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

May 31, 2016 by Ryan B

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 141

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 14, 2016 by Ryan B

Relative Race

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Episode 130

Segment 1 (00:30)

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

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

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

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

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

Segment 3 Episode 130 (44:45)

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

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

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

Click Here to Listen to this Episode!

Episode 120 – 2015 Listener Story of the Year

January 4, 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 American Ancestors.org, sharing some of the great discoveries of the past year. David talks about the 1,000 year old skeleton found in the ball of a downed tree in Ireland, the beginning of the end of Americans being able to read handwriting, and preserving your social media posting history.

Fisher then shares what many listeners consider the listener story of the year from Steve Anderson, a Minnesota native. One of nine siblings, Steve and a brother decided to do some DNA testing on the family. And what they learned was far from what they expected! It’s worth another listen if you heard it earlier this year.

Fisher then visits with Leann Walker Young, daughter of late Chicago Cubs coach, Verlon “Rube” Walker. Leann lost him when she was just three years old and has spent years trying to find a sample of his voice. Hear about Leann’s journey and emotional breakthrough. Her determination will inspire you!

Plus, Preservation Authority Tom Perry talks about what questions to ask local digitizers to know that they are experts you can could on.

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

Transcript of Episode 120

Host Scott Fisher with guest David Allen Lambert

Segment 1 Episode 120

Fisher: And welcome to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show!

I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall out. We’ve got a whole bunch of new radio stations picking up the show this week, so if you are a new listener to the show, welcome!

We are here to inform and inspire and hopefully entertain you as we talk to experts and ordinary people about the fun and challengers of discovering your family history, and preserving it and sharing it, and this week we’ve got some great guests from the past year.

The first coming up in about nine minutes; Steve Anderson, will blow your mind with what DNA testing told him about how he and his eight siblings came into this world. You will be telling friends about this.

Then later, the daughter of a Chicago Cubs Coach talks about her journey to know about her late father. But right now we head off to Syracuse, New York, to talk to our good friend the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org… David Allen Lambert, what are you doing there buddy?

David: Well, the New York State Family History Conference that’s running through Saturday, and we’re looking forward to meeting a lot of our Extreme Genes and NEHGS friends out here at the conference. So I’m just here working the booth, selling books, shaking hands and meeting people. Hopefully I get some guests for us too… I’ll keep my ears peeled for some good stories.

Fisher: Oh there are always great stories to be found. You know what I’m amazed at is every week I think ‘Okay where are we going to find?” There’s always another one and it just leaves your jaw hanging. So I’m looking forward to that.

What do you have for us today in our family histoire news, David?

David: Well speaking of things hanging, hanging from a 200 year old toppled tree in the Irish village of Collooney, there was a 1000-year-old skeleton found recently!

Fisher: What?

David: Yeah.

Fisher: Hanging in the tree?

David: Hanging in the roots of the tree.

Fisher: Oh, in the roots.

David: Yup. Basically what happened, the tree toppled and the roots itself, in the ball of the tree, was found the skeleton of a male between about the age of 17 and 25 and they said he died between 1030 and 1200 AD.

Fisher: Wow!

David: But here’s a bigger catch, his body contained injuries inflicted by some sharp blade, so he died by some mysterious means.

Fisher: So we’re not talking war, we’re talking murder here.

David: Perhaps, and then buried hastily in the ground, yeah. So it wasn’t in a church yard or anything like that. You know if that tree didn’t topple who knows if they even would have thought to dig there to find such remains.

Fisher: Sure. Yeah.

David: So it’s just a fluke, but an interesting one just the same. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is this interesting happened about three weeks ago. I’m always intrigued when people are having trouble researching their ancestry but this time it was somebody that came in because they couldn’t read handwriting.

Fisher: What?

David: A college student came in, had no idea about cursive hand writing and I’m not talking 17^th century early Latin hand writing, I’m talking deed books from the 19^th century that were handwritten, and I obviously worked with him and I understand it’s a complete learning curve. But then the following day another person came in with this same problem. I’ve done some investigating and I think you’ll probably see this as the case, a lot of schools are not teaching handwriting anymore.

Fisher: That’s actually most of the country right now, and it’s going to be a real problem for people who do research in the future there’s no doubt about it.

