Did you see the San Francisco episode of GENEALOGY ROADSHOW?

The San Francisco program was filmed at the Old Mint on 21 July 2013. By chance (and some schedule adjustment), Gena Philibert-Ortega and I were able to attend the filming (we were on a presentation and book-signing tour around California). What fun to watch all the folks milling around. I got to meet some of the "higher ups" in the program development, as well as the amazingly welcoming PBS execs from the local station, KQED.

I am not new to the filming industry. Besides having friends (past and current) in the "business," and often visiting studios over the years, I was a guest star on Oh, Madeline, with Madeline Kahn, for one episode (this was in the 1980s . . . but the show pops up every now and then . . . I no longer get residuals!). But I continue to be amazed watching the equipment and the operators thereof . . . it's almost like a waltz as cameras move in, move out, and make it look so easy. I know it's not and that often there are last minute adjustments, for various reasons: lighting, sound issues (and the Mint was fraught with those as the ceilings have to be 30 feet high and with hardly any furniture in the rooms, if there were few people around, the echo was pronounced), availability of the applicants to be filmed, equipment failures, etc. The casting director was a miracle worker. She must have been in three or four places at once and used both walkie-talkie and her phone to connect with people. Bless her heart, when I didn't appear in the lunch room when the rest of the folks were there, she texted me to make sure I had something to eat! And what a spread (Hollywood folks are known for getting some of the best food for their people . . . I have no idea how so many stay so skinny). Anyway, the constant flurry of activity kept me on my toes (often getting out of the way of people).

So, I have been asked: did people really just show up with their stories, asking for genealogy advice? Yes. But those that Josh and Kenyatta worked with had submitted their materials at least two weeks in advance (most, more than that), and we on the research team had lots of time (this being a relative term, of course) to get the information and verify it. I will be sharing a little more about some of the stories that I worked on in later posts. But let's look first at those crowds of people.

Folks had an opportunity to reserve tickets in advance (I believe for free). I tried to do that, but all tickets were gone within three hours of the PBS station posting their availability! (Funny: one of my friends - non genealogist - got one of those, not knowing about my involvement, arrived, looked in and saw me, and we had a great reunion!) Anyway, not all of those people were ticket holders. The others were a mix of family members of the applicants, various crew members (moving furniture, setting up lights, tearing down tables, etc.), and paid "extras." Yup, they paid folks to make sure there would be a crowd. At first I thought that was strange, but when you consider that a lot of people would come in for their consultation, chance to be on TV, etc., and then leave, there was a frightful chance that, at the end of the day when they were filming the last bits, there would be just an empty building. Hiring extras kept that from being an issue and, watching large families leave after having their clans' mysteries solved, I realized the need for the additional, guaranteed "audience."

There were four or five genealogists there to answer questions and I was included in that group. Jim Dane, Kim Cotton (who was instrumental in securing a number of documents for us), Gena (who had another obligation in the morning and didn't arrive until later in the day), and me (I am sure I am forgetting someone, so please let me know who you are) talked to people "off the cuff," giving them websites to visit, other avenues of approach to their brick walls, etc. Usually no more than about 20 minutes was spent on each of these good people. But I also handled some of the less dramatic (for television) stories that had been submitted early and I was able to give a little information about the applicants' ancestors. So, while Josh and Kenyatta were filming in two large rooms across the hall, other genealogists were working with folks in another big room without large crowds around. Personally, I liked the more intimate setting as we got to discuss side issues that were not possible to cover in the filmed segments. The two segments I did do that were filmed never made it to the final cut . . . I am not surprised . . . one of them would have not fit in comfortably (due to the awkward setting and no real information involved - more of a show and tell ancestor chart) and the other really didn't include any new information for the applicant (except that he came from a long line of people involved in refrigeration and, before that, the ice business).

The day went by too fast. I had a great time. And, personally, I think the resulting splicing and cutting made it look a lot like it was (compressed into a viewable hour). I continue to wish that there had been more time for a couple of additional stories, but those were received very late and one was a bit "touchy" in the final reveal. I would like to see more of how everything was found, but each of the more involved stories would have taken a minimum of two hours to do right. I will share a few of those background research details in the next blogs. Enjoy.

(above: Paxil the Platypus displays the KQED Genealogy Roadshow card that everyone was given for coming to the taping.)

I said I search for dead, not living, people

The second of the two "connect living family" stories from the Nashville episode of Genealogy Roadshow dealt with a young lady whose father was unknown to her. I would estimate that I spent a good thirty hours on this story, with many, many successes along the way.

