 Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. I guess depends on where you are. I know it's very late for Janet and early in the morning. There's something for Ian. Night time for the rest of us. What is everybody doing? I see we have a whole bunch of people watching already. Got our regular crew in the chat. I see Alice. Emma. Well, Emma's also here but she also has her. Steven. Mazawicks. Nancy. K. Knight. Chris F. D. Spray tanning guy. Charlie Hill. Debbie and Mary Roode. Oh, Bunch of Eel. Matthew. That's fine. She'll show me Buck. Oh, and then our Chris Whitton. Hello. Hello. Lizzie. I almost said Elizabeth but I know it's Lizzie. It's Lizzie. It's June. Hello. Betsy from Chicago. Karen. We have Benjamin. I know he's in Australia so it's um morning time for him too. We have Denise. Ta-Poplinus. I don't think I said that right. Janine. Mickey. So many people. Richard. Can you, did I name everybody? Probably, I don't know. 65 people watching so far. Now I'm nervous. Don't be nervous. I'm just kidding. So we have some, maybe some new faces that you guys haven't seen before. Some old faces. So I am Sarah. I'm with Julianne A. N. And we have my cat, Tiki. Makes an appearance. We have Janet, who is the captain for Jen's week, who Jen is in the bottom. This week is her week. Then we have Emma. She's the captain for Dr. Gates. And Dr. Gates will be joining us in the last 15 minutes. So he will be here but just later. Then we have Mindy. She is the overall coordinator for the wiki tree challenge. And then we have Ian. He's been, he's a leader on wiki tree and he's very active in this past week. We invited him on to help share what we found. And then obviously, Jen. So yeah, so that is everybody who's here. Introduce everybody. And then just for, sorry my cat is being ridiculous. Okay. So for those of you who don't know what the wiki tree challenge is, it is our year-long event where each week we take on a different genealogy guest star. So for instance, this week was Jen. This coming week is Dr. Gates. And a team of wiki treeers work together to improve their tree and to make it more complete and accurate than it is anywhere else. And this challenge is a part of our year-long year of accuracy where our goal is to improve our overall accuracy on wiki tree and also to make friends. And I think we've been making friends so far this, this past month. And it's February already. So we've already done a month of the wiki tree challenge. We've done four weeks. This is the end of our fourth week. Kind of insane to think about. That went by really fast. Yeah. Time flies when you're having fun. I feel like we've been having so much fun. I know that all of the wiki treeers who have been participating have been having a lot of fun. I know our genealogy guest stars have been having fun. At least I think so when they've been on. I've been having fun with the live cast and watching everybody. So yeah, that's pretty much, if you didn't know, that's the wiki tree challenge. And I know we have a lot of good stuff that we found for Gen's week. And I don't know who actually, Mindy created this. Hold on. I was going to share my screen. Mindy created this little slideshow to kind of make everything a little bit more organized. So this week is Gen's week. So I don't know who wants to start if Ian or Mindy or Janet. I guess I can show her before chart. So this is what her, at least on wiki tree, this is what we had to start with. This is what we had to start with. I think a lot of feedback. But you're getting feedback for, so this, what am I doing? What are you doing? I don't know. I clicked share instead of present. Don't just ignore me. Yeah. So we have this beautiful slideshow that kind of will quickly overview of stuff that we found. So I guess we'll start here, whoever wants to go on in and begin. The England project did quite a lot on the Lawrence family. So Ian, you did the work on the oral history. So do you want to pick up about? Yes, I can say for a little bit about the oral history. Anyway, thank you for the opportunity to work on the oral history. It was actually an interesting journey, I guess, because we started off really having a lot of doubts about whether we could, whether it was accurate. And the first day or two, we really got nowhere. We just went down rabbit holes and found nothing. That sounds familiar. Yeah. There's the uncle who's a knight, the artist. Right. And we looked at him and we got nowhere. We looked at the silversmith and we found the silversmith. He was on wiki tree already. And then we found he had a son, John, but he was still with him in England. And so we weren't really getting anywhere. And then we looked for Sarah Evans' father who we thought had been murdered. And we couldn't find him. We found her sons, two sons that had been murdered in similar situations. Well, not similar. One was shot in the back and one was shot over a farm dispute. And we wondered whether they were things that had been mixed up. And we weren't really getting anywhere. And then about three days in, someone, one of our project members, found and king. And we don't know how he found him. He won't, I don't know, anyone knows how he did it, but he discovered John, John Vomitsa's sister. And she'd been married twice, which made it more difficult to find. And then all the pieces came together very quickly then. And we found his birth. He was born on the same day, but in a different year. And then we found about his military service. And the regiment had been in India and then in Ireland and then in Canada at the time that the oral history said he went to Canada. And a lot of the facts and all the things in the oral history turned out to be roughly true that, as far as we can tell, that most of his siblings died in infancy. And then he joined the army. He went to Canada. And what we didn't know beforehand was he deserted the army in Canada in Ontario. And then he... He deserted? In New York State. Yes, apparently. In 1836. And then he popped up on the opposite side of Lake Ontario in New York State, according to the oral history at that time. Yeah. So that seems to be the story. And then we found some snippets of information about Kaisersville, although we haven't been able to find all of the details