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

May 31, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 141

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

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

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

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 134 – Ron Fox, Photo Expert, On Finding Rare Photographs on eBay / First Time Genealogist Breaks Open Ancestry Line That Baffled Experts For 20 Years!

April 11, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.com, who is in England for the Who Do You Think You Are? Live! Conference. David shares the huge news that NEHGS is opening EVERYTHING, over 1 billion records, for guest users, free, through Wednesday, April 13. David then talks about Jewish tartans now available for Scottish Jews. He’ll tell you about their unique features. David also reveals that a Russian princess, living in England, has come out with a tell-all book. You won’t believe who she was set to marry at one time. (Think “large ears!”) Fisher and David then discuss a recently published and very narrow list of heirlooms you should consider saving for your children and grandchildren.

Photo expert Ron Fox then joins Fisher (starts at 11:39) to discuss the exciting new New York Public Library “Photographers Identities Catalog.” This remarkable index and biography catalog covers 115,000 photographers and others in the field dating back to the mid-1800s. How can you use this great new tool to learn about dating your antique photographs? Ron will tell you. Ron has lots of other great tips and advice for discovering rare and often valuable photos on eBay, as well as of individuals from families you are interested in. It’s a fascinating topic you won’t want to miss.

In the third segment, Fisher visits with Utah resident Carole Burr. Carole was a first time genealogist who decided her initial investigation would be to crack open a family line that experts had failed at for over twenty years! Guess what?! Carole will tell you about the case and how, with a little help from somewhere out there, she was able to make the breakthrough!

Tom Perry, the Preservation Authority drops by from TMCPlace.com to talk about recovering fading audio tapes, how to enhance the sound in the digitizing process, and some simple ways to maximize your family’s ability to enjoy your audio. You’ll be adding another awesome project to your list when you hear what Tom has to say!

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

Transcript of Episode 134

Segment 1 Episode 134 (00:30)

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

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And I’ve got to tell you this show today is just covering a lot of ground! Coming up in about eight or nine minutes we’re going to be talking to photo expert Ron Fox, he is back talking about a new source that’s going to help you ID photographs and perhaps date them as well.

And later on in the show we’re going to talk to a lady who was a rookie researcher, had never tried to research her ancestors before and she decided to take on a challenge that had baffled experts for 20 years… and she broke it! How did she do it, what was the story? You’re going to hear that from Carole Burr, later in the show and just a reminder by the way, all of our shows are now transcribed, so when you hear something and you want to follow up on that all you have to do is search it with ‘Extreme Genes’ in brackets and you’re going to be able to find it much more easily than ever before.

Right now let’s head out to London, and my good friend David Allen Lambert, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. He is their Chief Genealogist.

David, what are you doing in London?

David: Well, right now I’m trying to get the best Wi-Fi signal possible to talk to you! [Laughs]

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: So we can talk all about genealogy and the exciting ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Live!” Conference in Birmingham, England.

Fisher: And you’re going to be there for the next two to three weeks right?

David: I’m actually here for all of ‘Who Do You Think You Are.’ I’ll be doing a tour with NEHGS, we’re doing London, we’re going to the Society of Genealogists, the Public Record, the London Municipal Archives, and then I decided to take my comp days and spend an extra week in London touring the museums, going to the Tower of London where some of my ancestors met their own demise. Just having a great old genealogical time and going up to some ancestral places up in Cheshire, so I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a genealogist’s holiday.

Fisher: Oh it sounds like it. What a great time! And by the way, speaking of NEHGS, what an amazing announcement that’s out right now and it affects a lot of people if you haven’t gotten on it, you need to. Tell them what it is.

David: This is an amazing deal. NEHGS of course offers a free guest user database but if you register as a guest user now, we’re entitling you to a billion records.

Fisher: With a ‘B’?

David: A billion records is basically everything we have to offer!

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: And the thing about it is that you only have until April 13^th so take a peek at it, it’s kind of like test driving.

Fisher: Right, and by the way the link is on our Extreme Genes website and our Facebook page and of course I’m sure you’ve got that up on Twitter as well, and at NEHGS and AmericanAncestors.org

David: It’s amazing. There’s just so many stories I’ll be having for the next couple of weeks and potential new guests for you to interview on an international level. We’re exposing Extreme Genes on a level that’s never been done before and it’s really exciting, and I’m learning all these wonderful stories. I’ve seen some people in their tartans, the Scottish are rich in their tartans and their history. But now I heard the story that a gentleman by the name of Rabbi Mendel Jacobs, who’s a Rabbi up in Scotland, has authorized and has now got through the Scottish Tartan authority, an actual tartan for those that are Jewish.

Fisher: Really?

David: Yes. And the interesting thing about it because it has to meet kosher rules so it’s non- wool / linen mix that abides to Jewish law prohibiting the mixture of wool and linen in garments and it has navy and burgundy it’s quite colorful.

Other exciting news, a tell all book from a Russian Princess who was a potential bride for Prince Charles at one point before Diana, this lady who lives in England, her name is Olga Romanoff; she lives in an opulent 30 room manor house in Kent, called ‘Provendore.’ Her father was the eldest nephew of Czar Nicholas II of the Romanoff Empire.

Fisher: Wow! [Laughs] there’s a little there huh?

David: Exactly. You know I have some history I might follow, we always talk about photographs and I went through the last time I was in England was in 1986 and I was going into my senior year in high school and I’m in London for a lot of this trip and I found a few photographs, took a picture of them with my iPhone, I have them on my phone and I’m going to do a before and after picture.

Fisher: Yes.

David: And maybe I’ll share some of them with some of the visitors, I don’t know sometimes the after pictures are not as good as the before’s but it’s a fun picture I actually have curly black hair at that point of time!

Fisher: [Laughs] Well side by side pictures are fun to do not only in other countries and places you’ve but your old home, like I did recently with my house that I grew up in. It went on the market recently and we were able to take some of the MLS listing pictures and put them side by side with photos from 40 years ago, it’s just amazing.

David: Well that’s my tech-tip, so take an old photograph on your phone and the next time you’re on a vacation or even going down the street, do a before and after picture. Put them side by side on your social media. You know, there are so many things that people are showing me here at the conference, but heirlooms, I think we’ve had this discussion before. What is important to save? I mean right now in my jacket is my passport that is something that you would want to save. I even have my old one.

Fisher: It’s interesting you say that. There is a story out in the Huffington Post this past week, it talked some ideas of things that you might want to save as heirlooms and your first passport was on that list, in fact it was the first thing on it. Because it would show you when you were young and some of the cool places that you’ve been and show us what an adventurer you were. Then it lists things like your military discharge papers or one printed photo of your wedding. You know maybe there are lots of pictures but one printed photo.

David: Um-hmm.

Fisher: Something that belonged to the oldest living relative that they knew. A sentimental piece of jewellery, a receipt with a date on it that shows how cheap things were back in our time.

David: Year by year we can all as a family put together a time capsule- if you will. That represents the certain events that make the whole year what that year has been for you, the good, the bad, the indifferent and everything that happens to us. It is what shapes our story. That’s why I always thought journals were important but this adds another dimension to it. This is taking family ephemera into the picture.

Fisher: David, have yourself a great time, we’ll talk to you again next week. Where are you going to be next week when we talk to you?

David: I’ll be still in London, and at that point of time I’ll be heading up to Cheshire to a village called ‘Brereton cum Smethwick, where my family lived from the time of the Reformation all the way through to the 1890’s and then we go to our family farm, and going to go to church services where my family has not attended since 1874 like we did for over 300 years.

Fisher: Oh unbelievable! You have a great trip my friend and we’ll talk to you next week.

David: Thanks so much! Take care, Fish.

Fisher: And coming up next we’re going to talk to photo expert Ron Fox about a new source that’s going to help you ID photos and date them it’s good stuff on the way in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 134 (11:10)

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

I am Fisher, your Radio Roots Sleuth with my good friend Ron Fox, the photo expert; we’ve had him on many times before. Ron, good to see you again!

Ron: Good to see you, Scott.

