Welcome to Wayback When, Big Blend Radio's History Podcast. Welcome, everybody. Family history is a big deal. In fact, I think it's one of the top hobbies, not just in this country, but around the world. We've decided that we do a lot about family history and genealogy on the shows, but we decided, "Well, we really need to stick to doing something a little bit more frequent, so we're going to be doing quarterly family history shows." I think we always get into that with Glenn Burrows, who's on the show. We've got some amazing guests joining us to share their journey. That's what this show is all about is your family history journey or genealogical journey. We'll say that 10 times. A lot of the guests on the show today are authors. Some of them have been doing genealogical research, like I'm not saying it again, for their books. It's going to be very fascinating to hear the journeys, the stories from this, but first as always, Glenn, pretty much as the co-host of these shows, because he's a family history expert. He's a historian. He's also the owner of Norfolk Tours in England. He's been part of our shows for over a decade because we're so much younger now. He has a show that he airs with us every fourth Saturday, talking about England, travel, and then a lot of history. In fact, he helps people find their family history and their ancestral roots in England and even takes them to those places. The people can actually really connect with their family history. I encourage you to go to his website. It's Norfolk- Tours.co.uk. Everyone's links are in the episode notes. Welcome back, Glenn. How are you? I'm very good. Thank you. Do you know where I've been today? Did you see? Apple picking? Apple picking? I went apple picking on the King's estate. How's that, eh? Ooh. Did you get chased off? Was this at Sandringham? Yes, Sandringham. Yeah. Just up there in a little village called Appleton, would you believe? How is that? Apple picking? Very sweet. Escapade. With my granddaughters. That would be lovely. Oh, that is lovely. So they let you go pick the King's apples. Yep. I never heard you thought you got to hear you say that, but there you go. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. So with the tours that you do at Norfolk- Tours, what percentage do you think are people looking for their family history or some connection of the people that come and see you? Probably about 85 percent. Whoa. Yeah. It's mostly people who are either interested in their family history or something to do with the family. Like for instance, it's now the children of the men and women who served over here in the Second World War. So it's all family orientated. I also do other things, but family history has to be the majority. I've had people who are writing novels and they wanted to do research about the novel that they're writing, so they needed to go to certain places to get certain feelings. So I remember I had one lady from Australia who was writing about medieval Norfolk. So I took her to Castle Lake, which is behind you, and other places. And there's one ruined abbey, which is based on the Norfolk broads, which we talk about quite a lot, which are lots and lots of waterways. So the way that the medieval monks would have got to this abbey would have been in a sailboat. So what I did is I arranged for us to sail to the abbey in a little tiny sailing boat. And when we were out on the water, it absolutely tipped it down. It was boring. We were both soaked down to our underwear. And she was absolutely thrilled to bits, because there is no way that she would have got the feeling of that without doing it. So that's the sort of thing I do, really, really, really personal stuff. That's awesome. That's awesome. I want to bring Joe Clark back on the show. Joe is a travel writer, photographer, and avid genealogist, right? She is addicted to finding her ancestral roots. And she's been on a recent family history show with Blin talking about her family history in Gettysburg. We've got a great article that she wrote, and that is linked in the episode notes as well. But welcome back, Joe. How are you? I'm great. How are you? Doing good. Doing good. You just came back from upstate New York on a travel adventure, right? I did. And I must just be slung, because I was there in a cemetery taking pictures of a couple of bucks bouncing between the headstones when it dawned on me that I was in Elmera. Duh, Elmera, as it was called by the Confederate soldiers who were imprisoned there during the war. I don't know where my head was. It took me a minute, but I was pretty quick on the uptake after that, that these headstones behind me, almost 3,000 men buried there for at least 20 from my home county in Henry County, Virginia. So wow. It's been a lot of time taking pictures of headstones and researching those men, and it'll be added to our book on Henry County and my upcoming book on Patrick County. Wow. Wow. Jo also has a podcast with us, and she's on the show every second Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern time. Jo goes everywhere, and she does. She goes everywhere. And I know we're going to be talking about New York and the next podcast, right? For October. Definitely. The Finger Lakes. Not about Elmera. We'll be talking more wine and food. We'll be talking the good stuff. Okay. Well, I think headstones are great, too. I'm into that. I love cemeteries and you and I are on. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, I want to go to our next travel writer, Lisa Evans, Elisa has been on our show over the years. She's an author as well, a hundred things to do in coastal Mississippi before you die. So make sure you write it down so you know, your future generations know what you did. So you got to make sure about that. But you can keep up with Lisa, writer, Lisa.com, and also for Jo, go have glasswilltravel.com. And also for her recipes, go to recipestravelculture.com. A lot of travel stories on there as well. But welcome back, Lisa. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. Good. So I know as a travel writer, you know, we share the same love of nature and going out there. I know that Jo is like that too. I love history, apparently that's a thing for you as well. It is. I love history. I love exploring different things and going and there's always a story to learn. I mean, there's always something people love to tell you stories and it's very, very interesting, especially if they're from a different culture or a different whatever. It just, to me, it's very interesting. I've done a lot with civil war, obviously I live in Mississippi. But originally I'm from upstate New York, so I'm a Yankee, but I moved south. So, you know, who the places that Jo has mentioned, I've been there many, many times. So it is a beautiful area. I just didn't like it in the wintertime, so I had to get out and go south. But yeah, I'm originally from New York and New York has huge amounts of history back to the Revolutionary War. I mean, I've done articles in where I grew up. And of course, as a kid, you don't think about it, but as you get older, you realize how much history was like within where I grew up, within five miles of where I grew up, we're talking Revolutionary War history, Erie Canal, Mohawk Indians, United Nations. It's crazy. But again, as a kid, you don't think about that, but I found it. So I've done a few articles on that, I like going home every now and then and, you know, looking, you know, digging a little bit more into it. And wherever I go, I tend to like to try and find a historical bend. And now you've got the Mississippi Blues Trail to do, and that's like major history. Yep, I know. We're going to come see you on our way across and we'll go, let's go to some grave sites, right? And most importantly, you want to talk rabbit holes. I mean, the Mississippi Blues Trail, I mean, I thought when I first started out, I was like, oh, this will be real quick. Yeah, no, it's like you have to go down the rabbit holes to find out the history. I have the book. I have I've been carrying this book in the car for over 10 years. So I think I'll get Steve Chesbrough on the show so we can interview him about it. Okay. So we'll do that. He's been on years ago. But all right. So, you know, we've got more writers and authors on the show. And the next guest I want to bring on is Cliff Garstang, he's an amazing author. He's a novelist. He also writes short stories and essays. He's an editor and encouraging goes website, Clifford Garstang.com. So welcome back Cliff. How are you? I'm doing great. It's great to be here. This is awesome. How was Ireland? You went to Ireland. We want to report. It was an excellent trip. I only thought after I got home that I should have looked for ancestor information. One branch of the family did come from Ireland and then I also