← The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
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Welcome to episode 439 of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet. 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 about Tampa's Zion Cemetery. We tell you about MyHeritages record editions, infographics and its new transcription tool, Scribe AI. We talk about RootsMagic's update to allow syncing with ancestry, new Irish online records, and the latest record additions to FamilySearch. George and I discussed my recent trip to Sacramento where I spoke at the Root Cellar Spring seminar and I suggest that listeners email us with what topics they would like me speak on in Salt Lake City at RootsTech 2027. I talk about next month's GRIP virtual courses, including one that I'll be a part of and George identifies his recent successes in his own research. Finally, George and I recommend to genealogy societies that they make sure that every society role has a backup person who knows all the account numbers and passwords. The Genealogy Guys Podcast is sponsored by MyHeritage and RootsMagic. And now on with the show. Welcome to another episode of the Genealogy Guys Podcast. I am your host, Drew Smith and joined as always by my co host, George G. Morgan. George, how are you today?
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I'm doing great. Hope everybody out there listening is. I hope you are good, Drew.
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Doing good. Doing a little physical therapy to get rid of a few aches and pains and but that has been successful so I'm doing a bit better. Yeah.
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Yes, George, and I've been doing my treatments and my, my treatments are a real success and I feel like I am, I am in, in better spirits than I have been in many years.
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Yep. Although he's now listening to music all of the time, so it's okay.
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But anybody who wants my recommendations for hot classical music recordings, send us an email@genealogyguysmail.com and I'll be happy to to share some of my favorite picks with you.
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But he's also working on his own genealogy. As always, he'll mention a little bit of that in a few minutes. But I did want to share some local news first. One of the projects that many of our listeners know I have been associated with for quite a few years now
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is I have too.
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Oh yes. Oh yes. But I mean ongoing. George did some heavy lifting as part of the research on the Zion Cemetery in Tampa, Florida, an African American cemetery that was basically erased from history and built over unfortunately, and was rediscovered several years ago. And now the real good news as we get closer in, I have to understand first that the people that own the property currently that the Tampa Housing Authority had actually a big piece of it. And there were five buildings that were part of that complex that are going to be destroyed. They had already planned to do that for the entire complex, but they're doing that. So those five buildings will be eliminated.
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Right.
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But there were two other property owners. One was, I believe, a towing company that parked their vehicles there. And then one was a very well known Tampa restaurateur and whose last name is Gonsmart and owns many of the prestigious restaurants in Tampa. And he owned a piece of that property that was the Right.
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Including the restaurant the Columbia, for which Tampa is famous.
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Absolutely. And I believe they even have a branch inside the Tampa airport that you can go to. So the point is, is that he actually owned a piece of the property that was on the main highway there, which is the Florida Avenue, which was really a major US highway before they built the interstate. And he planned, before they discovered the cemetery, he planned to turn that into a cooking school for particularly to benefit the community, the folks there. And so when the cemetery was rediscovered, it was pretty well clear that the property he owned was really part of that. And so there had to be a lot of work to figure out how can Mr. Gonsmart be compensated? Because what they want to do, and this is what they did do recently, they came to an agreement to transfer some other land elsewhere in Tampa, right next to one of his restaurants actually, and its place then God Smart would transfer the property that he owned on Florida Avenue, that that would go to the city for the cemetery. So the plan being that there is going to be some sort of memorial park built at some point, so all the buildings will be torn down that were built on top of the cemetery. And the plans are to develop a memorial park and even possibly a genealogy research center on a pie of that property that is not above any grave sites. So that's the part that's very exciting. And again, thank you to Mr. Gonsmark and the city of Tampa for coming to an agreement and making this workable. So that's the best news we've had in quite a while, particularly in relationship to the Zion Cemetery. Yeah.
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I'm telling you though, Drew, working on the Zion Project has. Has been very. A feeling of real reward for me. I just feel like I've given something back to the community for the work that I did. But it. It wasn't that it just needed to be done. It was the right thing to be, to be done to that property.
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And we're right and we're this, this
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news is the culmination of, of a huge amount of work on the part of, of public, elected officials and volunteers and people on all levels of society in Tampa Bay.
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It is just for those who have not heard about this cemetery before, if you're just joining us on the podcast, we have talked about it in a number of past episodes. We're talking about a cemetery that had at least 750 burials. So a lot of our work was looking at city of Tampa death ledgers or burial ledgers and death certificates for Hillsborough County. And that's how we were able to obtain names of individuals who are buried there.
