Genealogy (FAMILY TREES) Encore with Stephen Hands

This podcast is brought to you by Hotels.com. Make your next trip work for you. Hotels.com's new Save Your Way feature lets you choose between instant savings now or thinking rewards for later. It's a flexible rewards program that puts you in control with no confusing math or blackout dates. Book now at Hotels.com. Save Your Way is available to loyalty members in the U.S. and UK on Hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. Seasite for details. Oh hey 2026 Ali here with a well-deserved encore of an episode that I love. Perfect timing also for Black History Month and if you go to Aliware.com slashology slash Black History Month you'll find a wonderful catalog full of greatologists and all of the causes that they chose for us to support in their name. So we'll link that in the show notes but onto this chat that I love. Okay. Oh hey it's your worth cousin. Twice removed. Aliward back with a familial historical episode ofologies. So you are here because people made babies with each other and out of all of the camis in all of the gonads you became a collection of molecules and you're suspended in a web of family. Even a cockroach technically has grandparents and cousins. Isn't that weird? Your cat might have an uncle and if you have children gaze at them. They may have children who have children and then those children 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 mail or by wearing my face on your chest via allegiesmerge.com. Also thanks to everyone who boosts this show for others to see by hitting subscribe and by rating it and telling friends I read all your reviews such as this fresh 2026 one from birds for brains who wrote not a single uninteresting episode in the bunch not to mention life changing. Birds for brains thank you for letting us change your life. Okay genealogy the first topic ever to not be anology look at it genealogy what is this the parents stained bears it's an allergy what the heck man so genealogy comes from the root word Gina meaning to give birth to 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 tellu meaning folk tales but the allergy and not allegies is because the oh analogies is borrowed from the first word anyway so this week's allegist 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 16 19 20 Africans 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 mystery 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 test 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 my name is still with a pH as you probably know just then yes when it was funny when I introduced myself they say Steve okay Steve nice to meet you yeah Steve and Steven and now you are a genealogist yes and you've been a genealogist for quite a while now yeah I started like in 89 yeah but I was like god how old was I was uh oh about 30 years old and that's uh I got the bug uh I was over at my dad's house that day and uh summer July and he was uh watching the baseball game and he handed me this letter that he got from a cousin in Kansas and he says read this and uh of course I didn't know anything about my family's history uh you know I'm just a kid growing up for an artist and so he shows me this letter I started reading it and it's a on a bituary out of a newspaper and all these relatives and names are listed in the subituary oh and so on my dad's side family and I just said wow I don't know who these people are and that's what that's what God has 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 uh so that's how I got started 89 yeah and what was the first thing you did back in 89 we had libraries and microfiche and the dewey dust system yeah you know microfilm readers yeah the mike fish totally totally no no internet no clicking of the mouse uh 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 58,000 cubic feet of records that's a lot of records all about the pacific northwest for organ Idaho Washington and now Alaska but just in the past few weeks this is breaking news historians are rightly p-oed 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 and how the professional geneologist did it and so I learned about census records, tax records, um you know land deeds and all that sort of thing courthouse records and just on and on and on museums so I say well let me start with the census records that sounds pretty easy enough you know every 10 years they have a census and of course they put a privacy restriction on the first 70 years they know it released it to the public so the most recent census that was available to me at that time was I believe the 1920 census yeah 1920 and but they had no National Archives branch in Portland I could either fly to Washington DC while that that probably wasn't gonna work or they 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 1920 and the genealogist rule this is the genealogist rule Ali 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 so you know what what journey what path you're gonna 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 I 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 Mason you know yeah you know just start looking under the rocks and so with the 1910 and 1900 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 him 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 you know you know kind of the slavery thing so that was a big shock of rule but Steven's first book was 2013's a keytree a descendant's quest for his slave ancestors on the escridged 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 1880 census and the 1890 census I guess was burned in a fire in 1921 so that's yeah that's something that all genealogists if you're studying Greek Italian whatever your you know ancestry is that's something that you have to live with the 1890 census is God forever wow yeah Steven told me that through the 1870 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 1870 June something I can't believe it 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 is you know you go and be on 1870 is the 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 and many different people just even friends that I've done it for for all type of different Italian Greece so forth so 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 for you always someone who liked mystery novels like detective novels like what did yeah it was that could have been in your genes oh my gosh Sherlock Holmes I can remember as a kid just staying up late at night and just watching the Sherlock Holmes with uh who was the 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 plays Sherlock Holmes he was the one that I I fell in love with I can't remember his name or off the bat but oh look it out my guess is that this is Ronald Howard who in