there. That's something to read in his profile in John Lawrence's senior's profile. There's quite a lot of information that it's worth having a look at. And we've done an analysis of the old history of things that we can confirm and can't confirm as well. So that was an interesting journey that we thought we were getting nowhere and we ended up getting quite a lot, a lot more than we thought that we could get. That's... So a lot of that is really surprising. My running theory had actually been that he pinched out in Canada and got land instead of an actual pension. And that's how he ended up in Canada. So hearing that he possibly deserted is makes me think maybe they just made up that whole part of the story to put a positive spin on it. Maybe that's right. I mean, I think when he says he lost his money and maybe that was really a great code for something he didn't want to say. And he wasn't alone in terms of the terms of deserting or looking at it, a very large number of the soldiers deserted. And I think the opportunities were much better to desert than to cross the border into the US than to stay in the Army. I probably would have done the same thing. Yeah, it was an interesting discovery. But I guess one thing I would say after last week is don't rush out and buy the silverware that we were thinking about last week. I still think the history of silversmithing is very interesting for the record. It is. But maybe you need to look for antique footwear. Right. Because your fourth grandfather was a bootmaker, it seems, rather than a silversmith, which is probably where he led the trade as well or he led the skill as well. That's John's farmer. So did you find anything on the idea that John served an apprenticeship? Was that something that you were able to connect? All we can find is his occupation is described when he deserted as being a plater, which sounds like in the metals industry, like a silver plater or a tin plater or something like that. So it seems he worked in the metal industry himself. And his father was the cord wainer, the shoemaker, the bootmaker. And he came from a family of bootmakers. I think for several generations, we've traced them back, the England project, traced them back, not me, for another four or so generations on his mother's side. And there were several shoemakers in that side of the family. Wow. And then, sir, to go back to that slide that had the sons, they had some interesting finds on those, that one. Yeah. The murders. Yeah, I know about those. Yeah, there was eventually four Lawrence men who were murdered at some point. Yes, very interesting story. We would have liked to have found the father as well, Evans. But the son's story, some of those were quite sad. Yes, some of them are quite tragic. But lots of newspaper coverage on those. Actually, one of the first people I ever met doing family research was like a distant cousin, and she handed me a binder where the newspaper copies. It was incredible. Whenever your ancestors in trouble is more likely they'll be able to find them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let's make it easier. Do we have anything else on the, on John Lawrence or his? I think that was it on him. Can I, what's this comment about his son Mortimer made a fortune in banking, lost it all in a run on the bank and escaped an angry mob? That's not the research that I've done at all. What does that come from? I think there's an article in one of the murder-related articles. There's a talk about that. There's some discussing about that, I think. Whether it's true, I don't know. But it sounds like he raised a lot of money and then maybe he died in incredibly wealthy man. Yes. He made it and lost it and made it again. Really? Oh, I'm really fascinated to see where that comes from, and that would be really interesting. Looks like his profile is very well fleshed out. So let's see who, I know it looks like Maddie was working on that profile, Maddie Hardman. Yes, Maddie did a lot of the newspaper article research. But we had, I mean, we had a small army of people working on these profiles. It was great teamwork. Okay, well, so we got that to be interesting. Yes, that was the Lawrence Branch. And then we had the Sarah Evans. And I have the next slide here is Oldest Ancestor, William Thomas Sargent. William Warner Brown and Thomas Sargent from England. We're in 16. Thomas Sargent was one of John Lawrence's ancestors. He was a court waiter, she made him as well. I think that's where he fits in. So this is, sorry, so if he's one of John's ancestors, he's... So, yes, John's mother's side, the Suffolk family. Okay. So we couldn't find, his father was James Lawrence, not John. We couldn't find his father, the father's connection, but on the mother's side, she was Jane Suffolk. We found quite a lot of siblings, that is, cousins and ancestors going back to Thomas Sargent, who was also in Warwickshire. They had them. They were comfortable people. They let wills. They had some property. They were tradespeople, quite well-documented into their family history. Okay, then there is... Did we want anything else on that line? Because then we have Emma Angus Anderson. Wait, Emma Angus. Where did Angus come from? I've never seen that before. I don't know the answer to you, but you can click on her profile. So all the ones that are out there on the green, those were all new ancestors. So let's see who added this. It looks like Janet. Janet was I... Were you, Janet, at the middle name? Somebody had a different one. Emma Angus Brown. Any insights? What do we find about? This is one of the pictures that Jen had on one of her trees. So we added it to Emma's profile. It's a nice family group, but not quite sure which of them in the middle is actually Emma herself. Yeah, it says Emma's in the blue dress with the gray hair. It was a lovely family group. I thought she was the most likely, but I didn't want to actually sort of specify that that was her. Yeah, but I think the Agnes that was found in one of the records, I don't think it's on her find-a-grave memorial though. Let's see where this... Was that Agnes, A-G-N-G-N-G-U-S? Angus? I can track that down while everybody's chatting here. To spelling it, one of the records are write-ups. Again, I think Maddie did