Fisher: And, I was thinking about this. A couple of weeks ago, we saw the release of a brand new index, it’s the New York Public Library Photographers index, 115,000 Photographers going back into the middle of the 19th century, and very significant thing, because this helps us in researching our photographs, maybe…actually, even identifying who somebody is, based on the age they may have been when the picture was taken, and that you can determine by the location of a photographer from this index. Let’s get into that a little bit.

Ron: Well, yeah, I mean it’s a great, great research tool, and it’s something that, you know, we had photography, it was introduced in 1839 came to the U.S. in about 1841, and then it was like wild fire. It was like Apple phones, you know, it just went crazy.

Fisher: Yes.

Ron: And, so, we had a lot of people develop it and our friend, Samuel Morse is the one that really caused it to happen in the U.S. He’s noted for the telegraph, but actually, he’s the father of photography, but the thing is, that is most important about this index is, if you find daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and even albumens or paper print photographs, at the bottom of most of your albumen prints put on cardboard or just photographs all the way up into the ’50s, photographers always put their stamp on them, because it was free advertising, and so, you’d have the opportunity to take a look at this index and see that this Photographer between a certain point in time, a certain year and another year was at that particular address.

Fisher: Right. The address is usually on the photo, obviously with their name.

Ron: Yes, and by so, you would know that, say, that the photographer Bogardus, for example, was in New York on Broadway between 1851 and 1856, and then he moved over to Park Avenue. So, you would know then a finite time in which he was using those particular photographic supplies to provide you with your photograph.

Fisher: Yeah, and that can help you then identify the possible age of the subject or give you another clue in the event you have an idea of who it might be to note that it’s in the right year range for the age that person should have been.

Ron: That’s correct, and there’s another book you can find in certain libraries, The Collection of Western Photographers, for the Western U.S. It gives you a small bio, but it also tells about his movements and where he was. There were photographers that went on railcars and would go to communities and people would come into the rail car and have their picture taken and then they get off.

Fisher: Really?

Ron: Absolutely. It was a big business, and Union Pacific who really used after the completion of the railroad, because it was another thing to bring people to the train station.

Fisher: Nice! I’d never heard that.

Ron: You pull over the boxcar onto the siding and advertise it a day before. It’s like the circus man, it was coming to town.

Fisher: And so, you’d get ready and dressed in your best and go get your photograph taken, and then, would they get that to you days later? Do they mail it to you? How would that work?

Ron: No, they would normally just be there for like two or three days, so you had an item that was there and you just had to go and pick it up, but those days, tintypes were the cheapest photograph that you could purchase. Sometimes there were tintypes, other times there were albumens, and even later, they had something called ‘cyanotypes’ which were kind of fun, because they’re very rare and they are valuable, but they are photographs that are all in tones of blue.

Fisher: I did not know that either. You’re always a fountain of knowledge, Ron, which is why we appreciate having you on. All right, let’s talk about some recent discoveries in the photographic world. You’re kind of the king of finding the ‘needle in the haystack.’

Ron: Well, there’s a lot of things that have been found in the last few years. There was a photograph that a friend of mine bought through a guy who was a picker, basically, in an antique store, and it was Fredrick Douglas speaking in 1841 to a group of abolitionists. Well, he got it for thirty-five dollars, a very famous star has offered him a million dollars for it and he won’t accept the money. He has it now resting in the Smithsonian, and they think it’s one of the five most valuable historic photos in our history.

Fisher: Isn’t that incredible for thirty-five bucks?

Ron: Yeah.

Fisher: From a picker, I wonder if the picker knows about this.

Ron: I doubt it.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Ron: I doubt it. It’s just like my eBay find. You know, that was a big find.

Fisher: Yes.

Ron: It was worth in excess of $100,000 which we paid couple of hundred bucks for, and it was just that you recognized the face and the name was not there. It was just phrase about the guy, how he looked like “an intelligent looking man,” but there are other photographs. Couple of years ago, there was a small CDV, which is basically like a baseball card size.

Fisher: And CDV is short for Carte de Visite

Ron: Correct. French term, and of course our friend, Louis Daguerre who was a main player in a process of coming up with photographs, but actually marketed better, and therefore had his name attached to it, but there was one found in Washington DC where they had a group of people standing outside the White House and they blew it up and recognized by measurements with geometry, it was President Lincoln standing out in front of the White House!

Fisher: Really!? When was this found?

Ron: Oh, about two years ago.

Fisher: And what’s the value of that one?

Ron: Oh, that would raise that picture probably to $10,000 – $15,000.

Fisher: Unbelievable, and it’s the only one of its kind?

Ron: Oh yeah. A lot of people will not recognize, like when they have a tintype of like, President Lincoln. Now, a ferrotype, which was a different process, but a tin type of President Lincoln which was probably again a baseball card size, but it can go up to an 8×10, this would be a full plate, they call it, but they used to put a wood, like a bees eye or a honeycomb, so each one of those little openings would go through the lens and take a picture, and therefore you would have like twenty tintypes of one sitting, of one photograph.

Fisher: Yeah, that makes sense, sure.

Ron: Then they would just take tin-snips and cut them up and of course, we always talk about tintypes, but they were actually steel, not tin, but those are actual photographs. When you get a photograph that’s a tintype unless it’s a photograph of a photograph that person stood in front of that piece of tin. So, Lincoln stood in front of that piece of tin.

Fisher: Well, that’s interesting.

Ron: Yeah, it’s not like a photographic negative where you can make multiple prints onto paper. No, a tintype is a one-only-type picture.

Fisher: And it’s always in reverse, is it not?

Ron: Yes, yes, and there are practices that were invented at one point, because the early daguerreotypes were all reversed, but then they had a reversing lens that was invented in Germany which they propagated over here later in the 1850s to reverse the reversed image.

Fisher: Now, I have looked for some time for a lot of photographs of my family, my wife’s family, by putting search terms, say, on eBay.

Ron: Um-hum.

Fisher: She came from a small town in Indiana, Crawfordsville, and so, I would put the family name and Crawfordsville or Crawfordsville CDV, because maybe there isn’t a name associated with the picture that’s put on eBay, but this is what a lot of families can do to actually find old photographs, family Bibles, things like this.

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: But you could go years also, without ever finding anything, and then all of a sudden, after looking every day for three or four years, suddenly you find something new.

Ron: That’s absolutely true. One of the other ones is that, you know, usually you’ll have that print and you’ll have that name at the bottom. Call the local public library or the University, and Universities and Colleges right now are spending 10s of 1000s of dollars a month on scanning old newspapers and photographs and those are going online increasingly. FamilySearch is another good source. I mean, in their first year of operation they had a million photographs.

Fisher: And now, I think it’s many, many times that.

Ron: Many times that, and MyHeritage is another one who have done a really great job of collecting these photos from their members and placing them on their websites.

Fisher: Well, you know, you think about it, some of the pictures that you and I worked on finding together and I finally found a photo of my great-grandfather after thirty years and now, I have three of them, because one was identified which allowed me to identify him in a different picture, which allowed me to identify him in the third. The other two were not marked, and as a result of that now, after all these decades, we finally have it available and you put it up online and it’s there forever, because all the other descendents will make copies of that or keep that or it will just remain up on the website.

Ron: That’s right, and here’s another issue. A lot of times you’ll have a photographer in a small town like Crawfordsville and you’ll have the name of that photographer and a lot of times, you can actually do the genealogy on the photographer and find the family and ask them, ‘Where did all the negatives go?’ I did this recently with one family in our state, and candidly out of it I found that the woman’s father who took pictures from the 1890s to the 1930s they’re up in her attic. All these glass negatives, all indexed, are up in her attic.

Fisher: Wow, and what an awful place for them!

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: All that heat and cold and all that.

Ron: Absolutely.

Fisher: So, what are you doing with all this?

Ron: Well, I’m trying to get her to sell them to me, so I can scan them or I can provide them to the state. In our case, the state loves this type of stuff and they will increase their archives to accommodate them. I mean, there are collections, like there’s one collection in like, 1925 in one of the major cities that has 22,000 glass negatives all identified, with prints as well as the actual negatives, and all you have to do is get online, put your name in and up comes grandpa, you know?

Fisher: Well, that’s true. I actually found my grandpa in one of those collections in a state archive. That’s right, my grandfather from Oregon, and by the way, he was out of state at the time.