nearly 40 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 where Scottish where this sleeveless cloak thing because it allows for easier access to their sporan which is their long hairy fanny pack coin purse that hangs over their chunk area anyway yes Sherlock Holmes loved a good problem to solve and on the topic of clever scots but I love love to I'm Sherlock was was my guy and then of course you know James Bond I mean who who's not gonna like James Bond you know the Sean Connery I know I love you James but yeah I totally was into the into the the mysteries and the the detectives early on definitely for sure and after you were handed this obituary and you started driving up to Seattle to look in the archives you mentioned here in your 30s have you been able to balance genealogy with with other careers or did at some point do you have to decide what you're 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 a genealogist 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 have fun doing it the only problem was people had a tendency to not want to pay you but they want you 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 records clerk and it's amazing how many people come in on walk in or email or phone they want to do research about this down the other and that's just right up my alley doing research and it ties right into the genealogy itself for the first time after so many years I finally got you know they both together genealogy and just doing um 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 the Akeetri and um yes yeah I would love to hear more I know it's the Akeetri or a keytri you pronounce it either way I know I know I say a I say a keytri that I've heard people say no Akeet you know I know I was quite sure so I just messed it up either way but I guess it's my my auntie who she just freaks them past away I'm saying Lewis Missouri but she's my on my mother sister and she would take trips to Jamaica you know as often as she could and so she um she pronounced Akeet and she sent me a picture of it and I put it in the book so the Akeetri or a keytri depending on how you say it is native to West Africa and it bears this red fruit that in due time yarns 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 Steven's book the Akeetri has sepia-toned photographs of his ancestors and the silhouette 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 10 years to do the research on that and my whole goal when I first started out was just to learn about my my family on both my sites my father and mother's site I wasn't trying to like go all the way to Africa or anything like that just 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 yeah yeah it's getting to be interesting now I mean because as we all know you know Abraham Lincoln he ended slavery we know that in 1865 well 1863 some say because the emancipation proclamation and I like I had mentioned here earlier I found my parents or my great grandparents on the 1870 census that was the first time Ali that African Americans were listed on a federal census for the first time as far as everyone yeah because it was five years after the end of the Civil War and so now everyone was just you know a regular citizen yeah with the wave was supposed to be so but if you want to go further back 1860 within you're going back into the old system of things you know when the south was at its peak and and the cotton was king and all that so 1860 that's when you really get into the struggle of trying to identify who your your parents are and your your ancestors let's just 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 they were a free person of color meaning they were emancipated or they were set free long time ago maybe 1800s and their family just were free all the way up and right through the Civil War everything they were just cruising they were free and so they never had that that problem of being found on a census record because their family had always been free free people of color by the buyer refer 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 400 years in his book 1619 20 Africans their story and discovery of their black red and white descendants um but in hampton for jenna there was a a little ship that came in in august of 1619 and it had 20 Africans on it and they were taken off of a of a slave ship that was heading to Mexico very cruise Mexico and some pirates uh attacked the ship and took about 50 Africans off of the off of the slave ship and it's true story and 20 of them came to the coast of Virginia hampton for jenna and they 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 letter of which one fact is produced by lisa kudrow aka feebe from friends and she even did an episode on kourtney cocks and okay and she was hoping that you know her family were good people 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 uh it's just phenomenal and so i took by 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 you're ancestry or your inheritance was slavery but it can be done it can be done and i'd love to hear more about your your personal family discovery and what that was like for you when you were tracing your genealogy tracing your family history and you made that discovery that that you had obviously relatives who were slaves in this out what was that like for you um yeah to connect it was amazing i interviewed so many different relatives so many different cousins most of my father's side it 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 a web search and uh click on a document and you 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 um i'll never forget this day alie september 22nd 1994 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 it was deep yeah we corresponded over the phone and uh she uh said she'd be happy to meet me her and her husband and uh 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 uh 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 now you just let us know when you come in and we'll meet you so i planned my trip went down there in september 1994 and uh we met at the local bank there it's a little small town and uh we just embraced and uh we we just embraced and we just made uh made a really deep connection we're still friends to this day well actually her son and his wife or our friends with me because she's now passed on uh she was about 75 years old in 1994 but she just opened her arms and we just i had a rena car and i drove up from Jackson Mississippi rena to car drove up the interstate 55 and got into town there and uh she hopped into to my car she didn't know me from Adam the first time we met you know she hopped into the passenger side and she told her daughter drove her up there and she tells her daughter okay i'll