have scotch Irish ancestors who passed through Ireland. But I didn't do any of that. Instead I had fun. I did literary things. I did musical things and sightseeing. So, I know that part of that trip was to give you kind of like an atmosphere for an upcoming novel. Right. Yeah. And that had helped. I should have, I need to go to Northern Ireland also, which I did not do on this trip. But that would also be part of this new project. Ah. So, now the last bird of paradise, your latest novel. Was it important to you to get historical aspects correct for the story itself? Oh, absolutely. I mean, even in the art, even in the art that you talk about in the book. Right. Although the art that I talk about, except for their actual paintings that I own that are described somewhat in the book, I made up the most of the art. But the historical details of what happened during World War I in Singapore was really important. It didn't have anything to do with my own personal history, but it was, you know, important for me to go and do the research to make sure that I got the details of what was happening in 1914 and 15, right, even though I'd spent most of the 80s in Singapore myself. So I knew sort of modern Singapore. Hmm. Well, that's fascinating stuff though, that you've traveled so much. The travel helps on all of it, right? It helps on the writing. And it helps with even understanding and to paint the atmosphere that we were talking about. I want to bring Kimberly Hess back on this show. She's an author, biographer and genealogical researcher. See, I said that again, she is also the author of a lesser mortal, the unexpected life of Sarah B. Cochran. You can get it on Amazon. And so welcome back, Kimberly. How are you? Thank you. I'm well. How are you doing? Good. Doing good. Do you want to give everyone a quick overview of who Sarah Cochran is? She's quite an amazing woman. Yeah. She was a business competitor of Henry Clay Fritz at the turn of the 20th century, but she started out in a family that was very poor in southwestern Pennsylvania and happened to become a maid in the house of the man who pioneered the Connellsville coke industry. And his son and she fell in love while she was the maid, they got married. And ultimately, this man and their child died unexpectedly around 1899 and 1901 and that left her in charge of the family's colon coke businesses and some railroad interests. And then she also was a very powerful regional philanthropist and a trustee of three colleges and a suffragist. So she's very well known in a few very small places, but as people move away, that knowledge of her is diminishing. And I knew about her because she's my great-great grandmother's cousin and she put my great-grandmother through college about a little more than 100 years ago. That's amazing, right? Yeah. Just putting another woman through colleges. We talked about that the last time. In fact, I'm in touch, everybody. There's a link about the Pennsylvania suffragettes and that includes Sarah's history and we did a podcast on what was August 26 that we aired it, right? Yeah. And so I'll put that link in the episode notes so people can hear about it and I mean, it's just a fabulous story and it's inspiring. I think that's the thing. I think we could all agree that you can get some inspiration going and learning about people's lives and then you can find things and go, "Oh man, I didn't know that." So that's a fun thing. Our next guest is award-winning singer-songwriter Johnny Shafer. You can go to his website here, johnny.com. He's on our shows all the time. And also co-hosts our big daily blend podcast every first Sunday. And so welcome back, Johnny. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you and it's fun to explore this kind of thing. In addition to just the curiosity of wanting to know all the things that came together to create this person called Johnny, learning about where you came from can kind of inform a lot of things that you do every day including diet and things like that because what continent you came from can kind of influence maybe some of the things you should be doing. And so my husband's always talking about that kind of thing. So on a lot of levels, I think it's really fun and interesting and it also kind of has brought different parts of my family together because they're trading notes or the, "Well, I found this over here," and I went to a point and found this and so it's kind of gotten family members talking to each other that haven't talked to each other in a long time. So that's been kind of fun. Well, I know that you're getting ready to go overseas, right? And see Paco is doing his husband as a filmmaker, so you're going to be out there meeting him. So are you going to be doing any digging around? Don't dig in the graves. That's a no-no-no. But, yeah, are you going to be looking for any-- You're just trying to walk around cemeteries though, for sure. It is. Yeah, I don't think we're going anywhere that my family's from on this particular trip and Paco's family is more, you know, just Mexico, so I think this one, we may not do too much of that but, you know, I'm really-- You'll see some history, of course, if you go to Europe, you're already walking in history for sure. Absolutely. That's exciting. You're going to have to report back, you know, full report. Yes. You know, we're not done with Cliff yet, you know, he hasn't done quite a full report yet, but we'll get to him. He's got a happy hour show to get on to some point too. Yeah, one, we're going to go to Prague, which there's a lot of music history, which from the younger we're excited about. There's a lot of history in Prague, I mean, that's fascinating, fascinating. Well, our next two guests are both from the Tucson Sisters in Crime, and this is such a cool organization, and they're out in Tucson, Arizona, and it's really people coming together celebrating crime, you know, writing crime, and I love having crime writers on the show because, I don't know, our brains can-- I don't know, it's really highly creative. So first I want to bring Erin Lee on the show, she's a writer and author, and go to her website erin, Lee.com, and that's E-R-Y-N-N-N-L-E-I-G-H, so welcome back, Erin. How are you? Thank you. It's great to be back. Doing well. Yeah. Always struggling to get the writing going, but that's-- never have-- I'm trying to get ready to query my novel right now, like all those last-minute things before you go out to agents, so it's keeping me busy, but I'm hoping to get back into some family history stuff as soon as I get that going, because, you know, it's one of those things that I've been doing for years. So do you-- do you do any family history research for your books? I've done some. There are minor traditional mysteries. One short story is published and I'm waiting on-- I'm working on the novel that's trying to get out there. It is set-- both of them are set in my-- a fictional version of my hometown in Central Illinois. And I draw a lot of the inspiration and the setting and things from that and the fact that people have long histories and roots there. So while it's a traditional mystery, this particular one is set and the family dynamics not of mine or anyone else, but just similar stories to what I've heard have helped a great deal. And I have used the history center there, a great deal, doing research to just get background ideas and to help with some of my nonfiction genealogy stuff I'm working on as well, so. Cool. Very helpful. Well, I like what you-- you know, because that's what we're talking about, Cliff, also, I think when we were talking about your writer-insider conversation about that-- getting that atmosphere, the setting correct, right? And so historical research can really help with that, so you understand the backbone of a place, you know? Right. I'd like to go back. Go ahead. No, don't, go. I'd like to go back fairly frequently. I don't have as much immediate family there anymore, some of my older relatives have passed away and my mother has moved out to Arizona now, but I'd like to go back usually yearly just to see the character, the architecture, and do some research. It does give you that flavor that you're talking about, the setting. Yeah. And it's-- yeah, that's what brings the integrity, I think. Our next guest is Anna Bartowski, and Bartkowski-- I've got to get it right here as she's an author and also a family heirloom collector, so I'm fascinated about this because I think objects can really spur on-- just like our-- you know, can spur on all these questions and just, yeah, who had this, why, where, and how, and where did it come from? What is the journey of that heirloom? So you can go to Anna Bartowski.com, so welcome Anna to the show. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's good to have you here. Tell us a little bit about your books because I see like family history, murder, like-- And children's books thrown in there-- Oh, yeah, why not? --with two murders in the children's books, but I've got a kind of a unique-- I think it's a unique ancestry. I started doing genealogical research when I was in the third grade, and what I found is, you know, I knew my grandmother was German, and I got an assignment at school, and they said, find out where your family lived before they were in the United States. And my dad said, well, of course we're German, but we came via Russia. So my research has been of the Germanic peoples from the area of the Rindland Hesse, the Palatine, that border that has varied over years, centuries, between France and what is now Germany. And in the 1760s, Catherine the Great made my ancestors. She invited them to come and help her settle the Russian steps. She had just completed a war, and these people in that Germanic area had just retired, of the wars going on in those areas, because there was no united Germany at that point. And they were tired, they had served in the wars, they had to change religions, depending on who won the war, and it was really hard to be able to get land to farm. They were running out of land for these people. So they accepted Catherine the Great's offer, and they ended up traveling from the Germanic states up to Lubic over the Baltic Sea, and then somewhat over land and down the Volga River to settle, which is north of the Caspian Sea. And it was not an easy journey. So once I figured out, they were able to keep their culture, their German culture, their German language, their German food, and whatever religion they chose. But I really wanted to get a better understanding of how this all came about. So my book, Dead Reckoning, the Murder Mystery, I've used my own ancestral family records that I've found, and the protagonist Rosalind Schmidt is, she's not me, but she has the same ancestry, and what she uncovers about her family, what she does in trying to solve a murder back in the 1760s and current day, which was 2014, Arizona. So it's got dual timelines and a lot of family history. Wow. Now you're going back to the 1700s. Now Johnny, isn't your family of Germanic backgrounds? Yeah, I could relate to what she was saying. I found on my mom's side, my mother was always told by her grandmother that the branch of the family was from Lithuania. My aunt went over to Poland and really did a lot of research. She met a lot of the family, and they were big families, like 14, 16 kids. And then they spread out all over the place. And she couldn't find anyone that could trace the Lithuanian part, but my cousin had a blood test and said, yeah, there's Lithuanian, but we can't find anybody that we can trace back to that. But Polish, there's a lot of Polish, and the thing with that is that it took so many different forms that sometimes it was Russia, and sometimes it was Poland and Belarus. And so it seems like, depending on when you, what period you talk about, it was different, called something different. And then they also, because they spread out so much, I did find out that some of my family came to the U.S. in the 1700s because they were going to have to fight against other family members that were in other parts of Poland that were now against each other. And so they didn't want to do that, so they came to the U.S., but then interestingly, some of them ended up in the North and some of them ended up in the South, and then they fought each other in the Civil War. So it was kind of, they escaped, they tried to avoid that, and then they ended up doing it here. Wow, that's, that's rough, that is rough. I mean, it's, I went to a Civil War battlefield in Oklahoma called Honey Springs, and they had the locals there fighting against each other, right? Native Americans fighting each other, African Americans fighting each other, and Anglos fighting each other over the Civil War. So we had, you know, the South and the North right there. I mean, I just never thought we would see Native Americans or African Americans fight each other in the Civil War, but they did, and, but, you know, that's, stuff happens in Oklahoma. I'll tell you what, that's an amazing place, man. There's a family to have history there too, it's interesting. Yeah, there's a talk about murderers, man. The women out there did some crazy murders in Oklahoma. If you want some women killers like go look up Oklahoma, no, I mean, there's, it's brutal, it's brutal. So Lisa, I want to ask you, have you done any research on your family? Um, yes and no, thankful, I mean, yes, I started out like many. I start out, get into it, and then of course, life's happened and I get pulled away and then 10 years later you come back. But luckily for me, I have a cousin who I don't know when he started, he's about 15 years older than me, and the most recent time I got back into family history, he supplied me with years and years and years of research, so, you know, obviously he's my cousin, so, you know, his mom was my aunt, so it all kind of flows from the same thing. And it's absolute, I mean, you know, I talk rabbit holes, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, I have, and I printed out just, just because I went, he can, and I was told this happens to a lot of people, but a pair, according to his research, my 30th great grandfather was William the Conqueror, but I had heard, I had heard that William the Conqueror did that for a lot of people, so I don't know if that's true or not, but yeah, and it literally goes back 31 generations, my 31st great grandmother was William the Conqueror's mom, and that's as far back as it goes and she was born in 1003, so he has all of this data to cut and he shared it with me, I mean, it's literally his life's work, I swear, it's his hobby, it's been his lifelong hobby, and so again, I tried to get into it for my kids, because I have a granddaughter that is, you know, she told me she, it was again for a college project, and she was like, you know, do you have anything, so I sent her all this stuff, and she dabbled with it a little bit, and I think again, life got in the way she's 24, life got in the way she does her own thing, but now listening to everything and revisiting the file that he had sent to me, I'm like, it's, I mean, I could pick, I mean, I'm looking at this, these names on this thing, and you're talking, Earls and Countess doesn't, I'm like, me, seriously, it was just, it's just like, but it's cool, and that's on the England side, and then on the other side, they're more German, German induction, and there's a lot of palletine Germans that emigrated to my area in New York where I grew up, and you know, it's, it's just, it's so interesting, because, you know, like this particular thing that goes back to William the Conqueror came from my paternal grandmother, but on the other side, it goes the, you know, my maternal grandparents are the Germanic parts of it, and so no matter which way you go, you like go for, I mean, I literally used to spend hours and hours, it's like, oh my god, then that's kind of why I kind of had to pull back, because it was literally, I could get on my computer and spend a day and get nothing else done. I think you're, you're sitting with a bunch of people doing the same thing, but I'm listening to all these people that have, you know, and I mean, yes, I'm a travel writer, but you know, I guess deep down inside, I've always, you know, wished to write a, and that my book, my book is a tourism book, and it's great, and I love doing it, but like on the other end, like a novel or, or something else, and I thought, and now listening to all of the stuff, you could probably, you know, but again, it would take so much research, but that would be, I think that's on my bucket list is to somehow not, not necessarily a documentary or anything, or a nonfiction, but taking some of these parts and putting them into a fictional story. I think that would be really cool. That might be on my bucket list now. Yeah, I want to go to Glenn about William the Conqueror. I think, do you ever hear his name pop up in your life? Well, obvious, maybe, you know, 1066 and all that. But one thing I do want to talk about is having criminals, especially women criminals, you were talking about. I mean, my family history includes an entire family that were done for manslaughter in 1882, including the man and his wife, and three daughters. And the youngest daughter was let off because she was only 13, so she weren't prosecuted. But the other two daughters, along with their mother and father, were all prosecuted for manslaughter in 1882, and ended up in Norwich Castle. And the story is unbelievable. You know, basically, there was a fight in a backyard where this young man got beaten up by my ancestors, and he died of a brain hemorrhage. So