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Welcome to episode 437 of the Genealogy Guides Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet, now celebrating 20 years. I'm your host, Drew Smith and together with co host George G. Morgan, we cover news tips and solutions for the genealogist community. In this episode, we bring you the Latest news from MyHeritage Legacy Family Tree webinars, newspapers.com and FamilySearch. We share listener email about the Korean War project and how to organize a Genealogy Society project. George and I discussed the WikiTree Challenge and RootsTech 2026, as well as my work with using MyHeritage's Theory of Relativity. The Genealogy Guys podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage. And welcome to another episode of the Genealogy Guys podcast. I am Drew Smith and I am joined as always by my co host, George G. Morgan. Hello, George. Yeah.
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And let me wish you the day we're recording this. Happy Thanksgiving.
B
Yes, for those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, we do wish you a happy one and hope that you are joined by family and friends. And even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, we hope you're joined by family and friends during this kickoff to the holiday season. And we'll be talking a little bit more about that during the commercials. But yeah, we got lots to share with you and apologies for not having recorded in a while, but we're here. We are. So with that, George, I think I go first, actually. Okay.
A
And so why don't you take it away?
B
All right, I'll take it away. We're going to start with several from our sponsor, MyHeritage, and a couple of them are fascinating. One is something that I certainly didn't think I'd be seeing anytime real soon. But myheritage is of making available whole genome sequencing. They are going to be moving to that with their at home DNA test kits and yeah, and they process this in the Gene by Gene lab, which I believe is in Houston. And they are going to. They're the first company, first major consumer company to adopt whole genome sequencing at this scale. And this means that there will be more accurate ethnicity analysis, more accurate DNA matching, and there'll be future innovations. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. You can read it certainly at the MyHeritage site. You may want to wait until beginning of January to take advantage of this because what's happening is that's when they're going to start really rolling it out. But the fact that they're even doing this is pretty darn amazing. So I just want to bring that. George, did you want to say.
A
Yeah, and if you're not quite ready for that, if you're just. If you want to get some DNA tests done. MyHeritage has just announced a whopper of a sale.
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All right, don't give it away. That's in the commercial. So.
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But yes, I just don't want anybody to miss out.
B
Well, that means you all need to listen to the commercial.
A
That's right.
B
But anyway, yes, the. Another one that's of personal interest to me is their theory of family relativity. That's a regular thing that MyHeritage has been doing for a number of years where they take a look at your DNA matches and then looks at other people's trees, your tree, and tries to form a link between your tree and that of your matches, which means it may have to go through several other trees. And that's what makes it rather interesting. They. It takes a lot of processing. So this is why they just rolled this out a few weeks ago. And this is 103 million new theories, these new proposed connections. And that's a 44% increase. The total is now 336 million theories. So just the reason I wanted to talk about this. Well, anyway, I'm just going to announce it now. We're going to talk about what I did with it at the end of the podcast. But you do want to check that if you've already tested with MyHeritage with DNA and you have a tree on myheritage, take a look and see if you've got some new theories. And that's really what that means, is that three and a half million of their tests kits, DNA kits, have at least one theory. You might have multiple theories, but you will have at least one. So that's just a major thing that they. They do this again, lots of computer processing power that has to do this. So, George, I think you've got some things here too.
A
Yeah, you know, we're very proud and thankful for MyHeritage as a sponsor of the podcast, because they're always doing something new. It's amazing to me, it's something new almost every week. Earlier this month, they announced that the 1921 England and Wales census is now available to search on MyHeritage. It includes 38 million records providing really an extraordinary view of life in Britain just after the First World War. Now, this was taken on June 19, 1921, and recorded every household in England and Wales. But this is the most recent UK census that's available of the Formal censuses. It'll remain so until the 1951 census is made available in 2052. Because the 1931 census records were destroyed in a fire. No census was conducted in 1941 because of World War II. The only thing in between you have is the 1939 registration. And please take a look at that at MyHeritage as well. It's a wonderful resource.
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And George.
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Yes.