see you later on today goodbye bye she just she's that confident to get into the car with me in total structure but that's the connection we had that day it was amazing it was amazing and they forget it and she took me to the old family site the the old plantation home that that her great-grandfather lived in and she took me to the family cemetery and some of my ancestors were buried in the her family cemetery it was just it was just amazing and uh yeah just sido 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 alley what by time i was said and then i was able to work my way all the way from starting in 1920 i went all the way back to like the 1700s oh my god 1930s yeah come believe i had no idea that i could go that far back but i had paper documents from the courthouses and um estate records that just i just followed the paper trail you know just like you know Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes just to follow the paper trail i heard you had a reputation for resourcefulness so Stephen followed those clues and it led him to Virginia in the 1730s and an archived estate inventory you know when somebody dies they have to do in a state inventory right 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 these this paper trail pointing me to his name was Colonel George S. Gritch and he uh had Africans that were working on his he had a tobacco plantation tobacco was the the main crop i guess at that time and he had on his estate inventory when he died he died in 1735 they had to do a state inventory of all his belongings and of course unfortunately that they listed you know at you know human beings this property of the property we got that you know that's how they did but they were African nannies when i looked on the on the inventory they were African nannies i couldn't believe it and so through a little bit of more research i was able to identify one of them and uh it was just it was just amazing just amazing you've had a long history of going into you know musty bookshelves and microfiche and 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 learn 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 um how do you feel as a genealogist that can affect us emotionally 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 and and uncomfortableness because for some reason in our country of you know america united states of america i don't think we've fully ever grappled with what happened uh after 1865 um i don't think we ever really had any discussions about race and um you know that topic i just don't think we ever really dealt with it and uh because there were so many things that came on right after you know okay slavery ended 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 the gym crow and segregation and the 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 um has an addiction you know maybe um have an addiction with alcohol or drug addiction or whatever it is um 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 with you study your 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 uh and introduce yourself and you know because they're your family you know they're your family and the dna tests 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 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 uh just be in being peace and uh um 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 um 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 uh because we're all the same and so if we do that uh you know we're gonna we're gonna do fine we're gonna be fine the time for the healing of the wounds has come how has the advent of you know consumer dna test change what you do and how you research it's very interesting this is a very interesting question when I first took the test and got results back and uh all these I had like about I think it was like 2000 at least about 2000 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 20 you know and I 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 s-scribge 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 truth hurts genealogical ripper 100% her brain child so a london musician with the handle mean a linos tweeted that exact line in february 2017 and then it became a meme and lizzo 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 meana 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 there as well and i'm getting ready to take another dna test i hear um shortly because there are so many companies out there and people are choosing which companies they want to do it with so either my cousins haven't taken the test on the companies that i check 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 were my family you know you never know if you take a dna test your 23 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 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 more of my family in fact i know i've heard that more of my cousins are taking it on the ancestry one so i want to get on board and and just see how i line up with that so but 23 me i've gotten a lot of good hits and connections with that that did validate that that this this dna stuff is for real and because i did know their names and they did show up they were on my mother's side but not on my father's side show that how does that work um and i might have to look this up but how does that work with like the mitochondrial eaves 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 test then we do paternal mitochondrial eaves side note has become the pop cultural name of the most recent known maternal ancestor that we all share because mitochondria 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 eaves is what's called an m-r-c-a most recent common ancestor and she can vary depending on genetic discoveries so for more recent common ancestor lineage is discovered for example it's a different mitochondrial leaf but yes all related all of us wow for a female that wants to do genealogy and using the dna tool to in order for them to learn more about their father's side they need to try to see if they have a brother that 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 allegedly 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 cases parents you might share with folks in their database and that's another thing too about these genealogy this dna companies is they're always updating their 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 more people that join and you get new names that just keep popping up and so that's got to be the best email to get because I get those from 23 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 and you took your two you took your test through 23? Yeah I did and I yeah I have so many relatives and my dad's one of 11 my mom's one of six so we got