they were all done for manslaughter. But, you know, the fascinating thing is what you learn about the people. For instance, this was my great, great, great grandmother was the mother. She was four foot 10. Well, I would never have found that out if she hadn't committed a crime. As she committed a crime, the records are there, and they told me that she was four foot 10. You know, that sort of thing is the information that you can get about people who were common, common people. You know, these, these were as common as they come. You know, I'm a really rough end of a town living in a yard with like a hundred other people. They were really common. But you can find out so much about them. If they broke the law, if they did naughty things. And the other thing, I wouldn't really say about what Cliff was saying about making sure you get your facts right. There is nothing worse for a historian like me to read a novel or to see a television program. And they've got it wrong. My dad used to say to me, that aeroplane has got the wrong markings on it. You know, a war film or something. It's that's the wrong aircraft that weren't there in 1943. They didn't start using that until 1944. And I can understand why. If you're going to do something, the people say do it right. Yeah. And I think about travel too is because if people start talking about, we get that way about wildlife, Nancy and I, you know, someone, and you'll see it in art as well. You can tell if an artist is painting from a zoo or out in the wild, who's actually seen an animal in the wild, it's night and day difference. You know, and when people talk about a region in a book, and you can tell they haven't been there, you know, or it's, it's just a different thing. So, you know, travel is a huge part of family history, whether you're at armchair or actually going there, but I want to go back to crime. This is cool. Crime is always interesting. So, have any of you found crime in your family history? Okay, Lisa, you got my grandfather on my, and again, this I found from all of my cousin's notes. My grandfather on my dad's side. So, my dad's father. And I mean, I knew he passed away when I was only two. I have very limited pictures of him, but I know he had a drinking problem. And my grandmother was, my grandmother was the, how little I say this, she was hellfire and brimstone religion kind of thing. But when you find, when you dig a little bit deeper, they were, they were separated for many, many years because you didn't divorce back then, but they were separated because a he had a drinking problem. And he would, he had gotten arrested and apparently back in the, so I'm going back and pray the teens and 20s or whatever, he was arrested for stealing, he and his brother, so it would have been my, my great uncle, I guess, what were stealing chickens. And back then, that was a, a like a, considered a huge crime. And you know, they, he actually spent time in jail for, you know, like a year or more because, you know, back then during the depression, you obviously, you didn't steal thing. But, and, and I was like, oh my God, my grandfather was in jail kind of thing. And it was just, but again, it's all in my, my cousin's notes, because he, I mean, obviously going back to, you know, to, to 1028 when William the Conqueror was born, he doesn't have all those notes. But for immediate, probably three generations, he's got a lot of notes in each of the things. And it's, it's so interesting to read. That's how I found out my grandfather had spent time in jail. Cool. Well, I mean, it's interesting because it does tell you what was going on at the time. And a lot of crimes were done over finances, over money, you know, still to this day. I mean, it's, it's, you know, people still steal food for food. Joe, what about your family? Well, we've talked about it once before. I, I think I was, I was 57 or 58 and doing family research and found a note in, well, I guess I was probably 40s when I found the note, but it took many years to track it down. But there was a note that said about this young man who was the, the brother-in-law of a great aunt. Uh, I get this by this note that somebody had stuck into a folder in a library where I was doing research and it said killed by a Mr. Grant. I mean, my old ears perked up, you know, that's family name, Grant. So I kind of squirrel that away for the future. So years later, I find something else that leads to Mr. Grant and his brothers. So I finally asked my, my living at that time, uh, uncle, if he knew anything about this boy being killed by Mr. Grant. He said, Oh, yeah, that was grandpa. I went, how did I live 58 years and not know my grandpa was a murderer? He went to the pen in Richmond for murder. And if it hadn't been for a TB outbreak, I wouldn't be here because he was not married. He was a young man of 18, 19 years old. And it was eight years later when he was released, when he came back to the community and married and started a family or my grandma would have never been born. So it was pretty interesting that he and the two brothers killed this. There it was their sister's husband's brother, but they lived nearby. And apparently he made I heard two different stories. He made advances toward their mother or he cussed their mother for letting her chickens and ducks get in the creek, which of course slowed down into their section of land. And the boys took offense to what was said to their mother. And I guess the three of them cornered him. And I don't know if words were exchanged, but shots were apparently fired. So a very amazing story for me. And I've dug through trying to find all the records. The two younger brothers did not serve more time than they served until it went to trial. I think they were in jail for over a year before it ever went to trial. So the two younger brothers were released for time served, and he was not. So I guess because he was the oldest, he bore the brunt of the repercussions. Wow, this is like the Hatfields and the McCoy's. That's crazy. Do you know that they actually emailed us? Because we did a story and somebody, one of them, I think it was a McCoy, like, no, this person did not do this. And I don't know what I was a years ago. Well, the girl that cuts my hairs from that area. And she she is she has relatives on one side or the other. I will play witch. Yeah, but she knows a lot of that story. Gotta be careful. But you know, these stories, I mean, it's interesting how chickens are popping up. Anyone have a chicken chicken? Chicken, no chicken. Oh, you have a stabbing? Okay, let's hear about that. They didn't stab a chicken. No, they don't farm land. So it could have been who knows what the field was about. This is my third great grandfather. My whole genealogy thing started researching my third or my second great grandmother on my mother's father's side, because nobody knew anything about her. So I traced them back to like the Lebanon, Missouri area. And she and she was born there in 1855. But her parents, I used to say they must have fell from the sky. Her father had a very common last name, Massey, millions of them in the area. But he didn't seem to have belonged to any family. And her mother either died in childbirth or shortly after she was born because she just sort of disappeared and he remarried her father, my fourth great grandfather remarried a couple of years after she was born. She was raised by their family as was the he has the custom back then. And he remarried someone else. Well, this there was about him. I knew little about him, except that he had remarried. I found that and said obscure reference. And his second wife was supposedly was expecting at this time, although I didn't know that till later. But there was a little story when I was back in Missouri doing research in this little library of the books back then. And the name came up, a funny Eli Massey. And it said in there that he was stabbed, I think it was like February 8th of like 1858. This is a long time ago, a little tiny story. But he'd been stabbed on a street by a neighbor of his new father-in-law. He stepped into the fight because the new father-in-law was an older gentleman, you know, and that his neighbor, it was Nathan something, basically, he was apparently like a wild guy from back in the time. Everybody knew he got in fights. They own neighboring lands. They got into some fight, the father-in-law in the neighbor. And so Eli stepped in, apparently to defend his father-in-law and got stabbed. And it was reported in this little paper in Oliver, Missouri. And I guess the governor of Missouri even issued a reward for looking for Nathan B. And they can be Howard. That was his name. Nathan B. Howard and his brother or father or something, he was sort of wild guys because they fled elsewhere after that scene because they didn't want to be caught. So