 people. If you were watching Facebook this morning, you saw that I blurted out that I had a special guest today and it was a killer guest. And that killer guest is Nathan Dillon Goodwin. Nathan is in London, or not London, he's in England. Yeah, not far from Ireland. 60 miles away. And Sarah and Greg, Greg had to play for a funeral. We're very sorry about that, Greg. And Sarah decided to hop off to a wedding and kind of left me in the lurch. And I said, who would be fun to have in the show this morning? And so Nathan Dillon Goodwin is that person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So good morning, John Tyler and Ireland. What's that, Nathan? I'm quite far down your list. No, you're not. You're not down my list. I usually have co-hosts, so you're my co-host for today. Yay, Nathan! Good morning, Susie Carter. It's cold. Yeah, it's cold here too. Has it gotten cold in your area yet, Nathan? It's starting to, yeah. Are your leaves changing? They're just, yeah, just now starting to fall off and change colour and yeah, we're losing the heat, which is a bit of a shame. Oh, it's iffy. It's iffy here. Do you like the fall? What's your favourite season? I really like summer, to be honest, so I'm a bit, I'm mourning it already. I'm thinking, no, it's over too quickly, but I also love, I love winter when I can go skiing and be wrapped up nice and warm, but not winter in this old house that we've bought because it's freezing. It's freezing, but I thought you guys had like upgraded the house and done all of that yet, no? No, it's still the same, still falling apart, still freezing cold. But he is building a writer's niche. If you don't know who this gentleman is, I'm going to introduce him to you in just a second. Let's keep saying Susie Carter, Carter, Tommy Butt, Chris Federighiello is here. Betsy Kyle, hey Betsy. Let's see Lisa Gervais, Christine Miller, Melissa Fleischman, Steven Tomaskowitz, Judy Stutt, Pat Patricia Jackson, Donna Bauman, John Vasky, Norman Weston, and more people. Let's see Christina Corbilani, Thomas Kernelon, Kathy Nava, Donna Gerber. Oh, let's keep going. Yeah, all you people are here. And more. Oh, and Betsy Kyle says, welcome to Nathan. Oh, look at his, okay, we always talk about mugs. What's on your mug, Nathan? Some London buses. It's a cat kids and mug. It's got a nice big one for my tea. A big wampr for his tea. Yeah, I need lots of caffeine. Cheers. Cheers. And it's three o'clock where he is. So it is. If you don't know who Nathan Dillingill is, I'm going to introduce this gentleman to you because he's one of my favorite writers. And he writes books. Does he ever write books? I nearly killed myself trying to bring all of his books down today. And you see what happened? I just, I couldn't, it was hard. It was, it was so hard. I even had marks on my body from trying to carry all of these books down the stairs today to my, my office down here. So, okay, so I've done that. Let's put them back in order because, you know, I'm OCD that way. So Nathan is a writer and he writes lots of stuff. He's written historical books about some of the areas near where he lives in England. And he's also written a series of books on genealogical mysteries. And not only that, he started a new series recently called the Venator Cold Case series. And the last one was The Chester Creek Murders. And the new one, let me share my screen here. The new one is, uh, let's see, let's go big screen here, is, uh, go even bigger. The Sawtooth Slayer. That's the new one. Now, Nathan, Nathan, did you want to scare people with the cover of your book? I don't want to scare people or maybe a little bit, but I kind of wanted to give a good feel for what's inside. I think, I mean, you, you, you've read it. So, um, does the, does the cover tie in with the, with the content? Yeah, yeah. I just, before I even started reading the book, I was like, okay, the cover scares me. There's a guy that looks kind of like the Shaman who went into the US Capitol on January the 6th. And he's standing with a rug around him and a head and a skull and it's cold and snowy and just all sorts of scary thoughts. So when does this book come out? So it's available now for pre-order on Kindle, but it's released on 28th of October. So just over a month away. Um, and that will be in paperback Kindle and various other formats with audio book to follow. All right, we've got Donna Gerber says she loved the Chester Creek murders, especially as it took place not far from where she lives. Thank you. Good job it was a fiction. Kathy Nava says she loves the book cover. Yeah, yeah. So Nathan's here and we're going to be talking on and off about his stuff as we go. But guess what? We're going to do our regular stuff too. So he is the official co-host today of the Wiggy Tree live cast. So welcome. Do you have any journals or diaries in your family Nathan? Yes, I've kept a diary for, I can't remember when I started maybe about 1996-ish, something like that. I've done a daily diary. And I've also got a collection of my grandmothers that I had after she died. And she kept hers from about 1960 something right through to when she died a couple of years ago. So yeah, I've got some. Do you put salacious material in your diaries? Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? I think actually they're quite boring. It's more like what we've done in the daytime, you know, it's not very exciting. Got up. I kind of think, yeah, exactly. I kind of think, well, I can't make up my mind what I would want people to have in the future. Like, you know, some people kind of think they don't want to read my diaries when I'm gone. But I'm thinking, do I want that? And so I'm a bit mindful of that when I'm writing my diary, thinking someone's, you know, someone might read this in a few years time and think, what? My journal is therapy. So boo, if somebody ever got a hold of it, it would be salacious for only like three people. But do you keep everything? Yeah, so the question of the week is, have you found any diaries from your ancestors? Oh, and posted this. Oh, I picked a, I picked up my favorite one. Wait a second, where did it go? Number, I don't have any diaries, but there's a family Bible from my mother's adopted family and three of my relatives who've recently