to ask me “How do I stop people asking me ‘What are you?’

Fisher: Yeah,that’s a great question isn’t it? I mean, amongst any people whether you’re African-American, Chinese, European whatever, we’re all such a blend.

Paula: We are a blend and the question is phrased that way. You know I had one young lady who was just sobbing in my arms and I asked “It’s painful to you?” and she said “Yes because I’m me,” and I said “Then let me help you give some voice to that.”  I said “Are your parents of different races?” She said, “Yes, and they don’t understand.” So the first thing I think I was to emphasize is when a couple has a child or children and the children are mixed race, the parent doesn’t share the experience.

Fisher: Right.

Paula: You are not racially the same as your children. And the question “What are you?” is in some ways kind of insulting and it sort of reduces you to a thing.

Fisher: Yeah.

Paula: That is not what you want to be or who you want to be. So I suggest to people that when someone asks you “What are you?” that you reply “What my racial background is, or what my racial heritage is.” And leave it at that. Ignore the ‘what are you?’ question because you will never answer that to anyone’s satisfaction and most especially not to yours.

 

I recall a few years ago Tiger Woods was asked what his racial background was and he said “Well I don’t describe myself as just African-American because to do so would be to deny my mother’s heritage and its Thai.”   Now black people in this country, my experience is that so often we learn that nobody wants to claim us.

We’re the descendents of slaves. We ended growing up believing that we were the least appreciated people in the United States. And so when he said that, a lot of my friends who are black said “Oh he just doesn’t want to be black” and what I was insistent upon was “Why do you say that? When did he say that he doesn’t want to be black? He merely said that he is as much Thai as he is black.”

Fisher: Um-hmm.

Paula: So it’s not a simple answer to a question that the questioner might think is a simple question. It just isn’t. And importantly for the millennials, the fastest growing demographic group in the United States today racially, is mixed race.

Fisher: I’m talking to Paula Williams Madison, she’s a former executive vice president with NBC, the author of ‘Finding Samuel Lowe, from Harlem to China’ it’s in book form, you got it out in the film festivals, it’s going to be on TV I assume soon, Paula?

Paula: Yes, it will be on TV on the Africa channel in January 31st and it’s available as a digital download purchase or DVD on Voodoo, Amazon and iTunes.

Fisher: Boy, and it’s a great story, in fact we’re going to continue with your story about what happened once you got everybody found in China, how that adventure continued. That’s coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 3 Episode 124 (44:45)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Paula Williams Madison

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

It is Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, talking Paula Williams Madison, she’s a former Executive Vice President with NBC Universal, and a keynote speaker at the upcoming Roots Tech Convention in Salt Lake City, and this is going to be so much fun to hear you in person Paula, as I’m going to be there. I know many of our listeners are going to be as well.

Paula: Thank you.

Fisher: And in our last segment we were talking about the route you took and how quickly you were able to find your Chinese ancestor who was in Jamaica via going to a conference to Toronto, while you had grown up in Harlem, what an astonishing thing to accomplish so quickly.

Paula: Well, yes it was reasonably quick, but I do want to explain that my oldest brother had back in the 70’sh… he was the overseas controller for the now defunct airline, TWA… and learned as we were shooting this documentary that when my brother went to Hong Kong in 1973, I thought he was going to hang out and have a good time. He told us during the taping of this documentary that he went to Hong Kong to try and find records on our grandfather.  I had no idea.

Fisher: Ha!

Paula: And I say that because the swiftness with which I was able to connect with my family in China, started with a face to face meeting in Toronto and ended with an email confirming that this man whose name was Law Chow Woo, was my uncle, and he said yes Samuel Lowe, was my father.

Now we get to this point and I’m searching for more information about my grandfather, I’m trying to find as much as I can and I was able to do something that my brother wasn’t able to do which is go online and I researched a number of databases including ‘FamilySearch.org’ that’s how I came to the attention of Roots Tech, because as you know that is a website that the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints provides for free as you’re researching your history.

Fisher: Yup.

Paula: I plugged in Samuel Lowe, Kingston, Jamaica, Guangzhou, China, 1934 and within a few seconds up came a passenger list for a ship, the SS addresses in 1933 had Samuel Lowe, with him, his Chinese wife and his youngest two daughters, my Aunt Barbra and my Aunt Anita Maria who were racially Chinese, born in Jamaica and they were going to China.

Fisher: That had to be something that made your jaw drop.

Paula: I was breathless. I just could not believe it, tears welled up… The point I’m making here is that information that wasn’t available decades ago, information that wasn’t available weeks ago might be available today. Because these databases are being uploaded everyday onto the internet. So people shouldn’t give up and if you don’t find it that first time, just keep going back.

Fisher: I think the number on FamilySearch now is a million new pages a day being indexed and put up there.

Paula: Absolutely, and what you can find is fascinating. I found my mother’s naturalization papers when she became a citizen. I found the Pan Am flight list when she flew from Kingston to Miami in 1945 when she first came to the United States under the Chinese immigration quota. I mean there’s so much information on there that I just want to encourage people to, whatever you do, don’t be discouraged because you don’t find it now.

Fisher: Isn’t it crazy to actually find an airline manifest passenger list from those days? [Laughs] I found my mother flying back from Hawaii after she stowed away on a ship to there back in 1948.

Paula: Your mother sounds like my kind of girl!

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Paula: Wow.

Fisher: So those records are out there. So what happened now? You made contact with this uncle in China and you now have a little piece of the puzzle as you start to figure out where Samuel came and went to and from. You have names now.

Paula: Right.

Fisher: Where’s it go from there? You made contact. Did they want to see you?

Paula: Well, again I was mentioning earlier about being African-American and what the legacy of racism has been, and so my husband whose African-American asked me, “Paula, what are you hoping for when you find these Chinese people in your family?”

I was confused by the question, like I don’t know what you’re asking me. And he said “Well what do you want?” And I said ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He said ‘you know you’re black.’ [Laughs] And I started laughing hysterically. I said, ‘I know I’m black.’ I said, ‘why you’re saying that to me? I mean I don’t understand your point.’ And then it hit me, the point he was making was, you’re looking for Chinese people and you’re black. What if they don’t want you?’

Fisher: Hmm.