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Can I say for those of you who may wonder about this announcement, originally when the 1921 was first released and they in England there's a 100 year gap. So that's why it was not released until 2021. The, the folks in the British government had a contract with Find My Past, so they were the first ones to get it exclusively. That contract expired then. You may have heard Ancestry announced it and now we have MyHeritage announcing it. So again, more options here with where you can look at that 1921 census. And again, kudos to MyHeritage for releasing their version of it.
A
I agree. It's tremendous. The other announcement I have here is a major update from MyHeritage. 95 million marriage records have been extracted from newspapers using the advanced AI that MyHeritage is now running. There are four new historical record collections containing 95 million structured marriage records extracted from newspaper pages on OldNews.com and if you're a regular listener here, you know that that I am addicted to OldNews.com but. But these four collections cover the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand and include announcements of marriages, engagements, marriage licenses and divorces. So these marriage records are now available on MyHeritage. So get researching.
B
Okay. Me, right? It is me and it is en espanol. Don't worry, I'll read it in English. But we did have an announcement about Legacy Family Tree webinars. Now some of you know that George and I have the genealogy guys learn on as a page on Legacy Family Tree webinars and we're very proud of that. And we're proud of Legacy Family Tree Webinars which is part of the Myheritage family. They are now as of the middle of October, they are creating a series of live genealogy webinars entirely in Spanish as well as 30 Spanish language sessions that are available on demand. Now we've passed the dates of the first four live sessions. The fifth one is on December 9th. I just want to read you the titles. For those of you who may know some Spanish speaking genealogists, let's hear your Spanish X I'm going to do my best. I've been learning some over the last year. We'll see if I can at least pronounce Como utulizar la nueva busquedas de texto and familysearch que busco un adaptado dorante la buscida de ore genes claves para localizar on the ways to a premier ante pasado. Excuse me, ante passado. I believe that is de spana busque das efficaces in familysearch and como se de la trea do apelido. Now the last one como de letrea do opilito will be on Tuesday, December 9th at 1 9am Eastern. I'll give it as an eastern. You can calculate your own local time zone from there. The first four which were live should be part of the been recorded and online at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. But again, you can still attend for free. The actually I think the fourth one, the Busquetas efficacy search, should also be free for a week. Usually they're free for one week and then you can see. So I would look for those. But again, if you are a Spanish speaker, if you are if your family member is a Spanish speaker and interested in learning genealogy, if you have some relative, this is something you may want to maybe you want to give them a gift for the holidays so they can go to Legacy Family Tree webinars and do a lot of learning. So I'll leave it at that. But the fact is we're very excited about the fact that there are now Spanish language webinars available through Legacy Family Tree Webinars. All right. And George, I think you've got a newspaper thing there.
A
Newspapers are prominent in this episode. Drew, we found an announcement of interest to lots of people about newspapers.com and they have announced a partnership with Gannett Newspapers to digitize nearly 150 new titles of rich and diverse newspaper content. And Gannett is a premier diversified media company, as you probably know, with a portfolio that includes hundreds of award winning newspapers. So this partnership is very, very important. So what you're going to see in this first release, we have newspapers from Daytona, Florida, Pueblo, Colorado, Sarasota, Florida, Norwich, Connecticut, Jacksonville, Florida and Fort Smith, Arkansas. And they have newspapers coming from just about every state in the union here, it looks like so. And 91 of those newspapers have issues spanning 100 or more years.
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Yeah, the Jacksonville goes back way far, I remember.
A
And they actually say four newspapers contain over 200 years of of issues, with the oldest dating back to catch this 1785, right?
B
Yeah.
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We didn't even have Constitution then.
B
That's true about four years before, I think. But. But again, Gannett owns a lot of newspapers around the world, certainly in the United States. And so we're glad to see that there's now a connection there to make them available through one of the services. So that's great news, George. I think it's my time to end the news with some news from FamilySearch. And this is from the last two months from October and November. Again, they're always adding records and it's why we keep telling people you got to keep going back to FamilySearch to see what's new. So let's start with October. They added over 21 million new records. Seven countries a lot from there's from Italy, from the Philippines. They added actually 13 million civil, which means birth, marriage and death records and church records From Italy and 3 million census records from the Philippines and other countries that they've got again, the other five countries, American Samoa, Brazil, Haiti, Ukraine and the United States. So that was just in October and November. They added 18 million new records from 10 countries. That includes 12 million civil and church records from again from Italy, 8 million civil and immigration records from the Dominican Republic, 2 million records from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the other countries which have major additions here. And I think I'll probably leave out somebody by accident. I apologize. But. Well, it's just the numbers aren't adding up for me here. But Belgium, French Polynesia, Honduras, Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. So if you've got ancestors in any of these countries, it's time for you to go back and do another search. And that was in November for that last one. So we hope that you make new discoveries over the holidays with these new additions in FamilySearch. George, I think we're done with our news for this episode and we're going to take a commercial break. When we come back, we do have a little bit of listener email and then George and I have a number of discussions to get into.