Ron: Yeah. There’s also, as I said, these Universities, I know of at least one major University that I’ve dealt with that has over 2,000,000 photographs that they have not even scanned yet.

Fisher: 2,000,000?

Ron: 2,000,000.

Fisher: And see, what you’re doing right now is validating what I think, and that is, with as much stuff as we have online right now, there are still far more stuff that is not online, that’s still in archives, that’s still in libraries, in people’s private collections, in their attics, in antique stores, all over the place.

Ron: I really would encourage your listeners to take the opportunity to, get into that trunk and open it up and mark the photos that they who they are, because 90% of the time, people do not write, even today, on the back of a photo who it is, and one generation and it’s gone.

Fisher: You know that is the best advice of all. Ron Fox, great to see you again, thanks for coming on, always enlightening, always a pleasure to learn something more at your feet, and by the way, if you’re interested in that index from the New York Public Library of all the Photographers, dating back to the 1840s and ’50s, we have a link to it at ExtremeGenes.com and on our Facebook page. And coming up for you next, we’re going to talk to a rookie genealogist, one who said, “As my first project, I want to take on a line that’s baffled experts for twenty years.” And she succeeded! Wait till you hear the story that Carole Burr has to tell you, coming up next in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 134 (24:50)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Carole Burr

Fisher: And welcome back to America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. I am Fisher your Radio Roots Sleuth and I am very excited to be talking to Carole Burr, she’s on the line with us right now from Utah County, Utah.

Hi Carole, how are you?

Carole: I’m fine thank you.

Fisher: Carole had this idea in her mind that she wanted to find out about her husband’s ancestor, and Carole you’ve never done this before right?

Carole: Absolutely. It was new territory.

Fisher: New territory. I’ve been following this story and it’s just absolutely incredible. Now your husband had an ancestor that came out to your neck of the woods some time back in the 1860’s. Now what was his name?

Carole: Charles Berry.

Fisher: Charles Berry, and where did he go?

Carole: He went to Moab Utah, and that’s where my husband was born and raised.

Fisher: And so he had a lot of family members I would assume from that area? A large farming family as they spread out, so you probably had a lot of cousins who had worked on this line for some time.

Carole: Yes, and they were really eager to know more about him.

Fisher: So here’s the name Charles Berry and then he just kind of disappears into time. All these folks who worked on it and used stepped up and said “Hey let me try” and so who did you reach out to, to help you with this?

Carole: I have a wonderful cousin that is in Oregon and she does genealogy all the time and knows how the resources and how to do it and she is the one that helped and she basically was the one that led us to the right place.

Fisher: Let’s talk about this a little bit. It was a dead end for a reason. Obviously they couldn’t find anything that would link him. When you do genealogy you take what you know and you connect it with what you don’t know and there’s got to be some kind of connecting document, and nobody could ever find Charles Berry before he arrived in Moab Utah. What was the clue?

Carole: Well the clue for her was the name of ‘Bachrach’ and we had heard Bachrach, he just didn’t go by Bachrach.

Fisher: So this is something that had been passed down through the family?

Carole: That’s right, and so now this wonderful genealogist as she was, she found a listing on it and then she started searching for it, and then that gave me a lead also to start working on the same name.

Fisher: Okay. So what did she fine? And what did you find?

Carole: Well what I found, it’s hard for me to even believe, even though there were many families with that name, I did find the name of the right person, and interestingly enough it was in the library. There was just an old little book that they gave me and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in front of my eyes. I started crying my eyes out [laughs]. In the back of the book I found a whole Bachrach family and it was all names that we now could research even more. Without the blue book it would have been probably a dead end for all of us. But it was wonderful because it had so many Bachrachs and they did have this specific line in the book. My husband’s grandfather… this particular book outlined that he lived in Moab Utah.

Fisher: Wow.

Carole: So they were giving us details that were so tiny and it was talking about all the families, who they were.

Fisher: That’s unbelievable.

Carole: Everything else just kept verifying it over and over and over.

Fisher: And so you took this information and passed it over to your cousin who’s the expert, right? Who hadn’t been able to do this in twenty years, and what happened with her?

Carole: Well she was as excited as I was. At that point she really started concentrating on this particular line going backwards and going forward, and you see I am not that astute, so she would tell me what to do. We had a lot of people to connect now.

Fisher: Sure.

Carole: And so then we found out by our searching that there was a book written and it was ‘The Jews and Kestrich’ and it was by the Mayor, and I’ve learned that because in that Holocaust they were trying to reconnect all the Jews they could that were taken, and connect them to these towns and so this particular name is The Jews in Kestrich. So at that point we had his wonderful book that was so great that we not only found the family, we found our grandparents and the houses they lived in and even their dogs, and there was a picture I think.

Fisher: Wow!

Carole: It was so complete and so amazing to us and even into their cousins and the gravestones he had, and that’s very important because that’s more verification when you see those headstones with their names on them, you know. Also these picture of grandmas and grandpas and their houses and I just felt like all of a sudden we found this most amazing, wonderful family.

Fisher: Isn’t that something after all these years and here you are the newbie, you stepped into a family history library and pulls the book out of the shelf with a little help.

Carole: She was so much help. She would say to me, because she had all the knowledge, “Okay now you go to do that, and you ask somebody to help you do this.”

Fisher: Right.

Carole: And it was so exciting to me and it was so exciting to the whole family who had been searching, and believe me they were searching, and some of them had become very, very close to finding it and it wouldn’t have to have been in this particular method but I’m certainly glad it was my experience because now I feel very strongly about how much the feelings are when you can connect your family!

Fisher: It’s incredible isn’t it? Now there was a tie in one of your cousins found in Baltimore too, right? There was a museum that had posted a new book out?

Carole: That connected the name. It wasn’t necessarily connecting him. But we knew then that this was a Jewish name and then we also knew that there was a name which was such an unusual name and so that’s why she was hoping that she had really found that one family, but it didn’t matter because we ended up finding another family with the right name.

Fisher: Right, so it all tied together. So she basically discovered that this was a German-Jewish name and as a result of that, gave you a little bit more to work on and then you found the little blue book in Salt Lake City and suddenly you’re connected back to Germany where the mayor has written a book about the Jewish families that had once been in this little town. Unbelievable! How many ancestors would you say you have found now of Charles’s from that far back.

Carole: Oh at least four hundred.

Fisher: Unbelievable.

Carole: And then probably more. We wanted to do it right and we got all the connections all going forward and back, as far as we could do that, we even called a family reunion which I’ve never even been in a family reunion with genealogy before, and we made it very clear that it would be better for them to go by Bachrach or you’ll send someone down this goose chase again.

Fisher: [Laughs] Well you know that’s the thing, once you find stuff like this it lasts forever online, right?

Carole: That’s right. Thank goodness it wasn’t before.

Fisher: What a strange journey, Carole, but congratulations on your find, I’m sure it almost makes your life at this point.

Carole: And also all the people that had gone on before. We’re searching and the time was right for some reason, you know, and it was time. That’s all there is. There was no excuse, I have nine children, there’s no excuse!

Fisher: [Laughs] Well congratulations Carole, and enjoy the find, and I guess you going to get to know a lot of cousins now who are probably very happy with you.

Carole: Oh, they were so grateful and I keep saying ‘Get the name Berry off everything you have.’

Fisher: Exactly.

Carole: Even your checks for heaven’s sake.

Fisher: [Laughs] Oh, you wanted them to change their names back!

Carole: Oh without a doubt. A lot of people would be searching the next three generations are going to be searching Berry again.

Fisher: Well thank you for your time, and congratulations!

Carole: Well thank you and it’s a pleasure.

Fisher: What a rookie genealogy story that is. Nice job, Carole!

And coming up next; we’re going to talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority, about what you do when you have old audio. Whether it’s reel-to-reel or a cassette tape that’s really difficult to understand. How can you enhance it and how can you make it even more useable. Tom’s got some great ideas on this and much more coming up for you in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com

Segment 4 Episode 134 (37:10)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: You have found us, America’s Family History Show, Extreme Genes and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth and it is preservation time with our good friend Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Hello Tom, how are you?

Tom: Hello, super duper.

Fisher: I’m very excited to hear that you’re starting to get more people bringing in audio to be digitized.