written their memoirs so they can be passed down. That's Robin Lozier. One memoir from each from an uncle and an aunt and one from a father. There aren't any in our family, but I have a bunch of letters that my grandfather wrote my grandmother during World War II. Virginia, don't forget to upvote these two people. Give these people some love when you're doing this. Virginia Field says she has a few pages from a diary of my maternal great-grandfather Ezekiel Thomas. Those pages relate to a trip from East Texas to Fort Worth, Texas by train, and then by horseback out west of Fort Worth looking for land and then back home. So it's part of a lengthy diary that somebody borrowed. Much more interesting than what I had for dinner and things like that. Yeah, I had chicken for dinner. But what would you put, have you ever been to Texas, Nathan? Yes. It's big and flat. Well, for the most part, flat. What would you talk about on a train trip in Texas? There's another scrub bush. Yeah, I had that when I was on a train going through Nebraska. I think it was a very similar thing. There was another field, another field, and another field, and another water tower, and another field. Yeah, it's like driving through the prairies of Canada. Everybody goes down into the US to go around. That's so funny. Let's see. Rick Pearson, Peterson says, yes, Diary of Joshua, Hempstead of New London, Connecticut. He has that. The diarist appears to be my ninth great grandfather. Valuable and invaluable genealogical and history information. I have diaries of my grandfather from a memoir of my third great grandfather, Bill Floyd. Here was my favorite of the day, Carolyn Cummings. I have a diary from my paternal grandmother. In one memorable entry, she glottes over the lingering painful death of the man who jilted her practically at the altar because he'd gotten another girl pregnant and a shotgun came into play. That's a very good answer. Yeah, you could probably get some fodder for some of your novels from some of this information. Absolutely. That's very interesting. A box of letters written in grandfather received while he was fighting in the South Pacific from John Faske. Hey, John, you're in here somewhere, aren't you, today? Short diary that my grandfather kept during his time in Houston, Texas. Apparently people in Texas keep diaries. 1911 and 1960, my grandmother also kept a diary of family events from the 30s to the 60s. When he joined the Boy Scouts, his dad, at age 13, received a diary in which he wrote a week's worth of events and then stopped. That's from Pip Shepherd. Where is Pip? Where is our man in the kilt this morning? Pip, Pip, you are far too absent. Just saying. See, in Ross, I have letters between my parents from 1950 to 53. They married four months pregnant. My older brother, she's not allowed to continue teaching and married quarters have been found and then she moved to the base and the letters stopped. That's indicative of something, I'm sure. Al Gore says she found a childhood diary of an aunt's in her possession that passed to her in true style. It didn't have that many entries, but a few that were an insight into the teenage aunt I never knew. Very mundane. What time she went to bed, housework duties, and friends' missions mentioned. So that's just like Nathan's diary. I'm so surprised you have a boring diary. Surely there's something salacious. I think you should write something salacious about today. I'll try to think of something salacious for you. Think of something. Nancy Freeman says she has a travel diary from her paternal grandmother, Abby, that she's slowly transcribing. That's fun. That's what I need to do with my grandmother's ones, to transcribe them. I've dipped into them to look at key dates like when her father died and things like that to see what she wrote down, but I do need to just go through them methodically and type it all out. Can you follow all the rules of transcriptions? Do you put things in brackets and make... I haven't started yet, so I'll probably make my own rules up and after a while... All the mundane stuff and kind of, you know, trying to find... I can't imagine my grandmother would have written anything salacious to be honest. Oh really? Oh, I couldn't have thought about it about my grandmother till I started doing some research. Woo doggy! I have my... Nancy Woodward says she has her paternal grandmother's diaries from 1925 until 1953. That's crazy. That's really crazy. And then Roger Strong has some reprints of family diaries that I particularly like. A compilation that my grandfather did of the daily action reports of the field artillery battalion that he commanded in Sicily in France during World War II. Wow. Yeah, that's craziness. I also have letters home to my grandmother, and he was in charge of censoring his own letters, so he did very little editing. That's funny. Let's see, Anand Sharkley. Sharky says my great grandfather by adoption died in his early 30s with TV. He was a plate layer on the railroad. He was also a keen gardener and bird watcher. A diary presumed to be his was found recently with my aunt who was moving into a shelter accommodation, and the entries include how far he had cycled to work, which birds he had spotted, and where and when to cut back from sanctum plants. That just is so exciting. That was from Anand Sharkley. Paige Colt says I have my grandmother's diaries from when she was a young woman. She wrote that she and my grandfather left their wedding reception through a window, through a window. I can't imagine my grandmother doing that. That's funny. Great aunt, a diary that kept for a few minutes while she was in college, a few family bibles, some family information from Stephen Sanders. Let's jump on down here, just because I want to say her name, from Fiannuala, O'Connor, just because you know I want to mispronounce something. Judy Stets is saying over here that she's got some cards and diaries. Chris Berriello says he has no diaries, just letters. Judy Stets, don't worry, Nathan, I make my own rules too. Found a diary of a cousin about an abused cousin, that's sad, and also a birthday and anniversary diary. Florian says that my third great grandfather was a painter and traveled the U.S. and wrote a diary about it, which later got published. But