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Oh hey, it's your fourth cousin twice removed Ali ward back with a familial historical episode of ologies. So you were here because people made babies with each other, and out of all of the game meats, in all of the conats, you became a collection of molecules, and you're suspended in a web of family. Even a cockroach technically has grandparents and cousins. Is that weird? Your cab might have an uncle, and if you have children, gay at them.
They may have children who have children, and then those children's might not even know your damn name. They'll just know you're dead. But before we get into it, first, a quick thank you to the select slice of listeners who are also patrons. You know who you are. You make the show possible. Thank you to everyone spreading the word with your mouth, or with your tweets, or by wearing my face on your chest via ologiesmerge dot com.
Thanks to everyone who boosts the show for others to see by hitting subscribe and rating it that actually works and leaving reviews like sweet Sweet Tier Male for me to see, such as this fresh evaluation from DC Doppelganger, who says, feeling sad and monotonous life getting it down, listen to this podcast Ologies reminds you about how amazing the world around you actually is. Thanks Dad word, stay curious. Everyone will do DC, I promise. Okay. Genealogy the first
topic ever to not be an ology. Look at it, genealogy? What is this? The Baron's stained bears. It's an allergy? What the heck man? So genealogy comes from the root word gena, meaning to give birth to you, like genesis, and genealogy is not the study of genetics and how DNA works. That's just called genetics. So this was news to me. Now, genealogy is the tracing of family origins, and in Old English it was called folk talou, meaning
folk tales. But the allergy and not ology is because the o analogies is borrowed from the first word anyway, So my point is that this podcast should actually just be called lo cheese, and to be honest, I'm not really emotionally prepared to process that. Also, it has taken my laptop one hundred and fifty episodes to not correct this my life's work into eulogies or logis, which it's done in business emails. So now we know the ology
allergy is as good as analogy. So this week's allogist, I suppose, has been in this field for three decades, starting as a personal passion that just consumed him into making it a job. And I was introduced to him by someone who worked to publish his latest book, which is called sixteen nineteen twenty Africans, which just came out
this past July, and I immediately ordered the book. I was so happy he was down to pop into a sound booth in Portland to chat with me about his passion tracing family histories and chasing down records, and also about mysteried novels and capes. Questions you should ask your relatives us history and how we treat the past, how to heal from our individual legacies, the joy of cracking a case, DNA tests, technology, brunch revelations, and how everywhere
you look there's family. So pull up a chair and absorb the stories of two time author Total Peach distant relative to Tom Hanks and perhaps your relative as well, genealogist Steven Hanks. I'm sure you get that with a lot of Stevens.
I do.
I do.
My name is over at pH as you probably noticed, and when it was funny when I introduced myself, they say Steve, Okay, Steve, nice to reach you.
Yeah, Steve, Steven And now you are a genealogist. Yes, and you've been a genealogist for quite a while now. Yeah.
I started like in eighty nine. Yeah, but I was like, God, how old was I? I was, oh, about thirty years old, And that's I got the bug. I was over at my dad's house that day and summer July, and he was watching the baseball game and he handed me this letter that he got from a cousin in Kansas, and he says, read this, And of course I didn't know anything about my fa family's history, you know, I'm just a kid growing up for the and so he shows
me this letter. I started reading and it's an obituary of a newspaper and all these relatives names are listed in this obituary. And saw my dad's side of the family, and I just said, wow, I don't know who these people are. And that's what that's what got it started. Right there, I said, I got to find out who these people are. I got to find out about the history of my family. And so that's how it got started. Eighty nine.
Yeah, and what was the first thing you did? Back in eighty nine? We had libraries and microfiche and the Dewey Dustal system.
Old microfilm readers. Yeah, the Michael Fish totally totally no no Internet, no clicking of the mouse. You know, it was old school all the way.
In old school ways involved making the two to three hour drive from Portland to Seattle's National Archives, and that houses fifty eight thousand cubic feet of records. That's a lot of records all about the Pacific Northwest for Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and now Alaska, but just in the past few weeks,
this is breaking news. Historians are rightly poed that the government wants to sell this building because the Techie Seattle location has become so valuable, and a building sale would mean moving all of those records of the Pacific Northwest to Missouri or California, making the journey for people much longer, and let's face it, mostly impossible. And note, you can't just jump on the information super highway. A lot of
those ledgers and records haven't even been digitized. So genealogy research, like family trees, still has its roots in the past.
Well, when I started getting interested in this field and wanting to learn more, I had to learn the rules of the game and how the professional genealogists did it. And so I learned about census records, tax records, you know, land deeds and all that sort of thing, courthouse records, just on and on and on, museums. So I said, well, let me start with the census records. That sounds pretty
easy enough. You know, every ten years they have a census, and of course they put a privacy restriction on the first seventy years they released it to the public. So the most recent census that was available to me at that time was, I believe the nineteen twenty census. Yeah, nineteen twenty. But they had no National Archives branch in Portland. I could either fly to Washington, d c. While that probably wasn't going to work, or they said you could
go to Seattle, Washington. They have a branch there. So I would just take off whenever I could and just drive up three hours up to Seattle and just spend time looking at the old microfilm reels and putting the old microfilm on, you know, cranking the machine, and boom, there they were. I found my grandparents in Manhattan, Kansas. I started getting excited in nineteen twenty. And the genealogists rule, this is the genie all it's just ral Alley is work your way back from what you know to what
you don't know. That's the rule. Never do it the other way around. Never go to what you don't know and try to work your way up to the present because you don't know who those people are in the past, right, so you don't know what journey, what path you're going to be on. So start with what you know and work your way back. So I found my grandparents' names. I said, okay, I'm on the right track, and just started working my way back. But it started getting tricky
as you get, you know, further back in time. And that's what even got me more excited, because you know, I'm like a detective, you know, like the Perry made said, you know, you know, just start looking under the rocks. And so went to nineteen ten, a nineteen hundred census, and this was really getting exciting. I finally was able to locate my great grandparents, knew their names, and it just blew me away, you know, found them in Kansas and found out that they had moved to Kansas from Mississippi.
