Dreams Come True for Genealogy TV

[Music] hey welcome back to another episode on genealogy TV my name is Connie Knox I am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research so do dreams really do come true well Judy Garland certainly says it does in The Wizard of Oz and well it certainly has for me after two and a half years of preparation I launched genealogy TV in late August of 2018 and well I couldn't be happier I love teaching I love video and I love genealogy so it was kind of a match made in heaven for me so why do you care well my goal and dreams is to help you go further faster and factually with your family research so I do that through a variety of programs if you think about it for a moment people don't go to physical locations as much anymore and while I I was really trying to reach beyond my little town here I thought video would be a good opportunity to do that so that is my goal and my dream is to continue to educate and inform about the genealogy industry all while having fun well you know the cool part about YouTube is it's a very unique platform in that it offers engagement and feedback from from you the audience to me and so I'm always encouraging feedback in the comment sections below and so in an effort to to really help everybody because every time you the audience offer advice to another in the comment sections we're all engaging with each other and so it's kind of a community spirit of helping each other and that's what genealogy is all about anyway right well recently I was speaking at a Rotary Club and I was speaking about DNA and how to how to make it work for you a little bit farther than just the ethnicity estimates and so I was doing this speech called DNA the strategy that the pros use and while I created a video out of that too I'll leave a link up there if you want to see that but afterwards a young man a student named Ryan Monroe came up to me he is a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and he asked me he said do is doing genealogy TV a dream for you and I said absolutely and he said that he was building a business called the dreams-come-true network it is a podcast that he has created and he asked me if I would be a guest on his show well later we decided that let's record it in video because I might be able to share it on genealogy TV so here it is today we're going to be sharing that interview with you make sure you stick around to the end of the interview though because I'm going to talk a little bit more about the future plans of genealogy TV and I need some feedback from you so I hope that you'll stick around to the end of the show and and I'll share with you what my future plans are for genealogy TV and how you can get involved hello and welcome to the dreams-come-true network please like subscribe and share for more videos this is a platform where I interview people who are pursuing or have achieved their dream and it hopes to inspire others to do the same I'm here today with connie knox and she is the host of two YouTube channels genealogy TV and MCE ancestry where she discusses topics such as family history heritage and documentation welcome Connie how are you good thank you thanks for having me yeah no problem no problem um so for those who are not familiar with you um could you just please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in genealogy oh my goodness I think it started when I was a kid my earliest memory of doing family history was with my great-grandmother we were visiting her I actually think I was so little I don't remember but I think I think it was after my great-grandfather had just passed away and we were there looking at old images I was probably maybe six years old and we were looking through some very very old images of my danish ancestors and was intrigued then and then a little bit later my grandmother said made a comment about her parents coming across the country in a covered wagon Wow probably about I don't know 12 maybe at the time so I was kind of like oh this is cool and so I was kind of hooked at that point by the time I was 15 I was doing genealogy Wow 15 15 years old I don't even remember what I was doing at 15 and I'm only 20 so I was you know I was you know I still have my notes I had this old spiral notebook when I was 15 years old with the still original bad spelling and everything all the original notes I was a kid so it's pretty funny to go back and look at it now but mm-hmm and so um you talked about how you're I don't know handwriting bad handwriting and things like that when you're organizing things for genealogy and you are trying to find documentation as it relates to your family history and other people's family history how important is handwriting in terms of that because you have a lot of people you know hand that have specific handwriting that most people's handwriting can't recognize other than themselves so do you just talk about a little bit the role that handwriting please when you're looking for documentation great question and you know it's interesting because a lot of times in a lot of the schools these days they don't even teach handwriting so one of my concerns for um you know kids growing up today if they don't understand how to read just normal cursive handwriting from you know 20 years ago it could be it could result in lost history because as we go back in time and we start looking at documents from 200 years ago that are all that beautiful old hand cursive writing a lot of people I know my daughter for one does not know how to read it and there's there's there's a whole art in actually learning how to read that because there are certain things things in the Old English way of writing like for example what looks like an F in cursive handwriting is actually an S and then there's also some what they call it a dangling s it's a it's a little curlicue at the end but some of that old handwriting you know is it is it true art in it it's not something that I learned growing up that old of handwriting anyway and so yeah there's lessons on how to just read that stuff so that's really fascinating because we didn't really focus a lot on cursive