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We do.
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The holidays are a great time for genealogists, as we often get the opportunity to meet with family and ask them questions, as well as share what we have recently learned in our research. But the other thing we can look forward to is Black Friday sales for genealogy products and services. MyHeritage has a fantastic sale for MyHeritage DNA. They've never had a price this low on Black Friday itself. You can buy a Myheritage DNA kit for $25? Yes, I said $25. This could be for yourself or as a gift for someone else. The MyHeritage DNA kit will match you against countless other test takers and will help you to identify ancestral ethnicities. MyHeritage checks for 79 different ethnicities and 2,111 different geographic regions, but this sale is good only on Black Friday itself, so don't delay. Meanwhile, RootsMagic is offering a Black Friday special for its popular RootsMagic 11 software. If you're running an earlier version of RootsMagic, you can buy an upgrade to RootsMagic 11 for only $19.95. Or you can buy a new RootsMagic 11 license for yourself or or for a gift for only $29.95. This includes printable gift certificates, but you have only until Tuesday, December 2nd at Midnight Mountain time. No limit as to how many discounted copies you order.
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Drew I'm very pleased to share this email with our listeners. I have an email here from Hal Barker and Hal is an honorary life member of the 23rd Infantry Regiment Association, Korean War Branch, and founder of the Korean War Veterans Memorial December I'm sorry, in Washington, D.C. how Wright greetings guys. You might want to consider the Korean War Project as a resource. We've been online since February 1995. You may have heard about the controversy over the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall of Remembrance. That was us in the New York Times, Washington Post, and hundreds of other media outlets. The promised correction of thousands of names is dead in the water. In my lifetime. We have the most accurate list, but it changes every single day with new input. Our site is the Korean War Project and our key element is the Korean War Remembrance Database. And again, as I said, that dates Back to day one in 1995. We started crowdsourcing almost instantly 30 years ago and have had tens of thousands of people over the years working with us to create the most accurate casualty data from the Korean War anywhere. The final destination for our data when one of us passes is a donation to FamilySearch. I am 78 and my brother is 80, so we have a short period of time to go. Well Hal, I certainly hope not the URL for this and I'll include this in our show notes is www.koreanwar.org so take a look at www.koreanwar.org and you can access this fine collection of data. Thank you for all your work, Hal.
B
Okay, and I have one from Julia. She actually wondered if this was a podcast question, but I think it is not just but also a Please help. Question. This is several. I apologize that it's from mid September, but we're just getting to this and I think it's a wonderful question. It has to do with organizing a Genealogy Society project when you got a lot of researchers. Our Genealogy Society is receiving funding for what I hope will be an interesting big project. There was an Indian school in our city that was designed and run by a Yale education Native American man and wife team, making it the only college prep Indian school in the US at the time. 1910s.
A
Wow.
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Memories have faded, Buildings have been demolished and a few people in town have ever heard of it. I'm sorry, Few people in town have ever heard of it. We're proposing to do a deep dive into the school. We're searching the school as a whole, the individual students, faculty and staff and board members, and student groups like the football team and choir. We're hoping the local history museum will be interested in an exhibit. And we'd like to invite the granddaughter of the founders to talk to a couple of groups, including the kids at the school named for her grandfather. George, What?
A
Where. Where is this?