you haven't read it? Yeah, published. He's bought it, but he hasn't read it. Florian. You need to read it. You need to read that. That's very interesting. I'm supposed to read John Tyner's when I get to it. If I skipped over it, John, tell me to go back. I don't see it yet. Online at JSTOR, I found a scholarly paper on the diary of the 18th century George Arian the Ragman. George's wife Christina was a daughter of old Philip Grimm, as George called him, my ancestor. George spent a lot of time complaining about his unruly teenagers. He'd write them out of his will and then occasionally reinstate them. How much money could a ragman have had? That's from Jane Pepler. That's funny. And some of these people actually have journals online that you can actually go and read. Union Army in the Civil War, this is from Laura Rader. He lived on a farm in Ohio, speaks about that. He's teaching his family the farm debates, encoding my great-grandmother. That's sweet. That's from an 1866 diary of her grandfather. Then Marsha Litzinger says she's got a diary of William Ransom, a journal of Elizabeth Ransom, the Ransom and Latimer families in the sketch of Colonel Ransom and the Ransom families. You people were writers. That's fun. Let's check out the new comments down here. Let's see, Florian, so much genealogy, so futon. That's so few minutes, that's for sure. Mary Lou Morris, I have my mother's diary journal from her young sister. The diary's written in the 40s. Aunt, so a lot of people have diaries. Make sure you go through and upvote these. I'm scrolling through looking for John Piner. Thankful. Steve Lake says, thankful for a cousin and her mother when he inherited a diary and a family tree journal. That's so cool that they had that information and did it. Pat Callan says, no, I'm still looking for you, John Piner. I don't see you. Oh, here's one, the Spencer car. Yes, but it's in Croatian and I have not found anyone to translate it yet. Have you tried looking in wiki tree? We have wiki tree people who just translate. They're sitting around doing nothing and all they'll do is have volunteered to translate. I would put it a G to G question and say, does anybody do Croatian translations? I have a journal I like to translate. You might want to look into that, the Spencer car. Let's see if John Tiner shows up here. Richard Hill. My wife has a pocket journal that her grand uncle Captain Alfred Ireland kept while he was serving as a doctor in Europe during World War One. There are interesting entries up until the day before he was killed in action, then nothing more but hauntingly blank pages. That's an interesting thought, is to look at all the blank pages and wonder what went on. John Tiner, if you're the last one, we'll find it. And what is this? I love Dylan's books. Dylan's books? Dylan? I think I've read all of them, but the most current. That would be the most current was... No, I've got them backwards. The Foundlings. The Foundlings. It's on the very bottom of the stack. I'm not going to do that again. It's too heavy. Make sure you upload these people and let's scroll down here to... Ooh! Somebody actually... Okay, it looks like it's in German. Oh my word. Mark Williams. Does he say anything about it? My third great-grandfather kept genealogical information in a Psalm book. Wow. That's crazy. That's fun. Let's keep going down here. Hillary Gadsby. Where are you, Hillary? I don't have any diaries, but I know that my uncle has his uncles, my great-uncle's diaries. I have a letter from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, and my sister has some of my father's letters to our mother that she found, and I have a digital copy. I do have autograph books, as well as some pages digitized, and she has a space page. Of course, Hillary has a space page. Let's check it out. Oh, look at the signature books. Oh, that's fun. Be good, sweet maid, and all who can be... I can't even read that. Anyway, that's cool. Thank you, Hillary. You always have fun stuff. Let's keep on going down here. Chris Miller, Mary Harb, for John Tyner. We'll upvote at John, even though we haven't read it yet. I found a 1960 diary written in by my maternal great-aunt, great-grandaunt Augusta Maud Hutton, who was born in 1875. She wrote cousins' addresses in her diaries, so it helped confirm where some of them lived that I didn't know what had happened to them. She was known in Maud and died three years later. Something doesn't make sense with those numbers, but that's okay. That's cool, John, that you have that. I have my grandparents' address book that has lots of genealogical information, and then bank slips. My grandmother would be at the bank, and she would be talking to the teller about who she was, and she'd be writing notes about the teller on the bank, the back of the bank, out of the slip. Hey, Azure. Hey, Debbie. All right, so that is the question of the week, and that's fun. Let's see, where we are. Nathan. Yes. Good one. Do you have any magical connections to Middle Earth? Well, not that I'm aware of, but you're going to tell me, aren't you? I'm going to tell you. Here are Nathan's degrees. He's 28 degrees from J. R. R. Tolkine. How do you pronounce his name? Tolkine. Tolkine. 33 degrees from Sean Bean. Right. 35 from Tate Blanchett. Oh, Orlando Bloom. He lives not far from me. Well, I think now he's in Los Angeles, but he grew up in Canterbury, and he's similar to my age, so 43 degrees. We're practically twins. You're practically twins, and now everybody knows he's not at his house in England right now. But then you move. I think he just lives in LA. Oh, okay. Being all actorly, you know. But that's really interesting. Marty Freeman. And Adam and I talking. That's really good. 28 degrees. Well, it's the connections. It's not like, we can look and see if you're really related to him. 35 from Christopher Lee. 37 from Ian McCallum. Howard Shore. 