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But the other thing that we wanted to do with, with those names of people and the events, the information that we received elsewhere is we wanted to go back and try to reconstruct any part of their lives so we could get to know them better. And we were looking initially for descendants, living descendants of those individuals who were buried at, at Zion or living next of kin. Living next of kin. Right. So we've, we found some of those. We didn't have a huge success for that. But what I will say is that the, the work that was done, the volunteer work, as Drew said just now, we used the city of Tampa death and burial ledgers. We used census records to try to identify who the people were who were in the household and maybe identify next of kin descendants, next of kin. But we did a lot of work that way and the fact that it has paid off and so many people are, so many people's lives have now been documented by all the volunteer work that we did. We have something very strong to give to the descendants and the next of. Ken?
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Yeah, that's right. George, can you tell us a little bit about one of the new features that MyHeritage has been coming out with relating to infographics? Tell us about that.
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Myheritage is busy. They stay busy with all the records they digitized make available. But they also have some other tools that are available for you too. And there's a brand new one called Family Infographics. And so you can try that now. It's, it turns the information that you've gathered and put into a, into records and myheritage into a meaningful work of art that you can be proud to share, display in your home or give as a gift. And what it does is it you, you, you select a template to use with that may be appropriate to the individual's occupation or their personality. And you, you link it all together, you and then you submit it and it runs in the background at MyHeritage for a few minutes and then comes up and produces a, A, a high quality poster type representation of your loved one's life story. It's a beautiful work of art.
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So
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you should play around with that. It's fun. I did that for two sets of my family members and two individuals and it really was quite striking.
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Speaking of MyHeritage and speaking of recent technology, which is AI because that certainly has changed the way we do a number of things. With genealogical research and dealing with documents and photographs, MyHeritage has produced something called Scribe AI. Now let me start by explaining that when I've talked about genealogical records that, that you could manipulate or, or understand. I, I don't want to say manipulate as such, but understand with AI. I've often talked about an Austrian product called Transcribus, which is not specifically for genealogy. It's basically offered as a product for anyone who has to try to understand particularly handwritten materials, possibly in a language you don't even speak, which is. Comes up particularly for European records. Is that, you know, that's pretty cool. But Scribe AI is by MyHeritage is really designed specifically for genealogists. I mean, others could probably benefit from it if you're an historian or someone else. But Scribe AI can take documents, historical documents, historical images, and these could be JPEG, these could be PNG, these could be PDFs, and they can be uploaded. And by the way, you can run this Scribe AI software on a desktop computer in a browser, or you could run it on a mobile device, whether it's an iPhone, iOS, iPadOS device or an Android device. So you've got all the standard options as to what tool you can use to you run Scribe AI, but what you do is you upload these documents or photos to the tool. If you're using a web browser or if you're using a mobile device, you can take a picture with the app. There is a, there is an app to take pictures of the documents or gravestones. Some of us come up against gravestones that we're having trouble reading. And one example that's often given is sometimes the rather complexity of Jewish headstones because there's a lot of information about family on many Jewish headstones. But you can analyze these and of course it might take a little time understand that there's a lot of Computer processing that has to be done. So it can take a little bit of time on these. The other thing I want to say is that before I get into more details on what it can do, is that there, if you're not already a MyHeritage subscriber, you can use this Scribe AI tool for free for a limited number of images. But if you want to use this a lot, maybe after you've tried out the free version, you would need to subscribe to MyHeritage through one of their subscriptions, whether it's just their regular standard subscription or whether it's their Omni, which provides you with everything pretty much that MyHeritage does. So that would give you access, either of those would give you access pretty much to a unlimited or extended use of Scribe AI. Let me tell you a little bit more about what it can do for you as a genealogist. So again, you could be visiting a relative who has photos. You could be, or you've come into possession of photos. Now we're not talking about, we're going to change the photo in any way. That's a very different category. What we are trying to do here is try to analyze a photo so that you can maybe get some information about maybe when the photo was taken. It can give you some information about that. It can maybe it will look at things that you would normally have to look at yourself, such as the clothing and the hairstyles, the architecture in the background to see if you can figure out when the photo was taken and where the photo was taken. And so it can maybe describe it, the scene that it's looking at and see if there's anything that should be noted. George, you were going to say, I'm
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just going to ask a question. You mentioned the scenery, the background architecture and so forth to figure out the site. I'm just brainstorming here. Would it, would it be possible to take a photo, take a photograph that includes that background stuff and use Google Lens to maybe find additional pictures?