Paula: Now at that point when that question came you know, I was retired. I was doing whatever I was doing and I thought to myself ‘how could I have been so dense, why did I never think of this?’ So I called my two brothers. So the three of us are on this call and I tell them what my husband Roosevelt has said to me and they said ‘Well we never thought of that either.’ And I thought ‘how could we not have thought of that?’ And then I said, ‘Wait a minute. Ma looked Chinese.  So the face of the woman who raised us and nurtured us and cared for us was a Chinese face.’

So when my uncle Chow Woo learned of me and I told the story that my mother explained, that when she was almost 16 years old, she went on a quest to find her father in Jamaica and learned from his two brothers who had migrated in order to run the businesses with him, that he had returned to China permanently just months before and wasn’t returning. So now it’s like, ‘All right that’s the end. That’s truly now the end of any hope my mother had of ever finding her father.’

What has subsequently happened was, not only when they learned of our existence my uncle Chow Woo said, ‘That’s odd because I know all of my father’s children and I’ve never heard of a Nell Vera Lowe.  And I recounted that story and I said how old my mother was, the date of her birth and my uncle who I didn’t know was a retired accountant, in seconds did the math between my mother’s age, the year and when his father returned to China and said ‘That’s my niece, I need to meet her.’

Fisher: Oh. Haha wow!

Paula: So five weeks later I flew to China with one of my dear friends. I met my uncle Chow Woo, who was 87 at the time, my aunt Adassa, she was biracial, black and Chinese, grabbed my hand… strong for an old lady, and said ‘Bring everyone home to China.’

Fisher: Wow.

Paula: And I thought everyone? Do you know this is not down the street?

Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs]

Paula: So my two brothers gathered our families and twenty of us along with two cousins who were racially the same composition as we are. The oldest son that… my grandfather had remained in Jamaica and he had 10 children, and while searching for them I found evidence of that son… contacted his children, the oldest and the youngest accompanied us and so twenty of us Black-Chinese we went and met them, and there were 300 of my grandfather’s direct descendents that assembled!

Fisher: Oh my goodness!

Paula:  A family that, by the way, had a documented history dating back three thousand years to 1006 BC!

Fisher: You have your line directly back that far?

Paula: Directly back that far, and the next direct one which is way too much for me to fathom but the linage is in a book. The Chinese keep it in legacy books called a ‘Jokbo’ and our Jokbo goes to 1006 BC.  We have since connected with another Lowe clan and they are based out of Hong Kong and their Jokbo connects to ours and it back another 2500 years.

Fisher: We are out of time Paula; it has been a joy talking to you about this! Obviously once you got there you found out there really weren’t any concerns about how you would be viewed and welcomed.

Paula: Oh no. we all have a good time, we dance, we love, we party, we drink, we hang out…

Fisher: [Laughs] Well I cannot wait to hear your keynote address at Roots Tech in the coming week at the Salt Palace Convention Center, in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s going to be a great time. Good luck with your journey because I’m certain, already just having spoken to you, I know it’s not over yet, is it?

Paula: No, it’s not. I’ll be in China two days after you see me at Roots Tech, and we’ll be celebrating yet another lunar New Year with the Lowes, there’ll be about 200 of us gathered in Guangzhou.

Fisher: Unbelievable. Paula Williams Madison, a keynote speaker at Roots Tech, coming up this weekend.  And on the way next… He’s our Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com, Tom Perry, talking about how preserve your precious family heirlooms, next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

 

 

Segment 4 Episode 124

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: It is preservation time at Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry the Preservation Authority from TMCPlace.com

Hello, Thomas.

Tom: Hello.

Fisher: We have questions from AskTom@TMCPlace.com

This one, I have no idea who it’s from, because it says something like, R-C-F-M, whatever! Anyway, it says, “On a past episode of Extreme Genes, Tom talked about ‘Cinematize’ and how it is needed to transfer and create DVDs. Is there a better, more updated program available or is this still best, Tom?”

Tom: Well, listener, whoever you are, I have not as of date found a product as well designed as Cinematize. Cinematize is pretty awesome. I’m just sad somebody bought the technology and wants to use it for something different. I’ve been trying to get licensing rights, which is going nowhere unfortunately, but what I suggest is, go to eBay, Amazon, any place you can and if you can find a used version of it or a new version that’s just still in the box, go with it. Cinematize is just so much farther ahead than anything. If you can’t find that, the next thing that I have used is Handbrake, which is a good program.

The only problem is, its shareware, so it’s free, which is good. However, usually you get what you pay for, and that’s about the only other option. The problem with Handbrake is, it’s really, really slow and can take a long time to take your DVD’s and convert them to AVI’s or MOV’s. So, if you can find an old version of Cinematize, rock and roll! And if any of you listeners have run into something else, let me know, and I’m going to be looking at Roots Tech, see if something is available there, but as of right now, Cinematize is definitely the way to go.

Fisher: All right, thank you so much, Tom, and thank you so much for the question. Here’s the next one, this is from Theresa Elliot, she said, “Tom, I’m trying to make the light box for my iPhone you described on the Extreme Genes show. Can you tell me the dimensions you used and where you got the filters for the lights?” This was a fun episode! I remember talking about this. It’s quite homemade, I love it!

Tom: Oh yeah, it’s a great way to do your own scanning where you have three dimensional objects. You can use your iPhone or any kind of a Smartphone. You can use a regular camera too, like a good Nikon, but this is more made for the people that don’t have a camera stand, and they come out with their Nikon on, basically, what we talked about, let me just real quickly go over it again. Go back and listen to the episode if you can.

We’re building a box that’s five-sided, it doesn’t have a bottom obviously, because that’s where you’re going to put your watches or your rings or whatever you want to photograph, you know, old photos that are damaged, daguerreotypes and anything that you want that you want to actually scan that you can’t put it in a normal scanner or you have so few, you don’t want to go buy a scanner.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: You get your iPhone, you cut a hole in the top, you set your lens over there and then inside, if you’re going to put in lights, and I recommend LED lights. The email that we received, I’m a little bit confused some of the things, because she’s talking about filters, so, I’ll go over a couple of different options, and the best thing to build the box out of, is corrugated plastic.

You can get it at any art store, any sign store, it’s pretty reasonable pricewise, and I recommend you get white, because then it intensifies your light inside of it. The one that I built was a 24×24, because it’s a good easy size to use, you can get most things in it. You don’t want stuff too close to the sides or you’re going to get reflections.