And the thing about that experience was they came from Mississippi under a different set of living as you as you know where I'm coming from, you know, the slavery, you know, kind of the slavery thing. So that was a big chakaru.
But Stephen's first book was twenty thirteen's A Key Tree, a Descendants Quest for his slave ancestors on the Eskridge Plantations, and he has such an amazing way of writing about the process of genealogy through his own narrative and how one discovery can kind of ignite another the further you.
Go back in time. I was able to find them on the eighteen eighty census and the eighteen ninety census, I guess was burned in a fire in nineteen twenty one. So that's yeah, that's something that all genealogists, if you're studying Greek, Italian, whatever you're you know, ancestry is that's something that you have to live with. The eighteen ninety census, it's gone forever. Wow.
So yeah, Stephen told me that through the eighteen seventy census he discovered that his grandparents lived in a little town called duck Hill, Mississippi, hailing from what is now Montgomery County, the same place that Oprah Winfrey's family is from. Small world, but big deal, given that Oprah Winfrey is like the closest thing this country has had to a queen.
There they were eighteen seventy June something I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. There they were never met, these family members, but these were my ancestors. And so when I got to that point, I was just in heaven, you know. But the problem is, you know, you going beyond eighteen seventy is the trick for you know, as
far as African American genealogy. But I enjoyed, you know, doing it for I've had many different clients, many different people just even friends that I've done it for, all types of different Italian Greece so forth. It's exciting.
And you've established yourself as a genealogist, You've written multiple books, you've consulted on multiple documentaries, and you know, going back a little bit to your own history, were you always someone who liked mystery novels, like detective novels like what did?
Yeah?
Was that kind of in your genes?
Oh my god, Sherlock Holmes. I can remember as a kid just staying up late at night and just watching the Sherlock Holmes with who was who was the guy that was playing that? But yeah, you know, it was it was It always had to be this one actor that played Charlotte Holmes. He was the one that I fell in love with. I can't remember his name or off the bat, but we'll look it up.
My guess is that this is Ronald Howard, who, in nearly forty episodes of Detective Capers portrayed the caped icon.
What are you doing anyway?
Research research? Ps. I know, I just learned that that cape is called an Inverness Cape and it's named after a rainy region in the Scottish Highlands. We're Scottish where this sleeveless cloak thing because it allows for easier access to their sporan, which is their long, hairy fannipack coin purse that hangs over their chunk area. Anyway, Yes, Sherlock Holmes loved a good problem to solve and on the topic of clever Scotts.
But I love loved TI. I'm Sherlock was my guy. And then of course you know James Bond. I mean, who who's not going to like James Bond? You know the Sean Connery?
I know, I love you James, But yeah.
I totally was into the mysteries and the detectives early on.
Definitely, for sure, after you were handed this obituary and you started driving up to Seattle to look in the archives you mentioned to your your thirties, have you been able to balance genealogy with UH with other careers or did it at some point did you have to decide what you were going to dedicate your career to well, you know.
That's a good question. And I did have to kind of juggle back and forth because I had, you know, the passion and the drive to want to be an genealogists. I tried to start up my own business. Actually I did start my own business. It was called Genealogical Networking Services. And I went back to school and learned how to do computers because I didn't know that, and so I started up my own little entrepreneurship and I was getting requests all across the country. It was amazing, It was amazing.
I still have those those inquiry letters to this day, and they were all over the country. People asked me to do this, that, can you look this up Native American? Just anything you could think of, and I had fun doing it. The only problem was people had a tendency to not want to pay you, but they want you to do the research first and then okay, now send me a payment. So it got to be kind of
hard to make a living out of it. But I always had the passion for it, so I had to do other type of work just to you know, pay the bills type thing. But finally I was able to just recently actually five years ago, I finally got a really nice job that goes right along with my genealogy. I'm working for the school district here and yeah, I'm a record's clerk and it's amazing how many people come in, walk in or email or phone. They want to do
research about this, that and the other. And that's just right up my alley doing research and it ties right into the genealogy. So for the first time, after so many years, I finally got you know, they both together, genealogy and just doing historical research, you know, in local research. So it's cool.
Oh, that's amazing. And you know, I know that you chronicled these discoveries that you made with your family in your first book, A key Tree, and yeah, yeah, I would love to hear more. I know it's the ackey tree or a key tree. You've pronounced it either way.
I know, I know I say I say a key tree that I've heard people say no Aki.
You know, I know I wasn't good shirt, so I just messed it up either way.
But I guess it's my auntie who she just racally passed away in Saint Louis, Missouri. But she is my mother's sister, and she would take trips to Jamaica, you know, as often as she could. And so she pronounced it aki, and she sent me a picture of it, and I put it in the book.
So, the Aki tree or a ki tree, depending on how you say it is native to West Africa, and it bears this red fruit that in due time yawns open to reveal dark black, glossy seeds and this yellow, spongy flesh. And it's popular in Caribbean dishes. But if you try to eat that sucker before it's ripe, your impatience might get rewarded with the very self explanatory Jamaican vomiting sickness. Anyways, let it ripen and then cook it with cod, and it's just supposed to be heaven on earth. Now.
Stephen's book The Aqi Tree has cipia toned photographs of his ancestors and the silhouett of this tree behind them. And he told me that his first book was narrative fiction, based on his family experiences and inspired by books like Alex Haley's Roots, but later he revised it to be purely nonfiction.