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Well, that's possible, sure. Because that's what Google Lens does. If you take a picture, let's say of a building, it works obviously much better. If it's a well known building where there's been a lot of photos taken of it, it can look throughout through the Google Image collection and say, oh, this building appears to be xyz, appears to be this. So it will try to figure out where this is. But again, you don't need to use Google Lens to do any of this. The point is Scribe AI can try to figure out any details and images. So I wouldn't say you don't need to necessarily use Google Lens with this. That might be an extra thing to do. But the point is you can just look at an historical picture and see if it can identify some things. So and by the way, it does it in sections. Most of us also have documents. You can think about all the documents you've ever used, handwritten documents, whether they are probate records, whether they are property records, such as real estate transactions, whether they are. Or land records, as we would often refer to them. And you need to know what is it saying, you know, who's getting what and who are. What are their names? And can it get all of that stuff transcribed? And I've looked at some examples on some websites of people who have tried it out. In many cases, the results are not perfect, but they are extremely good. And so it can often find things for you again, transcribe stuff. By the way, it can also deal with things that are not handwritten, but things maybe that are typed, such as older newspaper articles or things that are a little faded and hard to read. So that's another aspect of this tool, is to be able to take things that are difficult to read because they have. Parts are faded. You know, parts are just not as legible. And it can translate too. So it can. If you're dealing with something that's say, in Latin or something that's in French or Spanish or German, it can do a lot of translation into your language. So that's pretty impressive. But as I say, it's going to give you a lot more details. It'll also even give you details on things that you should now research. In other words, it can make some suggestions and things to say. Here's your next steps for doing research about this. Maybe it's going to tell you these are the names of the people you need to look into or these are the names of the places that you should look into. So I mean, I mean, I could go on and on, but this is a free tool. If you would like to try it out, go to myheritage.com scribe AI and you can play around with this for a few images and examples. And then if you really like it, maybe then you're going. If you don't already have a subscription of MyHeritage, you can maybe consider that you might want to do that. So we're excited that now we've got as AI technology has improved, has expanded, that we're starting to see which is not surprising. We're starting to see applications of AI to very specific uses. And so rather than generic things like Perplexity and Claude and chatgpt, we're starting to see tools being developed in conjunction with genealogical research. And that's why I would suggest you take a look at this, George.
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Well, certainly, when we're talking about other genealogical applications, the first thing I think of, of course, is family search, full text search, and the fact that you can use that on a variety of. Of different documents. Scribe AI allows you to do. Do some of that as well. So. But it's very positive. Positive product.
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Yeah, very much so. Okay, George, you're going to look. Tell us a little bit, I think, about myheritage records that have come out in the last little while.
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Well, I, I am going to tell you that the Scribe AI is now available on MyHeritage mobile app.
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Yeah, right. And I said it was available for Android and iOS, so it's there. Yep. So let's go on to the records.
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Yep. In March of 2026, MyHeritage added 366 million new historical records. And they include collections from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and other countries. And it includes newspaper archives, newspaper records, vital records, military records, and more. So that's very, very exciting, Drew.
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Okay. When we do research on our families, we come upon some questions that we would, in some ways, like to know the real answer to. And not everything we are hearing about family stories are pleasant. One example is about whether or not if you had German ancestors who lived during the time of World War II or just prior to World War II, the question is, did they join the Nazi Party? And again, we want to know for sure, one way or the other, if we can. So we don't just have to make guesses and know a little bit more about them by what they did. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that this is going to tell us their motivations, because people did a lot of things during the war that they had to do to survive. But my point is that the BBC just came out with an article from last month that says there's now a search engine. What they have done is they have digitized the membership records, the Nazi. There's several million of these. And by the way, these, I believe the original materials have been also given to the. The US The National Archives in the United States. But they've digitized these. They can search, they're searchable, and they give an example of someone whose grandfather died shortly before they themselves were Born, but they, it, they learned by searching this database that, that five days it took them, he actually joined. His grandfather joined in five days round right after when Hitler annexed Austria to Germany. So this allows you or anyone basically to search to understand also maybe you find people that you thought could have been members of the Nazi party but are not showing up. They're, they're, they're membership cards if they, they, if they, they were not members. So you would be able to use this database to kind of say, yeah, no, they weren't members, they didn't become members. They don't have a membership card in that database. So it's been, a lot of people have been looking for this. And one guy, apparently one user, said, I've already found two close relatives. Which destroys the myth that no one in our family was invol. And this person was apparently 71. And this perspective has come as a bitter shock. There's about 10 million, 10.2 million Germans who were members. This is between 1925 and 1945. They were stored in Munich. They almost were destroyed. They were saved by the director of a nearby paper mill, and that was then handed over to the Americans. And so, you know, again, this is a part of history that we may not be happy to learn some things that are in it, but at least we know and maybe can make. Stop making guesses.