a lot of his out there and um but that's got to be the most exciting email to pop up in your inbox is that you have new relatives totally yeah you've got to be like jackpot man totally yes um and I actually I I told our listeners that I was going to be talking to you today and uh they sent in questions can I ask you some questions from them absolutely absolutely okay great like literally hundreds of questions right now I know I'm 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 Stephen advocates for is blackpast.org and blackpast 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 6,000 pages of genealogical resources and history available and again are at blackpast.org so that donation was made possible by some sponsors of the show which you may hear about now okay let's hop into your questions and so let's see first a patreon question this was asked by Rachel Kasha Jennifer Tran and first time question asker Danielle Levoie asked what's the deal with second cousins versus first cousins once removed um Rachel Kasha says the whole once removed hurts my brain and I don't understand what does that mean yeah well that's a good question um well I'll take the first part because that's easier okay the second cousins um would be like your you have your first cousin like say you have your mother has a sister which would be your aunt and your aunt has children and those children would be your first cousins cousin twice removed and all that I I'm still trying to wrap my head around there that makes you better because if a genealogist who's um like published several books and I consulted for PBS shows does it quite get it that makes you feel so much better okay side note I looked up a float chart for this and my soul hurt but I think I got it so your first cousins child is your first cousin once removed so your first cousins 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.com is someone who has the same great-grandparents as you but not the same grandparents so third cousins have the same great great-grandparents fourth cousins have the same great-great-great grandparents and so on so that cousin removed business is about generations unlike on my Italian side feuds blistering family shattering feuds in my family my dads you know one of 11 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 yeah if I'd have kids and so my family reunions which are like ginormous literally different colored t-shirts so you know who's a level two and you're like who's kid is that you're like I don't know they're in yellow shirt they're level four so it helps a lot of people wanted to know about the reliability of sites like ancestry um Maggie Frazier who's the first time question asker wants to know about reliability Michelle minor Lisa and Kendall Bernal Jesse Cole Bennett Garber who's also the first time question asker Diana one 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 uh whatever company you choose to go with know a little bit about and their ratings and how they're doing how the people feel about them and I've heard some things about ancestry pros and cons um so I have heard that I don't know if this is true or not but I'm going to find out because I'm getting ready to take my test with the 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 boom boom boom he was born in Maryland or you know Jackson Mississippi whatever and if someone else on the other another part of the country they go in there if they're 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 force 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 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 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 how to child out of wedlock you know so you know be be aware because that could throw you into the wrong direction 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 connector within then yes I'm gonna work with but so I kind of was like well if I take this ancestry test I'm not gonna finish names right yet on my profile I'm gonna just wait and see who tops 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 I'm saying so yeah so yeah do your research and just kind of know what company that you that you choose to go with you know along that line a lot of listeners like Aaron Jesslyn Maria Cumbreaux and Concetic Gibson Jesslyn is the first time question asker I'll ask about surnames Jesslyn asked that there's a mentions of there's a law 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 to set ever cause issues when tracing back families oh yeah totally I have heard that too um that there are some cultures where they it's an eternal line and the the female just goes by her uh made name is the surname yeah I would say too that um 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 um 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 listed 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 she 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 genealogies are able to do is try to find a marriage certificate and if that doesn't work then um a death certificate sometimes we'll show the maiden and if you can't find the marriage or the death certificate it's gonna be a tough one just quick aside one study show that a 1980 98.6% of American women almost 99% took their husband's name after marriage but that's declined in recent years to about 80% now what percent of men adopt a new name after marriage these days 3% so this next tip is a revelation the other genealogist rule this look at who's living next door 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 this 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 uh yeah I found that many times I had that discovery and I'm like wow I've been I spend two years trying to locate and here they were right living what were you there the whole time and that kind of brings me to a question a lot of people asked um Anna Thompson, Kanchetta Gibson, Jessie Dragon, Margaret Abacher, Rene, Chelsea O'Leary, Sarah Jean Horowitz and Larissa, Larissa and Chelsea are both first time question answers and Larissa asks 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 yeah and the first yeah obviously you're you're listeners they're the best so 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 your mother is still living or grandparents whoever's whoever's 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 becoming up with stuff I don't remember and he told me yeah that's oh 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 and then just are 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 died 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 where the great grandparents how did they meet each other because just because you were born in Chicago Illinois and you died