00:14:01.700And we are back with Krista Cowan, the barefoot genealogist, genealogy influencer extraordinaire.
00:14:11.220Because as I say all the time, there is an influencer for everything, my friends.
00:14:16.880I want to know a little bit more about Krista's own recent past.
00:14:20.960How does one become fascinated by genealogy and then actually turn that into a career?
00:14:28.540Well, I came by it naturally. I had parents who
00:14:31.700very much cared about family narrative, like intentionally crafting a family narrative that
00:14:38.580made sure that certain stories were passed on and that information was delivered to their children
00:14:43.860at age appropriate times and that we were able to learn from those things. That was a really
00:14:51.760intentional thing on their part, which I so appreciate. And it's something that I'm really
00:14:56.420passionate about families doing. I think sometimes we craft narratives in our family that make us
00:15:01.860victims. We craft narratives in our families that disempower us. And there are so many stories
00:15:08.800available to us to create and raise resilient, strong, self-assured children that just come
00:15:16.980from their own stories. The stories that literally are part of them and their very DNA.
00:15:21.900yes yes and yes i can't and i can't wait for my kids to be old enough i've got a six of four
00:15:27.720and a one to be able to really tell them these stories but i also haven't shied away from it i
00:15:34.040took them with me to sicily last summer to solve this murder uh and told them exactly what i was
00:15:39.360doing and who we were investigating and what we wanted to learn because i think there's power in
00:15:45.680talking about this woman left alone for 13 years 12 13 years uh we recently discovered she bought
00:15:53.380her own land i don't know if she was ever planning on coming um but you know there is power and like
00:16:00.300you said stories of resilience that i think are so important to the generations today especially
00:16:05.660as i think a lot of us are searching for our own identities amidst the craziness of the world
00:16:11.440Yeah, and I think there's also, there's resilience to be found. I think there's also just some basic coping skills, right? Like, we're raising this generation that is so susceptible to anxiety and to other mental health challenges. And there's a lot of reasons for that, societal reasons for that. But, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are two generations that measurably have more anxiety than any other previous generation.
00:16:38.680And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that that we make life comfortable. Like we try so hard to avoid discomfort, to avoid hard things, to avoid consequences sometimes. And when you look to the past and all of its mess and madness, sometimes what you see is that they went through really hard things.
00:16:59.560and some of them made it out and some of them didn't, but all of them dealt with it in the
00:17:05.440best way they knew how with the tools that they had available to them. And I think there's something
00:17:09.400to learn from that. There absolutely is. And I couldn't agree with you more. And little did we
00:17:14.460know that we would be giving parenting advice. But no, I completely agree. I think, you know,
00:17:20.560there is something about saying they did hard things. You can do hard things too. I'm not going
00:17:24.660to shield you from the world which is hard yeah and that it's in you that that is literally like
00:17:30.020those are the people who made you and and there's something about that too and that is in your
00:17:35.920literally in your dna where does someone even start if they've got a story in a nugget where
00:17:40.900do you go from there yeah absolutely so um i started my genealogy career at owning my own
00:17:48.600genealogy research firm before i came to work for ancestry and i loved that i loved being able to
00:17:54.400work with families. The challenge was oftentimes they would hand me the research and I would go
00:18:01.160away and do it and then come back and present it to them. And that wasn't nearly as satisfying as
00:18:06.460the work that I've found over the course of the last 20 years, which is here at Ancestry, I'm able
00:18:10.900to guide people on that journey for themselves. And I think just as much as, I think that that
00:18:17.760process of discovery is an important part of the process. And you've been through this now,
00:18:22.380so you kind of have a glimpse of that like that is part of the part of the processes is where the
00:18:28.260power lies so so yeah if you've got a family story the first thing i always tell people to do is just
00:18:34.420start with a family tree right just sketch out on a piece of paper or you can do it for free on
00:18:39.840ancestry or there's a million ways just start by sketching out your relationship to this person
00:18:45.940because for me, when I first heard the stories of Peggy, I had this like vague notion that it was
00:18:52.620my granny Kerr's family. That's all I knew. But once I fully understood like the past from me to
00:18:58.620her, there was a tie. There was like a visceral connection. And so the family tree is the best
00:19:05.280way to start to sketch that out. And you do it with the best of your knowledge, but then you
00:19:11.340have to talk to your family members and I think again sometimes that's something that in the
00:19:16.120messiness of families we shy away from sometimes you know you may not have a great relationship
00:19:21.700with your mom but call her sister or her first cousin or reach out to you know somebody you once
00:19:26.720met at a family reunion when you were a kid and maybe you can have a more candid conversation with
00:19:31.560them than with a parent or grandparent who sometimes are protective of their own stories
00:19:37.820and when people start digging into the family history get a little bit nervous yes I haven't
00:19:44.240you were describing my exact situation like this is these are all of the things that have happened
00:19:49.720to me over the past year while I've been digging into this story yeah and it's funny some people
00:19:57.020are all in and some people are so hesitant and I think part of it has to do with just the way that
00:20:04.220certain things were viewed in the past. There were so many things that had so much shame attached to
00:20:10.440them, having a child out of wedlock, getting divorced. I mean, things that we wouldn't even
00:20:15.900blink at today that just carried so much shame and so much societal pressure. And so, you know,
00:20:24.160that older generation, when we start talking to those grandparents and great-grandparents,
00:20:28.300if you're lucky enough to still have one or two of those around. They're often hesitant.