handwriting when I was in school I remember in third grade they said okay guys we're gonna learn cursive we learned it for I believe one week that is it and we didn't even learn the capital letters so there was this not like you said there's not a big emphasis on handwriting and that could result and like you said a lost generation you know people might not be able to actually read cursive anytime soon because we don't really hand write in cursive that much anymore you know genealogists all across the country especially in my age group are transcribing these handwritten documents all over the place you know I mean like I know that I have lots of documents that are old Will's from the 1600 1700s that I'm trying to transcribe but you know I can't transcribe them all but yeah I mean we at genealogists around the world are transcribing these documents but it doesn't mean that they're all going to be transcribed so yeah I think it's I think it's important that people continue to learn how that how that art gosh it's beautiful to some of that stuff I've seen it oh let's make it even worse let's put it in a foreign language I was trying to translate some Danish old documents the other day and you know what I have to say social media is my friend here because I met a cousin who is in Denmark and I discovered him through DNA connection and he translated a bunch of Danish census records for me you know kind of explaining to me what different things meant because even Google Translate now you can put you can put things into Google Translate and it'll translate for you but not everything not everything translates like some of the headings on census records might say birth or marriage or something but it might say it in a different way per the lingo of the time the era right and in the region Wow yeah and speaking of handwriting again in terms of medical records and things like that my grandfather actually has three different birthdays because they couldn't really read the handwriting in the time of his birth and stuff like that it was just a lot of confusion so they I guess he just picked one he liked and we stuck with that and so in terms of the handwriting and things like that in medical records can you talk a little bit about searching through medical records and family previous and as it relates to like family predispositions and stuff like that well you know it's funny you say that because I was just working on another video that where I'm gonna define some of the old medical terms mm-hmm droop see and there's a there's a few of them that are kind of unique to the time that are no longer being used and so you know just just looking that stuff up you know some of them you know meant the flu or it meant something else or they didn't know what it was at the time they would put generic terms on there but you know let's talk a little bit about North Carolina so North Carolina history and ancestry is North Carolina and the area in general is really fascinating because you have a lot of historical sites here you have a lot of mountainous regions as well as coastal regions there's a lot of diversity in terms of the landscape so could you talk a little bit about typical when you're looking when you're looking for North Carolina through North Carolina ancestry could you just talk a little bit about you know different students between Native Americans Quakers English German and things like that just in general well you know um the earliest settlers not keep in mind I am NOT a historian I'm a genealogist settlers that I'm aware I've started coming in in the in the mid to late 1600s and they were coming in in a couple different ways by ship and by the great wagon trail I believe it is called from Virginia and you can follow the migration patterns as they cross North Carolina a lot of them came into the paschal tank Creek woman's County area my Quaker ancestors did for sure and my earliest Quaker ancestor came in and in the late 1600s and he died in North Carolina in in 1690 and I have held his will in my hands at the door yes they have it at the North Carolina State Archives and that's a wonderful place to go research but so yeah so as they moved across the the Piedmont some came in up here in Wilmington up the Cape Fear River you know we have deep roots in in the Revolutionary War in civil war records we have you know the migration patterns went across the Piedmont and up into the North Carolina mountains one of the projects that I'm working on this is probably going to take until I die to do this but I've got a website called NC ancestry.com which goes along with the You Tube channel and what I'm trying to do is create a county-by-county resource for people that want to research in that County and it's kind of like I'm trying to answer the question why should I go to this County so you know a lot of the records are online these days but so you know like in the mountain region for example you know if they've got ancestors in Wilkes County or up in the boone area whatever it's kind of like why should I go to that County so I'm trying to put resources on there that are online but are also not online like the cemeteries and you know some of the some of the resources that are not digitized you know there's a various estimates from ancestry in different places that say that only 10 to 15% of the records that are available for genealogy are online so that means that there's you know roughly 85% of the records that we want to look at are not online so the idea is tell me what is there in that County why should I make a road trip to that County and go what am I gonna find when I get there oh absolutely absolutely and I think that's important because today a lot of people say oh I'm German oh I'm Danish oh I'm this and that and they just kind of just say that just assuming that is true but there's a lot of confusion associated with that you have to do a little bit of your own research and you have to actually have to have the initiative to go look for those kinds of things so I think a lot of people shouldn't really dismiss genealogy and ancestry they should really want to get to learn about where