a lot of the work on this profile. Really brilliant finding sources and stuff. I know with... There's been a lot of work done on the tree. I think we ended up adding... We made new profiles for 69 ancestors and we added 141 relatives associated with those ancestors. So there's a lot of sight-bearing on adding children and siblings there. So yeah, great. It'll take a while to go through and digest it all. You have a lot of questions, you can challenge it. Yeah, but we had a lot of fun. I mean, obviously there was one or two... We couldn't get past the great grandparents, but it's like thinking... It's where our research takes us. I think it was one or two... We couldn't confirm, so profiles weren't created. Now these were wonderful. We had several people working on the tree next to mine and they found these incredible documents that you can see, images of them. So these were a lot of new ancestors for you, Jen. But you can actually look at the documents and see where they got the information from. Yeah, this is all new. I mean, like I said last week, I haven't done any of my Swedish, so this is incredible just to see all of this. Yeah, I'm not sure how much... If you see the ancestors that were added for him, I'm not sure how much you... Yeah, I didn't know any of this actually. This is probably a full three generations that I don't think I have anywhere else. My dad is going to be so excited. That's awesome. And then one of... I guess her great grandfather, Lars, we also have here. Looks like Marta was working on these profiles, right? I like Marta created this one. Working hard on these ancestors. And if you look though, Jen, at the changes log later on when you go through it, some of these, it's really awesome to see the collaboration because you may see, you know, six or eight different names that have worked on that one profile where people are just all getting their input in. It's been fun. Julie just removed the middle name as we weren't a hundred percent sure. Should we put a research note? Did we put a research note? We could do that. I can do that while you're all talking. That come me by surprise actually. So, you know, my father and his siblings knew Emma, obviously. And they actually just relate that she never had a middle name. And so she's always just been Emma. And that was it. Because it shows here at least in one of the censuses that there was an A. Yeah, we always just assume... I guess that's probably Anderson. That it was Anderson. Yeah. We'll just leave it blank for now. I guess somebody can dive into that. Who's beeping? Is that me? Stand back, everyone. Help me. Okay. So, I was trying to say something. Okay, what's the next one? So, we have... Oh, this should be good. Paul Tobur. Yeah, and unfortunately, we didn't get as far on Paul's line as we would have liked to. I think just because his location is a little bit different than where the other Polish ancestors were. Yeah. Not for the lack of trying. We tried. The three new ancestors that you see out there. And I believe name corrections on the two that are underlined. Right. Now, you had Christina that's underlined, but she was a Paulina Christina. Interesting spelling of that. I actually like how that... So, yeah, I would have had Christina because she... I'm sure that would have been her Americanized, right, when they got to Canada. That's probably what they did. Yeah. Right. And this was Christian. He was Christian Frederick Bucenius, was born in Kutno. And I'm probably saying that wrong, but I've never been to Poland. He and Paulina Christina, and in Naktagal, later pronounced Nightingale, a lot of times, married in 1855. They had at least six children, all baptized in the same church. We found quite a few of these records, which was really wonderful because some of these, they're in the process of moving over from one archived site to another. So, some of the ones, like in Weyloon, we could actually view some of the other ones we could only look at the index for. Made a little more challenging. Very cool. Was there anything you wanted to say? Oh, sorry. I just wanted to make sure we didn't have anything more to say. Yeah, this one we had a lot more luck on. This one was fun. His wife, Emma. All of the green boxes, once again, our new ancestors that we found for you. We have vital records to track the process. So, marriages, births. I can't translate them. I've been speaking out to everybody. Can you translate a birth for me? But, Jen, I'll tell you this. You definitely want to talk to somebody that can translate the rest of these records because you just got dozens of records that we couldn't get to them and get them all translated. But there's links to them or they're attached. I know there is a G2G post. Is it? I guess it was you, Mindy. Is this Polish? That's me. Well, it might be in Yiddish and I'm like, it doesn't look like Yiddish, but okay, I don't read Yiddish either. So, I don't know. Somebody else is like, well, Mindy Hebrew. So, finally, I changed that one. Is this Polish or not? I got people to come in and look at some of my other records. It was awesome. Jacob came in and I think he did four or five for me. He was really wonderful. Which Jacob who? Jacob. He's on one of those wonderful posts. I have my email shut down right now, so I won't have pop-ups. Okay. Well, thank you, Jacob. Yes. Whoever you are. He was awesome. I got a lot of new ancestors out of that one. I can't even pronounce most of those. And some of these changed over time. Now, like the more recent one for the hints, it was H-I-T-Z. But when you go further back, it's that spelling. Still the same pronunciation, still hints, but H-I-N-C is how it was spelled on their documents. And yeah, I love the, you know, that the Y's and the I's are interchangeable. They eat the Y's a lot. So, Albertina. Albertina was great. She was Jen's second great-grand aunt. She was the daughter of Jen's third great-grandparents. She had a lot of children. And, you know, for being back in that age, it really was amazing to have that many. You know, not many of the families in that area did. I was trying to, didn't go to her. Oh, there she is. There she is. Albertina. Albertina and her lovely group of children. And I believe her husband was a farmer. And her