So, I recommend 24×24 and anything up to 8×8 in a 24×24 is fine; you can even go a little bit bigger. If you have great, big, huge things that you need to scan, then I’d go bigger, 36×36, but whatever you scan, and you want to have at least two to four inches space all the way around it. It’s just better for your camera to focus and everything. Specifically on her question, she talked about filters, I believe what she meant is not, filters for the light, but filters for the iPhone.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: The kind of filter that I believe you’re talking about is, the filter for the iPhone. You want to get a polarizing filter, you want to make sure it’s the kind that spins, because what you do is, you turn the filter until all the glare is gone away from whatever you’re shooting and take the picture, ready to rock and roll! If you’re looking at actually physical filters because your camera isn’t white balancing properly, just always remember that daylight is blue, florescent lights are green and incandescent are yellow, but as long as you can white balance, you shouldn’t have to mess with any kind of filters on your lights. Use LED daylights, they are the best.

Fisher: All right. Thanks Theresa for the question! Hope that helps you out and we’ll get more questions from AskTom@TMCPlace.com coming up next when we return in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 5 Episode 124

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our guest, the Preservation Authority.

It is Fisher here, and Tom, we have another email here from Danielle Haiba Loveland, and she said, “I was listening to an Extreme Genes show last week. Tom indicated you should save videos and MP4s before backing them up. Going through some family videos that were already downloaded on my computer, they are AVI files. I don’t see anywhere even when I open it, like save as, to save the property type to MP4. Anyone know how to change them?”

Tom: You know, that’s an awesome question, because sometimes we’re misunderstood. So, you’re not actually taking your AVI files, you don’t have to take them and convert them to MP4’s. What I’m suggesting is, if you have a whole bunch of video files and you have limited space, MP4’s are great, because they’re really small.

Fisher: Right.

Tom: So you can have a whole bunch of them, they’re universal; you can send them to anybody that can play an MP4. As long as you have a computer, you can play an MP4. In fact, some of the new smart phones will even play MP4’s now.

So, they’re great because they’re small, the quality is really, really good, you can also edit them. If you have plenty of storage space, there’s no reason to do a conversion, and one thing you want to remember when you’re doing conversions, the file that you have that’s now an AVI which is a good quality file, it’s very, very large, is when you convert it, you’re not losing the AVI, it’s not like pouring food coloring into water and now the water’s red.

Fisher: Right. [Laughs]

Tom: You’re actually taking that and doing, as you mentioned, a ‘save as’, so, you’ll still have your AVI file, and it’s just that the MP4s are so nice, because they’re small. You can email them to people; they’re awesome to work with.

Fisher: So, this is like converting a photograph of higher quality to a smaller one.

Tom: Exactly! That’s exactly what it is. Now, be careful on the quality, MP4s quality is really,  really good, that’s how they’ve come along so much, in fact, we had an episode we talked about how everybody’s got Mp4’s because they’re so wonderful. So, back to your question; if you want to convert an MOV or an AVI to an MP4, there’s a good program that we’ve talked about before called, ‘Power Director’ and it’s really a great program. It’s only fifty dollars.

Fisher: Yes, I see it everywhere.

Tom: Oh, it’s awesome. You can download it from newegg.com, whoever you want to work with, and it’s a great program. You can take your AVI’s and MOV’s and convert them to MP4’s for the reasons we discussed earlier. One thing about that program, it’s only a PC program.

Fisher: Okay.

Tom: If you have a Mac, then you’re going to need Final Cuts Pro and I believe the new version of iMovie will also do MP4s’. So, when you just click on, it’s not opening it as a program that you can convert, unless you actually go into Power Director or iMovie or one of these programs and then do the ‘save as’ or ‘convert’.

So, you know, just read your software, check up a little bit on it and find out what’s the best way to do that, but like I say, Power Director is the best way to go if you’re a PC user, and most AVI people are PC or Windows-based, if you’re Mac, you’re probably going to have them saved as MOV. So, there’s no reason to convert it, unless you want to save a whole bunch of them and you’ve got a ton of them, but like we’ve always taught, whenever you’re backing up, you want it on your hard drive, you want a disk of it and you want it in at least one cloud, if possible two clouds, and make sure the two clouds are unrelated. A lot of different people out there, such as ourselves, use Google because they have a great platform and then, we add software on the top of it to make it more user-friendly.

However, you want to make sure you use two different people. So, if you use us, don’t use Google. If you use Google, don’t use us. Get Dropbox or one of the other programs out there, like Apple, and make sure they’re saved on two different ones.

Fisher: So, the idea is, if somebody goes bad, you don’t lose both at the same time.

Tom: Exactly! Exactly! And people always say, “Well, what’s the chance of a cloud going down? It’s probably pretty slim.” You want to make sure that with cyber attacks and things like that, there’s so many crazy things going on, you want to make sure, if you can afford it, get two different clouds you can use, and a lot of them are free if you don’t have a lot of stuff, and if you have MP4’s, they’ll fit.

Fisher: All right, Tom. Great stuff, and if you have a question for Tom, you can always email him at askTom@TMCPlace.comThanks for coming on, bud!

Tom: Good to be here!

Fisher:  And that, as we say in the biz, is a wrap for this week.  Thanks once again to Paula Williams Madison for coming on and sharing a real extreme journey, talking about tracking down her Chinese ancestor who came to Jamaica back in the day and how she located all her family in mainland China, the reunions, if you missed it you’re going to want to catch her keynote this coming week in Salt Lake City.  Take care, and remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal, family!

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 119 – The War of 1812 Project/ The Night the Stars Fell

by

Shooting Stars

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

It’s a 2015 rewind show for the holiday weekend, with a pair of Fisher’s favorite segments from the past year!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org.  David talks about a nine foot idol discovered in Siberia in 1890.  Only recently was it determined just how old this item really is.  Listen to the podcast to find out! David also reveals some fascinating facts about his grandfather, who disappeared on the streets of Boston decades ago.  He also shares a terrific “Tech Tip” that will change the way you manage your photographs.

Then, Fisher visits with Fran Jensen who is all over the War of 1812 Project.  The Project is well underway, digitizing the pension records of the veterans of that war.  Fran and some associates have been reviewing them and has pulled out some gems, found in the records, that she’ll share in this segment.

Linda Emlee (starts at 25:16) from Richmond, Missouri then talks about a night few people have ever heard of.  It’s referred to as “The Night the Stars Fell.”  It took place in 1833, and many of our ancestors were affected.  Wait til you hear the details.

Then, Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority, talks equipment for Do It Yourselfers concerning digitizing and editing.  It’s always great advice you won’t want to miss!