David: You think of the Rosetta stone, I mean, I would think that until there’s an OCR program that can read handwriting and translate it all over.

Fisher: [Laughs]

David: Everybody’s handwriting is different. I know that mine won’t be an easy translation that’s for sure.

Fisher: Well the good news is a lot of parents are getting very upset with this and a lot of other states now around the country are starting to teach it, if not in English, as actually part of their arts curriculum.

David: And that’s the best way to do it. I mean if you’re going to get it somehow, I guess it’s a lesser vision of calligraphy.

Fisher: That’s exactly right, yeah.

David: This has to be it. Well you know I’m out here in New York, but if anybody is out near Boston on October 3^rd Saturday at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, we’re having a family history day out here, and that’s a full day of lectures and events and people can go to AmericanAncestors.org and find out, so maybe some of our listeners that are tuning in have some free time on October 3^rd come on down.

Here’s my Tech Tip; this is kind of fun. I think we’ve talked about Facebook and how wonderful it is to network with people and capture family stories. There’s a place called ‘MySocialBook.com’ on the internet and for around $20 it will capture/ publish for you, your entire year on Facebook or multiple years if you wish, of course the price goes up, and what it does is it captures all your newsfeeds, all your photographs, everything you’ve shared, obviously it doesn’t show the videos.

But it’s a great way of preserving your social media history and I’ve often thought Facebook is a great tool but how do we preserve it for future generations. So this is a nice little Tech Tip.

I haven’t created a social book yet but probably will sometime by the end of the year and I’ll report back, so no immediate news one way or the other but it’s going to be an interesting program.

Fisher: But isn’t it great that you actually will be able to preserve this stuff that is right now pretty temporary.

David: Exactly. Exactly it’s sort of taking a year in review of your own life and recording it. Jumping out to NEHGS databases for our guest users, we’re going far afield and teaming up with The Family History Library, FamilySearch, and we have posted Norway baptisms, marriages and burials from the 17^th century right down to the 1920’s.

Fisher: Nice!

David: And this is amazing! This has over 7.6 million baptisms, 3.8 million marriages and 740 thousand burials. Spanning the 17^th to 20^th centuries, it’s amazing.

Fisher: And all available to you in your home for the next week through NEHGS.

David: Right, just sign up as a guest user.

Fisher: And one other thing we’ve got to mention here David, we are working right now and this is so much fun, save the date September 13^th to 18^th 2016 leaving from Boston on a Royal Caribbean Cruise!

David: Exactly! The first of many I hope.

Fisher: Yeah I hope so! It’s our Fall Foliage, Extreme Genes Cruise. David Allen Lambert from the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org and myself Fisher will be doing lectures on the cruise. We’re going to give people a chance to actually take a tour of the Freedom Trail in Boston and NEHGS before the cruise. We go up to Maine and Nova Scotia; it’s going to be so much fun. We’re going to have more of it of course on our Facebook page and on our ExtremeGenes.com website, so check it out and if you want to be a part of it, we’re going to have all the details ready for you in about another week. So this is going to be great stuff for next year, make plans to be part of it!

David: Excellent. It’s a year away!

Fisher: All right David. Thanks so much. Have a great conference in Syracuse New York, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

David: Talk to you then!

Fisher: Up next, a DNA story you’ll be telling to everyone you know. On Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 2 Episode 120

Host Scott Fisher with guest Steve Anderson

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

It is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, and once in a great while you run across a story that just leaves your jaw on the floor. I think this is one of those stories and I’m not going to give you any hint about it other than to introduce Steve Anderson, who I spoke to about it over the weekend.

Hi Steve, how are you?

Steve: Hey, I’m doing great. How you’re doing Scott?

Fisher: I’m doing great. Steve is a Minnesota boy who ran across some interesting history in his family some time back, let’s just go back to the beginning Steve, and tell about how this all came about.

Steve: All right. About 45 years ago my older brother was in an accident; he was crushed, needed some intense medical care, and needed lots of bloody transfusions. So the call went out asking for blood from family members. My dad came to donate and when he donated the doctor said “Well, sir… um, we appreciate your donation but we cannot use your blood for your son because it doesn’t match.”

Fisher: Ooh.