B
We are not saying. So I think, although you can Google it, actually you may be able to find it. Plus, we'd like to make available research materials for anyone who sees a line in their grandfather's obit that says something like, he attended the Roe Institute. That's ROE. And tries to Google it. Anyway, question. I'm starting to think about the logistics of parceling out research and writing tasks to a group of volunteers and keeping track of our progr. How did you manage your cemetery projects? Do you have any recommendations for us? Julia? Yes, my recommendation is Trello. Trello. Trello. I've used it personally to keep track of my own personal projects for many years now. I keep sort of separate. Trello is a very visual tool. You have boards, boards have lists, lists have cards, and the cards represent the task. When you deal with Trello in a group, you invite people to your board so they have access to it. And what they can do then is you can have assigned cards, which are the tasks, to the individuals. And by the way, you can have multiple individuals assigned to a card. And certainly you can assign multiple cards to the same individual. And as a result, you can see what everybody's doing because everybody will be able to see this. That's the advantage.
A
George, since we used this on the Zion Cemetery project, and I was very active in that, I can tell you that that this is an easy system to use once it's. It's set up and in place. It's easy to, to pull a record in, to work with it, to add text, to add images, to add links. Just. It, it's, it's tremendous.
B
Yeah.
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It gave us the opportunity to really flesh out the, the lives of the people buried in the Zion Cemetery.
B
We ended up with about 750 cards for the individuals that, based on death certificates and death ledgers, we believe to be buried at Zion Cemetery. And again, we were able to assign these to different volunteers, and therefore everybody could see the progress. I don't care what kind of project it is, whether it's a cemetery project, whether it's a project you're describing, which involves a lot of different kinds of research to various things. It doesn't matter. And you can put these things in lists, so you can separate out maybe individuals from maybe the buildings, from maybe the groups like you mentioned, the, the athletic teams and the choir. You can actually, again, organize everything and make it very visual. And then, as George said, there's all these things you can attach, whether it's textual notes, whether it is, again, files you can attach, so photos could be attached if you have those. Again, lots of stuff. So I recommend it. Julia, apologies for this coming in a bit late. Hopefully you'll still hear this and find it useful, even if you've already begun the work, because this is so much better than we. The project started out with a different coordinator, using a spreadsheet that was really difficult for multiple different people to edit and keep it organized. Trello works so much better. And so, again, I encourage you to use that. If anybody has any questions who's doing a project, please send that to genealogyguysmail.com because we'll be glad to answer any questions you might have. You can indicate whether you want the question answered privately or whether you would like to have it on the next podcast episode. We'll do it either way. But it's a great tool, and it's a great tool for a team of people. So, you know, really only one person has to have an account, and the others can be basically guests who can be added. So they're not paying for it. It's just that easy. All right, George.
A
Great tool.
B
Yeah. All right, we're going to end the. That's the end of the listener email, because we're going to talk about a few other things. Which one's first, George?
A
Well, the first thing we're going to talk about is WikiTree. And.
B
Yeah.
A
The people at WikiTree have been working to collaborate on family trees for, for a tremendous period of time. And we're always very impressed with them. Yeah. But they have, they have instituted an activity called the Wikitree Challenge. And so the. Drew, you were a guest before. Why don't you explain a little bit about what it is?
B
Yeah, this was about three or four years ago. And by the way, for any of our listeners, although we'll put it in the show notes. Right. The two links that for me, so people can see. Because what they did was they put out a call for volunteers. Depending on who the person was going to be, it was usually someone who's known in the genealogy community. And so it could have been like, in this case, it could have been a speaker, a writer, a presenter, you know, whatever, someone who's well known and therefore probably has done some research on their own families. But what happened was they contacted me and asked. They said, we're going to put together a team of volunteers. They will have one week to research your family. So clearly I had to have a tree on Wikitree, which I did. And we're going to turn them loose for a week and they can decide how to organize and who's going to work on what. And then at the end of the. They began the week with me. And by the way, again, the. We'll have links on YouTube where they talk to me about my family and what my brick walls were, mostly my mother's side in South Carolina. And. And then they turned them loose and I avoided wickedry because I didn't want my, you know, anything spoiled. And at the end of the week, they invite me back again, also on YouTube, and they talk about what they found. So it's kind of like Drew Smith, this is your life. Here's the people that we found. And certainly some of them were people I had not found. They were parents of my great great grandmother. There were some other cases of things I did not know and I was really very pleased with everything they did. There were like, I think for me there were about 40 volunteers and that included people with different countries who were working because I have ancestors from Ireland and I have ancestors, Jewish ancestors from Poland. And they had people from some of those places working on my family as well as here in the United States and Canada and whatever in the uk. So it was fun. And then I got to learn stuff. I got to, they, they, they found some really interesting stories and things. But yeah, I said, guys, y' all need to do George, because I've been around.