Tom: Oh absolutely, it’s exploding. We get calls almost every day now, that their parents have passed away, they going through the attic and they find these cassette tapes that they didn’t even know existed, or they remember when they were little and listed to old reel-to-reel taped but they don’t know where they are until grandma and grandpa or mom and dad had passed away and they find them.

Fisher: Right. But some of these have got to be in pretty bad shape at this point.

Tom: Yeah, unfortunately like the ones I mentioned in the attic where it gets hot and cold and hot and cold, it can cause a lot of the tapes to start flaking especially the reel-to-reel, and don’t worry about it. If you see they are starting to flake, don’t throw them out. There’s a way that you can actually bake the tape and what it does is it softens the mylar just enough that the magnetic particles reattach themselves and then you can play it fine.

Fisher: Really?

Tom: Oh yeah, but you need to be careful because if you play the tape before that and all the magnetic particles are falling on the floor, there’s no way you can put them back together. It’s worse than having something that’s been shredded trying to paste the pieces back together.

Fisher: Boy and that’s going to be hard if you find an old tape. You’ll want to play to it!

Tom: Yeah, right.

Fisher: But you’ve got to resist that urge and make sure you get it to somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Tom: Exactly. Usually it’s forty, fifty sometimes even a hundred years of recordings. Its best just to be patient, get it to us or somebody else who is a professional in the field and then we can make your reel-to-reels and your audio cassettes come back to life. We just had a call the other from somebody who said “Oh I’m got this old cassette tape of great grandpa, the only recording we have of his voice and it’s very, very hard to understand what he’s saying, is there anything you can do?” Well fortunately there are several different things you can do; first off you want to get it digitized, that’s number one priority.

Fisher: Right and you can enhance the audio.

Tom: Oh absolutely. If you have a program like ProTools. ProTools is absolutely awesome and that’s what we go to for most of our ‘sweetening’ as they call it in the industry. However, sometimes the tapes are so bad it’s really, really hard. You got to get your ear right up to that speaker, you got to really, really listen to try and make out what they’re doing, and so the best answer for that is, what you want to do is go and transcribe it. Put it on to paper for two reasons, first off if somebody is reading along while grandpa is talking, even though it’s hard to understand, you’re reading the words and then it magically makes it like it’s more understandable when really it hasn’t changed.

Fisher: That’s true.

Tom: That way you’re hearing his voice, you’re reading the words and the neat thing about it is once it’s like in a PDF form you can go and look through it, you can type in the word ‘Martha’ and every time he mentions Martha then there it is. So if you fortunate enough that you have tons of tapes, you can go and type in your name and any time that he has said that or she has said that, whoever made the recording, it’s totally searchable you can find Martha, Martha, Martha, then go read those paragraphs and that’s why when he’s talking about you or other relatives you can type in a name and once you make that PDF searchable, which with any basic PDF program from Adobe, you can do that. It makes it wonderful.

Fisher: Yeah that’s a good point. You know I’ve done exactly that. I’ve got some tapes of a grandfather of mine who was born in 1886, he lived till 1975 and we have a couple of really lengthy tapes. Some of the material is really fun to listen to but a lot of it is ‘I don’t want to hear that part, I want to hear about this’ so when I’ve gone through and actually transcribed especially the more difficult parts to hear, it’s exactly as you say, I can read along with it and then I understand what I’m hearing so much better.

Tom: Absolutely. It makes a world of difference, and like you mentioned when you make it as a searchable document, which is easy, once you have a PDF all you have to do is open it with one of the Adobe programs that does the PDFs and there’s a little icon that you can click on that says ‘Make searchable’ or you just download the little typewriter and click on something and it will say ‘Do you want to make this document searchable’ and heck yes! Push the button and then it’s all searchable and you can look for what you want. You can go and maybe make it more understandable for the people later on.

Fisher: Give it some context.

Tom: Exactly and that is so important.

Fisher: All right, what are we going to talk about next?

Tom: We’ll go a little bit more into PDFs and see how you can make them even more searchable.

Fisher: Coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 134 (44:20)

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are back for our final segment of Extreme Genes America’s Family History Show, talking with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, our Preservation Authority and we’ve been talking about preserving audio, Tom and giving it a little more context by not only digitizing it and enhancing it but making it more understandable by transcribing it, actually like we’re doing now with Extreme Genes.

Tom: Oh exactly! It makes it so neat, we have people that call or write us an email and say “Hey, you were talking about such and such, what exactly did you mean?” so now they can go to Extreme Genes PDF’s and they can actually read what we were talking about and say “Okay!” and take notes and write down things. It makes it so much easier. So with your own family history this is something that you want to be doing also. So when you finally get grandpa or your parents tapes transcribed and transferred and all these fun things, on the CD’s that you’re going to make or the mp3’s however you want to do it.

What you want to do is go and add some of your own context because you know what was going on. You can explain, “Hey, grandpa was talking about this, we used to go there every summer… da-da-da-da.” And the neat thing about that it sets up the context for when people are reading this it’s not like something foreign to them but something they understand.”Oh grandpa used to live here.” And the neat thing about doing PDF’s is you can go and get a Google Map, “Oh this is what he’s talking about and this is what it looks like now.” And so when he’s describing our old farm if there are cows or goats you can say “Wow, it’s a Mc Donald’s now!”

Fisher: Yeah [Laughs]

Tom: But sometimes the houses have been restored. If you have old photos you can put those in the PDF’s as well and like we mentioned in the earlier segment, you can make these so searchable and it makes them so much nicer when they’re personal. It’s not just somebody rambling on, they’re sitting there “Oh this is grandpa talking about where mom was born.”

Like I have this story about my grandfather, in the old days they didn’t have incubators. In the early, early 1900’s. So they brought him home in a shoe box, they opened the oven door, turned on the oven and set him on the door of the oven for warmth when he was a baby.

Fisher: [Laughs] You’d go to prison these days for 30 years for something like that wow.

Tom: Exactly! But they didn’t have incubators, he was premature, he was so small he could fit in a shoe box. They didn’t have central heat back then so they turned on the oven. I’m sure it was on low! And set him on the door just to kind of keep the heat.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: He was not in the oven, he was on the oven door that was open to keep him warm, and he survived and lived a great happy life. But stories like that are just so neat and when you can put pictures to them, when you can go in and say “Hey, this is what happened, this is kind of what grandpa’s talking about.” Because most people when they’re telling their family history they know what they’re talking about so they leave out some details and maybe you’re going “What did grandpa mean by this, what did grandma mean by this?”

But you being the son or the grandson or the granddaughter add in some nuances to make it understandable.

Fisher: And keep in mind, you’ll have a tape where the interviewer has also passed and doesn’t identify himself/herself. You’ve got to say who the person is actually asking the questions and that’s been the case for me and so I’ve gone through and actually digitized tapes and then added an introduction at the beginning when this tape was made, who did the questions, how old the people were at the time of it and the context of that era.

Tom: Oh exactly! That’s what’s so important about making them searchable and like I mentioned once you go and make them searchable you can actually add brackets ‘( )’ with context. There’s some software that are called ‘Heritage collector’ which is neat software, you can take all these different pictures and make all kinds of cool things in them and it helps it a lot, you can do the PDF’s but it’s so important you do these brackets and say “Hey, see picture such and such on another document or look at the VHS tapes we had transferred or the film we had transferred it’s over here, it’s over here.

So they can go “Oh I’m really interested in this I want to go see that movie clip that talks about this.” So you can pull out your DVD and pop it in or if you used ‘Heritage Collector Software’ you can just type in what you’re looking for and it’s totally searchable.

Fisher: All right, great stuff, Tom! Thanks for coming on. We’ll talk to you next week!

Tom: Sounds good, we’ll see you then.

Fisher: And, if you have a question for Tom Perry, email him at AskTom@TMCPlace.com Well that wraps up the show for this week. Thanks once again to Ron Fox our photo expert for talking about the incredible new index for photographers that can help you date your old time pictures. Incredible stuff! And to Carole Burr, the rookie genealogist who broke open a line the experts couldn’t solve in 20 years. If you missed any of it, catch the podcast and search through the transcript. 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 118 – Same Docs/Different Views & Baseball Hall for Woman’s Ancestor?