father was a farmer. So, you know, imagine trying to help support your husband and take care of the farm and raise this large group of children. I mean, she must have been just an incredibly strong woman. Well, you know, more kids just mean some more possible DNA matches. So that's fine. Well, you got plenty of new ones. And once again, you know, any of the ones that are here now, Albertina was in that area I was telling you about, the Weyland Poland. Any of those, the documents are linked to it. You can look at the actual documents. So, if we don't have them translated for the 10 kids, you know, you can find somebody on Wickey Tree that or elsewhere that, you know, can help you get some of those translated, because they're full of wonderful information. They tell you what the father's occupation was, who the godparents were, sometimes what the godfather's occupation was, they have a lot of good information. Awesome. It looks like Cheryl was working, she created this profile. It looks like she was, and also Mindy, Cheryl and Mindy teamed on this one. Yeah, we were teaming up on this one. We were going back and forth and checking each other's work and it was a lot of fun. Very cool. We have, I'm not, how much, we have a few more finds. Oh my goodness. So many. So we're coming on the 30 minutes. Was there anything? So we have John Hurton. Hurton? Well, we were going to run a few minutes over anyways. Yeah, Hurton is our pronunciation for the north part of the family. The southern part of the family says it a little bit differently. How did they say it? I can't remember exactly. It's been a little while, so I was going to try it, but I'll get it wrong and my aunt will get mad at me. I don't know. I'm not even attempting it. Hurton with a southern accent, I don't know. So we have, so we have Am, Amke, Amke. And let me tell you, does autocorrect mess with that name? Oh gosh, yes. It was about Amke and it don't make. Make. And I say no Amke and it would say no make. Yes. It wants to fix this one right now. So do we find any new ancestors for this line? Or just mostly? No, we didn't. I think they found some interesting information on that. Some of the, a few of the people on that line, but no new ancestors. Okay. It looks like the next one we got some, I like the green boxes, very tells me. Who am I calling Cohen? Cohenkin. Can you go back into presentation mode so it's a little bit bigger? Yeah. Thanks. We have, I guess we found for the mother, Mary Hite, and I'm hoping Mindy will chime in at some point. I know that the people working on this, there was a group of them, and the whole height, height men, height, whatever, there was like five variations that this name could be. So they were extra diligent and like triple and quadruple checking each other's work to make sure they get the names and the information at the time it was, you know, with those particular records to try and get it right. I think they actually spent quite a bit of time on that. I don't know a whole lot about the other ancestors that were added, but those are, of course, four new, brand new ancestors. Yeah. And those are new to me. I haven't worked on this line for a number of years. So I don't think I've ever found this before. Johan Schoen. I probably said that's so wrong. That's how I'm going to say it. Johan. Yeah. Johan. I can help with this. And he was born in Germany and we really didn't have people that were, you know, experienced in the German records, full-time participating in the challenges week, unfortunately. So we didn't really find out a lot about him. We have George Clark Davis. Oh, he's such an interesting character. And he is. And there's a number of interesting people on that line. I know though, Jan, you've done so much incredible research on that line. You have just researched that like crazy. It's one of my current passions. I mean, if you take somebody and say that they dealt with the local band of Romanes or Gypsies, like, I mean, who can resist that? Like, you have to research that. And this was your, this was your Civil War gentleman. He was wounded and captured actually at Gettysburg. Yeah. Yeah, one of them in 1863. He wound up going to prison in Fort Delaware for 18 months. So he served. And the Confederacy. Yep. And we have Ella Mary McGowan with James McGowan from Ireland. And some of Jen's tree coincided with another lady's tree. And this is where the DNA comes from because it's part of her tree. Yeah. That's my most cousin, actually. Yeah. Oh, is that Beverly Norman? Is that, yeah. All right. Coming across cousin bait. She is a wonderful lady and a very good researcher. And Archibald Mackenzie, also from Ireland. They were charged with the riot and unlawful assemblage. They were, it's great. I know that one was great reading. There's a lot of detail on what happened between the two of them and what they said to the judge. It's amazing that you have that kind of history. It's fantastic. Yeah. When they're in trouble. That's right. Jen's got a lot of trouble. I mean, it runs in the family. What can I think? Oh, okay. Then we had, I guess I can just open the stats page. Because this is, I guess I'll refresh the current stats. Do you want to say the stats, Mindy? No, we did a whole bunch of exciting stuff. I know we had some really big numbers. It was great. Total points this time was 392. Now that's profiles of relatives that were created. Created ancestors, there were a total of 69. So that means, Jen, direct ancestors in your different lines, 69 profiles. For relatives in the nuclear family, we have 143. We had challenge members, team members that earned a total of 180 bounty points. We had 554 profiles edited. And over this last week, the total edits were 2,577. So, you know, once again, just incredible effort by people that chip in there and get this amount of work done. I'm Marta Johnson, MVP. She was our top person this week. She was working like crazy. It's remarkable what this community is doing really, really. So, thank you to all of you who worked on all of this. And Marta, it's just awesome. It's just awesome. And so, we showed your before tree. And we have some after trees as well. So, this is a seven gen after. See, it's a lot cooler. And we also did 11 generation ones to show that