00:20:34.820There's also a challenge sometimes with immigrant generations. You have immigrants who left the old1.00
00:20:40.100country intentionally for whatever reason and wanted to leave it behind. And sometimes even1.00
00:20:47.100when they came to the new country, dealt with a lot of shame around their identity and so tried
00:20:53.700to shed that a little bit. And so when we start digging back into that identity as the grandchildren
00:20:59.220and great-grandchildren who are removed from that immigrant experience, it becomes a little bit
00:21:05.380triggering for them if they or their parents had worked so hard to put that behind them.
00:21:12.440So there's that barrier that comes up as well. I don't know if my family wants me to refute the
00:21:19.200story that they have believed for so long. And I think that I will end up correcting it. And I
00:21:26.520don't think they're going to be happy about that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's true. I mean,
00:21:31.820that's true of stories, kind of the way they get built up in families. It's also true of
00:21:35.720identities. I mean, the number one complaint, if you will, that we get here at Ancestry
00:21:44.320is people who take a DNA test and find out they are not Native American, and then they are just
00:21:50.780convinced that the test is wrong. And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people,
00:21:55.320maybe thousands, who they have been raised with these stories of proud Indigenous ancestry,
00:22:02.060only to discover that it was just a story, that they don't actually have an Indigenous ancestor,
00:22:07.580but that someone started that story, or someone misunderstood something, or somebody's uncle
00:22:13.060married an Indigenous woman and the family took on that identity. And it really has become a part
00:22:19.560of people's identity in a lot of ways. And so sometimes when you start digging into family
00:22:23.620history, your identity, your perception of your identity shifts. Your identity always was what it
00:22:29.240was, but your perception of what it was or actually is often is confronted. Yeah. So you start with
00:22:38.020the family tree. And then how do you start using the records to start building the story?
00:22:44.320Yeah. So if you're starting here in the U.S. and working your way back, the magic year is 1950.
00:22:51.960So here in the United States, we take a federal census every 10 years. We've done that since 1790.
00:22:58.180Those census records, however, are protected by the government for 72 years. So the most recent
00:23:03.800publicly available federal census in the United States is 1950. It just came out two years ago.
00:23:09.900Every time there's a census release, it's a party around here. But that's the place you have to
00:23:16.360start. So you have to get your tree back far enough that you've got someone living in the U.S.0.98
00:23:21.000in 1950 in order to dive into those particular records. And those census records are so rich
00:23:27.800in information and story. And as you start to string them together back to 1940, 1930,
00:23:33.800You start to get these snapshots every 10 years of the economic condition, of the family
00:23:40.140relationships, of the housing situation, of the occupations, like this really kind of
00:23:55.100But that census is where I always encourage people to start in the records because it
00:24:00.100builds a really good framework for building out and discovering the rest of the story.
00:24:05.700And then from census records, where do you go from there? What is the next level?
00:24:10.380Yeah, so then the next level is what we call vital records. So that would be birth, marriage,
00:24:13.900and death records. If the person died here in this country, oftentimes that death record
00:24:19.700or an obituary connected to that will give you details about that particular town in Italy or
00:24:25.480ireland or germany where they came from and that you need that information because a lot of those
00:24:32.420other countries unlike the united states don't have national coverage of records you have to
00:24:38.040know where in the country they came from so you can dig more into local records once you've crossed
00:24:42.900the pond and so having that name of the place is a really important part of that process and
00:24:49.720sometimes you get lucky with those death records or with the birth record of a child for example
00:24:54.660would list maybe the birthplaces of the parents. So those are vital records for a reason.