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

 

Transcript of Episode 119

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert
Segment 1 Episode 119 (00:30)
Fisher: And welcome Genies to another action packed edition of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. I am Fisher, your Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. I hope you had an incredible holiday season, and that you took a ton of pictures of family members, that your descendents will be struggling to identify 100 years from now. You understand what I’m saying right? Of course, and I hope you taped interviews with your senior family members and got all kinds of stories that you’ll not forget in the New Year to store, share, record and all that good stuff.
There’s no better time of the year for family history than right now, and on the show today we’ll be talking with a woman who is up to her knees in the indexing project, involving veterans of the War of 1812. If you had an ancestor who was part of that little disagreement with Great Britain, you’ll want to hear what’s happening to make sure you have access to the records of your people. It’s a phenomenal effort.
Then later in the show, you’ll hear about a night that affected a lot of our ancestors, many of them even wrote about it. It was dubbed “The Night The Stars Fell.” And some crazy stuff happened that evening. But right now of course it is time to check in with our good friend, David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and AmericanAncestors.org. Hi David, How are you?
David: Hey Fish, I’m doing great! How about yourself?
Fisher: I am doing awesome, of course still refreshed from my little excursion up to Alaska.
David: That makes reference to an email that you sent me with a photograph of you with a totem pole.
Fisher: Yes! I didn’t even know that they put family history on totem poles until I was there. It was amazing.
David: Well it’s amazing… now that wasn’t an ancestor there by any chance?
Fisher: No! No, no.
David: Okay well, one thing that may be an ancestor is something that was found back in the 1890’s directly linked to the northwest totem poles. This is a 9 foot wooden idol that was found back in 1890 in a peat bog in Siberia. Now the thing about this is, this is older than you might believe. It is actually eleven thousand years old.
Fisher: Ooh! 9000 BC. really?
David: Amazing isn’t it?
Fisher: How they’d figure this out?
David: They’ve used radio carbon dating, and because of this we know its eleven thousand years old, which actually makes it twice as old as the great pyramids of Giza.
Fisher: Wow!
David: The nice thing about this is that, this actually gives a nice link between the time when the Native Americans were coming across the Bering Land Bridge into North America, and of course the traditions as you’ve seen recently of the northwest with totem poles ties perfectly with this tradition in Siberia, which is eleven thousand years ago.
Fisher: Boy that is just an incredible find! I love hearing this stuff. Every week there’s something new or old.
David: It really is exciting. It’s nice to know that old news becomes new, but nothing found that long ago.
Fisher: Yes.
David: Well, some new news is going on in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at the Allen County Public Library. You may have visited this wonderful facility.
Fisher: It’s like the number two biggest in the world, to the one in Salt Lake City.
David: That’s very true, and they are having a $100,000 plus renovation of the two thousand square foot downtown center. It’s going to make genealogists a lot happier. It’s going to go in November, so there’s probably going to be some disruption of service. So check out their website to find out what’s going on before you head down to Fort Wayne.
Fisher: That’s great news for midwesterners.
David: Exactly.
Fisher: Well you know it’s funny, I often don’t talk about my own dirty laundry but one of my black sheep ancestors… it’s time I talk to you about my own grandfather… and at NEHGS we just did a little video which is up on YouTube with a photograph.
Remember a couple of weeks ago we talked about the alien registration files?
Fisher: Yeah those are great.
David: Within that file I found the only photograph that we have of my grandfather.
Fisher: That’s fantastic!
David: Yeah it’s a little passport size photo, has a signature on it. But because I have no other photographs, I cherish this probably as much as anything I do in my genealogical collection.
But the ironic thing is I found it a year to the week after my father died.
Fisher: Oh!
David: It was his dad. He always said you know, “Dave, can you find what happened to my father? He disappeared.” Unfortunately I think this bootlegger and person who side stepped the law quite a bit, died on the streets of Boston.
Fisher: You think or you know?
David: I’m pretty sure.
Fisher: Okay.
David: He died as a John Doe; I mean he isn’t in any records that I found. But it’s a nice little video and you get to see how much I don’t look like my grandfather.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: [Laughs]
Fisher: Well let’s link that video to our Facebook page from ExtremeGenes.com that sounds great.
David: Yup, I’ll be glad to do that. We have some exciting news at NEHGS. We have our Labor Day experience for September 2nd to September 9th we’re offering to our guest users, census tax and voters lists over 40 separate databases.
Those are going to be free to our guest users, and that leads me to a tech tip that you may have never tried.
Have you…. well you probably have, have you ever drawn the floor plan of your childhood home?
Fisher: It is so bizarre you would say that. I was thinking about this just a couple of nights ago because I have all these photographs from around our house, indoors and outdoors and I thought, it would be kind of fun to take some of them and put them together and basically take a tour of the house. And then perhaps draw the layout of exactly how it all was and where the shelves were and where this was and where that was. It would be quite fun I think.
David: Well I think with graph paper but now with CAD programs that are pretty reasonable in price you could probably layout the floor plan like if you were going to do a renovation of your house. How about doing a recreation of your old house?
Fisher: Right or your grandfather’s house.
David: Exactly! Or interview somebody and have them sit down and draw where the kitchen was, where the bedrooms were. Who slept in what room, great stuff. And last but not least my weekly tech tip is… An iPhone, an Android app called ‘Photo Myne’ spelled P-H-O-T-O- M-Y-N-E. This goes for $4.99 is a great little app. I’m going to download it and I’ll give you a review next week. You can take pictures of your photo albums. You know the magnetic ones your pictures are stuck in and you’re afraid to lift out of.
Fisher: Oh the 70’s, yeah what a great time. Who was thinking when they made those things?
David: Not archivist obviously. But the one thing about it is, you’re able to scan the pages and then it does auto and color contrast corrections. So those faded pictures from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s come to life again, and then you can use social media to post them and share them with your family.
Fisher: So we’re talking with the cell phone?
David: With the cell phone. A cheap app for $4.99, I have an album from the 70’s that I’m going to use and upload to Facebook and I’ll do it as my test.
Fisher: He’s David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. Thank you David! Talk to you again next week.
David: Very good! Have a good week yourself.
Fisher: And coming up next, we’ll talk to Fran Jensen who is knee deep in exploring the pension files of the veterans of the War of 1812.
It’s a project that numerous researchers are excited about. That’s in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 2 Episode 119 (11:10)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Fran Jensen
Fisher: Welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and on the line with me right now is Fran Jensen, and Fran was a speaker recently at a Family History Conference at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Fran you had a fascinating story about your exploration of the War of 1812 files, and obviously you have way too much time on your hands [laughs]. Tell everybody what you’ve been up to.