It took about ten years to do the research on that, and my whole goal when I first started out was just to learn about my family on both my sides, my father and mother's side. I wasn't trying to like go all the way to to Africa or anything like that, just learning about the family. But every time I would go further back in history, I kept getting excited. I'm like, how far back can I go? Yeah, this is getting to be interesting now. I mean because as we all know,
you know, Abraham Lincoln he ended slavery. We know that in eighteen sixty five or eighteen sixty three. Some say because the Emtancipation Proclamation, And like I had mentioned here earlier, I found my parents or my great grandparents on the
eighteen seventies. That was the first time ali that African Americans were listed on a federal census for the first time as far as everyone, because it was five years after the end of the Civil War, and so now everyone was just you know, a regular citizen, you know, the way it was supposed to be. So, but if you want to go further back eighteen sixty well then you're going back into the old system of things. You know, when the South was at its peak and the cotton
was king and all that. So eighteen sixty that's when you really get into the struggle of trying to identify who your parents are and your ancestors. I should say, now, for some people, they have what they call free people of color. I learned about that as I became a genealogist. There were some people who had the designation of they were a free person of color, meaning they were emancipated or they were set free a long time ago, maybe eighteen hundreds, and their family just were free all the
way up and right through the Civil War everything. They were just cruising and they were free. And so they never had that problem of being found on the census record because their family had always been free.
Free people of color by the bye or heard to as free people of color, and just the distinction is a very painful reminder that they were the exception and not the rule. Stephen explored the beginnings of the laws that would shape and scar the nation for the last four hundred years in his book sixteen nineteen twenty Africans their story and discovery of their black, red, and white descendants.
But in Hampton, Virginia, there was a little ship that came in in August of sixteen nineteen and had had twenty Africans on it and they were taken off of a of a slave ship that was heading to Mexico Vera Cruz, Mexico and some pirates attacked the ship and took about fifty Africans off off of the slave ship. This true story, and twenty of them came to the coast of Virginia Hampton, Virginia and they let them go.
They traded them for food and long story short, I did this book based on this and DNA is so interesting now too. Everyone is taking a DNA test trying to find out about their ancestry. You know, we have TV shows about it.
Please see Finding Your Roots, Genealogy, road show, Faces of America and Who Do You Think You Are? The latter of which fun fact is produced by Lisa Kudro aka Phoebe from Friends and she even did an episode on Courtney Cox and See and she was hoping that you know, her family were good people and knowing like murdered anyone.
And it turns out her ancestors murdered the King of England.
I looked into this further and a red hot poker may have been involved. But we don't need to go into it anyway. Part of discovering one's genealogy is facing that, guess what, just because they're your ancestors doesn't mean that they're the protagonist of the story. So it's easy as a white person to think that, say, Black History Month doesn't involve you, But if you live in America, it does.
It involves all of us. And with knowledge comes context, and with context comes understanding, and DNA tests are expanding that knowledge more and more.
It's just phenomenal. And so I took my DNA test and come to find out that I have some connections to these first Africans. So that's what this latest book is about. And so the further you go back in time, it just gets harder and harder to locate your family. If you were, if you're you know, if your ancestry or your inheritance was slavery. But it can be done. It can be done.
And I'd love to hear more about your personal family discovery and what that was like for you when you were tracing your genealogy, trasing your family history and you made that discovery that you had obviously relatives who were slaves in the South, what was that like for you?
Wow, Yeah, to connect it was amazing. I interviewed so many different relatives, so many different cousins. Most of my father's side had passed away, but my mom's was still around. But it was just amazing just interviewing people. But then, as we mentioned earlier, we didn't have the Internet back in those days, so you can't just get on Google and you know, type in a web search and click on a document and you know, print out your family tree. It doesn't work that way. So I had to travel around.
I didn't go fly, but I would get on the ground bus and I would just travel to Mississippi to Kansas. I went to Virginia, South Carolina, just interviewing people, going to courthouses. And I'll never forget this day, Alli, September twenty second, nineteen ninety four. I'll never forget that day. That was the day that I took a trip down to Duck Hill, Mississippi, to meet the great granddaughter of the man who my ancestors worked for. It was deep. Yeah.
We corresponded over the phone and she said she'd be happy to meet me her and her husband, and I told her about my book and that I'm trying to write this information. I'm trying to research my family, and I just would like to know where my ancestors lived and where they worked at and the land and just everything about it. I just wanted to breathe it, touch it, smell it whatever. I wanted to get down there and
see that. She says, come on down. You just let us know when you're come in and we'll meet you. So I planned my trip went down there in September nineteen ninety four, and we met at the local bank there. It's a little small town and we just embraced, and we just embraced and we just made a really deep connection. We're still friends to this day. Well actually her son and his wife are friends with me because she's now passed on. She was about seventy five years old in
nineteen ninety four. But she just opened her arms and we just I had to rent a car and I drove up from Jackson, Mississippi, rented a car, drove up the Interstate fifty five and got into town there and she hopped into my car. She didn't know me from Adam the first time we met, you know, she hopped into the passenger side and she her daughter drove her up there, and she tells her daughter, Okay, i'll see you later on today, goodbye bye. She she's that confident
to get into the car with me. A total strange but that's the connection we had that day. It was amazing. It's amazing. I'll never forget it. And she took me to the old family site, the old plantation home that her great grandfather lived in, and she took me to the family cemetery, and some of my ancestors were buried in her family cemetery. It was it was just amazing, and yeah.
Just side out. I was casually fully crying in my recording closet at this point.
I just was taking notes the whole time. And that was a turning point, and that just broke through to finding another generation of my family. And long story short, ALLI went by the time I was said, and then I was able to work my way all the way from starting in nineteen twenty and went all the way back to like the seventeen hundreds, oh, my seventeen thirties. Yeah,
I couldn't believe. I had no idea that I could go that far back, but I had paper documents from the courthouses and estate records that I just followed the paper trail, you know, you know, Perry Mason and Charlocke Holmes followed the paper trail.
I heard you had a reputation for resourcefulness. So Stephen followed those clues and it led him to Virginia in the seventeen thirties and an archived estate inventory.
You know, when somebody dies, they have to do an estate inventory of all your property. And they did that back then too, nothing, you know, pretty much the same. And so this person's plantation home that this paper trail pointing me to. His name was Colonel George Eskridge, and he had Africans that were working on his He had a tobacco plantation. Tobacco was the main crop, I guess
at that time. And he had on his estate inventory when he died, he died in seventeen thirty five, they had to do a state inventory of all his belongings, and of course, unfortunately they listed you know, you know, human beings, this property of human beings. We get that, you know, that's how they did. But they were African names. When I looked on the on theory, they were African names. I couldn't believe it, and so through a little bit of more research, I was able to identify one of them,
and it was just it was just amazing. It's just amazing.