there were like these reward things listed in all this Missouri history and newspapers. I mean, this guy was just your average, you know, as far as I can tell, just like a farmer, a working class guy, you know, and so that was surprising because of the notorious, apparently, the Howard's were and how they got into fights, and they issued the reward for him. It was actually reported. So I found out something about him through that day. I don't know what the argument was about, but it was a neighbor feud. Wow. Hey, maybe some good information. It's all about farms. Okay, so this is farms and plants and processing, chickens and all kinds of things. Well, you bring up a good point about where we find our history, right? Obviously, there's ancestry.com and all those places, but you know, seeing a reward for a family, and that's pretty like wild to see in a newspaper, a reward, right? So Johnny, have you found anything like, like, wow, how did, you know, like a wow factor in your research through your family that you didn't know, like, either a story or like some kind of connection that you wouldn't expect of a place or, you know, a book or something like that? Yeah, actually, I always wondered how my mom's family ended up in Toledo, Ohio, and my aunt explained to me that originally they had settled in New York, and a great, great uncle became a, well, there was a strike, and he stepped over the picket line, so he was a scab, and the union went after him, and the whole family in the middle of the night had to flee, and they ended up leading to Toledo, and that's how the family ended up in Toledo, because they were afraid for their lives, because their union was really retaliating against, you know, anyone that stepped over the line, so that was kind of interesting to me. Wow, what about you, Kimberly, in the research you've done on your family, and then, obviously, Sarah Coughlin is, you know, part of your family, too, anything surprising, or a surprising kind of, like, the organ, right? The organ, yeah, I mean, it was interesting because we knew certain ethnicities that we might be based on last names, but what I learned was that people had been in Southwestern Pennsylvania for so long that they had lost quite a bit of their history, and I found 10 ancestors who were in the American Revolution in New Jersey, and Maryland, and Eastern Pennsylvania, so that was very interesting. I would have never expected that because no one had any information about that passed down, and one woman, one person among those 10 was a woman, who wasn't in the military, but she was burned out of her house during the revolution and actually talked about it in the pension application that she made as the widow of a soldier, so it's interesting as you're reading and researching about a male soldier, you actually find out about a woman's experience in the war, too, so that was a wow. And so the pension records, that's another source for people to look at is a pension. Wow, wow. I want to bring Katie Walls back on the show, Kathleen, as a travel writer and also an author, you can go to our website, KatieWalls.com, and it's K-A-T-Y, or americanroads.net for travels, but welcome back to the show, Kathleen. How are you? I am so sorry, I'm late. I ended down for four o'clock. Oh, I thought you were off, I thought you went down a rabbit hole, but you know, that's what happens. You know, it's like suddenly, oh, we've got to be on camera here. No, but Katie, you know, we're talking about family history journeys, and you know, I know that you've done a lot of it and written about it even in your books. Right now, we're talking about the latest questions are, have you found crime in your family? I love these shows, anything with crime, or have you found anything surprising or in a surprising source for your research? Hi, my favorite to us, and I, unless you consider serving in the as a Confederate soldier or crime nowadays, I had a great, great grandpa, and I had a copy of his diary and was able to dig up more on genealogy sites. And there's a book written called the, "A Man in His Ship" where picks up parts of the story that I didn't know about. But the whole story was just fascinating. And the irritating thing was there's so much about his business, which he started working for Virgo building the Custom House before the war in the wars. And then when the war, he felt he owed his allegiance to Louisiana because he was a Scottish immigrant. He had come over and the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans had accepted him, and welcome him. And he did pretty well. Oh, he was not a slave holder. I was happy to learn. He worked with Virgo and then after when the Civil War broke out, he began building cannons for the Confederacy. And when New Orleans fell, he had a letter from Jefferson Davis Commissioning him to go to Selma and build a foundry, and that never happened. So that part is a big blank in my history. And then I picked up later towards the end of the war. He was working as a master of ordinance for this lieutenant who had the last ironclad to surrender in the Civil War of the USS Missouri. And there's a little caps that I'd like to feel, but I did work them into my books, my war in the West series. Very fact, as much as I could, I had to fill in some of the spaces because the Selma Foundry never came about. I know we had the letter, I've seen a copy of the letter, but there's a life after that. So frustrating when you start digging in, there's some things you can find out and some you can't. Yeah, I think, well, I think this is, you know, we've got the internet now in groups and Facebook, and, you know, all these online and even talking like this. So that does go to a question. But I do want to see if Cliff has any, you know, scandals in his family history or anything surprising. I want to talk about sources though, because I think that's something important. And if you have stumbling blocks like what Katie's talking about, maybe as people here can help us from the research they've been doing, but any scandal, Cliff, come on. Well, of course. I don't know any details, though. I mean, it's a lot of scandals in the sense that there seem to have been a lot of marriages that were hurried because of pregnancy. So when you're looking at dates of weddings and births, you realize that these might not have been love marriages. One in particular that I find interesting because now I can't locate anything about the, I think it's my great grandfather who married my great grandmother and then quickly disappeared after the birth of the child. And so we know nothing at all about about him. His name, in fact, we do know that he was born in Norway, but that's all we know about him. I don't know what happened to him afterward. I became really interested when I was about 10 years old. I was living in Central Illinois at the time, Aaron, so I'd be curious your background, but my great uncle had done a lot of genealogy research. And so, of course, this was before the internet. So he had this folder that he had created with all of these mimeographed cages of showing the chart of the family history. And we were mostly curious, at least when I was that age, I was very curious about my surname, which is unusual, Garstang, not very many American Garstangs. And as Glenn may know that Garstang is a town in Lancashire, England, and that's where a lot of the sources that he had were from. And I continue to do online research about the Preston area and Garstang, Lancashire, to get information. But sometime, I don't know, 10 years ago, I realized that researching my father's name was only telling a tiny part of the story, because there's my whole mother's whole side of the family, and then my grandmother's on both sides. And I have found some fascinating information about people who arrived very early on in this continent's story, like 1630 and several many in the early 18th century. In fact, I was hoping this week earlier to visit a cemetery in Virginia, where a number of our Quaker ancestors are buried. And that would have been fascinating. Probably no scandals in that cemetery. Yeah, Quakers did so much as abolitionists, right? They did such amazing history. But I think when you very first came on the podcast, I mean, we're talking about like ancient times, right? I remember going Garstang. We used to hang out at Garstang Beach in South Africa. That was, you know, it's part of my childhood, hanging out at the beach there. And then Nancy and I lived in Preston when we lived in England for a short time. And you're not supposed to go walking around saying that, right, Lynn? Am I right about that? Why do people give me an uphill on Preston? What's wrong with Preston? I had fun there. There's nothing wrong with Preston. Thank you. Or Southport, right? Or Southport? No, there's nothing