we have some lines that go way out there. So, those were your trees. Oh, look who just popped in. Hello. Good evening. Good evening. We're just wrapping up Jen's week. Yeah, this is just really incredible. I really can't say thank you enough. That's really awesome. So, would you say that we got an A plus? Well, I have a lot of reading to do for sure. Yeah. I mean, without being able to actually look at anything, yeah, I'll give you an A plus. Why not? I'd like to chime in and say that Azure was able to track down the record where Agnes is listed. Oh, good. Yeah. So, it was on Donald Eugene's birth record. Really? Yes. Interesting. Okay. I don't see him listed as one of her children yet, but... Go to, it might be under Boone instead of Donald. Oh, he is under Donald. Yeah, he was the last living descendant and I mean, I knew him. Right, I grew up with him. We called him Uncle Boone because when he was a kid, he wore one of those caps like, you know, the Coonskin caps that were popular and he just, we just always called him Uncle Boone. It took me until I was probably in my 30s to realize Boone was not his first name. I had one of those caps. Did you? Yeah. And he actually was the last to live in the family house. So, my family owned the same house in that town of Orting, Washington since it was created essentially, since the house was built. And we had P.O. Box 4, Orting, Washington until Boone passed away. So, I guess we'll have to add that source and that child so that then we can add her middle name properly. Yeah. Very cool. So, I don't know if anybody has anything else to say about Jen, but thank you, Jen, so much for letting us work on your tree and everybody had a great time working on it. And I know you, I know if you want, if you have anything else to say, if anybody has any questions for Jen. Yeah, it's quite a gift that you guys are offering to the world. So, thank you very much for allowing me to be a part of it and inviting me to participate. It's pretty incredible. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing stuff with us. We're happy you could be here. Ian left. But now we have Dr. Gates. Dr. Gates, we start pretty much after this live cast. We will be starting Dr. Gates week for the Weakie Tree Challenge. So, hello, Dr. Gates. Thank you for participating and joining us. We all have been so excited to have you on. Thank you, my wife and I just finished dinner. I loaded up the dishwasher. It doesn't make too much noise, but I will in 15 minutes or so. You're a good man. I love to do the dishes. She cooks and I do the dishes. That's so fair. That is a fair split. Yeah. And I like putting the dishes away too. Wow. Impressive. Cool. All these amazing spaces in front of me. I have to say, my husband's pretty good about that too. So, I'm sure probably most people will know who you are, but do you want to give us a quick introduction, Dr. Gates, about who you are, what you do? Me? Yeah. I'm Henry Louis Gates Jr. and I am a professor of African and African-American studies in English at Harvard University. I'm the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research and fathered two daughters. Um, what else do you want to know? Oh, yeah. And I heard the TV show called, It's in your free time. The biggest season, season seven. Very good. We're having the highest ratings we've ever had. It's incredible. That's great. Yeah. It's a really good thing. Um, I love doing, I love doing the show. And I get, last night we had Jim Gaffigan and Jane Lynch. I just, 10 minutes ago, answered an email from Jane Lynch, um, talking about her family's reaction and her aunt, Marge, who's 91 years old, the family historian and how delighted they were with the stories. It's great. It's such a great gift. Very rewarding. Now, who are you? That's amazing. We did, we did some introductions before you got here. So myself, Julie and Aon, we're a wiki tree team members on wiki tree. We have Janet here. She was the team captain for Jen's week. Okay. And then we have Emma. She's your team captain. Hey Emma. He's very excited. And then we have Mindy, who is the wiki tree coordinator. I'm Mindy. The wiki tree challenge coordinator. And then next to you have Ian. He was a project leader on wiki tree and he's been working on the profiles for Jen. Probably will work on some of yours as well. So I guess he's having connection issues. He's in and out. So I know, you know, I always put a post-it over my own image on the screen. And so I can't see myself talk, which I find creepy. And every time Ian, every time Ian disappears, I have to move this post-it. You know, get that X-finity fast connection. Now I'm going to start doing it on purpose just to play with you. Oh, please don't. It's on purpose. Ian, where are you from? I'm, well, I'm from Australia. But I live in Japan. Oh, I knew it was Anglophone, but I didn't know where. I couldn't hear you enough. No, that's right. If I had heard you say Australia, I would have heard. Are you an Australian now? Tell me about the accent. Now he said he's in Japan. No, I mean he's in Japan. Japan? In Japan. Yes. Yes. I can hardly, I can hear everyone, but Ian, either talk louder or move closer to the mic. Sarah, did you have some questions? Yes, we do have. So if anybody in the chat has questions for Dr. Gates, you can go ahead, but we have some, some standard questions for you. So what got you interested in genealogy? I got interested in genealogy the summer 1960. It was the date on which we buried my grandfather, Edward St. Lawrence Gates, my father's father. And after the funeral, my father took my brother and me upstairs and showed his scrapbooks that my grandfather had kept. And he, he kept them in old bank ledgers because he was a janitor in the bank. Excuse me, I'm a little coarse. And he was looking for something and he pulled all these bank ledgers out of an armoire that was on the sun porch of my grandparents' bedroom. We had never even been upstairs in my grandparents' house. You weren't allowed to do that, you know, back in the day. I was, as I said, I was nine years old. I would have, I turned 10 that September. And finally my father found what he was looking for. And it was an obituary. And it said, Dive this day in Cumberland, Maryland, January 8th, 