28 from Liv Tyler. That's pretty close. Yeah. But 24. Your closest is David Wynnum. So we got a couple of here. Chris Ferriero says his closest is Christopher Lee. And Debbie Root says, Tate is one of my closest. Are you on first name basis? Middle Earth. I am not going to do this as well as Greg does this. So, you know, we might zoom through this so that we can just have a chat with Nathan Dillon Goodwin. Sean Bean. This is more interesting. You are. No, no, this is more interesting. Middle Earth. Middle Earth. Sean Bean. And did it say who he played? He played Foramir. So he was a good guy, right? Yeah. Yes. And since he's alive, though, he's got a pretty good profile for somebody that's alive. He went Tuckwood. Read it, Tuckwood Bean. Is he related to Mr. Bean? Broke Compliments of School and Rotterham College. Got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Wow. Oh, but there's no sources. Well, there's a birth marriage. Okay. So they put the sources in. I don't know if I like that. I like sources just boom, boom, boom. But who's the profile manager on this? Oh, Ross Haywood. Ross. I like this profile. Nice. So that's him. And that's not a very good picture of the fellow. No, not a very good picture. Okay, let's go on to our next one here. Kate Blanchett. Let's see what she looks like. Kate. She's the daughter of Robert DeWitt Blanchett Jr. I am assuming that he's passed away. And there's absolutely nothing on her. So I don't know if you know this, Nathan Dillon Goodwin. But on WikiTree, because of the GDPR, we don't put living people's stuff up. So even though she's a public figure, we still have to be careful. And not, not cross pass with bad things and telling too much. But she portrayed Galadriel and Elf and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring movies. She's an Australian, but she can do, she can do some scary stuff. She was, there's a movie called Hannah and she was in that and she was scary in that movie. Orlando, here you go. So he grew up near you? Yeah, in Canterbury. Born in Canterbury. Yeah. So but you like in a different town? Yeah, I mean, I'm now not far from Canterbury. So I was in Sussex where I was born. But yeah, so he grew up there. I should pull up a picture of your current project. Which current project? Building your writer's book. Yeah. So Orlando Bloom doesn't have a lot of stuff. But he's been lots of stuff. He played Legolas. Legolas was one of my favorite people, my favorite characters from the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, mine too. Mine too. Let's get rid of him. Let's get rid of that. Martin Freeman was Bilbo. Not one of my favorite characters from the book, even though he was the main character. Again, nothing on the profiles to really talk about. I think Greg did this to me on purpose this week. Peter Jackson, the director of the movies. ONZ, that's KNZM. Does anybody know what those honorary degrees or honorarians are there? New Zealand film director, producer, screenwriter, producer of the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit. Is Peter Jackson working, Chris Ferriero probably knows this. Is he working on the new TV show that they've got coming out? Anybody know that? Nice. A bit more in his information, but not much. Christopher Lee. Now there should be a good one on him because he has passed away. There's lots of great pictures. Oh, and as Dracula stared me to death, esteemed actor, author, musician notable for such iconic characters as Dracula, Skeramanga, Saraman, and Count Dooku. Oldest singer in the heavy metal industry. Really? Who knew that? Who knew that? So he was born in Belgravia, Westminster, London. Actually this has a pretty good, there he is from the Lord of the Rings. He's got a pretty good, who's got the profile on that? Scott Fokerson, you've done a good job. He's got some honorariums too after his stop and he's a sir. What does CBE mean? Commander of the British Empire. Do you know what CSTJ means? No, I can make something out, but no. Oh, see Christine Corbilani is 23 degrees from Sir Christopher. But she was, her mother was born in British South Africa. There you go. Order of New Zealand. Knight commander of New Zealand. Order of, thank you, Erin. And then somebody else also answered that. And then somebody else answered that again. Morgan Freeman, 40 degrees, 40 degrees from Martin Freeman. Hey, I'm doing an okay job when I'm the only one here. No offense to Nathan. I didn't tell him how to do all the comments. He has a really good profile. So thank you very much for that, you guys. That's great. I want to know if I'm related to Tolkien. Is he in the list? No. He, well, no he is, but he's in your list of... Yeah, I'm related to him. Okay, so there's, every time there's a green, a change from green to yellow, that means that it's a connection, meaning that there's a marriage or that it's a brother of somebody or it's an AJ Jacobs type connection. If you ever heard AJ Jacobs saying that he's related to somebody by their first cousin, second wife, third sisters, daughters, whatever. But we can go down here and we can see if we have a common ancestor. Let's see. Let's see. Let's check this out. No, could not find a blood relationship. Sorry. I'm so very sorry. So Ian McKellen. How close are you to Ian McKellen? Did I lose you? I did. Let me go back to you. Here we go. Ian McKellen, 37, so way far, way, far away. We're getting to your closest. Ian McKellen, Gandalf. He's quite the colorful character in real life too, isn't he? He is, yeah. He is. Was he in the movie The Dresser? I don't think I've seen The Dresser, so I'm not sure. Yeah, he was. Yeah, I think he was. He's got a good name commander of the British Empire in 1979, got his knighthood, so KBE his knighthood, for services to the performing arts in the Queen's New Year honor, uh, named him Order of the Companion of Honor. He had quite a few. Are they all up here? They don't want to have any of his honorariums after his name, so he needs to go fix that. Oh, oh, but look who the profile manager is. Does anybody notice who the profile manager is? Somebody notice it. It's Ian McKellen is the profile manager. Is it actually him? I don't know. Send him a private message. Quick. No, I know. I can't click on the name, which means that would be somebody else. Oh my God. I'm geeking. That's crazy. Okay, somebody check that out. Somebody check that out. I just, I'm so shocked. Okay, Howard Shore, composer of the movie, movie score. He's Canadian. Yes, composer and conductor noted for his film scores, including, particularly for including particularly. Now, is that good grammar? It is punctuation day. Howard was born in Toronto. Nice. Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings. Most respected and impressive trilogy of music of all time. Nice. Governor General's performing arts, officer of the Order of Canada. Nice. All right. So do they have his honorarium? Yes, they do. Not that I'm the honorarium police today. Liv Tyler. That's who I would, but if you're related to Liv Tyler, you would also be related to Steven Tyler. Yes. He's an interesting fellow. Oh, she's got a bit more. Tyler was initially named Liv Rungrind when her mother claimed that her biological father was Todd Rungrind. You can't look at Liv Tyler and not realize who her father is. I'm sorry. Yeah, they're very similar aren't they? They look very much alike. Famous Ken. I have no idea what that is. Let's look at it. Huh. Okay. That's just another website with some ads on it. I apologize to you people. And we get down to Nathan Dillon's closest connection on WikiTree. David Wenham. Do you even know who this fellow is? Who did he play? No, no, but when I just saw his picture, I do recognize him from the film. Yes. I don't. And he played Faramir. David has featured an episode of Australian version of who do you think you are? Okay. So fun. From the Lord of the Rings. Artemis Productions. Okay. So he's my closest connection, is he? He's your closest connection. Let's see what it is. So Nathan Dillon's good one. David Wenham. Oh, look. Well, there's a couple of oranges to greens. Okay. Let's see if you're really connected. Let's do that. Nope. Not by blood. Oh my goodness. Look what happened there. Wow. They all look very interesting. They look very interesting. So that's the stuff for the connections of the week. Not as much fun as Greg usually does. And there weren't a lot of names for me to trip over. We usually laugh when people mispronounce things. Aaron says that I live in here, 14 cousins once removed. So he went beyond the connections. Chris Ferriolo. I don't know what you're saying. Oh, six degrees. No, there's Judas. That's six degrees from Kevin Bacon. People are talking about being close to Patrick Stewart and how close they are to live. So that's pretty cool. So there are photos of the week. And here they are. I'm going to share a photo of the week. Here's my photo of the week. Oh, it went away. Now you found all the secrets out about me. Okay, come on. Where is it? Let's go to me. Scroll down here. There's my photo of the week. Take all my comments off. I was driving home. You all know I went to a funeral last weekend in South Carolina. And I drove home Thursday night or Thursday all day. This was the most spectacular. It was so intense, the colors of this rainbow. And it was just the bottom of the rainbow going up into the clouds. So I took a picture of it. And there's a little bit of fall color starting here. This was right at the Canadian border when I crossed over from the US. That's my fall picture. But there are more. Let's see. This is from Mark Weinheimer. Here's one of the Scowhari Valley from a scaffold set up for chimney repairs and some stuff. So where is the Scowhari Valley? Does anybody know? Somebody find that out. John Tyner was traveling on Thursday as well. I'm glad you made it safely. Alexis Nelson always has great pictures. She and her grandmother, Nellie Marvin, in Enid, Oklahoma. That's her fall picture. That's cute. What are you playing with? Some sort of toy. I'm looking for animals. I don't see any animals yet. This is cool. Joyce Bander Bogart. This is the oldest standing school house in the United States up in Ashford, Massachusetts. That's amazing. A little bit of a saggy roof. The oldest school house still standing, 1792. How old is the oldest school house still standing in London? Do you know, Nathan? I have no idea. You have no idea. That actually looks a lot like your little project. Yeah, I thought that. If you just move the door into the center. Move the door over here. It's not too far off. Let's see. Here's a spooky cemetery from Pat Miller. His great-grandfather Michael McKeel was baptized in this church in 1722 known as the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow. Now, if you don't know, the whole Sleepy Hollow story is about the headless horseman from the legend of Sleepy Hollow. This is apropos for fall, even though there are some fall colors in that as well. Let's see. Lake Tahoe in the autumn. It's all fir trees, so there's no changing colors on that one. Mark Williams. I love this one. Autumn sky, 19th of September 2022. We lost our grandson, Cade, to a rare form of cancer, and he loved sunflowers. His parents planted sunflowers in his memory in the garden. Somehow the seeds got into the remains of the surplus pile of earth and sunflowers returned every year. Nice. That's nice. Nice. That's autumn. This is an autumn picture. Daughter-in-son-in-law and my grandson taken in the fall. I'm not sure where, but gorgeous picture. And let's see. We've got a picture of Uncle Harvesting Grain. Harvest Moon this past few weeks ago, so that was good. So that is everything. We're done. In 38 minutes, we're done. Everything is done. Now we can just go and we can talk to this man about his wonderful books. I want to ask you some questions if it's okay. That's okay. Go ahead. You started writing historical stuff down here, non-fiction. Hastings at War, Hastings, Wartime Memories, Around Battle, Hastings, and St. Leonard's. How did you go from writing historical novels to writing incredible mysteries, the Mrs. McDougal investigative series, the Venetra Cold Cases, and all of your Morton Farrier books? How did you go from writing histories into that? I really enjoyed the writing process of those initial four, even though they were obviously they're non-fiction, so they were very fact-based, but I just enjoyed the process of actually writing. And so after the first one, I think it was, after Hastings at War, I signed up for a master's degree in creative writing, and so I went off to Canterbury University and did a part-time master's in creative writing, and that was when the idea for Morton first came about, and I actually started writing what would become Hide in the Past on that course. And it was quite early on, actually, that I started, I thought, you know, some kind of spin on the detective series