they came from could you just talk a little bit about why that is important because some people don't value value looking back into their past and looking back to where their family originated from well I can answer that question by asking you a question think of for a moment that what your folks may have told you growing up and those stories so if you recall what those are and you don't write them down they're lost when you have kids and and you know we're all gonna pass someday and if we haven't documented those stories they're gone and so you know I think genealogists you know are kind of honoring those who became before us by by trying to document as much as we and you know as we as we go back in time the tree gets bigger and bigger and bigger right you've got you've got four grandparents and eight great-grandparents and sixteen great-great grandparents and by the time we get back to ten generations you got hundreds of grandparents hundreds and hundreds of them if you count all the different layers right so you know there's a lot of stories to document but fascinating stuff man I'm telling you we have come across some really really cool cool stories and you know if we don't write them down then then our kids our grandkids and the kids that aren't even born yet the future generations they're gonna you know there's not everybody's gonna be interested but but there are gonna be some that are and we're at a really great time in history right now because there's so much that's becoming available for genealogists and if we can document that stuff now because from where we're sitting here in 2019 looking backwards 200 years we are the closest thing to that to that documentation and over time that stuff's gonna get lost exactly look at the the horrific fire that just happened in Paris I mean things get lost things burn up things go away for whatever reason and or they just you know some of those old documents they fade over time that's true talking about translating stuff we need to translate stuff now because that's 1690 that that from the year 1690 that my great-great great-great-grandfather his will thankfully I was able to copy it at the time I was at the archives and they've they've done a beautiful job of preserving it but you know I've trans I've transcribed it because that document eventually is gonna fade away even at the archives even in perfect storage facility you know and so thankfully we're at a point where we can start digitizing this stuff yeah start preserving it yeah and it's funny how how you said how things the further we get away where the closest to 200 years ago then you know maybe in ten years it won't be as accurate so I kind of have a I kind of have a I don't know what you call it a philosophical question for you okay now do you believe that is history more accurate the closer it is to an event or later on because sometimes a little bit later on more information comes out that wasn't available at the time of certain things at the event around the time that the event occurred so you think is more accurate the closer or further away from an event both why for example I lived through 9/11 I wasn't there but I was working at the TV station at the time and I remember you know when you work at a TV station I'm a general manager of a TV station and I have all these monitors in my office and I'm sitting there clickety click just doing my normal morning routine and I turn around and look at the television and the World Trade Center is on fire and I'm like holy cow turn up the volume well my first instinct as a genealogist was to start documenting and so what I did was I started typing everything I saw and I'm typing the minutes and I'm typing it as fast as I can and at one point things were happening so fast that I couldn't type fast enough and the reason I tell you that story is because I have now created this document of what my impression of what was happening it's like holy cow one of the towers is burning holy cow a second towers been hit oh my gosh you know this is the thoughts running through my head I'm putting on paper oh my gosh this can't be an accident this has to be enacted these are the thoughts that are running through my head and I'm typing them as I'm thinking them right and as I'm observing what's going on in the news and and and so my point for the to get back to your question is that is something that I lived through and that is recent relatively recent in time that was 2001 here we are in 2019 and so I you know if we document recent history okay and then 200 years from now we're gone right if I hadn't documented that then and I'm not saying this is a world scholarly thing it's just an observation on my part but 200 years from now the impressions that we had during our lifetime will be lost if we don't document right so to answer your question yes they'll probably be more records available for people to collect and combine into a new book or a new document or new history or a new video you know to help tell the story because as more things become available it may might make a clearer picture but also I have a very clear picture of what I documented the day of 9/11 and so that is my interpretation that would never have been written had I not you know I'm saying today I think yeah it's good to have that documentation in order to kind of when you're moving back later in time or when you're further back in time it's good to use that as a reference as you get new information to kind of confirm what you're thinking about what you're researching absolutely and look at how valuable like when we go back and we find journals of our ancestors and we go oh my gosh she's talking about you know the plow in the fields and you know bringing in the wheat before the snow you know I don't know whatever they did but you you know I'm saying and so we find those journals really valuable and people don't journal that much anymore you know we get we get news out of the newspapers and actually here's a tip we should be saving the really good stories that we find on social media because I don't know if the social media platforms are actually archiving that stuff