Stories That Live In Us

Epizodai

• Delaware: Courage to Save the Words That Built America (with Anna Crowley Redding) | Episode 118 02.07.2026 47min

  How close did America come to losing its foundational words forever? In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) takes us to Delaware—the First State—as our countdown to America’s 250th birthday reaches its finale. Our guest is Anna Crowley Redding, an Emmy Award-winning investigative television reporter turned acclaimed children’s book author. Anna shares the thrilling, forgotten history behind her book, Rescuing the Declaration of Independence: H...
• Pennsylvania: Stashed-Away Secrets and Forgotten Family (with Jessica Rae) | Episode 117 25.06.2026 49min

  What happens when a simple hint on your family tree uncovers a decades-old secret? In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) sits down with nurse, history lover, and content creator Jessica Rae to discuss a discovery that changed her life forever. While researching her maternal line, Jessica stumbled across a U.S. federal census record that listed her great-great-grandmother, Susan, not in a household, but as an "inmate" at Mayview State Hospital...
• New Jersey: A Sentence of Survival | Episode 116 18.06.2026 57min

  Imagine diving into your family tree to discover that your ancestors left you a secret message more than 300 years ago, encoded into the literal names of their children. I follow a trail of meticulous Quaker records from a genealogy brick wall in Ohio all the way back to 17th-century Boston to discover the story of Richard and Abigail Lippincott, my 10-times-great-grandparents. Together, they survived public excommunication in colonial Boston, two imprisonments in Devonshire, England, and rel...
• Georgia: Two Lives, Two Coasts, One Massive Secret (with Julie Merrill) | Episode 115 11.06.2026 47min

  A dapper playboy, a broken plantation safe, an embezzlement scheme, and a grandfather who completely vanished. What happened to William H. Wheeler? 🕵️‍♂️🔍 When an 83-year-old client named Jane came to Julie Merrill, an accredited genealogist with Ancestry ProGenealogists, looking for clues about her missing grandfather, she had no idea the search would lead away from Washington state, straight past California, and deep into a high-society scandal in 1890s Georgia. Armed with DNA clusters and ...
• Connecticut: The Windsor Witch | Episode 114 04.06.2026 21min

  〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️ 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️ Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com ...
• Massachusetts: From Rags to Riches to Ashes to Starting Again (with Laura Tasse) | Episode 113 28.05.2026 32min

  〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️ 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️ Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com ...
• Maryland: A New Kind of Identity | Episode 112 21.05.2026 19min

  Four months pregnant, two babies already buried in German soil, Anna Maria Niccum boarded a wooden ship in 1749 and crossed an ocean she'd never seen. Not for a revolution but for a foothold. My six-times great-grandmother made an extraordinary journey from the exhausted Rhineland Palatinate to the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland's Toms Creek, where she would hold the line for nearly two decades so her children could inherit something no tyrant had ever offered her family: a new kind of...
• South Carolina: Ancestors Leading the Charge in Battle and in Life (w/ Anne Mitchell) | Episode 111 14.05.2026 30min

  A wounded soldier refuses to dismount. His boot overflowing with blood, his hat riddled with three bullet holes, he rallies his troops up a South Carolina hill in Pennsylvania Dutch. History turns on a single moment. Anne Mitchell, a South Carolina native whose roots run deep in the Palmetto state, joins me to share the story of her sixth great-grandfather, Frederick Hambright, a German immigrant who helped win one of the most decisive (and least talked about) battles of the Revolutionary War...
• New Hampshire: Chosen Family, Jewish Roots (with Nancy Kotz and Lynne Snierson) | Episode 110 07.05.2026 45min

  Chosen family and Jewish roots run so deep in New Hampshire's Lakes Region that two families spent generations wondering where one ended and the other began. In this episode, Jewish genealogy researcher Nancy Kotz and award-winning journalist Lynne Snierson share the stories of their families, woven together across generations. From a Lithuanian rabbi who may have missed his train stop in 1902 to lakeside lobster bakes and a synagogue that still carries the nameplates of the original founding...
• Virginia: One DNA Match and a Woman Who Didn’t Want to Be Found (with Nicole Palsa) | Episode 109 30.04.2026 35min

  What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back? After Nicole Palsa heard her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking story, she spent the next twenty years searching for answers. Nicole’s great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney, disappeared from Virginia around 1914, leaving behind a little girl, a grieving family, and a silence that lasted generations. When a single DNA match arrived the Friday before Mother's Day 20...
• New York: A Melting Pot of Resilience (with Scott Pratt) | Episode 108 23.04.2026 36min

  What would you do if a single letter revealed that everything you thought you knew about your family was only half the story? Scott Pratt walked into a historic Brooklyn church as part of Ancestry's powerful documentary Railroad Ties expecting to find some connection to his Scottish colonial roots. Instead he discovered that he's a descendant of enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In this deeply moving conversation, Scott and I trace the extraordinary arc of hi...
• North Carolina: Buried Treasure, Buried Stories | Episode 107 16.04.2026 28min