December 21, 2015 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. The two talk about using the “Skywalker” family tree as a great teaching moment for children. Fisher & Lambert then talk about the Christmas traditions of England’s Royal Family. (Just what do you give the Queen?!) David then discusses the oldest remains found showing evidence of tattoos. You won’t believe how far back we’re talking! Plus, hear the value of those ancient coins found on British farmland this past October. David will also have another Tech Tip and the NEHGS free database.

Next up, Fisher visits with renowned genealogical blogger, “The Legal Genealogist,” Judy Russell. Judy has some terrific year end observations on dealing with various views of the same documents and how you can avoid misinterpretations. She’ll also discuss the genealogical trap best known as an “obituary!”

Fisher’s next guest is a Connecticut woman named Marjorie Adams, a descendant of Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, a baseball pioneer who played for the New York Knickerbockers in the mid-1800s. Most importantly, Doc was the man who led the way to standardizing rules by which we know the game today. Listen to hear which rules Marjorie’s great-grandfather fought to standardize, and why she thinks he should now be part of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Tom Perry of TMCPlace.com, the Preservation Authority, then talks about the challenges of conversion of digital video files. What do you need to know to save, view, or edit your files? Tom’s got the answer… as usual!

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

Transcript of Episode 118

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert
Segment 1 Episode 118
Fisher: And welcome genies to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. And I’m so excited, Christmas is about here! I’ve got guests at the house in fact… my daughter, son in law, three grandkids showed up three days early this morning, and so I was like, “Oh! Well, we don’t have everything wrapped. We don’t have all the beds made. There’s so much to be done.”
But we have some awesome guests today; Judy Russell is back, the Legal Genealogist, with some great genealogy observations in about nine minutes. Then later, I’ll be talking with Marjorie Adams, a great granddaughter of the man who back in the nineteenth century set many of the rules we know in the game of baseball. She wants him in the Hall of Fame.
David Allen Lambert’s on the line with us from Boston, the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. How are you, David?
David: I’m doing fine! My shopping’s practically almost done. So, greetings from a happy guy in Beantown!
Fisher: Oh, and I’ve got to give a shout out to a couple of people I heard from this past week… crazy stuff… Mary Williams in South Australia, listening to Extreme Genes. Mary, thanks so much for reaching out and saying hello. Love to hear from you. And from Ukraine, Miroslav Caban. I was just shocked to hear from him and so excited to know that they’re listening to us in all the four corners of the universe. Well at least the world.
David: Hello to them from Beantown.
Fisher: Yes, and let’s get into our family histoire news for today. Where do we start, my friend?
David: I think we need to start in a galaxy far, far away.
Fisher: Of course. [Laughs]
David: Well, in the latest Star Wars, one of the things that I thought to myself, I said, ‘You know, the movies are a little confusing. They come out four, five, six, then one, two, three. Now we’re doing seven!’
Fisher: Right.
David: So, we need a family tree and I thought to myself, I said, “Let me just do Google.” So, I did a simple Google search “Star Wars Genealogy” and on the Wookiepedia…
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: That’s the first hit. I kid you not!
Fisher: Wookiepedia!
David: There is the genealogy of the Skywalker family. So, if you ever wanted to know who Darth Vader’s kids really are without a DNA test, go there. [Laughs]
Fisher: Well that’s great and you know what’s fun about that? In keeping what you talked about last week, about inspiring kids to be interested in family history. What a great tool!
David: Absolutely is!
Fisher: Hey, speaking of people on a different planet or at least a different world, the royal family, have you heard about this?
David: Oh my goodness, yes! The gifts exchange?
Fisher: Yeah, the gifts exchange. The Royal family in England, Queen Elizabeth has set a budget limit. Because you know, you don’t want to break the budget on exchanging gifts when you’re worth how many billions of dollars. And apparently, there’s a tradition that was set, back in the nineteenth century by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, of course. What would they be, grandparents or great grandparents to our current queen? At least greats, right?
David: I believe it is her great grandmother.
Fisher: Yes.
David: Great grandparents.
Fisher: Well, they set it up where the gift exchange with the royal family is always on Christmas Eve, and so, they’ll be doing that this year, and Princess Kate apparently, is interested in making homemade gifts, and she has been making jam for each family member to give out. Isn’t that fun?
David: That’s amazing, and by the way, it is actually her great, great grandmother.
Fisher: Great, great, okay.
David: Yeah, I had to visualize the family tree in my head.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: [Laughs] Well everybody today if you walk around and there’s so many people with tattoos and facial tattoos.
Fisher: It’s like twenty five percent now.
David: Yeah, it’s amazing, but it’s not a new thing. I mean, obviously we can’t look at bones and say, you know, who had a tattoo. But Smithsonian had to settle an argument, who is known to have the oldest tattoo, and if you remember the alpine glacier that receded, and the iceman that showed up out of it?
Fisher: Yeah, Otzi.
David: Yeah, Otzi. Otzi is our man. He has sixty one tattoos across his body.
Fisher: Wow!
David: On his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso and he dates back to dying around 3250 B.C.
Fisher: Wow!
David: That’s a long time to make a mistake on a tattoo.
Fisher: [Laughs]
David: And have it preserved for posterity.
Fisher: [Laughs] Good point!
David: [Laughs] Well, you know, I’ll tell you, every so often, especially when you’re shopping, you reach in your pocket, you drop something like money or in this case maybe loose change. If you do it all together and you bury it in your yard, and some metal detector guy comes, it could be a millionaire.
Fisher: Right. That’s true.
David: So, think about burying a little time capsule in your back yard for future metal detectors. Like the gentleman in Oxford, New England, who back in October came out with a metal detector on his sixtieth birthday, went out and found over 180 coins.
Fisher: Right.
David: Bracelets and pieces of gold dating back to 870 AD from the time of Alfred the Great. The values out on the coins for instance, one of the Alfred the Great silver coins alone, are commercially valued at $2500 apiece.
Fisher: And how many does he have?
David: Over 180.
Fisher: Ohh!
David: So, needless to say, this is going to be split between the landowner and metal detector or whatever deal that they struck, and of course, the British museum find them.
I mean they find these Saxon hordes and Viking hordes once every so often, but it’s amazing when they find them and they’re just not found by archeologists.
Fisher: Right. All right tech-tip. What have you got?
David: The tech tip, well, I’ll tell you. I did see the new movie, “In the Heart of the Sea,” liked it very much. And then I thought to myself, “My own great grandfather was the inspiration for my genealogical interest.” If you might remember from the episode, I talked about him, was on a whaling ship. I have a copy of the whaling log and I thought, “How fun!” After watching the movie to plot where my great grandfather went from 1871 to ’73 with the longitude and latitude in the book, and I thought to myself, “Well I really don’t have mapping skills to do this. I don’t need that.” Google maps, I can either click on a place and it shows up as a location. When they went to the port and get the longitude and latitude and then follow it day by day by the longitude and latitude that’s recorded in the log book. I’ve done the same thing for my grandfather. In the 1920s when he was on the USS Galveston, in the 1920s and trapped for three years, where he was all over the Caribbean and Central and South America. It’s fun stuff and it’s free. So, if you have a person who is sea worthy in your family tree and you want to know where they were and you get some longitude and latitude, you can visually show your kids where your family was.
Fisher: Great stuff.
David: And of course, NEHGS and American Ancestors brings you a guest database every week and this is no exception. For the holidays, we have for you this week, the New York Evening Post death notices from 1801 to 1890.
Fisher: Saw that!
David: 100,000 death notices. And that’s right up your genealogical alley. So, hopefully you’ll find a couple of family members.
Fisher: Yes. Found one the other night. Very excited about it!
David: Genealogical gifts for Christmas. Got to love it! Merry Christmas my dear friend and a Happy New Year! And I’ll talk to you soon. Ho Ho Ho.
Fisher: [Laughs] Thank you, David! Talk to you soon. Coming up next, she’s the Legal Genealogist, and she’s got some great observations to wrap up the year. Judy Russell talks to us in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