1888. Dive this day in Cumberland, Maryland. Jane Gates, an estimable color woman. And I read that and my father was on the floor holding the scrapbook and my brother's five years older. And I were looking over his shoulder. And then he showed us a picture of Jane Gates and said that she was a slave and she was a midwife. It was a sepia photograph. And she looked very strange to me. She had very high cheek bones. She had a kind of nursing cap on. And that's all my father said, you know, and my brother and I looked at each other and then my father shut the books, the scrapbooks, and he put them back in the armoire. And then we went downstairs for the repast, you know, the meal after you bury someone. And then we drove, that was in Cumberland, Maryland. This is halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington, DC, in the Allegheny Mountains on the Potomac River. And as you'll find out, my family's lived there for 200 years, though I had no idea of that until I started this series that became Finding Your Roots. And Genial just in our first show traced my family tree. That was back in 2006. And we called it African American Lives because I only had black guests. And we did Oprah and Quincy Jones and Chris Tucker, even Ben Carson, who was my classmate at Yale, and Bishop T.D. Jakes. But back to June the 3rd, July 3rd, 1960. The next day, on the way back from a picnic, I asked my father to stop at a convenience store and buy me a notebook. And that night in front of our little 12-inch black-and-white TV, on July 3rd, 1960, I did my family tree. But my family tree only defectors, you know, my father's side and my mother's side. It never occurred to me that my father's mother's father's mother, it never occurred to me, you know, it only occurred that I wanted to know my father's parents and grandparents, so the paternal line and the maternal line. And that was it. And I was hooked on genealogy ever since, my own genealogy, because I wanted to know how I was related to this strange-looking woman whose photograph I had seen in the pages of that bank ledger. And my grandfather looked like a white man, and my father could have passed. And I wanted to know how I was connected to them. And I was much more interested in the Gates side, because Jane Gates had several children, they all looked white, but the identity of the man who followed them, she took that secret to her grave. And that was a source of wild speculation at every Gates reunion, every Gates family tree. Like who was this guy? And he's now been found, as you all know, but we can't reveal his identity, because C.C. Moore found him using genetic genealogy. But we can't reveal that because no one in my family knows, and we're going to have a big family after COVID, God willing. We're going to have a family reunion, and at long last reveal the identity of my great-great-grandfather, who was white, and we knew from my white DNA, I have the unial haplotype, that he was a virus descent. So you all had promised, right, that you won't mention his name, and we took all of those ancestors whom I haven't seen, off my family tree, because that would ruin the surprise for me and for my whole family. Yeah, that information was deleted that was sent to me, yes. Nobody knows it. Yeah, that's great. So that's the truth. That's how I got interested. And then when DNA analysis could be used to trace your genetic ancestry, I was contacted by, oh, and there's my friend, C.C. Moore, the genius. See, my buddy, I love C.C. And I was contacted by a black geneticist named Rick Kittles at Howard University. And he asked me if I'd ever seen roots. And this year, 2000, I go, everybody's seen roots. We think, what does he think? I am an idiot. And he said that they could now do in the laboratory test tube what Alex Haley did with roots. They could trace an African-American's ancestry on the maternal line back to the ethnic group, which used to be called tribe, but that's not politically correct anymore in Africa. And he asked if I would volunteer. And I said, of course. And he came up and took blood and then he told me what my mitochondrial DNA was. Turns out it wasn't right, but a short time after that, I got up in the middle of the night, frankly, just to go to the bathroom. And I'm standing in my bathroom and I got the idea that has become finding roots. And that I would get eight prominent African-Americans and I would trace their family tree using the paper trail back to slavery. And then when the paper trail disappeared, I would do their DNA to reveal where their mother's mother's mother's line was from Africa. And the rest of they say is history. Very, very cool. Thank you for sharing that with us. So who is your favorite ancestor of the ancestors you do know? Oh, no one's ever asked me that before. John Redmond, my fourth great-grandfather of my mother's line, was a patriot. He mustered in to the Continental Army on Christmas Day in Winchester, Virginia in 1778. And he was mustered I think in April 1784. And so he's infinitely intriguing to me. I mean, everyone's fantasy, right, is to be in the sons of the American Revolution. You know, I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts in Harvard Square, sitting in my kitchen. People written to me said they were killed to have a patriot ancestors. I didn't even think it was possible to have a black patriot ancestors, but he was a black man and he was married to Sarah Day, as you could see. And what's interesting is that I just said from three sets of fourth-grade grandparents who were free black people, we would have said free people of color or free Negroes. And I had no idea. I was only interested in finding Jane Gates's Parabor. My father used to say to me, your mother's family is really fascinating. You ought to focus on that. And my mother used to tell my brother to me, you come from people. You come from people. And ma'am, she was right. Unfortunately, I didn't know. I knew one. My grandmother's half-uncle's JR Clifford, who was Marguerite Howard is my grandmother. And her uncle was the first black man admitted to the bar in the state of West Virginia. He co-founded the Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois, John R. Clifford. He had his own newspaper. I have his photograph