would be an interesting read, and so kind of throughout the course I kept working on it and making changes, and so it was the sort of kind of rough draft done by the end of that period, but yeah, that's how it came about, but I just really loved the process, and loved genealogy, loved writing, so to be able to do the two is just a dream. So you were a genealogist, like a real genealogist for your family stuff. Did you do professional genealogy work for other people as well? No, I'm not that good. You're not that good, that's why you are good. Morton is much better than me. It's so funny, because when I have my own brick walls, I think I kind of, I get a bit impatient with it and kind of think, you know, my biggest brick wall, embarrassingly, is my Goodwin line, and I just think it can't be broken, it's just impossible, and then I think, but when I'm writing and Morton has to solve a case, he obviously, I do the genealogy that he has to do to make sure it's accurate, and so I really drill down deeply into trying to solve it and look at every possibility to how he would can solve this thing, and I think with my own genealogy, I get a bit lazing it. No, it's a brick wall, it can't be broken, it's not... It's done, yeah. So, okay, so when you're saying you really drill down on the genealogy, you're not actually doing real genealogy when you're writing, you're not actually doing genealogy that's in the books, it's not real genealogy, it's in your brain still, right? It is, but all of the, all of the documents, all of the methodology is all real, so everything that Morton does in the books, I do first, so whether that's just access and something, an ancestry, or if that's going to a churchyard, or if that's going to a local record office, or the National Archives, whatever it is, I do that first, so that the document he needs is in the right place, you know, in the book, how it is in real life for genealogists, and the process, so is it a microfilm, is it a ledger, is it, you know, how do you order this, how do you view it, and then what formats it in, what are some of the examples, so I usually, when I get a hold of a document that I think Morton's going to use, I then spend a lot of time taking notes and photographing, if I'm allowed, the document itself, and some real examples, and then sometimes I use those real examples in the books, but obviously, yeah, I then have to fictionalise some of the entries to suit the story, so it's kind of, it's a bit of a, a mixture of fact and fiction, but it's really important, given that, you know, my biggest readership are genealogists, I need to get that right, you know, I need to say, you know, that how you access that document is really how you would do it, and you can't access the, the 1916 US census, because it's not accessible, you can't use that, it's not there, I don't, you know, I don't go down that kind of a route, if it's not available then he has to find something else. Do you think, do you think that genealogists would hang you up on a flagpole if you, if you messed up? Yes, definitely, yeah. It would be bloody too. Have you ever walked into a churchyard and had, if you aren't familiar, Morton Farrier is the main character and the, the hero of all of his Morton Farrier mystery books, and he gets into some situations that most genealogists don't get into. My question to you, Nathan, is have you ever walked into a churchyard and been attacked? Not so far, but there's time yet. No, I haven't, he does get into some scrapes that most genealogists probably don't, he does attract trouble, particularly in the early books, I think now he's got a bit older and in the more recent books he kind of doesn't get into quite so much trouble. He just eats lots of good scones. Yeah, but I do, I mean, I don't know, I kind of get some of the characters in there, I do encounter some of those people that are, you know, there's one in every archive, that person that the grudge is handing anything over to you or helping and, you know, so, but that happens to me and then I think, well, I'm going to write that in the book then. One of my favorite books is, and your friend Robert's favorite books is The American Ground, which really has nothing to do with the United States at all. And the historic, it's a historical fiction wrapped up in a mystery. It's a lot of fun. I'll hold it back up for people. It's kind of hard. It gets shiny because of the screens. There we go. It's a historical fiction and that's one of the things that I love so much about your writing, is there's so much great history as a history writer before you've kind of taken that, you've taken that thread from your history books and you've woven it into the Martin Farrier books. Not so much the newer books, the Chester Creek murder books, but if you really get down to the Chester Creek murder, the Venator books, the Venator series are also could be historical fictions. Have you've worked on cases with the Venator books, cold cases and stuff like that. And in the newest book, it's not so much a cold case. Have you thought about tackling Jack the Ripper? No. Has anybody asked you that before? Obviously not. No. I feel like those sorts of things have been done so much to death. There are a million Jack the Ripper books. I quite like doing things where people, like you say, with the America Ground, a piece of history that is real, it's real events in a real time period and real things that went on, that actually lots of people, even people that live in that area now wouldn't have heard of and didn't know. So I tend to not be, I don't know, it just doesn't appeal to me as much. I'd like to read somebody else's book if they can actually solve Jack the Ripper or something like that. I'd be very interested in reading it, but writing it, not so much. I don't know why I'm more attracted to the less told stories, I think, for myself. The Venator series, good tackle, Jack the Ripper. If there's any samples left, we could find some DNA. I don't know if there's any DNA left, but I do think about less high profile cases. I think why aren't you using investigative genealogy on this case? You've got some kind of a sample left. Particularly in this country, we just don't do it. It's not legal, in fact, to do that, to solve cold cases using