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It's true, it is truth to add to your family story. And if it does debunk some myths, that's fine too, because what you always want is the most accurate information sources that you possibly can get in your genealogical research.
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Yeah. Let me give some provenance to these cards to help understand what happened to them. They were kept by the Americans at the Berlin Document center for almost 50 years. In 94, they were handed to the German Federal Archives and microfilm copies were sent to the U.S. national Archives. And then what you had to do was to make a formal request to the German archives to make inquiries. But In March, the U.S. national Archives began to make its records available online, so they are now easily searchable. And of course, people who are not related to some of these individuals in the database were searching famous people, politicians, judges, doctors, to see did they join the Nazi party. But now there's a lot of people looking for members of their own family to understand could they have done it. So again, history is history. And it doesn't always mean that it's things we like to learn, but. But that we should learn. Yeah. George, you're going to talk about a
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friend of ours I've got. I've got some very special news for a very special friend of ours. Margaret Lance Chaney has been involved with the Ohio Genealogical Society for many, many years and with, with her own local Lorain County Genealogical Society. Well, they just recently had their Ohio Genealogical Society Family History Conference, Genealogy Conference, and Margaret Chaney says she was humbled and honored to be awarded the Ohio Genealogical Society's Fellow award on Saturday, May 2, 2026, at the annual business luncheon that took place at the conference. It is the highest honor that OGs can give to an individual. It represents that the individual performed over and above the duties that were elected, they were elected to or assigned. OGs became her second family, she says. And I made many friends and acquaintances over the year. Those relationships are near and dear to my heart. My daughter, Kathy Eisenhart was able to go with me and not only was my personal chauffeur, but also my personal hairdresser. Thanks for all that you do. I am so proud of Margaret Chaney. She has become a very dear, very special friend over the years to both Drew and myself, and we give her our heartiest congratulations on becoming a Fellow. This honor is well deserved and long overdue.
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Yep, yep, yep, yep. The next bit of business here is between our favorite genealogy desktop software, RootsMagic, that George and I have been using for more years than we can remember, and Ancestry, which we've also been using for a lot of years. And so the thing is, is that many people like to use RootsMagic because they can build their tree in RootsMagic. We do. I do believe that everyone should have their tree on their desktop software so they can back it up and not worry about online copies or anything. But at the same time, you'd like to have your tree made available to the general public, or at least to relatives. So you might want to synchronize it between RootsMagic and Ancestry. Well, unfortunately, RootsMagic does a wonderful job. But Ancestry can change the way in which this syncing works, this communication. What Ancestry and all other companies that do syncing of data between different programs and so forth, is they use what's called an API, which is an application programming interface. So it is software that lets two different applications communicate with each other. So whether it's sending data from RootsMagic to a very different piece of software, mainly the Ancestry website, or vice versa. An analogy, if you are not clear what this is, is you walk into a restaurant, you sit down, you place an order, there's a waiter who takes your data to the kitchen, which is the server. And then not the server, who's the waiter, but who's sending you the food, and then the food comes back to you. So that waiter is the interface between you and the kitchen. Same way. Here is the API that Ancestry creates makes it possible for a company like RootsMagic to take all of its data and send it up to Ancestry to a tree, whether it's a public tree or private tree or whatever. Here's the deal. Ancestry changes their API from time to time, and when that happens, RootsMagic has to modify their software to work with the new API. And that just happened again recently. And what happened is now that Ancestry says you can't use the old way after May 4th. So that's come and gone. And that means that if you're using any version of RootsMagic prior to 11, You can't sync between Roots Magic and Ancestry. So if you're using. And this is the people that are probably going to be biggest affected by this. If you're using RootsMagic 10, I'm afraid you're out of luck here. You can obviously keep and before. But you can keep using it, but you can't sync your data from your computer to Ancestry. Could you do other things? Yes, you could output a gedcom and input a gedcom, but you don't want to go through those extra steps. Right. Trust me. But yes, if you're at least using RootsMagic 11.0, you'll still be. Or later something as it comes along. Don't worry. I think most of us are running later versions anyway. You can still sync with Ancestry, So that's the news. I think actually Rootsmagic is up to about 11.3, so just be aware of that now. Again, I know some of you don't want to go to a different version. That's fine. You can keep using rootsmagic. You just can't automatically sync your data to the Ancestry tree. An Ancestry tree. So, George, tell us about the Irish.