Segment 2 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Judy Russell
Fisher: Well, here we are getting ready to wrap up as we approach the end of the year, and I am so excited to get my good friend Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, back on the line.
Because she’s always got some interesting observations; Often things I just would never have thought about before.
Judy is in New Jersey with us. How are you Judy? Happy Holidays!
Judy: Happy Holidays Scott. Although I have to tell you that we are having such a heat wave here, it doesn’t feel like December at all!
Fisher: Well, go to the malls you’ll see, you’ll feel it.
Judy: You see it, yes. When you walk out to your car and its 65 degrees, it’s a little hard to be feeling like December.
Fisher: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Well I’m so delighted that you’ve come on, and you know I was looking at your site the other day and you have so many unique observations.
Part of it I’m sure is because you have a background in law and ethics, but I love some of your observations, for instance, the thing you did about different copies of the same records and how they appear in different websites. What made you think, “Hey wait a minute, this would make a nice column”
Judy: Well in fact what happened in that particular instance, Scott, was that I got a reader question about one column on a passenger record, for her ancestor who had come into the United States very early, and everybody else on this passenger record, the country that they were a citizen of pretty much matched the hometown.
Fisher: Um-hmm.
Judy: But with her record, the town said Schonwald which is Germany, and the country said Russia. So I popped on over to FamilySearch to look at the document myself, and it was quite clear to me, on the FamilySearch record it said Prussia, and not Russia.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So it’s Germany not Russia.
Fisher: Yeah, a little bit different.
Judy: Well, except when you look at the records she looked at, the exact same underlying document, but a different microfilming on Ancestry, it absolutely does look like Russia. It was even indexed as Russia, on Ancestry.
Fisher: Wow.
Judy: But there was a much clearer, probably newer microfilming done by FamilySearch, and on FamilySearch there was no question at all, it was Prussia not Russia. So that just reminded me of all the circumstances, I have come across in my own research.
Fisher: Umm hm.
Judy: Where, depending on where you find the document, you may really come to different conclusions. So when we as genealogists get told and boy we are told over and over and over, you’ve got to cite your sources.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: And that includes saying what website you saw it on. There are a lot of people who say “Well I don’t need to do that that’s not important.”
Fisher: Right.
Judy: Oh but it is. Because if you’re looking at it on Ancestry, you say this family came from Russia.
Fisher: Sure.
Judy: But if you look at it on FamilySearch you see that they were really German.
Fisher: And you gave a demonstration of that. You showed illustrations of both pieces from both sites, and there’s no doubt, it says Russia on one and Prussia from the other. But it’s the same record, the same underlying original record. It was really quite an eye opener.
Judy: Yeah, and the other example that I used out of my own family research, there’s an entry in the 1850 census of my family in Mississippi, and looking at the census record everywhere I’ve ever been able to find it. I was never entirely sure how old the second child was. It could have been three months, or five months, or six months, or eight months, because the outline of the top number over the slash and then the twelve just wasn’t clear.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So I was in Mississippi in June, had a chance to go out to the libraries in the local areas and somebody had actually done a physical photocopy, printed, believe it or not, not digital. You could hold it in your hands…
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: … of the original census record and it was crystal clear, it was five months. No room for doubt at all. So, getting as close to the original document as possible. Looking at all possible websites, checking any source, and checking to see if perhaps there’s a newer version of the microfilming, can make all the difference in the world.
Fisher: Right. Don’t you think it’s also true and maybe of even greater value to recognize that people index them differently? There have been different indexing efforts on the same records and people come to different conclusions. Even though you’re supposed to have all these people double and triple checking what the original person came up with. It’s amazing to me that you can look in one record of census indexing for instance and not find who you looking for and then go to a completely different place and find exactly what you looking for, quite easily.
Judy: Absolutely. I mean, start with the fact that a lot of the older census records were indexed by local genealogical societies.
Fisher: Yes.
Judy: So they knew the people in their community. They knew the families that were there. They’re not going to misread Catullus Cattrall; they’re going to get it right.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: Then you have some of the commercially prepared indexes. The 1910 index on Ancestry for example, I think was outsourced to China or some other place where clearly they didn’t speak English.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: It is brutal in the number of mistakes. The only time you get the double and triple checking realistically, is the crowd sourced indexing at FamilySearch.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: So yeah, lots of different possibilities on the indexing, which is why we don’t rely on indexes got to get to that underlying document if it exists.
Fisher: It’s funny sometimes to look at that original and go, “How in the world did they ever come up with this?”
Judy: Exactly. You look at it with a, “That’s a joke. You can’t possibly be serious.”
Fisher: [Laughs] Exactly.
Judy: It happens.
Fisher: All right, what else do you have that’s on your mind? I saw this thing about obituaries… an incorrect obituary. That kind of lit me up because it’s so true.
Judy: We have to understand, and I do really understand, that obituaries are often written or the information is provided by somebody who is grief stricken.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: Not focusing. Giving the best information they have on the spot, but it just turns out to be wrong.
Fisher: Umm hm.
Judy: And the example that I used is a first cousin of my mother’s. So a first cousin once removed to me. It’s a perfectly lovely obituary they ran in two or three South Dakota newspapers after she passed away there. Some of the information was terrific, and some of it was just totally wrong. It had her born in the wrong state. It had her born in the wrong year.
Things that you would think people would get right, and they were simply 100% wrong.
Fisher: [Laughs] Yeah, birth years off, birth dates off, age.
Judy: It happens.
Fisher: It does happen all the time. You know we had an ancestor on my wife’s side, he was a cattle rustler. He ran off with his farmhand’s wife and then he actually absconded with twenty five thousand dollars under the guise that he was going to buy more cattle. But he kept the money then sold the cattle he had for more money. Changed his name, set up house with this woman and then got caught. Well 28 years later he was an upstanding member of the community when he died and he’ll be missed and mourned and it’s like, “Really, you’re kidding?”
Judy: You just have to love it.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: The fact of the matter is that it’s the winners that write the history or the survivors who tell the story the way they want it to be told.
Fisher: Right.
Judy: And that I think is the key to some of the mistakes and errors that are in obituaries.
This is where we tell glowing stories of people where everyone who knew them looks at it and says, “Are we talking about the same person?”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Judy: But it’s interesting that errors like that, because I think either of grief or because of just not knowing creep into even records that we tend to think of as “Take it to the bank accurate.” Case in point: death certificates;
Fisher: Yes.
Judy: We all, particularly when we’re baby genealogists we think, you know, “If it’s in the death certificate it’s got to be right.” The problem is what has to be right in a death certificate is the identity of the deceased, the date and cause of death. Those are the legal attributes of a death certificate that you know, whoever signs that death certificate better be right or there’s a possible penalty of perjury. Everything else is up for grabs.
Fisher: Right and you know really what we’re talking about here Judy, is the idea of, “Are we going to be name collectors or are we going to be real name detectives where we take all the clues and analyze it and come up with our best conclusions.” Don’t you think?
Judy: You are absolutely right! You know we talk about the elements of the genealogical proof standard and the one that is the most important is reasonably exhaustive research.
Fisher: I love that. Yes.
Judy: And then we go on to the analysis and correlation once we have all of the evidence pieces. But if you took my father’s death certificate, you’d have his father’s name wrong. You’d have a misspelling of the city in Germany, where he was born. You’d have his mother’s maiden name wrong. My stepmother simply didn’t know those facts. So when she put in the information she put in what she thought. Fortunately I also had a chance to get his original birth certificate from the city of Bremen.
Fisher: Yup.
Judy: So I know what all the details are. We need to broaden our horizons and keep in mind that no one record is always right.
Fisher: You know this is the thing Judy… we’ve got to help people to understand we don’t want to be just name collectors. We want to gather everything and analyze it and really it’s much more fun this way.