IgG, which I think is a big shame, really. We've got a little bit of a lag between us and the people who are chatting in our chat. There are about 40 people online right now. If you have a question and it'll come up before we log off in a little while, ask a question of Nathan Dillon Goodwin if you have a question for him. One of my favorite authors and a lovely, absolutely lovely person to hang out with in general. When you get hiding your past as a part of your master's coursework, and how long did it take you after you finished that one to start the next one? And your process in getting the next one started, the Lost Ancestor? Yeah, it took a while, to be honest. Like I said, I had a very rough, not particularly great draft finished by the time I finished the course, which was 2009. I then trained as a primary school teacher. I had these ideas of, I'll still do writing though. I'll write on the weekends and I'll write in the school holidays, but as any teacher knows, that just doesn't happen. You're either working on the weekends in the holidays or you're just totally exhausted. So I didn't really do too much on it and just put it to one side. And then there's another author in this genre called Steve Robinson. And I just came upon his book, I think it was his first book, and very similar type of thing, you know, a character in the modern day solves a crime in the past using genealogy and read it and loved it and thought, wow, there's obviously a market out there for this type of book. And so I went back to hiding the past, or what I don't remember if I'd called it hiding the past by then, but what would become hiding the past and polished it, edited it, did lots of work editing it in fact. And I had to be really quite disciplined because I basically set my alarm for five o'clock in the morning. And I got up and did all this editing and the rewrites just before going off to do a day's teaching. So it was exhausting, you know, like if I was still awake by half seven in the evening, then it was a miracle. So I got it to a point in 2013. So coming up for 10 years now, I got it ready to be published. And then it came out September 2013. And it was, yeah, received very well in the genealogical community. And that kind of encouraged me to do the same thing. So I started Lost Ancestor straight away, on the back of that being published. And again, I was having to get up at five o'clock in the morning, and I just thought, I can't keep doing this, I'm exhausted. And it's obviously, I am a morning person, but I'm not a five o'clock in the morning person at all. And it's not the most creative time, you know, to be getting up in the dark and the cold and just and having to just do an hour. And so by the time I started to get into it, every time to stop and go off and and do my real job. So I decided to kind of take a bit of a gamble. And I went part time in my teaching job. So dropped down to just two days a week teaching. And then that enabled me to write on those days off instead. And then did that for, I think a year. And then I think by that point, I got up to the orange leaders have been out. So the third book in the series. And then I decided to just take again, take a leap and stop teaching all together and become a full time writer. I thought if it goes wrong, or, you know, fails, I can always go back to teaching, but I haven't had to so far. Thank goodness. Thank goodness that you are going back to teaching week. Yeah. You have a comment here from Kathy Nava. She says, I love how Morton was adopted by a family member and his journey to find his father. Thank you from an adoptee. I get the sneaking suspicion that we're going to hear more about that journey and more interactions with this family at some point on hint, hint, hint. Yeah. I won't give too much way for spoiler alerts, but yeah, so Morton is adopted. And he basically, each book is a standalone case that he has to solve. So they can be read out of order, but his personal journey of discovering his biological parents, that kind of goes through the series. So I usually tell people if you haven't read any, then start at the beginning. In fact, hide in the past at the beginning, but I wrote a very short prequel called The Asylum, which is available for free from my website. Basically a taste of the series. So if you like that, then move on to the rest. And if you don't like it, don't. So yeah, so yes, see that he's kind of across the series, he has been trying to find his biological family. And yeah, I won't give too much way about that. Yeah. So that's The Asylum there. So if you haven't read any at all, you can download it for free and give it a well, it's only a short story. And that's a prequel to the whole series. And I read them all in order, all of them in order. I remember I met you, I don't know, how many years ago, and I bought the very first one. And then you came out with a prequel and I was like, well, that's just not fair to me. I'm going to read these in order. I like reading an author's books in order chronologically from when they're written because you can kind of watch how an author's voice changes and grows and how it matures. In Man O' Day, your voice has been really consistent over time, which really says something about how good an author you are that you've been able to kind of jump in as a very mature writer. So thank you very much for that. Or I've never improved across the whole. Yeah, or you're still crap. Yeah, you're still crap. If you want to download this, I'll post this into the link. You can go and download this. It won't show up in the, it'll show up here, but it won't show up in fate on the chat. So grab it from this, from what I just posted. It's free. And it's kind of an introduction to what, to his writing style, but it's out of order. But yeah, it's on Kindle also, Debbie Roode is saying. So this one is free. And then you can order the others from Amazon and others. Don and Baumann says, thanks for coming on. This has been really fun. It was an accident. It was an absolute accident because I didn't have anybody to come on. And I said, Nathan, I begged him, I think I sent him some Canadian beaver tails or something to try and entice him to come. If I haven't sent them, I'll send them soon. So the asylum is the first