You've had a long history of going into you know, musty bookshelves and microfesion, all the way up to internet into DNA tests and you know, genealogy. The field expands, it seems like, you know, every year with technology. And on one hand, you know, we learned that we're literally like all related, but on the other it uncovers some really painful truths about our histories and about slavery and about colonialism. How do you feel as a genealogist that
can affect us emotion only? Do you think that can bring up pain or do you think it can help heal something? Or is it empowering?
I think that I think that initially it does cause a little bit of pain and uncomfortableness because for some reason, in our country of you know, America, the United States of America, I don't think we've fully ever grappled with
what happened after eighteen sixty five. I don't think we ever really had any discussions about race, and you know that topic I just don't think we ever really dealt with it, and because there were so many things that came on right after, you know, okay, slavery endered everybody's celebrating Da da Da, and then boom, we had a whole set of other problems that came right after that, you know, with Jim Crow and segregation and you know, the K K K and on and on and on
and on, and so we never really dealt with it, and so I kind of look at it like this here. It's just like a person that's maybe has an addiction, you know, maybe have an addiction with alcohol or drug addiction or whatever it is. The first step is acknowledging that you have a problem, and then you discuss it with someone and you try to get help. And the more you discuss it and you acknowledge it, it starts to heal you and you start to feel better.
Stephen notes that South Africa's post apartheid public hearings held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which it was then called, allowed victims of abuses and violence to speak out and explain the physical and emotional impacts of apartheid, and it also gave those who perpetrated violence a chance to ask for amnesty and forgiveness. Stephen thinks that having a similar healing process in America could lead to better understanding, compassion and healing.
If you study your roots and you find that you have people that are in your family that are of a different ethnicity or a different culture, embrace it and get to know who they are, reach out to them and introduce yourself, and you know because they're your family. You know they're your family. And the DNA test that's so popular now that people are finding that out more and more that we're all so more closely connected than
we ever have been, because we're all related. Really when you look at it, you know, and so it is painful at first, but just acknowledging that we had a problem, but that we want to move forward and just be be in peace. And that's one thing about doing genealogy for me is that I have to look at it. It is a little emotional sometimes, but I have to put that aside and put that on one little compartment and look at it from the perspective of this is history,
and I want to learn about history. I want to learn about people. And because we're all the same, and so if we do that, you know we're going to We're going to do fine. We're going to be fine. The time.
Has come. How has the advent of you know, consumer DNA tests changed what you do and how you research.
It's very interesting. It's a very interesting question. When I first took the test and got the results back and all these I had, like about I think it was like two thousand, at least about two thousand connections of people that were related to me. And they did it from obviously from the highest ratio down to the lowest ratio, and so I could look at my top twenty, you know, and say, wow, these are really close to me.
So Stephen has taken two DNA tests, and his father before he passed away, also took one, and their raw data led them to the Skridge family name he was already familiar with, which validated the technology for him. He was like, oh, this works, but sometimes results might surprise you. Turns out that iconic Lizzo's iconic te with Hurt's genealogical ripper. I just took a.
DNA test times out I'm one hundred percent that it's.
One hundred percent her brainchild. So a London musician with the handle Mina Linus tweeted that exact line in February twenty seventeen, and then it became a meme and Lizo liked the meme. She tossed it in a song and the original tweeter was like, uh, hello, excuse me, Lizzo, that is my DNA joke, and some legal things ensued, but fences have been mended. And fast forward to October when Mina tweeted out quote, I just took a DNA test. Turns out I'm a credited writer for the number one
song on Billboard. All's well, that ends well, and.
I'm getting ready to take another DNA test. Hear shortly because there are so many companies out there and people are choosing what companies they want to do it with. So either my cousins haven't taken the test on the companies that I took it with, or they haven't taken one at all. Or it could mean that my family that I thought was my family, maybe they weren't my family.
You know.
Yeah, never know.
If you take a DNA test you're twenty three and me say, but then you have relatives who have taken it through like Ancestry. Does that mean that you just might be like not connecting because you're using different companies.
Exactly exactly, And that's the point is that I want to take another test through another company. Actually, I do want to take it through Ancestry because I think that a lot of more of my family. In fact, I know I've heard that more of my cousins are taking on the Ancestry one. So I want to get on board and just see how I line up with that. So at twenty three and me it's a great company. I've gotten a lot of good hits and connections with that.
That did validate that that this DNA stuff is for real because I did know their names and they did show up, and they're on my mother's side, but not on my father's side showed up.
How does that work? And I might have to look this up, But how does that work with like the mitochondrial eve and things coming down from the X chromosomes? Like do we tend to find out more about our our maternal sides when we take DNA tests than we do Paternal mitochondrial eve side note has become the pop cultural name of the most recent known maternal ancestor that we all share. Because mitochondrial DNA is only passed on through maternal lineage. Scientists do not love this biblical name,
as it's misleading from a narrative standpoint. Let's say, but this mitochondrial eve is what's called an mrca most recent common ancestor, and she can vary depending on genetic discoveries. So if a more recent common ancestor lineage is discovered, for example, it's a different mitochondrial eve, but yes, all related, all of us wild.
For a female that wants to do genealogy and using the DNA tool, in order for them to learn more about their their father's side, they need to try to see if they have a brother they can take the test, or their father or an uncle, you know, anyone on the paternal side.
This side note is called a Y chromosome test, and it's helpful to figure out, say, if two families with the same surname are indeed genetic relatives. So ladies, surprise your dad or brother with a DNA test. It's a gift that just keeps giving you information. And then of course there's the mitochondrial DNA test you can do. Everyone has their mom's mitochondrial DNA, and this is helpful because historically women's history can be erased or at least very
illegibly smudged by the taking of surnames. More on that later. Oh, and you can get single nucleotide polymorphism testing, which scans your DNA for variations in the CG and AT pairings, and they'll tell you what traits or diseases or in some case says parents you might share with folks in their database.