00:25:02.080And again, what you're going to see is just those snapshots. So you'll know kind of when the
00:25:05.320children age out of the home so that you've got a range of time to look for marriage records for
00:25:09.680those children. You'll know where they're living. Another really important record set
00:25:13.840here in the United States for making those connections in the old country is naturalization
00:25:19.780records. So when somebody became a citizen, it would be noted on the census if they chose to
00:25:26.360become a citizen or not. And if they did, that naturalization paperwork is so rich in detail.
00:25:32.680They had to file first papers, a declaration of intent to become a citizen. They had to list the
00:25:37.460names and birth dates of all of their family members and where they came from. They needed
00:25:41.700to list the ship they came over on and the date and the port. And then a few years later, they
00:25:47.360could actually petition for naturalization. And then you've got that paperwork, sometimes with a
00:25:52.000photo attached. So that naturalization paperwork is a big link and a big part of the story to see
00:25:59.720how they chose to, you know, make themselves a permanent citizen of this country or not.
00:26:06.500We are going to take one more quick break here. And when we get back, there's a question that
00:26:10.480I've been dying to have answered ever since I started this research. And it's about women.
00:26:16.040it's about us. And it's about how our stories get lost and just how important it is for all of us
00:26:23.340to write down and share those stories so that we're the ones writing history.
00:26:46.040into the free audiobook now. And we're back. So much of women's history gets erased because
00:27:02.120for a long time, it's been men writing history. It's been men writing history books. It's been0.81
00:27:09.400men deciding which stories will get passed down through families. And when it came to my own
00:27:15.680great-great-grandmother's murder, we didn't know very much. In fact, most of my relatives didn't
00:27:21.740even know her name. They just knew that she was our family matriarch, and that she was murdered,0.95
00:27:29.020probably in a terrible way. There was no information celebrating her actual life,
00:27:35.500celebrating the fact that she had lived for 50 years, that she had had seven children.0.96
00:27:41.700we didn't know anything about what she was like and there's just so many women like her
00:27:47.500so many women whose stories we're never gonna know is there a particular difficulty in finding
00:27:55.740records and tracing stories of women's lives because it has not always been women who are
00:28:02.200writing history or who are the important actors in official documents yeah that's a great question
00:28:09.760um you're in a unique position because you're researching italian families and one of the
00:28:17.180benefits of italian families over many other cultures is that most often the women retain
00:28:22.840their own surname so you'll see that in the records you'll see that in the passenger list
00:28:27.700when they're immigrating um sometimes they often even chose to naturalize themselves here in the
00:28:33.860United States prior to 1922, a woman derived her citizenship from her husband, which meant if she
00:28:40.460married a U.S. citizen, she gained automatic citizenship. If he became a citizenship, she was
00:28:45.460grandfathered in under him. If she was born in the U.S. and was a citizen and married a non-citizen,
00:28:52.740she lost her citizenship. So there's like this really messy part of history where women were0.95
00:28:58.380not included in the records and records were not created about them. But one of the things we see
00:29:03.260about the Italian women is that even prior to 1922, they wanted their own documentation.0.74
00:29:08.960And so we see that happen. But in most other cultures, you know, when we see immigrants from
00:29:16.600Germany, from England, from Ireland, and then some of the way that the women are not recorded
00:29:23.640in records in Canada and the United States, they do lose their identity. They lose their identity
00:29:29.060first because they get married and often take on their husband's surname. And if you're tracing
00:29:35.140your way back in history, unless one of those children specifically lists that in a birth or
00:29:41.720marriage or death record, their mother's maiden name, it can be really difficult to find her
00:29:46.660identity and connect her to her family of origin. And then property laws. I mean, property laws in
00:29:52.560the United States right up through the 1970s often meant that women couldn't have their own bank1.00
00:29:57.520account. They couldn't own property without a man co-signing. And if there was an inheritance1.00
00:30:03.360to be had, oftentimes that got passed on to her children or to a brother before it got passed on
00:30:09.380to her. And so, yeah, there is a dearth of identifiers of women in records for much of
00:30:16.320history. I now feel like I am a part of this ever-expanding family tree that now could really
00:30:24.600go on for quite some time uh i was tracing the ancestors of my great-grandfather santo piazza
00:30:33.140lorenza's son but she had seven children so these are six other branches and rabbit holes that i can
00:30:42.060go down i mean do you find that people who are using ancestry it's it's just never ending
00:30:48.400Yeah, it's interesting. And when you think about it, we're called Ancestry because most people want to climb up the family tree, right? They're looking for the ancestors, your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents.