Judy: Oh it is so much more fun! If it were easy, why would we do it?
Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Well said. Hey my friend, have a great holiday season! Thank you so much for coming on the show! She’s Judy Russell the legal genealogist. Go to LegalGenealogist.com. You will see insights there that you don’t see any place else. Thanks Judes!
Judy: Thanks Scott! Take care.
Fisher: And coming up next, her great grandfather basically made baseball what it is today! We’ll talk to Marjorie Adams about her quest to get Daniel “Doc” Adams into the baseball Hall of Fame, coming up in five minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.
Segment 3 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Marjorie Adams
Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show
Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and always excited to talk to people with a fascinating family background, especially when it affects them to this very day after generations.
My next guest fits that bill to the “t.” Her name is Marjorie Adams; she’s in Connecticut, not far from my old stomping grounds where I grew up in south western Connecticut. Marjorie, welcome to the show!
Marjorie: Thank you so much Scott, it’s nice to be here!
Fisher: Well Marjorie, a few years back, within the last 10, started getting involved with her family history because you grew up with this story in the background and you didn’t even know that lots of other people were aware of who your ancestor was. Let’s talk about him a little bit Marjorie, what was his relationship and what was his name?
Marjorie: His name was Daniel Lucius Adams, MD.
Fisher: Um-hmm
Marjorie: He was my great grandfather. He was born in 1814 and died in 1899.
Fisher: And as in “MD” that’s where he got the nickname “Doc…” Doc Adams.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: And Doc had an interesting side passion, and what was that?
Marjorie: That was baseball, in New York City.
Fisher: And that’s really where baseball originated, with the New York Knickerbockers. Especially creating the game and creating the excitement around it that drew lots of crowds and eventually led to professional baseball and to this day the major leagues.
Marjorie: Well yes. Except I need to clarify baseball in some form existed long before his team.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: There’s so much evidence of a form of baseball being played in New Jersey.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: Before that in Massachusetts, where it was sort of a different form.
Fisher: Town ball.
Marjorie: There are even prints from France, in the middle ages of people hitting a ball with a stick.
Fisher: Uh-hmm.
Marjorie: So it’s really a very old game. But what Doc’s team did was make it really important.
Fisher: Yes that’s right and he made it popular, and he also took the rules from their little league and made it kind of the standard for the game and this is what makes him very important. And let’s go through what some of these rules are Marjorie.
Marjorie: Sure. Well first of all he created the position of “Shortstop.”
Fisher: Wow! Derek Jeter, are you listening?
Marjorie: Yes I hope so, and a whole lot of other people.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Marjorie: Yes, he created the position of shortstop. It first shows up in the team records in late 1849, and he made all the balls for the team as well. But the balls were very light so you could hit it quite a distance but you couldn’t throw it very far.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: So the shortstop position became a “relay position.” And as the equipment improved, the shortstop position moved in where it is today.
Fisher: Right, an extra fielder other than the basemen.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: Got that. Okay what are some of the other rules he created?
Marjorie: He was the first head of the first three rules committees in New York City. Starting with his own team in 1848 and then three other conventions that were held between 1853 and 1858, and he was the one that set the bases at 90 feet, he did that calculation.
Fisher: [Laughs] Wow! He’s the genius we all always heard talked about, “Wow, whoever came up with 90 feet was perfect!”
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: It was Doc Adams.
Marjorie: That was right. That was Red Smith back in the 1950’s said that.
Fisher: Um-hmm.
Marjorie: 90 feet between bases is the closest man has ever come to perfection.
Fisher: That’s right.
Marjorie: And that was Doc.
Fisher: Yup.
Marjorie: He did preside over the convention that passed the rule for 9 men, 9 innings. He was an advocate for that, a very early advocate for that. He also tried very hard to change the game to exclusively a fly game.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: In those days an “out” would be counted if a ball was caught on the first bounce.
Fisher: That’s right.
Marjorie: He didn’t like that. He didn’t think it was very manly.
Fisher: In fact, there were certain games, particular games that were played just with what they called the “Fly Rule,” as an exception from the usual rule which was one bounce.
Marjorie: Yes and the two rules existed side by side mid to late 60’s. It did not pass while he was involved with the game, and he always was very sorry about that. And he did predict in his last speech before the convention to the rules committee that eventually that fly game would pass, and it did.
Fisher: It did, and it’s the standard to this very day.
Marjorie: Absolutely.
Fisher: All right. Now let’s talk about your involvement. You grew up knowing the stories about him. You have some of his memorabilia, some letters. You have pieces of his uniform. Did that mean much to you as you were growing up?
Marjorie: Hmm, yes and no. I love American history so from the American history stand point, yes it meant a great deal. But I never really delved into it until four years ago. We do have an essay that my grandfather, Doc’s youngest son, wrote in 1939. His memories of his father. And in 1980 you might recall someone by the name of Nelson Doubleday purchased the New York Mets.
Fisher: Right.
Marjorie: And that brought the Abner Doubleday myth to the surface again.
Fisher: Which is just that a myth.
Marjorie: It is a myth indeed, and my nephew Nathan Adams Downey who was about 12 years old at the time and he wrote a long letter to the New York Times. Completely dispelling the Doubleday myth and quoting from this essay my grandfather had written, and God bless the New York Times they published the entire letter.
Fisher: And that kind of brought Doc into the public knowledge at that point.
Marjorie: Yes, that was probably the real kickoff. But then it sort of lay dormant at least as far as we were concerned. Then in the late 90’s I went to a vintage baseball game here in Connecticut, with my late mother and my nephew Nate and I met these two lovely baseball historians and they knew all about Doc Adams. I was astonished!
Fisher: I’ll bet. [Laughs]
Marjorie: I didn’t know anybody would know the name. I didn’t think anybody would care.
Fisher: Yeah, I understand. Baseball people though are unique as I know you know now.
Marjorie: Oh, I do!
Fisher: Yeah.
Marjorie: They’re wonderful.
Fisher: Yes.
Marjorie: Particularly those who play vintage baseball.
Fisher: Well because they understand the ancient history, the 150 years ago thing. Well, let’s talk really quickly here about the Hall of Fame thing. Doc was up for a Hall of Fame vote, just a month or so ago if that.
Marjorie: A week and a half.
Fisher: He needed 12 votes out of 16 and he wound up with 10, which to me as a baseball fan was very disappointing because I feel he should be in the Hall of Fame.
Marjorie: Well thank you, Scott, so do I. So do a lot of other people but it was his first time on the ballot and he got more votes than anybody.
Fisher: Yes, that’s right.
Marjorie: So I’m very grateful, but believe me in 2018 when this committee meets again, he’s going to get more than the 12!
Fisher: Well Doc Adams was born in 1814, it is now 201 years later and you are still out there talking about your ancestor. He’s changed your life. Talk a little about that.
Marjorie: It’s all I’ve done over the last four years, is study Doc Adams. I’m very blessed that my great aunt, Doc’s eldest daughter, transcribed all the letters written to Doc by his father. We have very little in what Doc wrote in response, almost nothing. But you can learn a lot about the man by the letters that his own father wrote him.
Fisher: Right. And that has been a wonderful resource for understanding the man… learning what he was about even though I have almost nothing written by him.
Fisher: Yes.
Marjorie: I’ve spent the last four years reading and re-reading those letters.
Fisher: And promoting Doc for the Hall of Fame.
Marjorie: And promoting Doc any chance I get.
Fisher: [Laughs]
Marjorie: And I’m positively shameless about it.
Fisher: And you know what Marjorie? God bless you. I’m sure he’s up there looking down on you and saying, “Go get them Marjorie!”
Marjorie: Well he was not a man to promote himself. But it’s the right thing to do because Doc should be in the Hall of Fame.
Fisher: He absolutely should be. What a delight it is to chat with you and I wish we had more time to get into this not only for the family history side of it, but you know I’m a big baseball nut myself.
Marjorie: We have a website, DocAdamsBaseball.org
Fisher: And baseball aficionados can check that out, and Marjorie, good luck with your quest to get him into the Hall and we’re going to be keeping an eye on this in the years ahead.
Marjorie: Thank you Scott, so much. I appreciate it!
Fisher: And coming up next, we’re going to talk to Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com, he is our Preservation Authority. Talking about how you can preserve your precious heirlooms on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 4 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. And every week, we do a segment on preservation, so you can figure out how you can preserve your old videos, your old home movies, old photographs, pretty much old anything. And so, we have a really old guy here to help us out! His name is Tom Perry with TMCPlace.com, he’s our Preservation Authority. Hi, Tom, how are you?