in northern Louisiana for example how did great grandpa meet great grandma or how to ground my meat grandpa you know and then you find out oh they got married and you know Atlanta Georgia you know and then what were they doing there exactly that's the point is what were they doing there was their family there in Atlanta so write all that down of 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 side on one side of the paper mother's side 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 whatever blanks you have filled in the blanks by interviewing your relatives and you know the aunts and the uncles and the grandmothers and the grand fathers 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 the marriage records they've got all the the pictures the photographs the obituaries and the deaf notices and all that sort of thing and the birth certificates so go to that person and and just plow through all that and write all that down maybe make photo copies if they will allow you to when you interview you know someone that's really old how old what does that mean really old sometimes I feel like I'm really old but when you interview a parent or a grandparent I even ask him is it okay if I enter if I can record it yeah you know record it and that way you're not missing anything so yeah that's great that's and then you're also like learn so much about your family who doesn't want to learn more about you know people's history that are right 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 Beatriz Bella Klava P Wilson and first time question ask her Lizzie for example um they all want to know about adoption and Lizzie asks my dad is adopted and knows some of his biological family's background but what does that mean for our genealogy do we trace the adopted family's history do we trace the bio family's history both excellent question um I would say do both if you feel like it if you have a yearning for wanting to know both go for 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 I always he will always be my grandfather and so I 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 that he had a aunt Minerva and she lived to be a hundred years old and I 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 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 in trying to locate their biological parents what about turning over some hefty forensic boulders I had a few people Julie bear Laura Maryman Stephanie Berhurti's and first time question ask her April Perry April Perry written and said I'm a forensic scientist and DNA analyst more specifically in our field has been all of us 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 lorry about putting their DNA information on a website where law enforcement agencies can come in and check into that and they're 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 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 didn't want anything to to turn back on me you know but I'm clean I haven't done anything so I'm good I have a clean 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 you know some of your your actual genes so yeah it's really interesting I think a lot of people are probably super ambivalent meaning you know they just seen the good and the bad and Rachel C wrote in should 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's 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 they're now they're becoming more where you can mark that you're a bio 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 are who's in our country and da da da but yeah I say hey why not just embrace all why pick why do you have to pick one or the other when you have so many that are part of your DNA so you know I haven't I have to admit I've been just picking the one African American but I was there was a few times where I did pick by racial because I am and if I can remember the my ratio I am oh I'll just round it off I'm about 80% African and about 18% European which includes Scandinavian, British and then 2% 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 type like that and the Native American part love to learn more about my Native American ancestry in regards to that race is just just a classification we we're all related and it's interesting the book that I just recently came out with 16 19 20 Africans one of the points I mentioned in the book is that when those Africans came to Virginia in the year 16 19 they didn't come as slaves as we know it as slaves that come to our mind they were indentured servants and so they didn't have the designation 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 indentured to 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 1705 is when the slavery laws you know the really hard and slavery laws came into being was in the year 1705 so prior to that there were a lot of African American families in colonial America colonial Virginia who were not slaves they were not an 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'm got before in big large letters before the slavery laws were even enacted and as huge and a lot of people don't know about that and I didn't know 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 and 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 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 as the the mother of the of the slavery laws but and everyone 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 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 they could sit on juries they could barter and trade it was just a lot of people just don't know the history of that and so again there was a lot of intermarriage 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 intermixer in our in our society today and so your listener brings up a very good question there that you know chances are 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 did 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 will be a way is uh yeah this is a perfect example is um um my wife sister would would be my sister in law she has children and we went to go visit one time and we're sitting around the the breakfast table there in restaurant chit chat and my sister in law's daughter says well yeah I can remember old grandma you know she was uh 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 uh and I'm said oh really well what what was her what was her name and she said well she was grandma grand them her maiden name was grand them almost fell off my chair I said grand them that's that's a name that's come up in my family research 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 knew you know your grandmother's family so when I got back home that night and I went through the records and uh I said I'll be dog gone but these my sister