And that's another thing too about these genealogy the DNA companies is they're always updating the results. The results get updated because more and more people are joining them, and so they're getting more hits. The DNA results keep updating and you get more and more people that join, and you get new names that just keep popping up.
And so, hey, that's got to be the best email to get because I get those from twenty three and me that'll be like, you have new relatives because my family's Catholic on both sides, which means there's a million of us. Oh and you.
Took your task through twenty three.
Yeah I did, And yeah, I have so many relatives and my dad's one of eleven. My Mom's one of six, so we got a lot of us out there. But that's got to be the most exciting email to pop up in your inboxes that you have new relatives.
Yes, totally, totally.
You've got to be like Jackpot.
Totally yes.
And I actually I I told our listeners that I was going to be talking to you today and they sent in questions. Can I ask you some questions from that?
Absolutely?
Okay, great, like literally hundreds of questions. I know everyone's so excited. Okay, but before we dive into your genealogical queries. As you know, each episode we donate to a relevant charity and one that Steven advocates for is Blackpast dot org and black Past is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and people of African ancestry around the world, and they aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge
and to generate constructive change in our society. They have over six thousand pages of genealogical resources and history available and again are at Blackpast dot org. So that donation was made possible by some sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now get value.
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Okay, let's hop into your questions and so let's see first patroon question. This was asked by Rachel Kasha, Jennifer Tran and first time question asker Danielle Levoy. I asked what's the deal with second cousins versus first cousins? Once removed? Rachel Kasha says, the whole once removed hurts my brain and I don't understand what does that mean?
Yeah, wow, that's a good question. Well, I'll take the first part because that's easier. Okay, the second cousins would be like your you have your first cousin, like say you have your mother, how's a sister or which would be your aunt? And your aunt has children and those children would be your first cousins cousins twice removed and all that. I'm still trying to wrap my head around there that.
If a genealogist who's some like published several books and is like a consultant for PBS shows, does it quite get it? That makes me feel so much better. Yeah, okay, side note, I looked up a float chart for this, and my soul hurt, but I think I got it. So your first cousin's child is your first cousin once removed, So your first cousin's kids kids are first cousins twice removed. So removed is in regard to generations. So same grandparents,
different generation. Now, your second cousin, according to genealogy dot Com, is someone who has the same great grandparents as you, but not the same grandparents. So third cousins have this same great great grandparents. Fourth cousins have the same great great great grandparents and so on. So that cousin removed business is about generations on on my Italian side, feuds
blistering family shattering feuds. In my family, my dad's you know, one of eleven, and then each of those siblings have a lot of kids and we just resort to levels like my grandparents are level one, my dad's a level two. That makes me a level three if I have kids. And so when are family reunions which are like ginormous literally different colored t shirts, so you know who's a level two and you're like, whose kid is that? And you're like, I don't know. They're in a yellow shirt.
They're level four. So it helps us a lot of people wanted to know about the reliability of sites, like Ancestry, Maggie Fraser, who's the first time question asker wants to know about reliability, Michelle Miner, Lisa m Kendall, Burnell, Jesse Cole, Bennett Garber who's also a first time question asker, Danna jan and Hannah h They all kind of want to know can we rely on these Yes? Yeah, cool, good question.
Very good question. Yeah. I have heard of different comments about different companies and you definitely want to do your research and you know, know which company, whatever company you choose to go with, you know a little bit about their ratings and how they're doing, how the people feel about them. And I've heard some things about ancestry pros and cons, So I have heard that. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm going to find out because I'm getting ready to take my tests with ancestry,
so I will know. But I have heard that they ask you different questions about, you know, putting in a profile, and so you start putting in names like well, this is my grandfather, this is my grandmother, my great grandfather, and boom boom boom, he was born in Maryland or
you know, Jacksonsissippi, whatever. And if someone else on the other another part of the country, they go in there and they if one of their names matches with yours just on the family tree, not not the DNA part, but just just the profiles they seem to they'll send a message back and forth to each other that you might want to look at this person. This person might be interested or might be related to you, just by the names that you put on your profile. And so
that's kind of something that makes you wonder. You be careful because you may not have been able to fully established those names that you're putting on your profile, if they really are truly related to you. I mean, unless
you have concrete proof, no problem. But if you're a genealogist and you you know, you're doing the family tree and you've been following the paper trail, you know, the old school methodology, that's just what it says on paper that these are your family But how do you really know? You know, how what if somebody was had a child out of wedlock? You know, so you know, be be aware because that could throw you into the wrong direction. If just because you match another person's profile just based
on the names, yeah, that may not. It may or may not you know, hold water. But but if you take the DNA test in your connected, well then then you have something to work with. But so I kind of was like, well, if I take this ancestry test, I'm not going to put any names right yet on my profile. I'm gonna just wait and see who pops up first, and then I'll go from there because I don't want too many people. You know, it might give
me the wrong leads, you know what I'm saying. So yeah, so yeah, do your research and just kind of know what company that you're that you choose to go with.
You know, along that line. A lot of listeners like Aaron jess Lynn, Maria Kumro, and Conchetta Gibson. Jess Lynn is the first time question ask her. All asked about surnames.
Uh.
Jesslyn asked that there's mentions that there's a lot in Quebec, Canada that forbids a woman from taking her husband's surname after marriage, and ask are there any cultures or countries in which women traditionally don't take their husband's name and does that ever cause issues when tracing back families.