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The Irish, My goodness, that could take a while.
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Well, they could, but something specific about them and their records.
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Sure. Our friends at Find My Past in the UK have been busy.
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We.
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We hear from them often with things that they have added in the way of parish records and so forth, and. And maybe some new newspapers. But two particular items were of interest here. My first, my family. Excuse me, Find My Past reported that they have added the Ireland directories and almanacs from 1844 to 1928. And so these records, they're added 13,056,071 records. And so those are available to to access now at findmypast. Another thing that you will have have seen happening is that the Ireland national census for 1926 has been released and Findmypast tells us that they have released Ireland National Census Reports, 1926-1991. I haven't been in there to look for the later ones, but from 1926, that's pretty good if you have Irish ancestors who were born and raised and maybe emigrated from Ireland after 1920. And then a national newspaper has joined their national archive and the British Social and Cultural History. The newest edition is the Daily Star and they've added over 200,000 pages starting back to the title's first run in 1978. So you may want to take a look there.
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True New Hampshire.
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You have stuff from, from Family Search, don't you?
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I do, and we always end our news with that. And so every month I can bring us up to date from both April and May. And again, there's a couple of biggies here. There are actually a billion. Get this one billion. That's with a B. More records from the United States covering public vital records, military, cemetery, immigration, naturalization, 13 million from the UK vital military and immigration, 10 million civil registrations and session court records from Ireland. And again, we got. I'm just going to give a list of the countries because there's just so much to cover and I don't need all that. We don't need all the details. But if you have ancestors from any of these countries, you need to check back on FamilySearch. And this is just April. I'll get to May in a minute. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain and the Ukraine. I'm sorry. And Ukraine. Don't need the D there. That is amazing. And the May records, they added more. 256 million new records from 27 countries. That includes 48 million vital records from England and Wales, 37 million residence records from the UK, 9 million civil registrations and church records from the Philippines, 4 million civil and church records from Italy, and 7 million vital military, immigration and census records from the United States. And other countries that have significant records include Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Ukraine. So you. That covers a lot of people, a lot of researchers. What's that? It is huge. Every month it's huge. And again, I'm sorry, if you never used FamilySearch. Please don't confuse first off FamilySearch with the FamilySearch family tree they're two different. The tree is part of FamilySearch, but there's also billions of records. You need to look at those. And if you've already been looking at them, you need to look at them all the time, because new stuff's there every month.
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And the best news there is that it's free.
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It is. You just create an account with your email address and boom, you're in and you can look at everything. So definitely. And by the way, let me mention one more thing that's free. I mean, there's a lot of. It's. Almost all of it's free. The point is, is that there's what's called the FamilySearch Research Wiki. It is. It is a date. It is a database, kind of like Wikipedia, but better, because it's all about genealogy, specifically, and it is maintained by volunteers who know what they're doing. And it allows you to do a couple of things. You, if you are now researching a country or a U.S. state or Canadian province, or researching some other part of the world that a county in the United States that you've never used records in before, you go to the FamilySearch research wiki, and you read the page for that country or state or county because it tells you about when that place had records, what type of records, and it links you to where those records can be found, whether those records are on FamilySearch or whether they're on a paid site like Ancestry or findmypast or myheritage or any other paid site. That's what you want to do. You'll learn about, and there's pages about types of records you want to learn how to use military records, you want to learn how to use census records, you want to learn how to use immigration records. There are pages for that that explain it to you. And so, again, every, Every researcher, any. Every genealogical researcher needs to go to the FamilySearch research wiki to learn about new places and new types of records. If you're not experienced, George and I'm
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looking at the research, the FamilySearch research wiki, and it's accessible. At the FamilySearch web page, click on Search at the top on the menu bar, and drop down appears, and you'll see Research Wiki listed. There are a total, as of this moment in time, 156,057 articles available. And they are, they can just, you know, you can do a search by place or by topic, but let's say you're doing research in, oh, let's say North Carolina and you want to know more about when vital records became available, when they became mandatory to be created, and actually when they actually became ubiquitous in that state. So you would find, you would find that out. There are other links to other places as well that are related if you're looking for historical information about a location or a topic that's in there too. So the research wiki at FamilySearch is a quick online tool. It's a genealogy manual online for you in actuality. And if you aren't using it, if you haven't used it, we urge you strongly to get, get into FamilySearch, get into the wiki and start exploring, see what all you can find.