but talk about great history because as world events happen people the Paris fire the Cathedral for example is a good example of of people suddenly posting their pictures and their memories from their visits there and oh my gosh what a treasure we've lost and by the law you know but its history in its and so it's a variety of observations that social media is really providing a great resource for I don't know that anybody necessarily is capturing that stuff well I know on Instagram and obviously YouTube as well YouTube is kind of a documentation as well um and Instagram you can go back and look at certain dates and things like that and you can look back and see what you recorded on a certain day so yeah it is kind of fascinating that you know people don't journal actually hand write in journal that much anymore but social media could actually be a a tool or resource used to track your family history a little bit later what's another great resource to that is starting to document history at least in present day is Google and Google Earth and and a lot of the way you can attach photographs to different locations I know that um I don't know that you're aware as a photographer I used to follow a guy named Scott Kelby and Scott Kelby is a photographer who's written a thousand books probably on Adobe products and he started this thing called the worldwide photo walk he started that probably I don't know a decade ago and what he was doing was he was getting people signing up to do photo walks in different cities there's one here as well but a volunteer would say all right I will do the photo walk in Wilmington and somebody in Charleston South Carolina you know volunteers to do one there and like 25 photographers sign up for free and they run around in they photograph on the same day all around the world it's really cool so there so Scott Kelby I don't even think he realized it at first and he does now but I don't think he realized when he started this little fun event that he was doing he was trying to sell books and and the reality was he was documenting the world on the same day Wow so you know people in Paris were doing this and people you know in New York City we're doing this and all around the world there was all these little photo walks going on and there are people posting this on contest it was a contest and you got you won a free book in each city if if your leader chose your photograph but you were I mean it could have been anything from moss and birds to architecture to sunsets it was all kinds of things but it was kind of cool so there's another way that you know the world is being documented now but it's the old stuff that we're really chasing in genealogy yeah Wow that is fascinating and so just as probably a final question just just in case someone is really interested in going back and looking through the family records and family documents and things like that can you tell them give them some tips in terms of how to handle the documents and how to go about getting certain information for your family records okay that's kind of two questions in one first thing people want to collect is events related to someone's life birth marriage death divorce military records church records all that kind of stuff and within those records what we're trying to look for are three things a name a place and a date so things that correspond so what that does is it tags somebody in a line it says even newspaper articles that kind of anything that what it does is say okay you know Punta de Knox was born on this day at this time and then on this day at this time she lived in this place and you can start creating this this timeline this trail of what a person did throughout their lifetime and actually that's how I write my notes is in chronological order and all the documentation that goes with it and how you say okay this person was in New York City at this time and this person was you know at different places so that's one thing how you handle the documents and how you store the documents are not in your attic you want to store them in a cool dry place please don't put stuff in the attic especially photographs but anything really will die in the attic really fast though and I can't tell you how many treasure trunks are in the attic right now people don't go maybe I bring that down stick that in the closet yes please and not in the garage either because that's a cool damp place usually you want you know where you are comfortable living is where your documents should be living as well wow that's fascinating good information a lot of people probably never heard of that kind of information and you know so it's always important to get to know about your family history I think it's always important to get to know and understand where you came from where your family came from because it creates a lot of connections a lot of it creates a connection with the past and it connects you to yourself today so it does help give you kind of a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging I know I've helped some adoptees and some people who maybe didn't know who their parents were or who their father was so once they find out that information there's the sense of relax and understanding and even if it's not good news sometimes when you help an adoptee find their biological family it's not always good news but at least they know and they know where they came from and you know it might not be that their parents were the best characters in the world but then from there they can start working back and learn where their ancestors came from you know maybe it traces back to Ireland or it traces back to you know a variety of different places but you know it's always fun and it's always fun when you find that immigrant ancestor the passenger list and then you find a picture of the ship they came over on oh that's always fun yeah I've seen a few of those those those pictures and photos they always look really interesting and really cool and it's always funny because sometimes the people when they first come over like a great grandfather a lot of them look really similar to the great grandson and