Fran: Well, for the past year and a half we have been perusing through the pension files as they have been digitized and placed on Fold3, and actually viewing many of the files one by one. We were looking for some stories, some fantastic records and information that were contained in the files, and we were just blown away by what we found in the files.
Fisher: Who is ‘we’ Fran?
Fran: Myself and two other volunteers.
Fisher: Okay.
Fran: So we’ve seen things like numerous original marriage certificates, family Bible pages that had been ripped out of family Bibles and sent in during the process of applying for pension or bounty land, and in one case we actually saw that the entire Bible was sent in by the family, not just the Bible pages.
Fisher: [Laughs] How do they store that? That’s amazing!
Fran: [Laughs] I don’t know how they store that back there in the National Archives, but I’m sure it’s just sitting right there. All the pension files were originally stored in alphabetical order, so it’s probably just sitting in alphabetical order with the rest of the pension files. [Laughs]
Fisher: Oh, that’s funny, the Bible itself.
Fran: So that was just mind boggling to see that.
Fisher: Did they digitize every page in the Bible?
Fran: No. [Laughs] They only digitized the pages that were pertinent to history or family history.
Fisher: Okay.
Fran: It was actually a Bible. I believe the date on the Bible if I remember right was 1815.
Fisher: Right.
Fran: If I remember right.
Fisher: Right from the end of the war.
Fran: Uh huh, yeah, and obviously numerous family members were actually documented in the Bible on those pages, their births, their deaths and their marriages. There was another pension file that we found, let me see, the soldier’s name was Fredrick D. Bolles. We were amazed at the information that was in his file. There was a really, really long obituary for the wife, and with that obituary that was in the file as well as the numerous other records that were in the file. We were able to find that individual on FamilySearch /FamilyTree, Fredrick Bolles and his wife, and they had one child in that record on FamilySearch. But in the pension file, we were able to identify the birthplace, the birth date, the death date and place. The file confirmed that there was only one spouse for either the husband or the wife. In other words the wife didn’t remarry after the husband died. It gave the marriage date, marriage place. It identified that the couple had twelve children.
Fisher: Oh boy!
Fran: And at the time of the pension, four were still living, and the couple had eighteen grandchildren and six great grandchildren. The file gave us all that information, including the wife’s father’s name and one of her sister’s names and where they were living. If it was my family, I would have been able to take that pension file and fill out all that information which was missing from the record on FamilySearch/FamilyTree.
Fisher: Isn’t that something…
Fran: So what we’re hoping is that people will find these records in pension file and fill in all the missing blanks they may have in their family records.
Fisher: Now what kind of military action stories have you stumbled across in these records?
Fran: Oh, military action stories, there’s been stories where either the soldier himself or the wife they will tell how they were injured or how they endured certain specific events in the war. In other words, they were exposed to extreme cold and it caused medical problems.
So we’ll see medical records in the pension file that were used in an effort to obtain either the pension or the bounty land, and it proved they were invalid and needed help through pension, through some kind of support, and so, being shot, losing a limb, and normal things you might see out of the ravages of war. You’ll see evidence of that also in the pension files.
Fisher: I’m talking to Fran Jensen. She’s been researching the War of 1812 pension files that are being released. How far along are we right now? I mean there’s percentages of them we see periodically going up 30%, 40%, what number have you seen lately, Fran?
Fran: I was on the Fold3 website this morning and it said 65%. They’re currently digitizing the soldiers’ names who began with the letter M.
Fisher: Was it all done alphabetically?
Fran: Yeah. At the National Archives the pensions are filed alphabetically, so they just started at the very beginning and now they’re working on the M’s. I don’t know how far they are into the M’s, but they’ve been working on that for a few months now. So we will eventually get to the W’s and X’s and Y’s. We will eventually get there. It’s just been amazing, the stories and information. Just the other day I was looking at one pension file, it had a little teeny tiny clipping from a newspaper. Well that newspaper clipping had nothing to do with that soldier. Nothing to do with the person who was applying for a pension which happened to be the daughter of the soldier, and the daughter was using that particular newspaper article to prove that she was the same type of a person, a living descendent of someone who served in the war.
Fisher: Right.
Fran: And so therefore she needed a pension too like this other person did.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Fran: So I went and looked for that other pension and found it. But that other pension mentioned somebody else who was the same situation, a daughter who was looking for support and hoping to obtain a pension like another daughter had obtained. So it was actually one pension file that led to two other pension files, and interestingly enough, the very last pension file that the story actually linked to, is actually missing and is not in the pension files on Fold3. It’s probably not even sitting there in the stack of the pension files. It looks like, based on the information we saw on Fold3 in the pension, it’s probably filed totally someplace else, and that’s the file I actually expect to see quite a bit of evidence and information about the family in that file.
If it can ever be found because the daughter was very young, I think she was fourteen years old when her father passed away, and she was partially blind and that’s why she was able to obtain a pension on behalf of her father’s service. Because of her age and because of her disability, her pension file was actually an exception to the rule and it was an act of Congress that actually made it possible for her to obtain her pension.
Fisher: Wow.
Fran: We’ve seen several pension files where individuals have tried to obtain a pension under the current laws at the time, and was not able to but due to extenuating circumstances, bills went up to Congress and then in many cases when it was warranted obviously the pension was granted to the individual outside of the basic laws that were available at the time.
Fisher: Sure, exceptions at the time. Fran, how many files are there? How many pensions were actually applied for?
Fran: We don’t have an exact count, in the neighborhood of 100,000.
Fisher: Okay.
Fran: The other interesting story… just to point out that even if your ancestor didn’t serve in the war, you may find lots of information about your ancestors, multiple ancestors in the file.
For instance, I had an ancestor, he served in the war. His name was William Fuller Card, Card was the last name, and his son-in-law, his name is Benjamin Kingman Curtis. Well Benjamin Kingman Curtis was born fourteen years after the war. Well, guess what? Benjamin wrote a letter stating that he knew William Card and that he was there when he died, and he was there when he was buried. He wrote all that detail out about this person that he knew in the late 1840’s who had passed away. He had actually written that he was living in his home at the time, and so both people, William Fuller Card and Benjamin Kingman Curtis, they’re both my ancestors. But I would have never ever thought to search for Benjamin Curtis in the War of 1812 files because he hadn’t even been born yet. You know?
Fisher: Right. Why would you even look there?
Fran: In the Civil War.
Fisher: Isn’t that funny how that all works out, and then that can lead to other things. Now you can look in places and you can look for land records and start tying those things together.
Fran: Absolutely, yeah.
Fisher: It is just amazing the little pieces that come together. The Revolutionary records are pretty much all available now. Now we’ve got War of 1812. We’ve come a long ways with the Civil War records, although I don’t think there’s ever an end to those [laughs].
Fran: I know [Laughs].
Fisher: You’re not going to start going through those are you?
Fran: Um… Who knows? [Laughs]
Fisher: [Laughs] Well, it’s great things that are happening right now in our country with digitization and so many new stories coming out. Fran, thank you so much for your time! This is very exciting stuff and I’m glad you’ve been doing this. Is there a place where you are sharing any of your finds?
Fran: Oh yes, absolutely. The digitization project is actually sponsored by The Federation of Genealogical Society and since several others of the Genealogical organizations, Ancestry.com, Fold3, FamilySearch; they are supporting this effort to digitize these records.
They’ve never been microfilmed; they’ve never been so easily available to us. So just going online and being able to see something that normally in the past. We would have had to have gone to Washington DC in order to see it in person or hire somebody to obtain a file and copy the file for us. So to have them actually be online is fantastic. We have block articles of the Federation of Genealogical Society’s website for preserving pensions, and we also have a Facebook page and a Facebook group. During the month of July on the Facebook group, we shared one story from one pension, every single day during the entire month of July.
Fisher: Wow fun stuff.
Fran: Yeah.
Fisher: And that’s up there still probably?
Fran: Oh absolutely, yes.
Fisher: Great. She’s Fran Jensen. She’s been researching the War of 1812 as these pension records have been released. Still another 35% to go before it’s all out there and all available.
Great stuff, Fran. Thanks for coming on the show!
Fran: You’re welcome. Thank you.
Fisher: And coming up next, I’ll be talking to Linda Emley. She’s a midwesterner who has dug up all kinds of information about a night that took place back in 1833 that’s been dubbed ‘The Night the Stars Fell,’ and our ancestors apparently went crazy that evening.