upstairs. By the way, I have that photograph of Jane Gates that I saw when I was nine years old upstairs in our family. We have a family history room. A real great photographic records, particularly of the Gates's. But all these three sets of fourth-grade grandparents lived 30 miles from where I was born. Two sets we think were freed by the American Revolution. And the third set, Joe and Sarah Bruce on my father's mother's line, were freed in the will of Abraham Van Meter in 1823. And we have that copy of that will. And he gave them 1,000 acres. And some of my Bruce cousins still have some in that land. And all of that is 30 miles or 40 miles from Piedmont, West Virginia, where I was born. I don't think that's true for any guest. I would be interested, you know, you guys are the pros. Have you ever met anybody who never moved? I mean, more than 30 miles away from their three sets of their fourth-grade grandparents? That's incredible. That's incredible. And all the time I'm looking for Kuntakinte in Nigeria, Urgana, I'm looking for my dissonance, and they were just under my nose. I mean, literally, those records were in the courthouse. And Johnny Cerny, who was our lead genealogist, God rest your soul, had found up to my third-grade grandparents. But Jane Ailes, who's a researcher and a very good friend, excellent researcher, who services we engage back in 2005, she found the level of the fourth-grade grandparents. You've got to remember this is 16 years ago, so a lot of stuff that is digitized now wasn't digitized then. And the best story of all is the story I told of Roots Tech. I guess two years ago, right, CeCe? CeCe could do the chat room. And this is a true story. I told this story about Jane Gates being called an estimable color woman when we started to do, you know, I thought about it a lot because that night when I went home, I looked up the word estimable in my little red Webster dictionary, right by my bed, because I didn't know what it meant. So I know I saw it, right? So, cut to years later, I'm telling Jane and everybody about this story, and it's a good story. And one time, Jane pulled me aside and just in a very calm way said, you know, we found two or three obituaries of Jane Gates, and none of them mentioned the word estimable. And then I felt, how could I have made this mistake? I really looked up that word. That night I'd never heard that word before. But you know how memory works. And I felt embarrassed, ashamed, then defiant. And for years, you know, I mean, my cousin John Gates is our family historian. He used to tease me. He said, you know, Jane Hale says that story you tell about that obituaries are not true. And I said, yeah, I know. And I just can't figure it out. And all of my grandfather's scrapbooks, except one, all of them have just disappeared. And Johnny Gates gave me the one, which is upstairs that I keep it. It didn't have anything in there, but it didn't have Jane Gates's obituary. So about two years ago, I go fishing with a bunch of guys in the Bahamas. They're all rich and I'm a poor professor. So we ride, we fly down privately to Nassau. And then we go to this five star fishing camp for bone fishing. I'm not like the fish I grew up on. Tell me. And you fly fish, they're very hard to catch, very exciting catch and release. But the main thing you get down to be with this, these guys, you know, and there's a private chef and it's like fantasy land, you know, it's wonderful. And you, all you do is fish all day. And then you, you take your lunch out on the little flat boat and two people and then there's a spotter, a guide. And he'll say, you know, cast 45 degrees and you'll, you know, have to throw your fly out right in front of the nose of the bone fish and then it hit it. It's exhilarating, man. It's great. So we were, if this was a week before the first time I'd ever addressed roots tech and I wanted to tell the story of how I invented finding your roots. And I said, well, you know, I'm going to have 10,000 people fact checking me. You know, I can't tell the story about, I have to tell the truth about memory that I'm sure that I encountered the word estimable on the day we buried Edward Saint Lawrence Gates and my father's father. But I somehow must have confused the trauma of seeing her picture, seeing these scrapbooks. It's the first time I'd ever been close to a corpse. My father took me right up to look at his, his father. He was so white, you know, he was so white when he was alive. We called him Casper behind his back. So you can imagine how white he looked dead. You know, he looked like he was painted with alabaster. That was part of what motivated me. How could I be descended from somebody who looked like Casper, the friendly ghost, right? And I'm my mother's color. So I was intrigued by, I mean, where did the white looking grandfather come from? So anyway, back to the fishing village, fishing camp. We get on the plane, we fly, we fly in there on Friday night, we fly back Saturday afternoon. And my friend, it's my friend's jet. And he's very wealthy. And it has internet. And so probably over North Carolina, I emailed the director of research for the Hutchins Center, which I, as I indicated, of which I'm the director. And I asked him, it was Sunday. I didn't even know if he would respond. I asked him if he could just do a search and send me any obituary that mentioned a woman named Jane Gates, who died in January of 1888. And, you know, we're all on the plane. Everybody's talking trash and blah, blah, blah. He's like six or seven guys on the plane. And I mean, literally within minutes, I looked down there as an email with an attachment. And it had three attachments. And I thought, well, that's strange. And I opened the attachments. And there was an obituary that I'd seen. And there was another obituary that I'd seen, the two that we knew about. But there was a third obituary that no one had seen before. And it was from a newspaper that didn't have the word cumberland in it, like the other two did. And I read it. I thought that I was going to fall through the seat of the airplane. It's as if you realized that you had purchased the billion-dollar lotto tank. And you're sitting with a group of people, and you look at it, and you look at the screen, you