so it kind of creates a lot of you know like I'm ready to have that has to do with yDNA to you know just to talk about DNA just for a quick second when we when we take a normal artisanal DNA test we get half of our DNA for our parents and from our mother and half from our Father but on yDNA you get a hundred percent of your Y DNA from your father so you as a male have a hundred percent of the Y DNA of your father your great-grandfather your Gregor great-grandfather for hundreds of years thousands of years you have the same Y DNA so Y DNA is pretty powerful when tracing the male especially what we call the surname line the father's father's father's father's line so that is not what they offer it like ancestry.com they a Thai ancestry they offer autosomal DNA which gives you a kind of a shotgun blast of the entire family tree but again why DNA is is I mean autosomal DNA eventually dies out after a couple hundred years it's so fragmented because you keep in mind you get half of your DNA from your father and half from you mother well if you're only getting half from each side that's leaving behind half it is and then generation back you're leaving behind bigger and bigger and bigger pieces of your DNA so eventually it it it dies out but that's what makes us all unique people well thank you so much for joining me today Connie it was a pleasure to talk to you and once again that was Connie nods host of genealogy TV and NZ ancestry you're on youtube so please subscribe to her Channel and find out more about family history and lineage there I'm Ryan Moreau from dreams come true Network and I want to thank you so much for watching and thank you and take care now thank you thanks Ryan for the privilege of being a guest on your show I had so much fun it was a lot of fun I really appreciate it if you want to follow ryan's journey there are links in the show notes below for that also if well we decided we were going to talk about the future plans of genealogy TV so I have so many ideas I don't even know where to start there's one of the ideas that I have that I really want to do it's going to take a little bit of time to pull this to get together but I really would like to start doing a live live show on Saturday probably noon Eastern which would be 9:00 a.m. Pacific to have engagement back and forth with the audience pick a subject and and we'll and we'll start talking about it and maybe we can also find an expert in that specific area to come on with us but I really want to start doing some live shows eventually I envision right now doing that about once a month I think it's probably going to be the second Saturday of the month so be on the lookout for that if you if there's something that you see that's interesting you know that you would like to see there please let me know so the footnote series I want to continue to do those these have been wildly popular these were the original of vision for genealogy TV and this is the long-form version of a specific subject whether it's researching in Italy or it's researching the Southern Claims Commission records those you know these videos have been very popular and wildly helpful I think so I plan to continue to do those so if there's a subject or a guest that you want to see for that please let me know Photo Fix Fridays is the photo restoration series that I've been doing I do those again as often as I can these have been wildly popular I was actually kind of surprised by how popular they are I know that photo restoration is not something for everybody but boy people seem to be really enjoying those so I plan on continuing to do that if you have a photograph that you would like to have restored on the show I might consider doing that please let me know in the show notes and all we'll get together and talk about it the trick for this is you have to have a good story that goes with the photograph so that you can tell the story while I'm doing the photo restoration so that is where I'm hoping to go with Photo Fix Friday's tiny tip Tuesday's will continue as fast as I can produce them those are the short form tips that kind of help help just quick little tricks to help you with your genealogy I would like to start a Q&A session these would be pre-recorded these would be like coaching sessions but I envisioned this to be a group coaching session not just me doling out information this would be like somebody presents a problem and a group of us try and help solve it and the reason why I want to do this is because we all learn from each other so by by presenting a problem and hopefully a solution during the show that others can learn from it or maybe be enlightened about a record they may not have known about or a technique that they didn't know about before so I envision going in that direction I do not have a name for that show yet so if you have any ideas for that leave that in the comment sections below so based on the growth of the channel it appears that I'm headed in the right direction I am a one-woman band working as fast as I can to produce as many as I can I do it all from beginning to end there is no cameraman there is no editor I am producing all of that so if you like it please give me a thumbs up I appreciate it I am having so much fun producing these and it really is a dream come true so don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so you get notified every time I upload one of these videos and tell me in the comment sections below where are you watching from I would love to hear lastly if you really are getting something out of it please help support genealogy TV and drop something in the tip jar I'd really appreciate it ok until next time keep on climbing your family tree [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 4,210

Rating: 4.951417 out of 5

Keywords: #familyhistory, #GenealogyTV, #genealogy, genealogy, family history, genealogy research, family tree, dreams come true, what is genealogy tv, who is connie knox, about genealogy tv, how to research your family tree, Dreams Come True for Genealogy TV

Id: TF2WXeLHhDw

Length: 36min 54sec (2214 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019