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Absolutely. I want to talk about some recent activities and but before I do, I just realized we have to stop and take a commercial break. Well, I just, it just occurred to me we haven't done that. So I know our listeners going when are you all going to take a break? Okay, so we do want to stop. We have wonderful sponsors. We want you to hear about them. You've already heard a little bit about them, but I'm, we're going to advertise them here. So listen to our commercial break and when we come back, we have and support our sponsors. Oh, please do that. Yes, support sponsors. But we'll come back briefly after that. So when you hear me talk about myheritage, you usually hear me point out how many different genealogy research tools it has. Earlier, in this episode, you heard us discuss another new MyHeritage feature, Scribe AI, a new way to use AI to analyze images of documents and photos and transcribe the text. Whether the original is handwritten or typed. It will estimate when and where a family photo was taken. It can explain what the symbols mean. In an image of a gravestone, I uploaded a copy of my great grandparents marriage certificate in the historical context section. Scribeai told me that the image was a New York City marriage Certificate and dated May 24, 1887, and went on to provide historical details. It transcribed all the names that appeared on the certificate, including the name of the person who performed the ceremony and the names of the witnesses. It transcribed the street addresses for the groom, bride and officiant. This was followed by a section of key findings. And then Scribe AI gave me five ideas of what documents to look for next. You yourself can try Scribe AI for free, but if you have a complete myheritage subscription, you can use Scribe AI as much as you want to learn more, go to myheritage.com Scribe AI
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One
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B
thing that we all worry about is whether our genealogical research desktop software is keeping up as things change. For instance, if you're trying to synchronize your desktop software family tree with your tree on a genealogy website, you want to make sure that the website won't change something that will cause your ability to synchronize to break. Fortunately, RootsMagic is always looking out for you. When Ancestry changed the way that desktop software has to work in order to synchronize between desktop software and a tree on ancestry, we RootsMagic quickly made the changes needed. This is one of the things I really like about using RootsMagic, that it quickly responds to changes in the online environment. Another thing is that if we make any changes to our RootsMagic tree, and if we close RootsMagick every evening, it will prompt us to back up the work we've done. Having that reminder is a good way to avoid having to redo any research. Why don't you try out RootsMagic for yourself? To find its free RootsMagic Essentials software, go to rootsmagic.com welcome back. So I want to talk about a recent activity and that is I had the opportunity, I don't often anymore, not as many societies do this, but I had the opportunity, lovely opportunity, to be able to go to Sacramento, California, this was in April, and to the Root Cellar Society, that's in Sacramento, California. And I had a wonderful time. I flew there on a Friday, all day. Saturday was me giving talks. I gave four talks, two in the morning, two in the afternoon and, and flew home on Sunday. And again, everybody was so nice. It was such a nice group of people. And I want to thank everybody involved, all the volunteers, there's just so many. And thank you for taking good care of me while I was out there. And, and so best wishes to all of you. Yeah, I'll try to keep everybody on the for the podcast informed of what I'll be doing next. Oh, well, one of the biggies I'm doing next, George, is of course, Roots. I plan to go to RootsTech and I hope they'll take my proposals. They have now opened for RootsTech 2027. They've opened the ability to submit proposals. So I'm going to be doing that very soon because I think I only have till like the end of June, so I've got to do that pretty soon. But what I'm talking to our listeners about now, I'm going to be there in person. Regardless of what happens, I'm going to be there in person and usually they'll take about three of my talks. We'll see if they'll still do that. I want to know from our listeners, if you're going to Roots Tech in person next year or planning to, what would you like to hear me talk about that you have not heard me talk about? So. Because I would like to get some ideas of what's most important to you in terms of topics, my guess is it may be something I've spoken on before, but maybe you haven't had the opportunity to hear it. So I would love to hear from you all about that. So just send us email@genealogyguysmail.com and say I would like for Drew@rootstech 2027 to talk about this topic. And so I'll, I'll take a look at those. The next thing we're going to do
- [47:09]
A
is is, is a virtual thing, isn't it, Drew?