wrong with anywhere. Thank you for that. Thank you. I want to find out if you know more about Garstang too. But first, I want to go back to Anna, because we are all finding these fascinating stories. Have you stumbled? I mean, your story, obviously, from the beginning is pretty amazing. But any interesting surprises or sources for your research? Well, I think one of the most surprising sources I found, and being that my ancestors were in Russia for about 200 years, you can imagine how difficult it is to get to some of those sources. But I got a tip from a good friend. And she said, there's a there's a history of Mary and Thal, written by Nicholas Dahlheimer that's in the Saratov archives. So through a connection, there's people that will help you get these copies. I was able to get a copy. And the my grandmother had always told me that because the Herman family line were part of the original settlers in 1766, they carried on the oral tradition. And then in about 1910, they asked my great grandfather, Nicholas Herman, to share the story. And Nicholas did not have the greatest penmanship. But my grandfather, who is a missing person, he came to the United States and he fled my grandmother at one point, actually wrote down the history as dictated by his father. So that was an incredible piece. It's 16 pages written in German script. That's absolutely phenomenal that I got translated and published and so forth. But if I could also add, this is this is kind of the wow factor. My grandfather disappeared. My grandmother, at the time, she was pregnant with my father. And so my father grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, without really any direct relatives. They ended up settling there. There were a lot of Germans from Russia there, but they were primarily from the Lutheran villages, not the Catholic village they were from, but they felt very comfortable, because here they are in this new country. Anyways, so my dad grew up without cousins, per se. And my grandma was said, well, think about it. My grandfather and grandmother left, a lot of them left. They left in 1913, because they knew this Russian German war. They feared war. And they, much like Johnny said, they didn't want to fight relatives. Maybe they didn't know those relatives in Germany, but they knew they still had relatives in Germany. So they fled. And a lot of people, there were a lot of issues, obviously, during that time. But what really happened at the start of World War II in 1941, all the German villages, the Volga, the Black Sea villages, those people were either tracked across going west to Germany, or they were taken to labor camps in Siberia. Wow. So we lost contact with a ton of relatives, obviously, at that time. But then, as I'm doing all my research and getting my name out there as someone who's interested in the Herman line, I discovered Vladimir Herman. Vladimir Herman is the grandson of my grandmother's youngest brother, who was sent to Siberia, who worked very hard in the labor camps. And ultimately, Stalin did let these people say, okay, you can go, you can leave Siberia now. This was probably the early 50s. But you can't go back to the village you lived in. So what they did, they ended up in Kazakhstan. They ended up there for quite some time. And Anton Herman's grandson, Vladimir Herman, one of my cousins, and I got in contact together. And Vladimir got a great education in Russia. He lived in Moscow for a while. And then Germany opened its doors. And it said, anyone who can prove their German heritage can repatriate to Germany. So not just Vladimir, but all his brothers and sisters, his mother, and their entire family repatriated to Germany. They got in contact with me. And we had 110-year reunion of the families in 2017. So that's my wow factor. Because even as all of you are talking, and Glenn, I think this is something so powerful about family history, is you're connecting with your past, and you're finding out all these people that made you. And Johnny, you made that point. It's like, who made me? You know, all these people made up who you are. But Glenn, as everyone's sharing their stories, aren't you sitting back and going, there's commonalities? So it's going to be connected with something here. Like, isn't that kind of this thing? It's like this whole other way of having a community, wouldn't you say, Glenn? Well, it just goes to prove that, you know, we're in England. We're hearing a lot about people coming into the country. You know, we're hearing about, you know, people coming over from Europe or people coming over from wherever, especially the ones that are coming across the channel, you know, in their little boats, which is a disgusting trade. Lots of people might get lots of money from it. People who are coming over are not the ones to blame. That's, you know, anyway, that's political. We don't get into politics, do we? Anyway, don't start me. I could go on. The thing is, we've been moving around the world since the world started. So people moving around, people coming into different countries, is not new. I mean, I'm very, very, very unusual in all of my ancestors that I found lived within 50 miles of where I live today. You know, I'm very unusual. I understand that. I live. Glenn, don't go there. Yeah. Yeah. Very unusual. I've still only got five fingers and two, who said don't worry. But, you know, I'm unusual. I live in a part of England that is right up against the coast. So sort of like three quarters of an area that is in my area is coast. So, you know, no one came in across, well, they did come in across the water. But you know what I mean. Whereas people, especially in Europe, they just traveled because you could travel where you liked. And you had to. Well, a lot of times. People in America could travel across land, you know, quite easily. So all this who are about people moving into the country is, it's been happening for years. That's, we're all nomadic. I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Go back to our Indigenous people here or in Africa or everywhere, they moved according to hunting, according to water, according to all kinds of things. And so that's, that's humans have been doing it. And I think that for part of family history is we have this like DNA inside of us. And it's like a magnet. It's like a magnet wanting us. And so do any of you find that when you, in regards to travel, you want to kind of go home and it's like a homing device, we're all little pigeons. You know, we want to go home, but we don't quite understand where all home is. You know, so it's kind of a interesting thing with this kind of research. You want to go there. I mean, Anna, don't you want to go back to go back and tour everywhere? Well, I did have the opportunity with my cousin Vladimir. When I went to Germany to meet his family, I took my sister, my brother-in-law along. We had this great reunion. It was absolutely incredible. And then we took, we took a road trip and we went to some of the Germanic cities, they were just villages at that time where our ancestors had been. And I think our greatest fine, I mean, we found, you know, we'd send from a Mertz line and we were in Vitlick. We found the Mertz winery. Well, we bought up as much wine as we could. And then we went- You need to meet Joe. You need to meet Joe. Yeah, yeah. My glass is empty. I think one of my favorite things was when we got to the Herman- Nicholas Herman was the original traveler who left what is modern-day Luxembourg and went to Russia. And he was from the town of Stopp-Raedemus. And we found the Catholic Church that was there in 1760s. And I think the picture of Vladimir and I in the front of that church where our ancestors, you know, where they attended, where they were married, I mean, that just, that was like the best moment of that particular trip. You know, Kimberly, in your research going through, you know, this is your families. Did any of your other family, you know, your living family today, did they get involved in the genealogical research too? Or did they- Are they interested like you are? Do you go to meet a family dinner and start going, "Did you know?" They're usually haven't been as interested. I have one cousin of my dad's who's become very interested and another cousin of my dad's who had been very actively working on some of our genealogy about 20 or so years ago. So there's a few people, but when you look at the whole group of people, it's amazing how many people aren't as interested in it. It's- I think everyone has a- you get that- once you get bitten by the family history bug, it's like it's a mystery and you keep going. In closing, if each of you could share a tip and the research that you've done is something for people getting started in family research, a tip or a question so that we can continue this conversation next