A
Guess what?
B
They did. They reached out to George. So tell, yeah, tell you what, Go ahead, George, tell them what's going to happen, what the dates are that you believe they're going to.
A
Okay, well, I just got another email this morning from, from my friends there. And so what, what they're doing for me here is they are, they actually are doing a kickoff chat on Thursday, December 4th at 12pm Eastern Time. And I will put the, the link to that in the show notes.
B
So that's at noon on Eastern time.
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At Eastern time.
B
Okay.
A
And then on December 6th at 12:00pm Eastern time, they'll be doing a weekend discussion and then they'll be, they'll be wrapping this up at, on Thursday, December 11th at 12 noon Eastern Time, they'll be doing a wrap up session. Let me just tell you all in case you want to be teased a little bit into this. I've been doing my genealogy work since I was turned on to family history in January of 1961. 61, as I told Drew the other day. I can hardly believe, you know, it, it's been 60. How many years?
B
A few.
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64 years that I've been working on my genealogy. And you probably, you probably thought, well, I was about 30 anyway, but that's wrong. I'm 73 now and I'm working on my family history just about every day to some little extent. But the Wiki challenge, I'm looking forward very, very much. I have some brick walls, I have some, some relatives that I would like more information on. And so I'm going to share some, some hints with, with the team and let them loose and see what they can come back and, and do to help me along with my research. I'm excited, Drew. And so just to, to tease you a little bit more, there are, there are sessions on YouTube and we'll provide the links in the show notes for Drew's Wiki challenge.
B
So you can see that one that was already done. Yep.
A
If you want to see that. I'm, I'm astonished when I sit back and look at that. I'm astonished at how much they uncovered and, and the different types of records, the diversity of records that they found, the geographies that they determine. I'm just very impressed. So I'm hoping for similar results for my Wiki challenge.
B
Yep. And that, that's, I can't wait to watch that one too. In fact, even my brother Jeff said, oh, I can't wait to see that one. So, so we're, we're excited to see what might be learned about George's family. Because he's got some branches from a number of places, although lots of North Carolina for sure, but some stuff back further to Maryland and Scotland.
A
George, Ireland.
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In Ireland, George is now learning everything he can learn about the Scots Irish.
A
So yeah, I went to, I went to Amazon and, and I created the national debt for, for, for my own gifts to myself for the holidays. And I've, I ordered books about the Scots Irish and the migration from, from Scotland to Ireland and from Ireland to the colonies. And so I have a total of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 books that I have to spend some time reading.
B
That's right.
A
So if you, if you think working on your genealogy just means being online, you're wrong. You have to go back and do, do some research into the history and the geography of the places where your ancestors originated and where they migrated to.
B
Yeah. Next, let's talk a little bit about the annual major event in Salt Lake City. Although it's not only in Salt Lake City, it's available online too. And this is RootsTech. So RootsTech 2026 is going to be on the three days of March 5th, 6th and 7. That's the three day event and you can watch lots of it online. There's going to be more than 200 sessions online in over 26 languages.
A
Wow.
B
And guess what? It's free. Online.
A
Free.
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Free. Free. Free. And you can watch the keynotes. Free. So they'll be, those will be live but all these other sessions will be recorded and so you can watch them whenever you want to watch them. It's free. All right.
A
That's my favorite four letter word, free.
B
That's, well one of ours certainly. But let's say you want to go to Salt Lake because they have this library there that you might want to do research in and, and you might want to network and there are some wonderful restaurants in Salt Lake City and lots of friends that you can make new friends. I make new friends every time I.
A
Go with lots of, lots of products and services.
B
Yeah, the expo hall is amazing. So they currently doing early bird pricing. Let me say that again. I don't have the deadline date for early Bird but I'm sure it's still there. On the website is three day pass is normally 129. You can get it now for 99 for the three days or if you only want to go for one day, maybe you just can't, you know, get away from a job or something and you're only going to be there for one day. That's $69, normally 79. And there's over 250 sessions that'll only be in Salt Lake City. So you'd have to go to see these sessions. And there's over. George was taught the expo hall. Guess what? Over 120 exhibitors. Over 120. There's nothing like it. One of the biggest exhibits for genealogy.