  He buried a fortune in gold under a bent white oak. Then he died before anyone could find it. My 6x great-grandfather Abraham Kuykendall lived 93 extraordinary years. He survived colonial America, fought in the Revolution, crossed the frontier with 13 children, and built an empire of 2,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But when I found him on a Sunday night FaceTime research session with my dad, I discovered that history remembers him as a ghost story. There's still an ...
• Rhode Island: A Spirit of Independence (with Maureen Taylor) | Episode 106 09.04.2026 43min

  What can a single vintage photograph tell you about your ancestors? Maureen Taylor, know as The Photo Detective®, has spent decades proving that old family photos can solve family history mysteries in pretty fascinating ways. Born and bred in Rhode Island and currently serving as president of the Rhode Island Genealogical Society, Maureen takes us on a tour of the 13th state’s unique history. She recounts stories of her great-grandfather’s paper hanging business in Pawtucket and her grandmoth...
• Vermont: Conversations of Green Mountain Kingdoms (with Mike Brousseau) | Episode 105 02.04.2026 37min

  Ever wonder how a "Hallmark movie" setting shapes a family for generations? In this episode, Mike Brousseau shares stories from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It’s a place so deeply tied to his family that there's literally a mountain bearing their name. From a French-Canadian lumberjack who couldn't read but could build perfect spiral staircases, to a spicy French-Canadian grandmother who fixed refrigerators before YouTube existed, to a charming Dairy Queen meet-cute that almost didn't ha...
• Kentucky: Postmasters & Snapping Turtles (with Caitlyn Bruns & Paul Abell) | Episode 104 26.03.2026 38min

  Paul Abell has never wanted to leave Kentucky, not even when he moved 90 miles away for college. When his daughter Caitlyn was born, he finally had the reason he needed to dive into the family tree in a way his uncles had been nudging him toward for years. In this episode, I sit down with Ancestry colleague Caitlyn Bruns, a genetic scientist turned strategist. She invited her dad Paul to join us. He’s a man with roots so deep in Adair County that the post office practically runs in his blood....
• Tennessee: A Patriot From the Holler | Episode 103 19.03.2026 32min

  What would it take for you to enlist in a war, march hundreds of miles in winter, survive one of the worst defeats in American history — and then turn right around and do it again? My own Revolutionary War ancestor, Daniel Jones, went from the backcountry of North Carolina to a tiny holler in Northeast Tennessee, where a single pension file, a stray boar, and a rundown farmhouse porch brought his story roaring back to life. I've stood on that porch. I've walked that field. And I promise you, ...
• Ohio: Family Roots, Foundational Soil | Episode 102 12.03.2026 30min

  What if the names your ancestors gave their children were actually breadcrumbs leading straight to the neighbors who helped shape their lives? In this solo episode, I trace my own Cowan family line from a young Irish weaver who had to register as an alien citizen during the War of 1812 to a doctor who built a house that became a historical society, a saddle maker who outfitted the Union Army, and a U.S. Representative who somehow kept his personal life completely out of the newspapers. But th...
• Louisiana: Red Lipstick, Hidden Heirlooms, and Family Secrets (with Arlene Rome) | Episode 101 05.03.2026 50min

  What if the most precious pieces of your family history were ones you had to secretly carry home five steps at a time? In this episode, I sit down with my cousin Arlene Rome, a Louisiana native and retired nurse whose story of love, loss, and quiet rebellion will stay with you long after you finish listening. Arlene grew up in the golden summers of Metairie with a grandmother who drove a red convertible, played "These Boots Were Made for Walking" on an 8-track, and loved her fiercely — ...
• Indiana: Been Here All Along (with Lisa Fanning) | Episode 100 26.02.2026 51min

  What does it mean to be an American when your family has been here longer than America itself? Lisa Fanning, a board member of the National Genealogical Society and DNA expert, has spent decades uncovering a story so layered, so uniquely American that it stopped me in my tracks. She descends from four of the six families who packed up a covered wagon and caravaned from North Carolina in the 1820s to build a thriving free Black settlement in southern Indiana called Lost Creek. But the story do...
• Mississippi: Finding Far East in the Deep South (with Larrisa Lam) | Episode 99 19.02.2026 49min

  What happens when a California family walks into Mississippi and walks out forever changed? Filmmaker and music executive, Larissa Lam, director of the documentary Far East Deep South, joins me to share how a simple trip to visit a family grave in the Mississippi Delta unraveled a mystery decades in the making and revealed a hidden chapter of American history most of us never learned in school. Together, we trace how her father-in-law's search for the father he believed had abandoned him led ...