All kinds of incredible stories, that’s coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 3 Episode 119 (24:50)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Linda Emley
Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth. You know one of the ways to write a family history involves writing down your family’s dates and names and then noting historical events that were happening at the same time. Well many of these things are pretty well known, and many others are not. Like the event my next guest has written about that I’d never heard about. From the Ray County Museum in Richmond, Missouri, its Linda Emley, she is the museum manager. Hi Linda, how are you?
Linda: I’m good.
Fisher: I’ve got to tell you, I was excited about the article I found that you wrote for the Richmond, Missouri Daily News about, “The Night the Stars Fell.” And you hear about these things once in a while and we think about Mark Twain and the comet in 1910, and the one that came the year he was born. But this one seemed to affect a lot of people and you did a great story on it. First of all, what got you interested in it?
Linda: Well, we have a genealogy library here at the museum, and a lady came in and we were working on her family history and she said, “I don’t know when it was but my great, great grandmother was born “The Night the Stars Fell.” So a lady that was volunteering for me in the library, she goes, “Well that was 1833.” And we all kind of laughed.
Fisher: Huh. [Laughs]
Linda: So yeah, that’s one of those stories that are in all the old history books. So from there we started piecing it all together and found out what a magnificent event this was. Because it affected so many people. Everybody thought that the end of the world was here.
Fisher: Well, you know, you hear that a lot now, remember the comet that went through Russia a couple of years ago? That was pretty frightening.
Linda: Yeah. But this one happens every 33 years.
Fisher: Hmm.
Linda: But in 1833, it was perfect because the weather was calm, the moon was low and it was a perfect example you could see so many more than you could the rest of the time. So it was one of those once in a lifetime or probably once in forever, the most perfect one that ever happened.
Fisher: How much area was covered by this? I mean, I would assume where you were you’ve got some quotes in your story from people who lived in the Missouri area at the time, obviously they got a great look. But what about the rest of the country, what do you know about that?
Linda: Well one of the stories in mind was the guy that was in Virginia, so it was all the way across the country. Elder Samuel Rogers, he was a circuit rider preacher and he was there. So after research all the newspapers everywhere were talking about it. So, it was definitely seen around the world but in those days you didn’t hear so much about it. But you go back to old accounts and everybody, every family has a legend about it.
Fisher: Now it started November 13th 1833, it went a few days they called it part of the Leonid meteor shower, and so this comes every 33 years. Which means the next time we see it will be around 2031 or something like that right, always in November?
Linda: I don’t have the actual turn on it but there was a place that gave you how often it came through. So it’s actually 32.5
Fisher: 32.5… Oh, that changes everything now!
Linda: [Laughs]
Fisher: So we’re probably looking at 2029 or something like that. So tell us some of the stories of some of the people. You mentioned the circuit preacher in Virginia, who else did you run across?
Linda: Well locally here in Ray County, we had two families that were coming up the Missouri river from Kentucky, and Lexington, Missouri is on the other side of the river from us and they had to camp on the river that night. So we had the Jabez Shotwell family and his seven children and then Edward Wall and his eleven children. So they were all camping and waiting to cross over in the morning to come over to Ray County, and their family traditions as they passed it down. Bruna McGuire, she was a little old lady that was a local historian. She said, “As they could not cross the Missouri River on a boat that day, they camped on the Flusher farm the night the stars fell.” One of the families seeing the sparks called out to the squire, “Stop stirring up the fire, you might set the tents on fire!”
Fisher: Oh wow! [Laughs]
Linda: So he said, “Come here and look, the world’s going to come to an end.” So they were talking about some of the slaves that were there, that they all fell on the ground they all thought the world was going to end. It wasn’t until the sun came up the next morning that they all realized that life was going on. So it rained stars all night long.
Fisher: Now, was anything actually hitting the earth?
Linda: Well, they said some of them were like bigger than normal and then they would break up and two or three of them would come down and they’d go behind trees. But they all felt like they were hitting the earth, and I’ve always collected rocks and I’ve always looked for meteorites that might have come from that event.
Fisher: Right.
Linda: I haven’t found any for sale but you know there had to be when that many had fallen.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Linda: There had to be meteorites that hit the ground.
Fisher: You would think so. But how would you know when they got here.
Linda: Yeah.
Fisher: So who else commented on this thing?
Linda: Well, there was a little slave girl, she was living in Tennessee, and there’s a great genealogy story out there about her descendant, Angela Walton. She found a quilt that Harriet Powers put together that had about the Nights the Stars Fell, had a panel on an old fleece quilt. So she said, “Oh, we heard the story about Amanda.” Then she finally found out how old Amanda was because they just gave a general idea that she was just a little girl. So they figured out that she was born around 1820’s. It’s a wonderful story there because Amanda said that all the slave owners thought the world was ending. So they came out and started telling all the people where they came from, who their families were, and where their mothers and fathers were. So they were all making-
Fisher: Repenting.
Linda: They were getting ready for judgement day, is what it said.
Fisher: Uh huh, and so they just figured it’s not much point in freeing them, but here’s who your parents are and where they went. Unbelievable.
Linda: Yeah, and so the next morning all of them were happy because they finally found out more about their family history. So that’s what it’s all about. Can you imagine somebody knowing your family story and then they start telling it to you. It would just be like a miracle if somebody came along and offered all your information. I thought that was really….I would love to have somebody come up and tell me all of my history.
Fisher: Very special.
Linda: Then we’ve got Parley P. Pratt. Parley Pratt actually spent time in Richmond. When we were having the Mormon Wars in Missouri, he was one of them that came to Richmond and was here with Joseph Smith. So when I found the story about him, it touched close to me because of all the Mormon history we have here in Ray County.
Fisher: Hm hmm.
Linda: They were up in Jackson County and they were all being driven out of Jackson County and they were being pursued when all this happened. It stopped the pursuit and it was like a miracle. So everybody felt like, you know, this was a sign from God that they were going to go on and life was going to be good here.
Fisher: So it actually saved some lives that night.
Linda:Yes, and it affected the whole future. My biggest thing was to find out why this one in 1833 was the biggest one that was ever out there. So I went all the way back through history and researched one whole night. Then I found in 902 AD, and Plato was talking about a similar meteorite shower, so it had to be the same one.
Fisher: Right.
Linda: It kept coming back over and over and over. It was interesting because when it comes around every thirty three years, it’s always out there. It’s just amazing the way the earth revolves around everything. You think of it shooting through the sky and just keep going straight forever, but it actually is revolving around. So the whole idea of how meteorites work is pretty amazing to me, and then I love the difference of a meteoroid just shooting through the air. When it starts to burn up, it becomes a meteor when its shooting through the sky, and when it hits the earth it’s a meteorite.
Fisher: Wow!
Linda: So you think of one rock and the name changes and what it’s doing at the time. So being analytical as I am, I thought that was really different, the meteoroid and the meteorite. [Laughs].
Fisher: Absolutely, and to think that this goes on every thirty three years. I’m trying to remember, I mean I remember Hale Bopp, the comet that went through back, I want to say in the 90’s, and it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen in my lifetime. But I don’t remember a Leonid meteor shower quite like what’s being described here.
Linda: Yeah, and this week we’re in right now, there’s a meteorite shower going on. I’ve reposted the story on my Facebook page for the museum, and everybody is like “Oh, I’ve been out watching it.” So you know there’s so many different versions of it, but this is one of them that’s the most spectacular. If that thing is like Halley’s Comet, then everybody knows about it. But this is one of those that you don’t think about it until you start reading up on it and it’s just so very interesting. Think about 902 AD, and Plato, that’s the beginning of time.
Fisher: Wow!
Linda: So it all comes from the beginning of written history.
Fisher: She’s Linda Emley. She’s the museum manager at Ray County Museum in Richmond, Missouri. She’s written an article about ‘The Night the Stars Fell’ You can find it linked on our website ExtremeGenes.com. Linda, thanks so much for coming on!
Linda: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s always fun to share a little piece of history.
Fisher: Absolutely. Coming up next, it’s Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com our Preservation Authority, answering your questions on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