one. Let's go back to the other list. Which one of your books of the Morton Farrier series is your favorite? So for a long time, it was number five, the Spyglass file, which is set in the Second World War. Basically, it was very, very, very loosely based on my grandmother's story. So the real story of my grandmother is that she had a child in the Second World War that wasn't my grandfather's and put the baby up for adoption. And that's kind of the nugget of what this book then came from. So yeah, that was my favorite for a very long time. And now I think it's the Sterling Affair book number eight. I really like the Sterling Affair a lot. It was the most difficult to write. And I think that's why I liked it so much because it was a real challenge. And it was the longest I've ever written. So the books usually are kind of 110,000 words roughly. This was 140,000. And from beginning to end, it was 14 months of writing. It was a real challenge for me because it was so complicated. And it kind of is told in a slightly different way, slightly going backwards in order. And it was really difficult and involved lots of traditional research for Morton and DNA. It's such a roller coaster. And you have that in your notes here that it's crazy how you are so good at cliff hangers and twists within the story. And then tying them all together. You're such a good writer. I think they've figured out that I think you're a good writer. Let's switch just a little bit. Let's jump from the Morton Farrier to the Venator cold cases. So now you've kind of jumped into a hot topic in the genealogy in the genetic genealogy community by jumping into the Venator cold case series. Give us a brief overview of what kind of impetus you had to get in those. Were you trying to jump on the bandwagon or take advantage of what was such a popular thing? No, no, not at all. When Golden State Killer was captured using investigative genetic genealogy, which I always struggled to say, investigative Yeah, IGG. I was like, wow, that's amazing because I'd always been interested in DNA. And I took my first ancestry test back in 2014. Before you could actually take them in England, I had to get a kit in America sent to an American friend. She posted it to me, did the spit test, sent it back to her. She posted it off to ancestry. So I've always been interested in and when this, the Golden State Killer was captured using this technique, I was like, wow, that's amazing. And I've kind of tried to keep on top of the latest DNA tools and things that come out. And I've tested over the years, I've tested with every company and I've had family members tested. I've really tried to stay up with the advancements as much as I could. So when this came out, I was thinking, wow, I need to know more. And so I did some research and obviously CC Moore and Parabon are the main companies, but there are loads of other companies now and people out there doing this. And I spoke to, thanks to you, thanks. I spoke to Barbara Raventer and she was one of the people who worked on the Golden State case. And so I spoke to her at length and asked, interviewing her and asking her various questions of, I kind of answered the process. I totally get, I understood before I wrote it, how you would do that. But it was more the kind of, how is your team organised and kind of the setup of a company doing this work? I just thought this is something totally nobody else has written a book about IGG. They can't have done because it's so new. And as I said, we don't do that in England at all. So I knew if I was going to do a book in this style, it would have to be in America. That's where the, I know other countries like Australia and Canada are doing it as well now, but that's the kind of the cutting edge of this technique. So I knew it had to be set in America with an American team. And yeah, and it really just, I thought, I've got to do this. It's kind of, again, it's combining the love of genealogy and also bringing in really heavy DNA and then this serial killer cold case type of thing. So I thought, yeah, I've got to do this. And so that's where the Chester Creek murders came from. And book two, yeah, I'll be out next month. And so it's the same team. But this one, it's set about two weeks after the end of Chester Creek murders. So it's actually during pandemic time, which was, again, a bit of a challenge to write about. That was fascinating to look at your perspective of the pandemic in Salt Lake City. That was really fun. I did my research and I spoke to Pat Richie Erickson, who lives in Salt Lake. And so she was telling me, well, this was closed. This was the moment. And telling me all about it and what was going on. Yeah, again, it's a challenge. But I thought, actually, I kind of, I thought it'd be really interesting to document that as a period of time, because, you know, that's, thankfully, we know we're coming out of that. And I think the rest of the series will just be normal. I think it's quite interesting to have that as a bit of a period in history. And so there, I mean, this book is actually a live case. So they're trying to find a live serial killer. A killer in action. It's somebody that is actually, yeah. Yes. We're out of time. The new book is the soft tooth slayer. It will be out soon. It's ready for order. I posted a couple of links in the video if you want to go and check that out. Nathan, thank you so much for coming on and being my guest host today. And also talking to us about your great work and your great books. Again, if you want to check those out, check out Nathan dillandgoodwin.com to find his books. And we will see you next week. Just really quick, I need to go up here and check to see. We have a genealogy of a living and Newton challenge. I think that wiki tree, the highlights are up for that. You can register for Mark Hamill's new challenge coming up. You were a part of a wiki tree challenge, Nathan, Dylan Goodwin. Yes, I was. Yes, you were. It was fun. And there are some other things going on about, are you closer to Queen Elizabeth and register now. So the source of the phone is coming up the first weekend of October. Make sure you get yourself signed up. And we'll see you then. And we'll see you next week for the next live cast. Thank you, Nathan. If I welcome.