A
For genealogy in the world.
B
It seems to be. I believe it is. And so you get to hear the latest news because you know what a lot of companies wait for RootsTech. It's like some of the other technology conferences in the world where they wait till the big conference to announce something new, some new feature or product. So there will be announcements. I'm sure I don't have any background info, George. Now, another thing is since I'm going to be there and I'm giving three talks and those of you who are curious, two of the talks I've given a number of times, your Ancestors fan club. And I'm giving DNA basics you need to know. But I'm also giving one on artificial intelligence and genealogy. It's a new one that I started earlier this year. And so I think if you've not seen that one, but the other ones too, you know, I think you'll enjoy the basics for the DNA. So I'm excited. I'm looking forward to seeing friends. I'm looking forward to enjoying time in the library, the family search library. I'm really thinking that's going to be lots of fun. So.
A
And can I give you all my brick walls?
B
You can give them to me, but. Well, they're the one. There won't be any after Wikitree. Right? It's a true.
A
That's true. They're gonna solve all my.
B
They're gonna solve all your problems.
A
But yeah, they're gonna finish my genealogy for me.
B
Well, nobody's genealogy is ever finished, so that's true. Anyway, now unless we have something else about that, I'm gonna go back to talking about the Myheritage theories of relativity. The theories of relativity. So one of the things I have started doing and I'm going to add to, obviously with new ones, I'm having to go through a lot of these is I'm trying to go through my theories one at a time. And guess what? When you get a theory from myheritage, you can either confirm it or you can say it's not right, or you can leave it, can ignore it for now. And I've confirmed a number of them, but sometimes you say no. That, that tree that it's linking me to, I don't think that's quite right. Now, I've used these theories. I've contacted people and said, I think your tree has something in there that's not right. For example, I have an ancestor, great grandmother named Jane Body. But there's a. There was another Jane Body who had different parents, was born 10 years earlier. And sometimes those theories get the two Janes confused for a number of reasons. So I contact people, but I've also been going in and looking at the family, excuse me, the myheritage trees, because one of my brick walls is my great, great grandfather, Charles King, who lived in Lawrence, South Carolina and who probably was from York. Everything I have points to where he was in York, South Carolina before he went to, to Lawrence, probably due to the Cunninghams. He knew the Cunningham family that had a plantation there in Lawrence. Well, the thing is, there are a lot of trees out there that say that Charles gives the names of his parents. Trouble is, I've never found any records that show this. So I've decided that my project and I'm doing it, it's going to take a while. There are several dozen trees that have this information. Now. I, I strongly suspect that they were copied from each other to some degree. I don't know who's the original. And I've started messaging them and saying, can you give me any info on how we know who Charles King's parents are? I've heard back from one person. They, they really don't know. And so it just takes a while. But I'm going to see if I can get through all of these connections to see if anyone might have had that information. That would be very helpful if I can link Charles to his parents, but I don't know.
A
Well, that's one of the key activities of these online family trees that we have access to all over the place is that we can and should be trying to network with other people. And if you find that there are a number of trees with information that you haven't been able to substantiate with evidence, it's great to be able to reach out and contact these people and they can tell you if they found this evidence themselves or if they obtain it elsewhere.
B
Absolutely.
A
That's part of the joy of genealogy, is the collaboration.
B
Oh, and it's so important. And I mean, just to go back to what George and I were saying earlier, that's one of the reasons we love WikiTree because it enables collaboration. It has a very fun community of people. And I always say genealogy is supposed to be fun. We do it. Not. I mean, yes, there's a serious side to it, but there's also an enjoyment to it, a fun part. And it's like any other hobby. We should be doing it because we have fun doing it. So, you know, that's important. And we, I encourage anyone, by the way, again, even though we've already talked about it, is to look at Wikitree, but definitely look at the videos that George is going to put the show notes, definitely attend the sessions that George is going to be at. So you can see George talk about his brick walls. And you can see a week later what the many volunteers probably found out about George's family. So we'll see. We'll see. You know, it's just, you never know. But so, George, I think that's brought us up to date on what you and I are busy doing, and we have been busy with our genealogy to some extent. And I'm still finishing up teaching a class for graduate students to become genealogy librarians that'll be finishing just in a few weeks where I'll be grading their final assignments and giving them their final grades.