look at the numbers, and you look at it, and you look at it, and you look at it. I had to fight tears. I didn't tell anybody. The plane, you know, it's very expensive. It's big enough it has a toilet. I'm saying that because it was big enough for me to stand up. But I didn't. I wanted to stand up and just scream and holler and cheer, because that researcher had sent me the obituary that I saw on July 3rd, 1960. It said, dive this day in Cumberland, Maryland. Aunt Jane gates an estimable colorboard. It was like, yes, obviously it hadn't been digitized in 2005. And that's how I ended my speech at Roots Tech. And I cried at the end of that speech. When I got home, I didn't tell those guys on the plane. When I got home, I printed it out. It was so emotional that I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I had made the whole thing up, and went to my study and looked at it again, and tears in my eyes, that my memory had not failed me. So every time we filmed something about my family, we filmed in Cumberland, Maryland, and the gates are by and large buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland. And Jane's there. And every time I go to her grave and I go, I'm going to out your grandma, I'm going to find that name of that white dude. I want to find the name of my great-great-grandfather and Ceci Moore has done that. And my family has speculated on the identity of this guy. They didn't have big fights. You know, we even filmed it. You could go back and look at the first finding your roots. And, you know, my father has passed, his sister has passed, they're there, and they are sure they know who this person is and they were wrong. So it's going to be quite interesting. I mean, I'm glad that I lived long enough to find it, you know, that this thing was digitized. And the moral of this story is keep looking, you know, records are being digitized all the time. And you could do now more than you could do last year. I mean, it increases exponentially. So that was a great story, Dr. Yeats. Thanks for sharing that. Thank you. Now everybody was at the edge of their seats. All right, my wife's telling me it's time to run the dishes. You have any other questions? Tell me. So I don't know anything about you guys in a week or so you're going to bring me back and tell me what you found, right? Emma, if you want to kind of, yeah, you have a team of about 100 people who will be working on your tree right now. We ran a report. There's only 29 people in your tree at WikiTree right now. So our job is to expand that as much as we can. We know that we won't be able to go far out because you've had professional researchers working on this and you've had to use DNA, but we know we can go wide and we can go, we can build lots of stores. So I guess one question too is what would you like to see us find for your tree that, you know, maybe you haven't seen before? Is that possible? Oh yeah. You know, I have, I have the version that Johnny Cerny created back in 2005 or 2006. It's framed in our family room, but you'll find a lot of, you know, you'll find a lot of things. You just aren't allowed to reveal the whole iris side, anything else you find to be great. I don't know much about the Coleman's, my mother's father's family. That, yeah, Charles was his, that's my great grandfather, I think, right? My mother's great, great grandfather. Great. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to know about them. And as you know, my birth name as you have there was Louis Smith Gates. And that's a story because my mother was, her best friend was Olivia Smith and she was unmarried and didn't want to die, didn't want her name to die. So my mother promised her that her next child, when she was pregnant with me, would be named after her and they thought that I would be a girl because the first child was a boy. And so my name would have been Olivia, but I was a boy and Oliver just was not cool in black community of B-Bot West Virginia. So she named me Louis after my father Smith. And when I was 25, I changed it to my father's name, which is what they wanted me to do all along, long after Miss Smith was dead. Because, so I had to get all of my degrees and diplomas and drive with like everything. So to secure everything changed from Louis Smith Gates, which is what I was to, I'm sorry, till I was 25, to Henry Louis Gates Jr. A name I love because my father's name. So anyway, I don't know much about my, I know a lot about my mother's mother's line because that's where all those free black people are going back to the American Revolution. But I don't know much about my mother's father's line and I'm intrigued by that. And one of my mother's brothers, Harry Coleman, is still alive. I mean he would be ecstatic to learn. He was, he graduated from, yeah, Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates. My daughter's Maude Augusta because Maude is a family name on the Gates side. And Augusta is my mom's name, Pauline. My, my mother's father's name was Paul. So there were lots of Pauls in my family. My, I like so many cousins with Paul and middle name. My brother's name was Paul. My mother was Pauline, you know. So no, no known carries of Paul's wife, Chromism, or his mother's, oh, you mean Paul Coleman. Oh, that's interesting. Well, we have to get all my cousins in Piedmont, West Virginia to take the DNA test over. We're added to Wiki Tree because that means that no one who's a member of Wiki Tree has tested from this line. Oh, okay. Yep, you got it. Danny Paul, that was his name. But he died in 1945, right? 48, it says here. 48. Yeah, he died before I was born. So our team will, we'll dig and research and see what we can come up with. And then next week we'll show you the results of what we find. Hopefully something new and exciting. It sounds good. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Gates for joining us. Thank you. Good night, everyone. Good night. It's nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. So I guess we will also wrap, thank, thank everybody for watching. We will also go. We already had a couple, Jen already, Jen left as Dr. Gates was talking, but thank you everybody for participating. And let's go start the next week of the challenge. And we will see you next time.