Steve: So you know all these years that whole issue came into question. ‘Okay, if you don’t belong to him, who is your dad?’ Fast forward about 25 years and my older sister got into a big fight with my dad and bounced over to my mom and just said “You know, I just wish he wasn’t my dad.” So my mom said “Well, you know, I’ve got something to tell you. He really isn’t.”

Fisher: Oh boy.

Steve: You know that kind of created some issue. So through the years we kind of knew that there were a couple of the nine kids in our family that were not kids of my father that raised us. My younger brother and I have always talked about let’s get some DNA testing and find out who is and isn’t.

Fisher: Now how were you guys dealing with all this? I mean mom tells the sister that dad isn’t your father. You’re finding out that he doesn’t match from blood. You skip ahead 20 years; there are a lot of families that don’t last 20 years after news like that. I mean how did you all cope with this?

Steve: You know…. I don’t know, we just did and not only that, we really get along. We really after all these years we’re a very close family. We keep in touch with each other on a weekly basis. We come back for reunions and I love them. I don’t know how we did it but we did it.

Fisher: So let’s get back to this now, your brother was thinking ‘we’ve got to do some DNA we’ve got to find out something here.’

Steve: Yeah, so he has a friend and his friend owns a lab, a DNA lab that does paternity testing throughout the world. It’s in Southern California, and he talked to him about this and he say “Hey, if you just get some DNA, you need to get some from your dad, you need to get some from your mom and then one of your kids need to provide some DNA.” You know, I had the means to do it so I said “All right, I’ll pay for it and then that’ll create the base and then either the kids, and the family who want to can pay to have their own DNA tested again to this standard that we created with mom and dad.”

Fisher: Wow!

Steve: Well, when my dad died, my brother said “Okay, this is our last chance” because dad is in the viewing room of the funeral home!

Fisher: Oh no! [Laughs]

Steve: I went to the other corner of the room and created a distraction and my brother reaches in and pulls out a hand full of hair.

Fisher: From your father’s corpse?

Steve: Yeah!

Fisher: Ohh.

Steve: So everything went fine after that.

Fisher: Now to do that by the way, I understand you need roots to get any DNA out of hair, there’s none in the follicle itself but it’s in the roots.

Steve: Right and we checked that to make sure that we had it.

Fisher: Okay. [Laughs]

Steve: And then with my mom, you know, my niece was doing some kind of research at school and so we just asked mom if we could get a cheek swab so that we could help this niece to get some data and she was fine with that.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Steve: So we got it from dad, we got it from mom and then I provided the cheek swab, and I knew my younger brother and I were dad’s sons because we look like him, our mannerisms are like him.

Fisher: Sure. So you were going to check out just fine.

Steve: Right, and I was fine with that. We get the results back and Tom’s friend says “You know Mr. Anderson; got your results back and you do not belong to your father.”

Fisher: Ooh.

Steve: Yeah, ‘Ooh’ is right. Then my brother was so shocked by this he said “Hey, I’m going to get tested.” So we ended up testing him and he doesn’t belong to my father.

Fisher: Okay.

Steve: So then I talk to my sister, I’m very, very close to her and I need somebody to vent with. Eventually she says “Okay, I’m getting tested.” So she gets tested and she doesn’t belong to him.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Steve: And I thought ‘Okay, we’ve got a faulty match here.

Fisher: [Laughs] This can’t be.

Steve: Well, we found dad’s razor and it had plenty of hair in it and our friend in California, said “Listen, give me that, there’s skin sample flakes in there and I’ll use that.” He did the test again, ran it again and the results were all the same.

Fisher: Ohh.

Steve: So she called another sister and says “I can’t believe that, this is impossible, I’m going to get tested.” And she’s not dad’s. Long story short, nine children eight different fathers, Tom and I found out that we were from the same father. So I confront my mother and say ‘Hey.’

Fisher: Now how old is she at this point when you confronted her?

Steve: This was 3 year ago, so she was 90 years old.

Fisher: Wow!

Steve: Yeah and her mind is very sharp so I said, ‘Mom, listen, we’ve had some DNA testing done and we found some surprises here.’

Fisher: [Laughs]

Steve: And you know, she denied it at first but the next day called and said “Steve, come on over we need to talk.” We talked and she gave me the names of all the fathers.

Fisher: For each of the children, each of the nine?