00:31:02.420But then back in 2012, when autosomal DNA kind of burst on the scene and Ancestry started selling those kits and that became this huge part of our business, what we were doing was we were connecting living people who share a common ancestor.
00:31:19.180So people started climbing back down the family trees looking for those descendants, right?
00:31:24.820And so, yeah, when you have families, particularly Irish or Italian Catholic families who have large numbers of children, or even my mother's Southern Baptist families from Arkansas, like, you end up with so many people.
00:31:53.980And the further back you go, the more that number just exponentially grows. And so you have to kind of decide how you want to approach family history. And I think there's times and seasons for different things.
00:32:08.440I am currently in the middle of a descendancy project where I have identified a set of ancestors of mine and I am tracing all of their descendants.
00:32:18.880The curiosity to see how a single couple and the choices that they made as part of their American frontier expansion West has affected the story of America is fascinating to all.
00:32:35.640and when you start looking at the exponential number of descendants and where they've all
00:32:40.260ended up in the world and the threads of commonality that we have even four or five
00:32:45.440six generations later and also the vast differences it's fast it's just i find it fascinating it's
00:32:53.740fascinating i can hear this love in your voice and this passion in your voice i could talk to
00:32:57.700you all day long krista there's a reason you're the barefoot genealogist there is i do love what
00:33:04.200I do. And I also just wish more people could catch the vision because, you know, as we started this
00:33:11.240conversation, we talked about the life-changing effects of family history. And I don't think
00:33:15.700it's just about us and how it affects us and how we change. But I also think there is healing to
00:33:21.800be found as we make those connections. People crave connection in the world today. And making
00:33:27.660those connections offers that. It offers perspective. It offers, I think, hope for the
00:33:33.200future as we can kind of just reconnect in some ways over some of those things. Because we tend
00:33:39.960to think in terms when we're doing family history research of families, but really it's networks of
00:33:45.100communities and tangential family relationships. And that holistic view gives you a clearer picture
00:33:52.460of who they were. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What is it like being a genealogy influencer?
00:33:58.320Are people constantly coming to you with questions?
00:34:18.760And any way that I can convey that is energy giving, not energy depleting.
00:34:25.860And so, so yes, I'm constantly bombarded and I do have to make sometimes hard decisions. And sometimes I don't get back to people as quickly as they would like me to. And some people get snippy with me and I feel terrible about that. But I do know that I'm in a space and have the influence to help people in a way that has the power to change their lives.
00:34:48.540You know, I, it's funny because my dad has such negative opinions of influencers and he called me back the other day and I had to laugh because, you know, I'm not selling yoga pants or Stanley cups to people on Instagram.
00:35:04.560yeah right um i'm i'm hoping that what i am opening their eyes to and their hearts to is
00:35:14.800the idea that there's an entire world full of people that they could be connected to
00:35:20.180some in very real ways and that there's an entire history um ancestry helped produce a tv show years
00:35:29.500ago called who do you think you are and at the end of one of those episodes it was the it was
00:35:34.360the episode with tom bergeron he says this thing that just rings in my ears constantly he said
00:35:40.640someone who lived 300 years ago if you're willing to listen could teach you something about the life
00:35:47.660you're living today and and that like that's what i want people to know is that there's such a vast
00:35:56.500opportunity to learn from the past in ways that will inform and direct our present and help us
00:36:04.860all together make the future even better. We're going to end on that. Drop the mic, Krista.
00:36:12.020I mean, I don't always get an ending as good as that, but yeah, fuck yeah. We are going to find0.99
00:36:20.660ways to direct our present and help all of us together make the future even better. Yeah, we are.
00:36:29.320Mm-hmm. You can learn more about Krista at KristaCowan.com or follow her on the Instagrams
00:36:37.060at KristaCowan. I love telling women's stories. I love talking about women's stories.0.53
00:36:44.780I genuinely love what Krista does, and I do think that stories about our past shape our identities today.