 

Segment 4 Episode 119 (37:10)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And welcome to the preservation segment of our program, Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry, from TMCPlace.com. Tom, welcome back! Good to have you.
Tom: Good to be back.
Fisher: We’re hearing a lot of people who are having trouble playing disks they recorded on one machine; they sent it to somebody who has the same machine and the disk won’t play. What’s going on there?
Tom: Okay. You run into this a lot, it’s an incompatibility problem. It’s almost common sense, but sometimes we put on blinders when we’re buying stuff. You know, like I tell people when they come into our store. We had a couple last week that came and said, “Hey, I bought one of these VHS to DVD machines.” Or, “I bought of these little boxes that I plug my VHS into or my Hi8 and then plug it into my computer and I go and burn these disks and there’s glitches in it.” Or, “It looks fine, but then I send it off to my uncle, he pops it in his DVD player and it won’t play.” Okay, the reason for this is the quality of the parts. You know, the same reason Maserati costs more than a Ford Fiesta.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: You know? It’s the parts that are in it that make the whole, so to speak.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: And so, what happens is, we’ve said this before; most computers are not made to turn stuff from analog to digital. That’s not what they’re designed for.
Fisher: Right.
Tom: They’re designed to work with digital information that they’re given and compact them. Move them around, do whatever. So, what happens, you have these little boxes that are usually like fifty bucks, and the reason it’s fifty bucks is, the components in them are pretty cheap. And so, what happens, you plug your VHS into it, this little box is trying to turn all your analog stuff into digital and then put it in a format that the computer understands. It’s like we have too much earwax in one ear and it’s not hearing the conversation right.
Fisher: Right
Tom: So, it’s getting your zeros and your ones all mixed up, and there’s nothing worse in this world than getting your zeros and ones mixed up.
Fisher: Can’t have that!
Tom: Oh, absolutely not!
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: So, you’re getting glitches and all kinds of stuff, and then once in a while, in some of your machines which we mentioned that is actually a VHS to DVD machine that it doesn’t have the box in between, and you go and do stuff and you say, “Oh yeah! This looks beautiful! This is wonderful!” And then you send that out to Aunt Margaret, she pops it in and says, “You sent me a blank disk. There’s nothing on the disk. It says it can’t read it. It says I need to put a different disk in.” And she sends it back to you, you pop it in and it plays fine. The reason why these machines that Costco or Sam’s Club are a couple of hundred dollars is the same reason a Fiesta is as inexpensive as it is. The components are really cheap. Those machines are made for you to record television or whatever you want to do or transfer your VHS tapes to DVD for you to use on that machine.
Fisher: Hmm.
Tom: So, it’s basically almost proprietary information that’s on that machine, and it’s so loosely written that this machine says, “Oh okay. This is stupid, but I know what it means, because it’s my machine.”
Fisher: [Laughs] Well, is there a way to copy that file, say, onto your desktop and then it’s playable on something else?
Tom: Usually not. Sometimes if you have a higher end computer and you have the right software, sometimes you can take this DVD that you’ve made, which if you ever take a DVD, a quality DVD and put it in your computer, it will say it’s a TS file. If you look at it where it shows you the thumbnails, you go, there’s a video TS and an audio TS. Why is that? Really quickly; in the old copyright days, they made this so it’s harder to copy DVDs. So, you have a TS file for video and TS file for audio and what happens is, these kind of get corrupted and don’t play together and if you separate them and try to put them back together, they’ll never work. But sometimes if you have a good program like Cinematize which we talk about constantly on the show, you can take the TS file and convert it to an MOV, and then take that MOV and make it into a QuickTime movie. Put it on your Facebook page then email that to Aunt Margaret, if she’s computer literate, and then she should be able to play it okay.
Fisher: Wow! I mean that sounds very complex.
Tom: Oh, it is.
Fisher: Challenging, isn’t it?
Tom: Oh, it is. It’s very much just like if somebody speaks Spanish, they might be able to understand some people in Portuguese and different languages that are close. But it’s not going to be really, really good enough to, you know, get by. And that’s the problem you’re going to run in with these machines, that’s the reason they’re so cheap. I tell people, if I could go and buy equipment for $250, I wouldn’t be spending $3500 on the machine because we have to guarantee our job. When somebody brings us in a VHS it had better work when they get their DVD home. And we’re going to do a little bit more of incompatibility problems concerning disks, why they might not work for you as well, in the second segment.
Fisher: All right, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