Steve: Yeah. And then Tom and I did one more test and found out that we are actually from the same father. But none of us 9 children were from the father that raised us.

Fisher: So, nine kids, eight fathers, one marriage, but none of the kids from the father in the marriage?

Steve: Correct, and you know my dad never ever said a thing about this to us kids. And I remember once getting mad at mom for something as a kid. I don’t know and dad just turned to me and he said, “Steve, you don’t ever talk to your mother like that. You show respect to your mother.”

Fisher: Now, he obviously knew right? Was this an arrangement, because perhaps he couldn’t have children?

Steve: After we heard about the other two siblings, at first many years ago. The joke in the family was ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we found out dad was sterile?’ Well, I don’t think it’s a joke anymore. I think it’s pretty much what we concluded.

Fisher: Right.

Steve: Because I mean they stayed together. They were married for 25 years and eventually did get a divorce but not because of this, because of something else.

Fisher: Wow.

Steve: But you don’t stay together for 25 years and not have children.

Fisher: So you think there was an arrangement?

Steve: I don’t know. If I had to conclude something I would say there was some kind of an arrangement. What was interesting was my younger brother Tom, was back only about seven or eight years ago in our home town. There was a fair there and my dad came up to him with an older gentleman and he said, “Tom, there’s somebody here I’d like you to meet.” And he introduced them and then he walked away and Tom thought, “That was so weird.”

Until we realized now that was our father that he had just been introduced to.

Fisher: Wow!

Steve: So dad obviously knew enough to tell this guy, “Hey, you want to see one of your sons?” and brought him to introduce him to him.

Fisher: All right, so here’s the question Steve, and I think the point of all this that’s very important to people listening right now is, I’m sure there are a lot of other folks out there dealing with family secrets. Let’s talk about how you all have dealt with it, and everybody knows at this point, yes?

Steve: No. there’s one still alive that does not know about it and we cannot let this individual know until our mother is gone and the wife of her [birth] father is still alive so we cannot do that.

Fisher: Ohh, okay. So complications right? ‘Do no harm, do no pain’ first, right?

Steve: Given who she is we know she will then go and confront the wife or somebody or our mother and it just wouldn’t be good.

Fisher: Okay. So how has this affected all your relationships, with mom particularly?

Steve: Yeah. You know with nine of us, there’s one who won’t see her anymore. There’s one who just says, “I’m done with her.” With me, it took me about three months. There was an enormous sense of betrayal up front. I finally was able to put it aside. This was about three and a half years ago. I still call my mother every Sunday night; others have handled it very well. Others you know just think this is a fascinating story. We laugh about it and when we get together it’s a great source of entertainment. But a couple of them are really struggling with it and one in particular really won’t have anything to do with her now. So we have varying degrees all the way from, “No. I’m not your son anymore.” To “Mom, we all make mistakes.”

Fisher: Umm.

Steve: Not quite like this, but we all do!

Fisher: [Laughs] So, has anyone reached out to half siblings from some of the other fathers?

Steve: No. we’ve consciously made it a point to really not do any of this until a few more people have passed on. We just need to make sure all of the spouses of the men are gone and even then I think we want to be extremely careful who we reach out to.

Fisher: That’s right.

Steve: Because some would be able to handle it well and some won’t. I know that one of the things for me that’s been a real blessing growing up is I’ve always seen on my father’s side, the father that raised us, which by the way as far as I’m concerned, he is my father and his posterity is my posterity.

Fisher: Right.

Steve: And he will always be and I’ve talked to my siblings and they all agree completely that dad especially now seeing what he has done in raising us and never, never betraying that secret, has just raised him as far as respect. But we grew up seeing his siblings dying of cancer and his parents both died of stomach cancer, and his grandfather died of stomach cancer and when I hit 50 the doctor every year ordered a colonoscopy.

Fisher: Right.

Steve: When I found out about this, it was the first thing to go!

Fisher: [Laughs]

Steve: I talked to him and said, “Hey, can we go to the five year checkup and he was fine with that.

Fisher: Steve, unbelievable story and I can’t thank you enough for sharing it with us and I think it’s a benefit to a lot of people who might be dealing with secrets like this, perhaps to learn from how you people have done so, and God bless and good luck!

Steve: Great. Thank you I enjoyed it!