Oh, yeah, totally. I have heard that too, that there are some cultures where they it's some maternal line and the female just goes by her maiden name is the surname. Yeah, I would say too that that happens. That happens to be a problem a lot in genealogy, not a problem that cannot be overcome. And I have come across that even myself in my own research. Say I find a person on the census and say her name is Mary Johnson,
just for example. But then if you go and you read further in the other columns of Mary Johnson's family line. It says that she's single, but then she has two or three children in her household enlisted as son, daughter, whatever, but they are her children. So then you have to ask yourself the question, she's single, but she has children, okay,
and then the children have different names. And so sometimes I've had that problem where I'm trying to figure out, well, Mary Johnson, if I can't find her marriage certificate to show that these are her children from her husband, I don't know if she's going if Mary Johnson is her married name, or if that's her maiden name, And so that happens sometimes where you have it's a question mark. That is a really big challenge with genealogy trying to
locate maiden names. And the best thing that most genealogists are able to do is try to find a married certificate, and if that doesn't work, then a death certificate sometimes will show the maiden name. And if you can't find the marriage or the death certificate, it's going to be a tough one.
Quick aside. One study showed that in nineteen eighty, ninety eight point six percent of American women almost ninety nine percent that took their husband's name after marriage, but that's declined in recent years to about eighty percent. Now, what percent of men adopt a new name after marriage these days? Three percent? So this next tip is a revelation.
The other genealogist rule is look at who's living next door. Oh, look who's living next door or even a few houses down, because families tended to stay together. Families tend to stay together, and so your family that you found on the census might be living right next door to another family member. And so it's just amazing when you find that connection
like that. And yeah, I've found that many times. I've had that discovery and I was like, wow, I've been I've spent two years trying to locate and here they were right living right next door.
What were you there the whole time? And that kind of brings me to a question a lot of people asked. Anna Thompson, Conchetti, Gibson, Jesse Dragon, Margaret Bacher, Renny Chelsea A. Leary serageon Horowitz and Larissa Lewis and Chells here both first time question askers, and Lewis asked what's the best place to start to actually look into family history? What are some questions that we should be asking ourselves and our family and professionals like librarians in order to look into our history.
Great question, great question, They're all great questions.
And the first Yeah, obviously you're you're, you're listeners, they're they're they're the best. So yeah, first, yeah, So the first thing to do when you want to get started on your genealogy is, you know, ask start assembling your family tree and ask questions from your family if they're still living, if your father is still living, or your mother's still living, or grandparents, whoever's whoever is the most
closest to you that's still alive, even your siblings. Sometimes your siblings have more of a recollection than you do. I know sometimes my brother be coming up with stuff I don't even remember telling me.
Yeah that's all. Wow, I didn't know that. So just sit down with a pen and paper and just start making a list on the paternal side, your father's side, and the maternal side your mother's side, and then just start going from there. List your parents first, and then list their parents. Put down where they were born obviously, if you have that information, where they died, If you could find the county name of where they were born
or die. That even helps to find out what year they were married, Like your grandparents, find out how did they meet each other. That's always been such a fascinating question to me, is how did the grandparents meet each other or the great grandparents, how did they meet each other? Because just because you were born in Chicago, Illinois, and you died in northerns Louisiana, for example, how did great grandpa meet great grandma or how did grandma meet grandpa?
You know? And then you find out, oh, they got married in you know, Atlanta, Georgia, you know, and then that right exactly, that's the point is what were they doing there? Was their family there and atlanted So write all that down where they got married, because those could be clues later on down the road. They may not
mean anything now, but they might later. And so just start putting a chart down, father's sign on one side of the paper, mother's sign on the other side, and just work your way back on who their grandparents and great grandparents were, and just list as much as you can, and then whatever blanks you have, fill in the blanks by interviewing your relatives and you know, the aunts and the uncles, and the grandmothers and the grandfathers, and try to fill those blanks in as much as you can,
and go to the family closet, you know, or wherever whoever's the one that's holding the records in the family, you know, consult them. You know, there's always somebody in the family that's got all the marriage records. They've got all the pictures, the photographs, the obituaries and the death notices and all that sort of thing, and the birth certificates. So go to that person and just plow through all that and write all that down, maybe make photocopies if
they'll allow you to. When you interview, you know, someone that's really old, how old? What does that mean? Really old? Sometimes I feel I'm really old. But when you interview a parent or a grandparent, I even ask him, is it okay if I can record it? Yeah, and I'll recorded, and that way you're not missing anything.
So yeah, that's great. That's and you're also like, learn so much about your family. Who doesn't want to learn more about you know, people's histories that are write around them. I think that's such a good bonding project too, you know. Yeah, So treat yourself to a nice new notebook through a pot of tea, and then sit down and interrogate a
loved one gently. A few people, including Beatrice Bella, Clava B. Wilson, and first time question asker Lizzy, for example, all want us to know about adoption, and Lizzy asks, my dad has adopted and knows some of his biological family's background, but what does that mean for our chie neology? Do we trace the adopted family's history do we trace the biofamily's history.
Both excellent question. I would say do both if you feel like it, If you have a yearning for wanting to know both, go for it. I know that in my family my grandfather who I met, I never did meet my father's parents, so I never did know my paternal grandfather or grandmother. They both passed before I was born. But on my mom's side, my mother remarried and so her husband was always He was the one I always called grandpa, but he was not my biological grandpa. But
to this day he will always be my grandfather. And so I did a genealogy search on his family. I wanted to know about him, and found out about that he had Native American heritage from Tennessee and you know, I found out that he had a aunt, Minerva, and she lived to be one hundred years old, and I recorded that. I still have that on tape, cassette tape. By the way, I need to update that. So I would say that for adoptions, why not look at both sides,
the biological and the adopted side. Absolutely, And for adoptions, I've had people that have contacted me over the years that have wanted to get help and trying to locate their biological parents.
What about turning over some hefty forensic boulders. I had a few people Julie Barre, Laura Merryman, Stephanie Berherties, and first time question asker April Parry. April Pary written and said, I'm a forensic scientist and DNA analyst more specifically, and our field has been all a uzz with genealogy in the past few years as cold cases are being solved using public database searches, and April is curious what your take is, including some possible ethical dilemmas. How do you feel about it?