time and focus on answering those questions and maybe everyone here can help you answer that question or give you some insight. So let's start with you, Lisa. A tip or a question? I guess my tip would be patience, something that I have not had. I will dive into it for a month or two and then I will realize how much time it's taking up and realize what has- so it takes patience. I look to my cousin who did all this research that I have at my hands and realize how long it must have taken him. It's- it's had to have taken his life- it had a lifelong hobby. So patience, I'm now after listening to everybody. Now, as you said, Lisa, it's the bug, it's getting into me again. I just got to figure out how to balance it with everything and I'm very interested to- from Glenn and anybody else, the sources. I mean, obviously everybody knows there's ancestry, but I've heard good things and bad things. I don't necessarily know. So I would like to hear from the experts as to where do you start? Yeah, exactly. Katie, any tips or any- especially on getting started? One of the things is you need to follow up on all of the sides of your family. I think Anna mentioned that it's not just your father mother. My mother was interested in genealogy and she did a lot of research on her family, which gave us the iris side of the family. The diary that we had, which was on my father's side, his great-grandfather, got me very interested in it. The germans out of my family is very, very hard to track. It's very difficult, you know, I can go back, you know, great-grandmother and that's about it yet. But it does take patience and you need to just keep digging. Sometimes things that don't look like it's going, like finding the book, this book written by somebody not totally related at all, but in the book, he mentions German boy, my master of ordinance. So I knew what was happening at the time and I knew it was my great-grandfather, Joe Roy, because of the knowledge. And that was what he was- was interested in, was building ship things because he did that in New Orleans, two of them were cannons, that the ships were of more interest to him. I worked that book by book, but it just takes a lot of patience. Joe, any tips or questions? Oh, so many. I think it was Erin maybe that said somebody in her family dropped from heaven. I swore for years that my grandfather was delivered by the store for sure, because there were no parents. And all of a sudden one day it clicked and I was off and running for what was it by great old time? 15 generations. Yeah. It's patience, yes. You've got to follow your gut too. I had people saying my grandfather, no, yeah, great grandfather, was James Farmer Stanley. And I had cousins that were saying, you know, that he was a farmer. That's why he had that in his name. And I'm like, no, nobody named him because of an occupation. And so finally I found his mother and her mother were Elizabeth Farmer. So, you know, eventually it came out, but my gut told me all along, Farmer was a name. It was not an occupation. In Texas, it's a street name everywhere. Farmer's Market Road, Farmer's Market Road, Farmer's Market Road. Yeah, but there were real people named Farmer. And they do take occupations. Apparently in the last name, Smith, we did stuff. And Clark, apparently that was Clark because you could write and look at this, perhaps in England, but still it wasn't that, you know, it wasn't in Virginia that they started calling them clerks or plarks. That was the occupation that gave them that name, you know, 15 generations back, not three generations ago. Aaron, any tips or questions? Well, I am pretty soft, self-taught, but I love, I think it was a mystery. It's a history mystery. So I loved digging in and I came across a few things that have really helped me tremendously in doing research on this, mostly on this, my mother's father's side of the family. And that is, one of them is ancestry is a great starting place, but also reach out to people who have family connections. And I have met some amazing ones in fact one woman in Florida gifted me like literally hundreds of photographs, which are priceless, because we connected just inadvertently on thing. And it was the best thing that's ever happened. Also, do you not overlook local newspapers? It's like the Facebook of the history, especially for small towns. Oh my gosh, I have found so many things there, like little things, like they would describe like who and who came to visit so and so on. They list the family members, also what they age, but you know, it's like you can find so many tips about tracking where were these kids during the time that they were separated, because it lists the most amazing stuff in there. And then the other thing that I've done a lot of help with is because they didn't track women very well and my families have been here for forever, like you know, since the 1635 on some of them. But the women's were not tracked as well. So if you research, if you can't find them through their father when you don't know their married name, check their brothers or their sisters or find the male name and whether you like it and go down that rabbit hole of where the brothers or the cousins or and sometimes, you know, the mother's living with the son or the daughter. And if you track that, you know, that the male, the husbands or the married name, sometimes you can find those women that you can't find anywhere else because they live with someone or live across the street. That's the other thing. It takes forever. But if you find a small town of 500 people, if you can't find somebody, look in the same town, whether siblings or their parents live and go through in every single, every single listing and census and you can find them. There's by maybe their name is spelled and they live across the street. Good tips. Good tips. The marriage bond is another place to pick up the father and brother's names. If the father's dead, that girl had to be signed off by somebody and it's usually a brother or an uncle and you'll pick up that name to get that made name. Kimberly, with what you did for Sarah, obviously she did so many donations, right? So was that a big source for you was finding where she donated and finding those records? It was. And a lot of that could be found online in college bulletins or historic newspapers and that would lead to organizations that I could contact. But what I learned from working on Sarah's book and the question that I would ask is after people have been doing research and they've accumulated primary sources, especially in other historical documents, are you donating them to archives and museums and what are you doing to make the person in your family discoverable? Because I think that's an important piece of writing this biography that I hadn't really considered because I grew up knowing that she was there and I knew other people who knew about her. But when you begin to look at the person more objectively, you realize that people in other parts of the country or researchers working on a particular industry don't have any way to find this person. And I started to think about what I could donate from my own collection to make her discoverable and I'd be interested in what others are doing along those lines because we accumulate so much stuff in this hobby. Yeah, that's a good, good point. Cliff, anything to add to that or any tips or questions? Well, I would say that I love ancestry.com. I know that it has limitations and there are lots of errors in it so that finding confirmation from other sources is critical. I also look at familysearch.com which is also owned by the LDS Church but that's maybe more reliable I think because it's monitored a little bit better than ancestry.com. But the one tip that I would have, one of the most interesting rabbit holes that I went down was actually going to a courthouse. I'm sure Joe is probably familiar with Loonenberg County in Virginia and I took a trip down there because I had ancestors that arrived there in 1739 and there was lots of information about those folks. Documents that were very difficult to read because they were in the script that was used at the time but information about the fact that they were slave owners and who inherited what from whom and that was fascinating. So I would say that if you can actually get off the computer and visit a courthouse from time to time you'll find some really interesting information. Good point. Johnny any tips or questions? Yeah I think for me don't forget to consider and I think a few people talked about this. Consider other spellings of names because like there are so many ways to spell Shafer. In fact that's why I went here Johnny on my website because I didn't want to try to deal with dictating how you're supposed to spell the way our name is evolved. And what a good way to plug your