Fisher: It’s a story that’s not over yet.

Steve: Oh, not by any means. Not by any means.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Steve: Thank you, Scott.

Fisher: And coming up next in five minutes we’ll talk to a woman from Charlotte, North Carolina, the daughter of a Chicago Cubs coach. She lost him at 3 years old and we’ll talk to her about the journey to know her late father better. It’s a revealing story on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

Segment 3 Episode 120

Host Scott Fisher with guest Leann Walker Young

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

It is Fisher here, talking with Leann Walker Young, from Charlotte, North Carolina; she is the daughter of Verlon “Rube” Walker, the former coach of the Chicago Cubs, who passed away in 1971 when Leann was only 3 years old.

Just a few years ago, 2012, she decided ‘It’s time I got to know who my dad was.’ And she began a search gathering stories as we heard in the previous segment but also looking to find the voice of her dad.

And, Leann was it frustrating to you or were the stories fulfilling enough as you went along but you still enjoyed the journey?

Leann: I really did enjoy the journey. I tried to talk about it as putting a canoe in the river and just letting the current take me. I wasn’t really morose about it, I didn’t try to manipulate it, I allowed it to come to me and that has taught me a lot in life, the lesson of just things move really much more smoothly when I get out of the way.

All I did was just be willing and the journey built on itself. One person would give me, uh, “You need to call this person, here’s their phone number. They knew your dad.”

Fisher: Right.

Leann: And so I would do that. I made the commitment early on, I would follow any lead. If someone emails me and tells me to do a library research, I would go there. So I did all of that. I did the footwork and it became really exhilarating and it energized me once I got started and it’s very exciting.

It really gets to the heart of the matter. You doing your personal journey and the mission of your soul and really finding out where you came from and the people that loved you and brought you into the world. It’s so important and empowering in a lot of ways.

Fisher: Yeah well I think so, and I think the fact is you get to know your father like you’ve never known him before and suddenly he is a figure in your life more than just a shadow.

Leann: Yes, and he had many layers. I wanted to know all of him. I didn’t want to know just what they wanted to tell me as someone who had died. I wanted to know it all. I thought, if he had a temper, I want to know it, if he cursed somebody out if he was mad, I wanted to know all of those things so I brought of all that to me and the last piece of the puzzle was the voice.

Fisher: Yes.

Leann: I kept looking for that. I was very hopeful all along. I really thought that I would eventually find something but I had no idea that I would find it in my own home town. I really had no idea.

Fisher: Isn’t that something. Well let’s talk about that a little bit. Now you started the search for the audio, obviously you were finding the stories as a result of that but the ultimate goal was to hear his voice and I would imagine still is. That you’d like to find more of him speaking, and I can’t imagine that you’re going to have that opportunity at some point with the effort you’re putting out. But you got coverage on ESPN and I’m just thinking, “This can’t be, how can a man as public as your father not have something out there for this woman to hear?”

Leann: It’s true and I’ve got a whole group of men, I think by nature are hunter gatherers.

Fisher: Yes!

Leann: So, where I don’t like to look on eBay, I have a whole gang, a gaggle, a team of men.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Leann: Who follow my blog and they search eBay and they’ll go to radio shows and all this stuff and collectors organizations and they will look for me. I have eyes and ears out there so that’s miraculous and amazing and the Keith Olbermann thing was just a watershed moment for me because it did put my story out there and much more came to me as a result. I do believe there’s still something else out there but the fact that it was the tapes that my mother had put away and forgotten about in her own garage and was recorded in my own home town when my father asked Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman, to come and speak at a church. My father’s faith was important to him and so was Bobby Richardson’s and still is and he wanted him to come and I guess do a testimony of his faith at the church. So that was recorded because of the Yankee that was coming to town.

Fisher: Sure.

Leann: So that was recorded and my mom found it on cassette. The pastor who is in his 80’s now gave it to my mother years and years ago, and we found it on cassette and she had it put on DVD for me or CD so that it would be more preserved.

Fisher: What a gift. I’ve heard it on YouTube you had it there. It’s got a lot of noise in it and a lot of buzz but your dad’s voice cuts through well even though it’s kind of soft. So I’ve kind of enhanced it a little bit here. So everybody can hear what you found, it’s only about a minute long. Here’s your dad introducing Bobby Richardson at a church in Lenoir, North Carolina, back in 1969;

“We’re very fortunate to have with us this morning Bobby Richardson, a great second baseman for the New York, Yankees for many years.