 

Segment 5 Episode 119 (44:20)
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: We are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority, answering a question about dealing with disks and compatibility. And it sound like its quite complicated, Tom, and most of it has to do with the fact that most of the equipment that’s available to us through Costco and other outlets is just not very good quality material.
Tom: Exactly! You know, you have to understand that when you’re buying something, nine out of ten times, you get what you pay for and the thing is, things have changed so much, even with camcorders. I remember my first camera situation, when I used to shoot NFL films; it was like a $30,000 system. You can go and buy for two or three thousand dollars, a Canon video camera now, that blows that thing away, and it’s a few thousand dollars. So, there’s real good quality equipment that’s getting into people’s hands, they have no idea what they’re doing with it. People are starting to be DIY people, Do It Yourself people; they need to be educated on this kind of stuff. So, just because you buy a machine, don’t just plug it in and start doing stuff. Read the manual! As much as everybody hates to read the manual, read the manual, do research online, find out what you need to do. And a lot of times, somebody will go and spend two or three hundred dollars to buy a machine, thinking they’re going to be able to do all this stuff, and they find out they can’t; now they wasted two or three hundred dollars. They end up sending their tapes into us anyway, to have them transferred. So, save yourself some of those problems, take it to us, take it to another good quality place and make sure that they get it right. Now, going back to the incompatibility problem that can happen even with your disks. People call me all the time and say, “Hey” and say, “I’m looking at these disks, there’s plus Rs, there’s minus Rs, there’s DL, there’s RWs. What do I buy? What should I go with?”
Fisher: Yeah. What does this mean?
Tom: Exactly! I always say Taiyo Yuden disks. If you forget what the name of it is, go to our website, TMCPlace.com and you’ll see on there the Taiyo Yuden disk is the kind that you want to use. The thing is, plus Rs were the first disks to come out, so it’s kind of like experimental. And when they first came out, Sony and Apple were kind of not interested in carrying them. They wanted to wait till the dash R disk came out, which is a better disk, but they’re still selling plus Rs even though they don’t need to anymore. But about three to four years ago, Sony and Apple started making their Macs and their Sony machines compatible with the plus Rs just because there were so many out there. But if you have the choice to pick between a plus R and a dash R disk, I would always go with a dash R. I have so much better luck with dash R disks then I do plus Rs, and they’re usually the same price anyway, it’s just the format they’ve used. So, basically back to the cheap equipment, it’s cheaper to make a driver that reads or burns a plus R disk, than it is a dash R disk. I can always buy plus R stuff cheaper then I can dash R. And just like the old VHS, BetaMax thing, “Oh, this is cheaper. This is what I’m going to go with.” Well, cheaper sometimes isn’t the best way to go. So, try to find a machine that burns dash Rs, because it’s going to last longer and it’s the better way to go, and, I really don’t like dual layer disks, because major incompatibility problems with them. Because usually people say, “Oh, I’ve got this thing that’s four hours long. I don’t want to go to BlueRay, but I don’t want to use two disks.” Go ahead and do two disks, because it’s going to be cheaper for you to duplicate two standard disks than one dual layer disk. Plus, a lot of machines have problems playing dual layer disks. If it’s not professionally done, I stay away from duel layer disks. I taught clients how to use them all the time. If you’re having a disk replicated, like a Disney DVD you’d buy in the store, so you’d buy like a thousand of them, they’re stamping them out, then doing dual layer disks are fine, because they’re all zeros and ones and they’re .in the right place. Everything is going to go well if you’re using a dual layer disk that is basically a professional disk that’s stamped out, not one that you burn at home. Now, about the RW disks, I don’t like rewriteable disks, because the same thing like we talked about a few weeks ago, about reusing a tape, they can get worse. Same thing with disks, as it erases the zeros rewrite zeros, the dye actually gets weaker. And so, the more times you write on it, the less compatible it’s going to be and disks are so inexpensive, even the Taiyo Yuden disks, you can buy it at a decent price. Don’t get RW disks; they’re just going to cause you all kinds of problems.
Fisher: All right! Great stuff, Tom! Thanks for joining us.
Tom: Glad to have been here.
Fisher: I cannot believe we’re wrapping up our final show of 2015. Thank you so much for all the support this past year! The growth has been phenomenal! And we’re looking forward to much more of the same, next year. Thanks once again to Fran Jensen for coming on and talking to us about the War of 1812 Pension Project, Linda Emley from Richmond, Missouri, talking about “The Night the Stars Fell.” Talk to you next week. Thanks for joining us! And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!

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