Yeah, that's been on the news recently here. Some people are kind of leery about putting their DNA information on a website where law enforcement agencies can come in and check into that, and they have cold cases where they're trying to solve and you might know some information about it. It's kind of scary, you know. I don't know's that's
a good question. If it can create closure to someone, I wouldn't mind participating in in solving something, But of course I wouldn't want anything to turn back on me, you know. But I'm clean. I haven't done anything, so I'm good. I haven't cleaned conscience. But I guess, you know, you have to think about that if you you know, if you when you take a DNA test, you're susceptible to whatever is out there, so you know, just be careful. I know there's a lot of pros and cons on that.
That's that's a very very big question right now.
It's such a new quandary. It's such a new ethical dilemma that we've just never encountered before. So I think a lot of people are still wrapping their brains around the benefits of getting closure or apprehending someone versus the how from a molecular level invasive that is on some of your actual genes. So yeah, it's really interesting. I think a lot of people are probably super ambivalent, meaning you know, they're just seeing the good and the bad.
And Rachel C wrote in Sho had a great question and said, I've heard that out of a group of three people, two black and one white, it is just as likely for a black and white person to be more related as it is for the two black individuals to be more closely related. If that is really the case, then what the heck is race anyway? And why does it persist in modern times?
It is so true, that is so true. I mean, race is just it's just a classification. I mean even now we have when we fill out forms, they have checkboxes where you can mark whatever ethnicity you wish. But now they're becoming more where you can mark that you're a Bible racial and even try racial. And so that's a problem for the government. They want they want to have solid data so that they know who's in our country and da da da. But yeah, I say, hey, why not just embrace? Why pick? Why do you have
to pick one or the other? And you have so many that are part of your DNA, so you know, haven't I have to admit I've been just picking the one African American, But there was a few times where I did pick by racial because I am. If I can remember my racial I am. Oh, I'll just round it off. I'm about eighty percent African and about eighteen percent European, which includes Scandinavian, British, and then two percent
Native American and Southeast Asian, which blew me away. So I'd like to learn a little bit more about the Southeast Asian part, you know, the Philippines, Vietnam, top like that, and the Native American part. I love to learn more about my Native American ancestry in regards to that race is just a classification. Were all related, and it's interesting the book that I just recently came out with sixteen
nineteen twenty Africans. One of the points I mentioned in the book is that when those Africans came to Virginia in the year sixteen nineteen, they didn't come as slaves as we know it as slaves that come to our minds. They were indentured servants, and so they didn't have the disignation of being slaves. So what that meant was indentured servants just like those that were coming from England. They worked for a certain period of time they were indentured
to their employer. And so those Africans were indentured. Once they served their time, they were given their freedom, just like just like all the other indentured servants. Virginia wasn't until seventeen five is when the slavery laws, you know, the really hardened slavery laws came into being, was in the year seventeen oh five. So prior to that, there were a lot of African American families in Colonial America, colonial Virginia who were not slaves. They were not in slavery.
They had a hard life, Yes, they had a very hard life. Many of them were taking advantage of no doubt about it, but they were not classified as slaves. So what I'm going with this is that many of these Africans, as they had children and their children had children, there was probably about two or three generations of African Americans who were free in this country before and I got before in big, large letters, before the slavery laws were even enacted. And that's huge and a lot of
people don't know about that. And I didn't know about it until I took my DNA test and found out that I was related to some of these early African American families. And so what I also found out was that a lot of the African families that were free in the early part of our colonial history, they were intermarrying with the Irish, with the Native Americans, with the Germans.
They were intermarrying, they were becoming a family. And so but many of the American families that are in this country today, whatever surname you want to use, Johnson, Smith, whatever, if your family's been in this country for you know, going back to colonial times or even the American Revolution times, chances are you are a mixed family. Chances are you're a mixed family, you know, in some way, shape or form, in one way or another in Native America or you know,
it's because it's just a fact. And but that is not taught in our schools. It's not taught in our history books that there were at least two or three generations of free people before slavery laws even were passed. Virginia as kind of what everybody looks to is the the mother of the of the slavery laws. But everyone o the other states looked at Virginia. You know, whatever
they passed, they'll pass. But yeah, there was quite a few years, quite a few decades before slavery even got entrenched, and so that that allowed a lot of families to have freedom. There was a lot of African families that were able to buy land. You couldn't do that as a slave. You couldn't buy land. You could, they could, they could sit on juries, they could barter in trade. It was just a lot of people just don't know the history of that. And so again there was a
lot of inner marriage. A lot of the Africans were marrying Irish women and Scottish women because there was a shortage of African women. And so there's a lot of intermixture in our in our society today. And so your listener brings up a very good question there that you know, chances are if if you have three people and if you're white and the other one's black, you're probably more related, just as much related as the two persons that are of the same race. Definitely.
And was that a discovery also that you made in your own family with your sister in.
Law, Yes, my sister in law, Yes, absolutely, yes, yeah, my sister in law. This this blew me away, is uh yeah, this is a perfect example is my wife's sister would be my sister in law. She has children, and we went to go visit one time and we were sitting around the breakfast table there and the restaurant and chit chatting, and my sister in law's daughter says, well, yeah, I can remember old grandma. You know. She was from Mississippi and she used to cook so well, and I
remember all these different dishes she would make. She said she was from Jackson, Mississippi, and her and I said, oh, really, well what was her What was her name? And she said, well, she was Grandma Grantham. Her maiden name was Grantham. I almost fell off my chair. I said, Grantham. That's that's a name that has come up in my family researched. Well, when I get back home, I'm going to look that
up because that's very interesting. I said, So maybe my some of my family members maybe new you know, your grandmother's family. So when I got back home that night, and I went through the records and I said, I'll be dog gone, but these my sister in law's children are related to me. Because when I took my twenty three and meters test, there was one genetic cousin that we had a connection with. This was like twenty eleven and me and her we had communication back and forth
trying to figure out how we were connected. We couldn't figure it out a thing. But she sent me her family tree, and her family name was Grantham, her ancestors, her grapham. It was just amazing.
In his book sixteen nineteen, Stephen writes of the encounter quote we might be related. We joked I was black and they were white. When I later got home, I looked up the information my sister in law's daughter gave me about her paternal grandmother. Turns out it wasn't a joke after all, that my sister in law's children and I were related. If everyone learns a little about their genealogy, chatter over waffles is about to get way more interesting.