A
Do you realize what that qualifies as you are changing the world? You're teaching librarians how to be better genealogy librarians, so you're sending a legacy out into the world.
B
Well, you know, the thing is, and it's funny, I even had a dream about this last night talking about genealogy librarians. Genealogy librarians are very special people. And often, particularly at smaller public libraries, they are the only one who knows anything about genealogy. You have to go to the biggest libraries to find multiple genealogy librarians, and they are the people. Guess what? If you're getting started in genealogy, they may be your first contact as you go out to help you with that getting started, and they want to help you be successful. And it's important. So you want your librarian to know something about doing research. And that's what my course is all about. I've got 28 students, and I hope that the vast majority will do well and will maybe even find jobs, whether they do or not in that field. But they will have had some training. And genealogy librarianship courses are rare. There's not a, you know, there's like 50 library schools in the United States and Canada. Probably only four or five have genealogy courses. So it's really not a common thing. And again, I know some of my students have gone on to become great librarians. So if they were not already they certainly went on to become great genealogy librarians.
A
Yeah.
B
So I'm very pleased, George. You're right. It means a lot to me. It's a very meaningful course. But. But we'll finish that. We'll have some holidays before January when I start doing some presentations for some societies around the country. I'll. At our. Probably our next podcast episode, I'll let you all know where to start looking for me.
A
Sure.
B
All right. And again, if you know between now and the next time you hear from us, we hope you are having a. A relaxing, fun time with family and friends. I'm hoping that things are going to be a little relaxed over the holidays. Yeah. Sometimes people go nuts over the holidays. We know, we know. But don't go nuts. Try to be. Try to find the relaxing times, because that's the best time of the year.
A
True. There's actually a recording of some Sweden, some Swedes singing a special Christmas song. I just go nuts. A Christmas.
B
Yes. Yeah.
A
One of my favorite. Yes.
B
All right, thanks for listening, everybody. If you have questions, if you have feedback, if you have comments, if you have problems, if you want to send your thank yous, send them to genealogy guysmail.com. we really, really want to hear from you. We know there's listeners out there, but probably don't know who you are. And of course, if you come up to us at a conference, come up to me at a conference. Certainly say, hi, I'm a listener. And I love to love it when that happens. And I get to see it because. Yeah, helps me visualize who we're talking to.
A
So.
B
All right, George, any final words?
A
Just happiest of holidays to everyone and we'll see you next time.
B
We will. Take care.
A
Bye.
B
Bye.
A
Sam. Sa.
Hosts: Drew Smith & George G. Morgan | Date: November 27, 2025
This lively episode marks the 20th anniversary of "The Genealogy Guys Podcast," the world's longest-running genealogy podcast. Hosts Drew Smith and George G. Morgan dive into big news from MyHeritage, expanding archival collections at FamilySearch and newspapers.com, and important updates for the genealogy community. They answer listener mail, discuss collaborative tools for big society projects, and preview special activities—including the WikiTree Challenge and RootsTech 2026. The duo’s hallmark warmth and nerdy humor keep the show engaging, practical, and welcoming to genealogists of all experience levels.
Whole Genome Sequencing Coming to MyHeritage
Theory of Family Relativity Update
1921 England & Wales Census on MyHeritage
AI-Extracted Marriage Records from Old Newspapers
Legacy Family Tree Webinars in Spanish
Newspapers.com & Gannett Partnership
FamilySearch Record Additions
The Korean War Project Database
Organizing Large Genealogy Society Projects
The episode is a treasure trove of up-to-date news, practical strategies for collaborative research, and genuine enthusiasm for the evolving world of genealogy. It is perfect for genealogists looking for the latest resources, big event previews, and tried-and-true tools for research projects, all delivered with the wit and warmth of two lifelong experts.
For questions, feedback, or your own genealogy challenges, contact the hosts at genealogyguysmail.com