- [47:13]
B
It is grip. So those of you don't know what GRIP is. Yeah, CRIP is a, is a genealogy institute, one of the services of ngs, the National Genealogical Society. And so grip, normally, over the many years, has actually been physically in Pittsburgh, and it's still going to be physically there. But they've also been doing virtual institute courses, quite a few, actually. And so of the. I think there's about eight courses, I Could be wrong, that are virtual. One of those is called the Intentional Genealogist, From Chaos to Clarity. And that's being coordinated by Kelly Jo Bergheimer. And I've gotten a chance to talk to Kelly Jo at other conferences and see her. So it'll be good to see her at Virtually. As I said, this one is Virtually, and the other instructor is Katherine Crichton. And so the three of us are going to do courses throughout the week. And that's the week of Monday, June 22nd, there's an intro, and it ends on Friday, June 26th. So we're kind of in the morning, it kind of ends before the afternoon. And I can tell you a little bit about this. It means you don't travel to Pittsburgh. You get to do this from home. The Regular price is 615, but if you're a member of NGS, you get the discount. It's 575. And so again, there are about 18 courses. Think of this, 18 presentations done by the three of us. And so, you know, it's. You're going to learn, let me just say, the objectives real quick so you can get it quick, so you can see an idea of what's going to be available. And there will be sessions will be recorded and made available in July until the end of the. I'm sorry, until July 10th. All right, so this is to learn how to organize and manage their own personal knowledge collection. Organize projects, goals and tasks, building the structure, ascendancy planning for brick walls and descendancy planning for DNA projects. Identify gaps in knowledge and develop an education plan. Plan an efficient and successful research trip. Focus on efficiency and time management to make progress in your research and use bullet journaling to focus on and analytical thinking and seeing connections. So those are the topics that the three of us will be presenting. I'm doing, I believe, three of those. 18. Kelly's doing a lot of them, as you might imagine, since she's the primary instructor. And I would just love to have you with us. I think there's still openings, I'm fairly sure. But again, the days of These are Monday, June 22nd until Friday, June 26th. So reach out to GRIP and see if you can still add it if you like. And if you'd like to spend a week learning from Kelly and from Katherine and from me, you still may have an opportunity to do that. So I'm excited. I've not really done institutes before. George.
- [50:48]
A
If you want to quickly find links to grip, you can go into your favorite search engine and type GRIP Space Genealogy and that will bring you up a search result with a link to the GRIP Genealogy Institute. And there you can investigate, you can have what's available, you can register for courses and go from there.
- [51:16]
B
Yeah, and there's like eight different courses. So the one I told you about is just one of eight. So you might decide you want to do something heavy into DNA. There's a course for that. There's. And some of our favorite folks are speaking at grip. Judy Russell, Kerry Taplin, Paula Stewart, Warren Jay, Stephen Little. I mean, again, all these people who are at the top of their field know this stuff really well.
- [51:48]
A
So Honey J. Morton will be there. She's one of. One of our favorites as well. And Katherine Wilson.
- [51:58]
B
Oh yes. They're going to be, I think local. Right. They're going to be on site.
- [52:04]
A
They are coordinators. The details of who's on site for the face to face sessions versus virtual sessions. I'm not sure you'd have to go through and do your own research.
- [52:18]
B
Yeah, the in person is from July 12 to July 17. So just so you'll understand, there's two different sets of courses. So again you can join that. So we're excited. I'm excited about that. And I think. Oh yes, as I said at the very beginning of this show, George, George has been doing genealogy. George, what have you discovered?
- [52:48]
A
I've been busy, busy, busy. My first, my first foray into genealogy took place in January of 1961. Think about it, 1961. So I've been doing this for a lot of years. But we had a snowy day in North Carolina. It was a snow day. I was deposited with my aunt and grandmother at their home. And they proceeded to what can we do with George? And so my grandmother started talking about her Revolutionary War ancestors and people in her family. And so ultimately we put together a long piece of parcel wrapping paper, brown paper. We spread that out over a drop leaf table in the living room. And then we started drawing a family tree using family Bibles and the information that was inscribed there. Now, you and I both know that those things in family Bibles may have been entered at the time of the event, or they may have been all transcribed from another Bible or added at other times where they aren't necessarily the best of sources. But that's how I got involved. And then as Drew said, you know, I've been, I've been involved with this long time, but as Drew said, I ended up certainly using after a lot of different software packages, I've ended up using RootsMagic. And I cannot tell you for how long I've used it, but it is, it is the package that I find easiest to work with. So that, that, that's something of interest. Now the reason that, that we wanted to talk here is, is I've been doing some research. Now I, I will tell you first off, with the caveat is that, that I have not personally reviewed the sources that, that are listed in all of these different places. However, for all the people, however, what I have done is I've gone back through my Roots Web Roots Magic database and I've gone back generation by generation by generation on, on all of my primary lines. And by primary, I mean my parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents. And so those of you who've been listening to the podcast or have seen me speak, have heard me talk about Greenberry Holder and his wife Ansibel Penelope Swords, both of whom ended up living and dying in Rome, Georgia, in Floyd County. And so what's interesting is I've been investigating backwards in time to, to see what I can find in the way of, of names and links and, and source material. And what I have done for the Swords line is I have gone back from, from me all the way back to my 14th great grandparents. Think about that. 14th great grandparents, John Seward. S E A W A R D. He spelled it that way. He was born in 1490. His wife, Ann Collins, lived from 1490 to 1571. But then I keep going, going through this and I find, find all kinds of people, but 14th great grandparents is pretty special. Now this morning I decided to do the same thing with Greenberry Holder's ancestry. And I worked back, I worked back through that and I printed off a. I used the tool, the relationship chart tool at Ruth's Magic, and I printed off a. A report of, of the relationships. Not only had I done one originally for the Swords family, going back to this John C. Word, but I also did one this morning and that was for the Holder family that I went back and I check to see how far I had information, whether it was proven sources or not. And I took this back also to 14th great grandparents. But what I found interesting, most interesting is that in the Holder family, they were. There were some that were involved in religious undertakings. One of them was. Was the dean of Windsor at one point. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. And then I found another one that was even better. And this is a Holder who, who actually was a member of the clergy. He was a doctor, doctor of divinity holder. And he was at St. Paul's Cathedral. He was a member of the clergy there. And he and his wife. And his wife is a Wren W R E N with some relationship back to Christopher Wren. But the two of them died and are both interred in St. Paul's Cathedral. And Drew, we've been to St. Paul's a couple of times in and just absolutely spectacular experience. But gee, I wish I'd known that they were there the last time. I'd have paid my respects. So I guess I'm going to have to go back again, huh?
- [59:26]
B
I'd say so. I'd say so.
- [59:30]
A
But the fact that I can amaze my brother, my older brother with all this family history stuff. I don't know if he's completely bored or not, but the fact that I can amaze and astound him with this type of information, it astounds me. So I'm expecting that he's going to be pretty darn impressed. So There we go. Drew, 14th great grandparents.
- [60:00]
B
That is a long time ago. All right, one last thing we want to talk about for just a few minutes. George and I've been members of the local society here in Tampa for quite a few years. I was president for nine years. And one of the things that comes up with any society, and it doesn't even have to be a genealogy society, but we certainly had a lot of experience with them, is that when you have officers who cover all the positions, the risk you sometimes have is that one or more of your officers may pass away. And it can be very unexpected. And the thing is, many societies are not well prepared for that, what we would call succession. And this is true. It could be cases of someone passing away, it could be someone moving to a whole nother part of the country, or the person just quitting without much notice. There's a lot of things that could happen. And what George and I want to talk about, because this has happened in our local society just in the last month or so, is that you need to be prepared for any officer position to suddenly become vacant and the need for someone else to step in and have all the information they need. Whether it's bank accounts that the treasurer needs, whether it's passwords to do things with the website, there are so many things that you need to have. I mean, I was talking to a society the other day and we were talking about the fact that, yes, for example, your bank account, you should probably always have two people who can access it, the treasurer and the president. So that if something happens to one or the other, that person who survives is still able to get to the important things such as the bank information. Again, same thing with technical stuff such as a mailing list or a website. You need at least two people who can step in if somebody becomes unavailable. So I just want you to say, to understand that having one person to fill each role is not enough. You've got to have somebody. It's kind of like in the movie, in the theater, right? You always have someone who's the understudy. The understudy. You need an understudy. It does that. And just to be understand, the person who's the understudy is not obligated to become the official full time person they are filling in until a new full time person is selected. And they might choose to be the new person, they may choose not to until someone else is willing to do it. So we've, I think made the case that you need backups not just for your data, you need backups for your people. And so make sure that you have that in place to prevent any kind of disasters. George, I think we have reached the end of the episode, but we do want to remind people that we want to hear from you. We never hear enough from our listeners, whether it's to say, hi, compliments on how you're doing, or whether it's I've got a brick wall, or I have a question about this particular type of record or whatever. We want to hear from you, email us@genealogyguysmail.com and we look forward to that, George. Any final words?
- [63:51]
A
Spend the time as wisely as you can. Talk to your older relatives. Get as much information now as you possibly can get. And I wish you all happy hunting.
- [64:04]
B
All right, take care, y'. All. Talk to you soon.
- [64:06]
A
Bye.
- [64:06]
B
Bye.
- [64:15]
A
Sam. Sa.