in law's children are related to me because because when I took my two twenty three in me test there was one genetic cousin that we had a connection with this was like 2011 and me and her we had communication back for trying to figure out how we were connected couldn't figure out a thing but she sent me her family tree and her family name was grand them her her ancestors were grand them it was just amazing in his book 1619 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 and lost daughter gave me about her paternal grandmother turns out it wasn't a joke after all that my sister and lost children and I were related so 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 their name you've never never would never wouldn't know that never would know that yeah if it weren't Sherlock Holmes man like who it is like I think it's your dope pad up and we embrace it we 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 now every time we meet and we can bring that up and so it's just a wonderful thing and uh you know race is this color is just it's just nothing it's just a classification we are all related Stephen says that the next book he's working on which will be his third will get deeper into how we're all related and I realized just 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 Douglass I told Stephen that international women's day kind of pisses me off because it's like hi here's your 360th 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 1920s and finally recognized by Gerald Ford in the 1970s 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 uh even for everyone everyone when I say everyone I mean including African-American yeah everyone to be educated and reeducated about just I get in line with one another um Martin Luther King Jr said that I want to be on the red hill to join the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood I have a true you know we don't judge one another based on the color of our scan 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 is to human family because we need each other this this uh world is as it's up and down 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 you know when the first Africans came here uh well I shouldn't say the first African-American that's gonna be that's that's gonna be something coming out of my next clip who were the first but um yeah those that came in in 1619 how they were just treated um just like everybody else and then um the slave laws came along and just took away everything they had but think of the need of Americans and what they've gone through I mean good and gracious that's why I'm really interested to want to learn about that but but yeah black history month is uh I think is still needed to as an opportunity to talk about things that we need to talk about to 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 uh the last two questions I always ask every guest is um what is the hardest thing about genealogy or the most annoying thing is it uh is it waterlocked uh books anything that just is really difficult about genealogy or this just maybe hester's you at all even if it's petty yeah yeah well the one thing that kind of urxme 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've elected more about you because some of the names 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 if you're not gonna go respond so that one that one's kind of that one is good yeah so if you ever if anyone ever gets an email from a long last relative reply to them it's worth it's 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 uh being able to go on the hunt go on the search to try to find define someone's brick wall someone who you know and what I mean by brick wall for interview listeners is you just come into a point where you can't go any further in your research you just you come to a brick wall you just you've exhausted all your avenues and you just don't know where to go you just follow who this person is where they were were who their parents were or whatever the the question is and I just love to take that brick wall and try to see if I can go through it I just love that and you know just take it on that challenge and and then once you're finding you're like oh yes like you know let's just love it do you wear a cape do you have a big pipe and a cake good uh I got a cape on right now that big mustache right with the old pipe yeah no so find the most wonderful smartest people and ask them about their great work and before you know it you might be saying on a plane and discover that 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 ink water press uh oligee's merch is available at alliwar.com thank you to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast you're that they manage the merch and thanks to Aaron Talbert for admitting the oligee's podcast facebook group thank you Jared Sleeper of the Mental Health Podcast my good bad brain for the assistant editing and of course to a guy who's like a bro Stephen Ray Morris who hosts the podcast and see Jurassic right which are about kitties and dinosaurs Nick Thorburn of the band islands wrote and performed the theme music and you know if you stick around plastic credits you get a secret and this week i'm gonna tell you i drove to an xboyfriends 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 overloaded with fruit way back then and this was not just any lemon tree this is a myer lemon tree which we all know how it's like way better lemons regular lemons are like a mount smart myer lemons to like an almond joy they're just better i think technically there's some type of orange but the point is from memory i drove to the ellie hills alone at 10 p.m i felt like such a creep and i found the side street and the lemon tree was still there with literally hundreds of myer lemons so i took maybe like eight or ten i put them 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 skibee and very thrilling to have a bowl of the best lemons on my counter twenty twenty six alley here again i kid you not i happen to go back to that tree this weekend i hadn't been in like years i got myself so many lemons the tree was stuffed with them also thank you to managing director susan hails scheduling producer new elder than editors chick chafi and raciti's mainland for helping the show these days but yes back to our secret from them i got to love myer lemons 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 offense technically it's legal to pick also no one's gonna ever eat all those lemons there's so many lemons okay so good all right bye bye hack a dermy college homology homology homology homology homology homology homology homology is that your third cousin four times removed or your fourth cousin three times removed