Tom: Hi. I was fine, but now, I don’t know!
Fisher: [Laughs] Well, we got a listener email, Tom… a little confused about some advice you gave in recent weeks, talking about MP4s and MOVs and AVIs. And he said, “I’ve got all my stuff in AVI. I want to convert it, but I don’t see any button I can push to convert it to MP4s.” What do you have to say about that?
Tom: There’s a lot of different options. If you want a free program, you can go to download.cnet.com and they have one that’s really highly rated. They’ve had over half a million downloads and it’s like five stars, so it’s really, really high rated, and it’s free.
Fisher: Wow.
Tom: So, that’s one that you can use there and it says on the website that it’s a Windows version, but generally, when there’s a Windows version, there’s also a Mac version. So you can try that. If you want to do something that’s a little bit more robust, they can give you more options. There’s another place called MOV AVI, but it’s spelled kind of weird. It’s M O V A V I.com, and they have PC versions and they have Mac versions. They’re really inexpensive. They normally list for forty dollars. However, if you use your tablet or your iPhone and go and order it that way, they do a half off special, so you can get it for like twenty bucks.
Fisher: Wow!
Tom: So, for the twenty dollars, it’s a really good program. I would suggest going to that. There are some other options that it gives to you, is you can edit all kinds of file formats. So, if you want to go the opposite, if you want to go AVIs to some other kind of form, like MOV, because you want to send something off to a family member and they want to edit it on their Mac, you can do that. One of the biggest problems when people want to turn stuff from AVIs to MOVs to MP4s and they keep going through all these changes, the quality goes down.
Fisher: Oh, okay.
Tom: So, they need to edit it this way, the quality goes down, they send it off to somebody else, and after it’s gone through so many incarnations it’s starting to look like your old VHS tapes. You make a copy send it out, Aunt Martha, she makes a copy, sends it to Uncle Ted and they get really degraded. They have a program that’s called “Super Speed Conversion” which you can get for like twenty bucks and this will allow you to do some basic editing without doing a conversion, which makes it really, really nice. So, if you want to end up with an MOV, however you want to burn it at the end, its fine but you’re not having to change between all these different formats while you’re editing. You can edit it in its existing format and then when you’re all done, say, “Okay, now I want an MOV or an AVI or an MP4.” or a whole bunch of other kinds of things. So, all you need to really worry about most of our people are, your AVIs, your MOVs and you MP4s. And like I say, things have changed so much; it used to be AVI was like saying PC. MOV was like saying Mac. MP4s was like saying, “What? What’s that?”
Fisher: [Laughs]
Tom: But they’re all good in their own way. So, just remember, do what you want to do. Like one of the programs that I’ve talked to people about that’s a real good editing program is called Power Director. The only disadvantage is, it’s only a PC program, but it’s really, really good. It’s only fifty dollars. You can do some pretty major editing and in that you can use MOVs, AVIs, MP4s, so if you don’t have that and you do a lot of editing. I’d really suggest you get that if you’re a PC user and if you go and download Power Director, you can go to NewEgg.com or whoever you like to buy things from and just download Power Director and it’s a great program and for fifty bucks, it’s really, really inexpensive. And the thing is, whenever you get shareware programs, not always, but generally you get what you pay for. So, a lot of those programs are going to drive you nuts trying to figure them out. They don’t have tech support. So, you kind of figure out what’s more important to you, if you have all kinds of time to sit and mess around with the program, then fine, save a few bucks. If you’re really tight on time, the money’s important, but not as important as your time then get something like Power Director. Because it’s easy to use, it’s rated really well. And by the time you’re done editing, the other people on their freeware programs are still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Fisher: That makes sense. Good stuff. All right, what are we going to talk about in our next segment?
Tom: In the next segment, we’ll go over a little bit of other ideas to help you with your editing. You can get all this stuff and start putting it together.
Fisher: All right, coming up next in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 5 Episode 118
Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry
Fisher: We are back! Final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. All right, Tom, what have you got?
Tom: I just got a text about MP4 editing. And he talked about, “Hey, I’ve got all this video on my iPhone, on my iPad, what can I do with that?” Well, almost the same thing. That software that we were talking about in the earlier segment, which you want to go to M O V A V I.com. They have programs, also, where you can take your iPads and your iPods and take the video and edit them, put them in a cloud or whatever you want to do, which we highly recommend. Whether you use Drop box, whether you use Google, whether you use LightJar, whatever cloud you want to use, it’s a good way to store and some people have also said, “Well, I have AVIs, I have MOVs” like we talked about, “Do I need to MP4s also?” You know what, if you’re going to do a few videos, AVIs and MOVs are fine to put on the cloud, however, they’re so big, especially AVIs, AVIs are really huge. So, the nice thing about converting them to MP4s is, you’ve got them safe and secure, but they’re so small, they’re not going to fill up your cloud. So, keep the AVIs and MOVs on your hard drive, have BluRay disks, DVDs, so you always have your disk, your hard drive and at least one cloud. So, that’s the best way to do it, however, I wouldn’t be putting all your AVIs and MOVs up in the cloud because of the size, unless you have like I said, a very few of them. Do them as MP4s, because they’re really good quality. If something happens, you lose everything you can still view your MP4s and do some basic editing. So, that’s a good way to go. You need to figure out exactly what your goals are, because you’re looking at all the stuff. You might have hours and hours of Thanksgiving stuff you’ve shot, Christmas things that you’ve compiled. Maybe people sent you videos, gave you DVDs and you’ve got this two hour DVD with ten seconds on your family.
Fisher: Right and maybe an interview with grandma and grandpa.
Tom: Exactly! So, what you need to do is, sit down and look at these DVDs and the best way to do this, this is what we tell people in our store is, put them in your DVD player or your BluRay player and hit display. Because when you hit display it’s going to show you up at the top how many minutes you are into the segment, what chapters you’re at. So, what you want to do is, get a legal pad and start writing down, “Oh, here’s Aunt Martha’s interview, I want to keep this.” “Oh, here are my kids at a birthday party, I want to keep this.” Write down what parts you want and then get a good program like we’ve mentioned before and just extract these segments and make your own DVD. Keep it on your hard drive. Put it in the cloud. Don’t wait till, “Oh, I’ve got everything done. Now I’ll make disks. Now I’ll put things in the cloud.” Don’t do that, because everybody procrastinates unfortunately.
Fisher: Right and then you could lose a lot of stuff.
Tom: Exactly because you never know when you’re going to get hit by an earthquake, a tornado, or a hurricane, whatever. There’re so many options that can come out there. So, what you want to do is, every day backup, like I have a backup drive on all my computers. Every night when I’m done, I close down my computer, I unplug the hard drive and I put it in a fireproof safe. So, worst case scenario, if something happens, I’ve got my hard drives in my fireproof safe. I’ve got this stuff on my cloud. I’ve got stuff on DVDs and BluRays which I’ve sent out to family and friends. So, don’t wait till a project’s done to take care of it. Take care of it in every step that you’re going through, and don’t assume, “Oh, Aunt Martha has it, everybody else has is, I don’t need to worry about it.” Trying to get stuff from people is like trying to get your nephew to finish editing your videos for you.
Fisher: [Laughs] Right. Yes.
Tom: We have so many people come into the store who say, “Hey! My nephew has had this for almost a year now. He’s supposed to edit it for me. I don’t want to deal with that anymore, I just want to get it done and be able to enjoy it.”
Fisher: Yeah, I go through that with members of my own family.
Tom: So, just everyday as you do stuff, you know, just take a few minutes, back up to the cloud. In fact, there’s a lot of programs that you can get that will do the backup for you automatically. You walk away from your computer to go have dinner, and when you come back, it’s already backed everything up to your hard drive or to your cloud and the neat thing with these small drives, they’re so tiny. Pop several of them into a fireproof safe, something happens to your computer, you buy a new computer, you plug that in and it puts all that stuff on your brand new computer just like it was your old one, magic!
Fisher: I love it! Thanks so much, Tom.
Tom: Thank you.
Fisher: See you again next week.
Tom: Sounds good.
Fisher: Well, that is it for this week. Thanks so much to the Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell, for coming on the show this week with some of her yearend genealogy observations, great stuff as always. And to Marjorie Adams great granddaughter of Daniel “Doc” Adams, who created many of the key rules that have standardized the game of baseball and her quest to get him into the Hall of Fame. If you missed it, catch the podcast. Merry Christmas all! And remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice… normal… family!