“I told Bobby that this was great Yankee territory so he can feel at home. And also I’d like to introduce his daughter Christie, sitting down here in our church place.

“Could you stand up, please?

“Bobby was a great baseball player and this is Yankee territory. I guess I could be here all day trying to tell all the great days he had on the baseball field. And most of you Yankee fans would already know about it, so, I will not try to attempt to tell all the accomplishments that he did on the field.

“But Bobby also had many great days off the field. Bobby was a great leader on and off the field. He was very active in youth groups, religious groups, and in my lifetime, I guess Bobby was the most respected player in baseball.”

Fisher: Wow! What does that make you feel like when you hear that?

Leann: Really, the first couple of times I heard it, I was completely blown away. I still get a little teary eyed when I hear it because I still want more, I want to hear him talk to me, that’s kind of where it goes, that’s where it goes in my mind. I’m so grateful that I have that sound of his mountain accent, and he was made fun of so much for that accent, and being such a southern boy and simple man. It just really takes me cry to you know the heart of what I really want, which is him.

Fisher: I’ll bet, and you’ve probably played it a million times since you found it.

Leann: Yes I have.

Fisher: And I’m sure to some extent it does speak to you.

Leann: It does. I really am just mesmerized by it actually. I always thought his voice would be more gravelly and low. I guess because he was an athlete.

Fisher: [Laughs] Sure.

Leann: But the more I listen to it, it’s gentle and sweet and it matches who I’ve been told he was, and I’m glad I didn’t find the voice first off because I wouldn’t have gone on that beautiful, beautiful journey to search for it and the journey really was the treasure. It was what I needed to do to heal my soul.

Fisher: And then from this you went on to Chicago, and actually visited the hospital wing that is named after your dad. Now what was his illness?

Leann: He died of leukemia, and upon his death the Cubs donated money to Northwestern Hospital and they started a wing in the hospital called the ‘Verlon Rube Walker, Leukemia Center.’ And it’s now called “The Blood Center.’ ‘The Rube Walker Blood Center’ because they do more than just leukemia. They really focus on the blood diseases where they have these beautiful, incredible machines that can circulate the good, healthy platelets and all that stuff and separate it all out, and you can use your own stem cells to heal your body. It’s amazing work.

Fisher: Isn’t that great?

Leann: Yeah.

Fisher: And to think that forty some odd years after his passing, your dad’s name is on that wing and is being remembered as people go through that life saving treatment.

Leann: Yes. That simple boy that left high school, didn’t graduate high school because he wanted to go play major league baseball, has this legacy of this medical facility named after him, and he would probably laugh about that. And he would be so blessed to know that people get healing under his name. It’s something that maybe his death went to a good cause, he would love that.

Fisher: Well it’s been an amazing journey for your Leann and I so appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and talk to us about it, and to see that you’ve had such great success and fulfillment in what you’ve been doing.

Leann: Yes. I’m honored you asked me and I loved it. This is my favorite subject to talk about. I love it. I encourage anyone to take this journey of their own. It’s a beautiful way to honor your loved ones that have passed and heal yourself.

Fisher: That’s a great way to put it, perfect. Leann Walker Young, from Charlotte, North Carolina, thank you so much for coming on!

Leann: Thank you!

Fisher: And coming up next, if you’re looking to have your old home movies or videos digitized. What’s the best way to know if you’re local digitizer is the real deal?

It’s a great listener question, and of course Tom Perry our Preservation Authority will have the answer in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History show.

Segment 4 Episode 120

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: And we are back once again on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show

I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He’s our Preservation Authority. He answers your questions about what you do to make sure you don’t lose your precious audio, your video, your photographs, your home movies.

There’s so much going on and so much to talk about, and Tom, this is a really interesting question that we got from Jack Smith. He’s in Indianapolis, Indiana, and he’s saying,

“I’m going to be going to a local outlet soon to get my materials transferred, my old home videos.” He said, “What questions should I ask to know that these people are going to do this right?”