Luckily, Sarah knew the name of her father (who had died in San Francisco a number of years earlier) so I got onto the SSDI to get his exact (or nearly exact) death date. From there, I checked the California Death Index and located an abstract of the certificate, but it was not complete (only part of the mother's maiden name was listed). I contacted a genealogist in the Bay Area and asked her to get a copy of the certificate, which she did. With that document, I had the full maiden name of the decedent's mother and the name of his father (Sarah's grandparents). I tracked the father's line a little way, but got tangled in the different lines for the surname; I changed direction to the mother's line and was able to track her back to the East Coast.

Sarah's grandmother came from Connecticut and her line took me to the immigrants mentioned in the Nashville episode of the show. There were a lot of name changes happening (both actual changes and misspellings) but the Polish roots were relatively clear from the beginning of the search. To follow the family from place to place, I used city directories and learned that Sarah's great-grandmother was an early female employee of the Fuller Brush Company in Hartford, Connecticut, working as a "matron." The great-grandparents' immigration data was located, some by me and some by one of the production team members, who was the one to do the tracking into the original village in Poland.

Finding living family is often a back and forth procedure, and here is a perfect example of this as I went backwards, then forwards, then back again to pick up the history of a second husband, another alias for the great-grandmother, a move across the country, etc. I contacted the Bay Area genealogist again for other death certificates and a marriage record, giving me the needed name of the death informant. This coming forward again led me to Sarah's father's sister (Sarah's aunt) who had attempted to reach Sarah when her father died. Armed with the aunt's information from her mother's death certificate and a telephone number Sarah had from years before, I was able to get in touch with living family, connecting Sarah to her father's family, as you saw on the episode.

Lesson learned: Sometimes using the RootsWeb mailing lists can help with finding others researching the same line (while I was not able to connect with others searching for the same line I was, I used some regional mailing lists for help in finding information about research in specific areas - in this case, Hawaii). I also used some "finding living people" websites for phone numbers and email addresses of people who might be related. I had some interesting conversations, but did not have any luck with them . . . this time.

But I look for DEAD people

One of the earliest ideas the casting and producing teams for Genealogy Roadshow decided they would like to see was reunions - or, more accurately, unions - with "long lost relatives" people didn't even know they had. My first response was, "I look for dead people . . . I'm not very good at finding the living. What you want is a private eye." And I recommended one. But they insisted that I could do this (at times, the casting team had more faith in us than we had in ourselves, making our successes prove them right and, when we had a lack of results, disappoint us).

On the Nashville show, viewers saw two such "reunions," and I am pleased to be able to share a little on these since they were "my" stories. They were actually two of the first stories I worked on.

The first was "Uncle Fate," the story of a photograph showing a two-year-old White boy in the lap of an older African American gentleman. The identification was clear for the boy, but the gentleman was identified simply as "Uncle Fate." Identifying Fate was no trick and took less than thirty minutes. Since the photo was taken when the child was about age two, and the boy was born in about 1900, that dated the picture as taken somewhere around 1902. In the 1900 Federal Census, "LaFayette Cox" is listed in the family's household. "LaFayette" is often shortened to "Fayette" and, in the South, the slurring of the name would give us the name "Fate." But identification was not enough . . . it was decided (and I have to admit I was excited about the prospect) that we should try to locate living family of LaFayette Cox. I did most of it by doing the simple tracking of his family, first back, then forward. I could identify his offspring and some of the later descendants, eventually leading to the death of one of the relatives in the not too distant past (within the past 20 or so years, as I recall). This was done with the help of a posted family tree on Ancestry.com, but an email to the tree-owner did not get a response. The family had stayed in Knoxville and the surrounding area, so a connection with a genealogist in that area led to the discovery of a newspaper obituary for that recently deceased family member and the listing of his surviving family, including a daughter (identified with her married name and her husband's first name). A Google search led me to the husband, who is an educator in the Northeast U.S. I emailed him and asked for information about his wife. I had a good idea who she was (the person who had posted that tree on Ancestry.com). In this case, all my identifications panned out. She emailed back and was thrilled to have her ancestor identified and his life laid out for her. And, if you watched the Nashville show, you saw the two families united (not "reunited" - these families of two different cultures had never known of the other's existence).

Lesson learned: while on-line family trees often have incorrect information and/or holes in the lines, they can sometimes take us to clues about living family. Contacting the tree creator/poster may take us to a long-lost cousin. Together, the family members can make the tree more well-rooted, with sources cited and holes filled in.

I will write about the second of these union stories in tomorrow's blog.