website. Well done. The way that I think part of the way that happened is just when you know when they were coming through Ellis Island or wherever they came through the official just you know Shafer and they just spelled it however it sounded to them and you know ours is AE so that's the German Oumlaut A you know the A with Oumlaut and a lot of times that's translated as AE but then other people put two F's and a C and don't put the C and so there's many many ways and so you could very well be related to people who have a similar spelling and I think the names can sometimes even evolve more when people get married and sometimes I have friends whose families combined names when they got married so that can sometimes you know throw you if you just stick to that you know the one spelling that you have. Awesome Anna my question for you in regards to tips is you collect Erlen's family Erlen's. Can Erlen's help you in your research? Yes I believe they can because it's you know it's funny what people keep. One of the things I have is an actual saw and the story is that my grandfather bought this saw and they came from Russia but my grandmother hated it so they went back to Russia realized how much worse it was but they took the saw with them and engraved on the handle you have to look very very closely is the word "marion tall" which is the village they were from and it corroborates the oral history of the story so there's there's lots of Erlen's I have like that but if I can offer one tip I think you know as as everyone recognizes you know ancestry and family search these people are doing their best but my tip and one I really have to use because I'm dealing with so many records from Russia is find the original documents unfortunately I can't go to a courthouse like like Clifte which is ideal but you know to get those original documents and then like one of the things I'm working on right now I'm looking at this village of Balzer which I know doesn't mean anything to anyone but I've got this family list from 1906 and it's written I can't even tell you exactly it looks like Russian it looks a little some words look like German I think they use a mixed you know way of writing when they did this so um you know I think finding your flock and the American historical society of Germans from Russia that I'm a part of as part of that but then the original documents are critical no matter what language they're in and my question to everyone is has anyone I'm testing the waters with this has anyone found an interesting way to use AI to translate these handwritten documents that are in German and or nor Russian I'm having a little bit of success it's time-consuming but since I will never know Russian to the extent to be able to do that and I can put with my German but I'm curious if it you know for future discussion if anybody has any success with that no I haven't done it at all no well you have to come back and teach a class have you done it Kimberly I saw a webinar and I think it was through the historical society of Pennsylvania about German records and the host gave a number of websites that can be used for trying to decipher some of the old German script so I mean that's the closest thing that I've seen to it and the German seems to go better than the Russian in my opinion but it's a slow process but hey Kimberly if you can send me any links I'd be happy to take a look yeah yeah make sure you're all connected I do have a lady that her family is Jewish from Russia and and she just came back from a really intense trip Auschwitz and all of that and and Poland and Krakow and and she still kept not for family's village but she got to her village and she had to prove to be able to go into the village she had to prove that she is related to go in because it's so protected and historic and going into the graveyards and things like that and I mean her stories when she came back the night she came back we all sat down and she was showing us photos I'll connect her on all of this and I couldn't even think straight the next day driving because the stories are so heavy of the ghettos that her family had to live in these ghettos and they had like five houses like apartments with one room so five rooms and a family of 20 to 40 people could live in this one little room but they took the fifth room and made it into guess what a library how about that is that amazing here you're in this living through hell and they all go okay well all you know we're all gonna sleep and you know on top of each other basically because we want a library I think that is amazing when we think about the power of books right and the written words so that's important Glenn you want to close off with comments questions tips you're the historian wow um the first thing is don't believe anything you see on someone else's website and don't just copy and paste someone else's family tree um so that's one of the most important things um some tips I find wills really useful in England anyway I don't know what the American will system is good or not but finding wills especially wills of single women can be a gold mine so wills are worth looking for even if you think my ancestors never had any money it doesn't matter some people left a will and they didn't leave anything to anybody hardly but they still left a will um I've heard about slavery on here today do not judge your ancestors your ancestors were living in a different period what they were doing in 1750 is different to what we're doing in 2024 so don't judge what they were doing in 1750 or 1850 because they were living in a different time that's the most important thing because I hear so much about all this stuff about people in the past it was what they were doing I can't help what they were doing and it was normal at that time cock fighting you know dog fighting slavery you know all of that happened and we can't change history so don't yeah chicken thieves chicken thieves yeah um but one of the one of the good one of the good tips or two good tips talk to your oldest relations first and don't think about putting it off for obvious reasons and also if you're connected to a place if your ancestors are connected to a certain place email write telephone as many people in that place so you can think of like the local vicar the local post office the local library the local school ask them if there's anybody in the area interested in their local history because they can help you because they are living in the place that you're interested in where your ancestors lived so contact them I mean if somebody contacts my home village and then someone passes it to me they've got a gold mine of information just by contacting me let them all write a book and send it and then bring them over too but there are people like me in lots and lots of places so just write to the place and ask them who you should contact cool cool good stuff Glenn always good stuff I mean you did so much research he found a family member in Canada and ended up going over twice and standing in his ancestors footprints but found a whole family you know what it's all about it's awesome that's awesome doing that thank you all for joining us again everyone the links for everyone's websites are in the episode notes Katie walls Kathleen walls go to Katie walls dot com t-a-t-y and you can also follow her travel writing at americanroads.net for Anna Bartzkowski you can go to Anna Bartzkowski dot com Aaron Lee is Aaron Lee dot com and that's e-r-y-n-n-l-e-i-g-h Johnny he knows his website it's here Johnny dot com you do not need to type out Shafer though I finally got it I've always made a mistake on every episode of a show with Johnny on there I give him a new name and I try to find it as quickly as I can Kimberly Hess again everyone she is the author of a lesser mortal the unexpected life of Sarah B. Cochran it is on Amazon and all those great places online and I have a new website oh you do what is it unexpected life of Sarah B. Cochran dot call that makes sense good one good one awesome so everyone go there and get that and then also Cliff Garstang is Clifford Garstang dot com and if you ever get to go to the beach in South Africa it's really quite beautiful also Lisa Evans go to writer Lisa dot com for Jo you know she likes to have her glass in travel so follow her at have glass will travel dot com and recipes travel culture dot com is great great a bunch of stories on there as well and of course for Glenn over in England he is always great about emailing back and connecting so if you have questions do feel free to reach out to Glenn go to Norfolk dash tours dot co dot uk thank you all so much for joining us it's been so much fun and interesting thank you so you like to thank you for joining us here on big blend radios way back when history podcast keep up with us at big blend radio dot com