Tom: That’s a wonderful question! Because there’s so many people out there, whether you’re buying a diamond ring or having your video tapes transferred, “How do I know that this guy’s legit? Because I know nothing about the industry, so I don’t know what to look for”.

One of the things you want to talk to the people about is, what kind of equipment that they use. You don’t need brand names. It’s just, “How do you transfer my video tape to a DVD or BlueRay or to a hard drive? Do I need to bring in my camcorder? Do I just bring in my tapes? If I have the old VHS-Cs, do I need an adaptor? What do I need to do?”

If you’re going to a reputable place, you won’t need your camera; you won’t need your adaptor. They will have all that kind of equipment and one thing you want to remember…

Fisher: Even the old ones?

Tom: Oh, absolutely! Oh, absolutely! Anybody that’s worth their weight in salt has to be able to already have VHS-C transfer machines. If they don’t have them, it’s like, what are they doing? Do they not do enough? Do they know what they’re doing? I’d be very, very skeptical about anybody that says, “Oh, no, you need to bring in your camera.”

The only situation that differs is, sometimes the camera gets shaken and it records a little bit off track, and it will play in your camera fine, however, it won’t play even on our equipment, which we have the best equipment you can buy, because our stuff is set to a certain standard, so you might get wavy lines and things like this.

But in the situation where it was recorded on a bad camera, then you would want to bring in your camera and tie it into our system.

Fisher: And how would you know that your camera’s bad or the video’s bad?

Tom: Well, generally you probably would not know if you don’t have a way to play it. So, what I would do is, when you take your tape in, if it comes back looking funky or something, then you’re going to call them and say, “Hey, why does my tape look like this? It plays in my camcorder.” And they say, “Well, I don’t know.”

Well, you probably shouldn’t have gone to that place, because what we generally like to do is, if we see that situation, we can generally tell and we will call you and say, “Do you still have your camcorder? Have you had it repaired since?

Because if you’ve had your camcorder repaired since you recorded your tape offline, it’s not going to do any good, because now your camera is back to what it should have been. So that’s the best thing. Find out what you need to bring in and what they have.

And another thing which, I take a lot of heat on this, but this is my opinion, the best way to transfer analog to digital is through a machine that’s made specifically to transfer VHS-C, VHS, High 88 to a DVD or Blue ray or hard drive.

You can buy these absolute kick butt Apples and even some PCs that are amazing on what they do. And so, people get these little squawk boxes, they pay less than a hundred dollars for.

Fisher: Oh.

Tom: And they plug their camcorder into it, and then plug that into a computer. A computer is not a device to turn analog into digital. So, you have this thousand dollar Apple computer that’s just absolutely incredible, and then you have this stupid little piece of hundred dollar equipment.

Fisher: [Laughs]

Tom: That’s in the middle of it, and you’re not going to get good transfers. You need to find a person that has equipment that’s specialized to transfer different media to hard drive in real time, BluRay, and hard drive, whatever you’re going to do, because if you don’t, you’re going to get all kinds of problems.

In audio it’s not so much, because the bandwidth of audio is so much smaller. When you get into video, you’re doing tons of stuff, terabytes, and gigabytes of stuff.

And so, when you’re transferring, if there’s the littlest glitch, if the computer just pauses for a fraction of a second, you might not notice until you looking at your DVD, you see these little artifacts that flash and stop and freeze, and it will drive you nuts, because it’s visual and most people are visual people.

So, that’s why you want to stay away from the computer if you can. So, I would really stay away from people that are transfering through their computer vs. having the hardware.

Right after the break, I’ll give you some more questions that you can ask your dealer where you want to get your memories preserved.

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

Segment 5 Episode 120

Host Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry

Fisher: We are back, final segment of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show.

I am Fisher, the Radio Roots Sleuth, with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com and we’re talking about this great question, about how do you know that someone is going to do a great job transferring your old family videos because there are so many different types of old videos, as we’ve talked about Tom, so what questions to ask and you’ve given some great answers on that already. What else should they be concerned with?

Tom: You know, I would ask the people, how long they’ve been in this business, how long they’ve been in this industry? Maybe they’ve only been transferring tapes for five years but yet maybe they’ve been videographer for twenty years.

Fisher: Sure.