If you hadn't asked over breakfast, what was her name? You never would have known that.
You never would have known that, never would know that.
Yeah, if you weren't Sherlock Holmes, get your noteod.
Of and we embrace it. We just love that little facet. I mean, we loved each other even before we knew that, but that just kind of, you know, put a little spice into our conversations every time we meet, and we can bring that up. And so it's just a wonderful thing. And you know, racist color is just it's just nothing. It's just a classification. We are all related.
Steven says that the next book he's working on, which will be his third, we'll get deeper into how we're all related. And I realized just then then this episode would come out near the start of Black History Month, which is in part a celebration of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglas. I told Stephen that International Women's Day kind of pizzes me off, because, Hi, here's your three hundred and sixty fifth share of the
year pie. And I asked him if he feels that way about February, Like, this country was literally built by people of color, but it was conceived first by history professor Carter Woodson in the nineteen twenties and finally recognized by Gerald Ford in the nineteen seventies. Stephen says that he too feels it should be more than a month, but that I think it's.
Just a good opportunity to educate people, all of us, even even for everyone. Everyone. When I say everyone, I mean including African American. Everyone to be educated, re educated about just getting along with one another. Martin Luther King Junior said that the reviews the job.
Sounds of farmer slaves and the sons of farmer slave owners.
Will they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
You know, we don't to one another based on the color of our skin, but on the basis of our character. And so that's what it's all about, is just embracing one another and just getting closer as a human family because we need each other. This world is as it's ups and downs, as we know, and so we all need to stick together and just be civil. And I think about, you know, colonial America and how when the first Africans came here, Well I shouldn't say the first
African America. That's gonna be that's that's gonna be something coming out of my next book. Who were the first? But those that came in sixteen nineteen, how they were just treated just like everybody else. And then the slavery laws came along and just took away everything they had. But think of the dative Americans of what they've gone through. I mean good, he's gracious. That's why I'm really interested
to want to learn about that. But yeah, Black History Month is I think is still needed to as an opportunity to talk about things that we need to talk about, to acknowledge and to heal. Yeah. Absolutely.
Now from the biggest issues to perhaps some sillier or petty difficulties in the job of genealogy. And the last two questions I always ask every guest is on what is the hardest thing about genealogy or the most annoying thing? Is it water logged books, anything that is really difficult about genealogy or this just maybe hesters you at all, even if it's petty.
Yeah, yeah, Well, the one thing that kind of irks me is someone will take their DNA test, they will log on to the website, they will download their data, they will click yes, I do want my information to be posted on this website. Here's my email address. And then when you connect and you find out that, oh, I'm related to this person. I'd like to know more about you because some of the that you have on your profile match my family. And then you reach out
to that person and they don't even reply back. That's That one just really gets me.
I mean, like, why did you want to put your email address on there in the first place, you know, if you're not going to correspond, So that one, that one's kind of that one that makes sense.
Yeah, So if you ever, if anyone ever gets an email from a long lost relative, reply to them. It's worth it, replied, do not sit on that email. What is your favorite thing about genealogy? What just like fills you with butterflies or just makes you love it?
Wow? The thing that makes me always love genealogy is being able to go on the hunt, go on the search, to try to find to find someone's brick wall, someone who you know. And what I mean by brick wall for any of your listeners is you just come in to a point where you can't go any further in your research.
To break through it. Somehow.
You just you've come to a brick wall. You just you've exhausted all your avenues and you just don't know where to go. You just don't know who this person is, where they were, where, who their parents were, or whatever the question is. And I just love to take that brick wall and try to see if I can call through it. I just love that, you know, just taking on that challenge, and then once you're finding you're like, oh, yes, you know, it's just wonderful. Love it.
Do you wear a cape? Do you have a big pipe and a cake? I got a cape on right now, big mustache.
Right with the old pipe.
Yeah?
No. No.
So find the most wonderful, smart people and ask them the stupidest questions, and before you know it, you might be staying on a plane and discover the person next to you is your fifth step cousin in law four times removed, and you'll kind of know what that means, and you might know them the rest of your life. So to get copies of Stephen Hanks books, you can go to the links in the show notes or in water Press. You can also find links to the sponsor
URLs and blackpast dot org in the show notes. We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one L on both, so follow along. Let's be friends. Ology's merch is available at aliward dot com. Thank you to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast You Are that they managed the merch, and thanks to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Thank you Jared Sleeper of the mental health podcast Make Good, Bad Brain for the assistant editing, and of course to a guy who's likel bro Stephen Ray Morris who hosts the percast and c Jurassic Right, which are about kiddies and dinosaurs. Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote and performed the theme music. And you know, if you stick around pass the credits, you get a secret. And this week I'm going to tell you I drove to an ex boyfriend's house in the middle of the night. We
dated for like four months a decade ago. But in the parking lot of the apartment complex, I remember there was a lemon tree that was were loaded with fruit way back then. And this was not just any lemon tree. This is a mere lemon tree, which we all know has like way better lemons. Regular lemons are like a mounts bar Meyer lemons. They're like an almondsoy, they're just better. I think technically there's some type of orange, but the point is from memory. I drove through the alley hills
alone at ten pm. I felt like such a creep and I found the side street and the lemon tree was still there. With literally hundreds of mier lemons. So I took maybe like eight or ten. I put him in a hat, and I ran back to my car. Now, granted he hasn't lived there in like ten years, but it still felt dangerous and skivy and very thrilling to have a bowl of the best lemons on my counter. I've been pulverizing them in a pitcher and drinking it as lemonade, and then I eat their ragged flesh and
skin like a buzzard. Also, if fruit overhangs a fence, technically it's legal to pick. Also, no one's gonna ever eat all those lemons or so many lemons. Okay, so good, all right, We're buy pack dermist college, homeology, do zoology, lithology, yeahnology, meteorology, fatology, technology, seriology, selenology, Hi skip believing.
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