Tom: So they’ve got the experience. There are people out there, and I’m not exaggerating, we hear horror stories about this all the time. They go to a place like ‘Goodwill’ buy some old VCR’s, buy some old camcorders, hook them up and say “Hey!..” You know, they hang the shingle that says “Hey, I can transfer your audio, video and film.” They know nothing about cleaning the machines; they know nothing about getting mould spores from one person’s tape, transferring to everybody else’s tape. You’ve got to be careful. You want to ask a question? Ask them, “How do you upkeep your equipment? What’s your experience on that? What do you use?”

Fisher: I want to go back to the mould spores there, because you’ve mentioned this before.

Tom: Oh yeah.

Fisher: Is this still pretty common and where?

Tom: Oh, it is! Especially places that are high humidity, like Florida.

Fisher: Alabama.

Tom: Exactly!

Fisher: Yeah, okay.

Tom: Not so much in Arizona, because it’s so dry. And people that have moved around, these tapes may have been in boxes for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and there could be rodent damage, there could be all kinds of stuff.

And, I don’t mean to be gross, but you don’t want to be running a tape with rodent pee through your VCR and then put somebody else’s nice, clean tape in there and do the same thing. It’s nasty.

I mean, we know this stuff. If we see something, we know about it. And I’ve had situations where something snuck in that we didn’t catch, we didn’t see the mould spores or whatever.

There’s no white dots, but when we started running it we knew exactly what was going on and so, we threw the VCR away. We just didn’t use it anymore.

Fisher: Really!?

Tom: Oh yeah! Because when they get really, really bad, there’s no way you’re going to be able to clean them. We clean all of ours by hand. They make good quality tapes cleaners, but they’re kind of hard to find nowadays, but you can get them to run through your machine.

We don’t do that. We take our machines apart; we clean all the rubber parts, all the metal parts with 90% isopropyl alcohol. We use the right kind of tip cleaners and things like that.

We’re always cleaning our machines, because we don’t want somebody else’s tapes, even though they think. “Oh, it’s on DVD now. I don’t care.”

Well, you don’t know. Something down the road could happen to your DVD and you go, “Boy! I’m glad I still have that tape. I can retransfer it again.”

We’ve had people that have taken tapes into the big box stores that they get the DVD back and they look at it and say, “This isn’t good.” And they ask the big box store, we won’t mention names, “Oh, no, we did the best we can. We’re professional at this.”

They bring the same tape in to us, we run it and they go, “Oh, now this is how it plays on our VCR!”

You know, we guarantee our work. If something’s wrong with the tape, we’ll do the very best we can. A lot of the big box stores won’t be able to do that, and that’s a good thing too.

If you ever take your tape into a place to get it transferred, and they say there’s always things wrong with your tape, yada, yada, yada. You can play it or you’re pretty sure there’s not a problem, send it to us. Let us try it.

We get tapes all the time that are rejected from the big box stores, but these guys are an assembly line. All they’re doing is going, ‘Oh, this tape is not working. Let’s pull it out, let’s pull it out!’

Fisher: Sure.

Tom: And we can transfer it.

Fisher: And you’ve got a lot of young kids often working in these stores. They’re not specialists in this material.

Tom: Exactly! It’s a 9 to 5 job for them, if even that, or it’s a summer job. But we take the time to go through the whole tape, find out if we can transfer it and we do, and it makes me wonder, how many other tapes out there, that these big box stores reject that people throw away that we could have transferred for them?

Fisher: So, bottom line is, Tom, you’ve got to make sure you’re working with reputable, experienced people, right?

Tom: Exactly! If they don’t answer your questions, then go to someplace else. Check with your local guys, if you don’t feel comfortable with them, write us at askTom@TMCPlace.com and I’ll try to help you.

If you can’t get anybody in your area, send them to one of our stores. We’re more than happy to help you.

Fisher: All right. We’ll see you again next week.

Tom: Sounds good. See you then, bud.

Fisher: That is it for this week. And thanks once again to Steve Anderson, for sharing with us the wild tale of what DNA testing told him about his family, including his eight siblings He has dealt with the shock well. Also to Leann Walker Young, for telling us about her journey to learn more about the father she lost when she was just three years old, a coach for the Chicago Cubs. Join us on Facebook this week and at ExtremeGenes.com. Talk to you again next week, and remember, as far as everyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family!