 We're back. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech on a given Tuesday. And it's the nine o'clock. Make that the 10 o'clock block. And we're talking about ancestry, making ancestry work here on Community Matters. And my brother joins me, Gene Fidel, who's a professor of military justice at NYU, and has been involved in military justice for 30, how many years, Gene? 50, 50, sorry. I don't want to make you younger than you really are. And his experience in military justice as a national expert qualifies him to talk about ancestry. Absolutely. You got involved. I don't know if I could call it a hobby or something more than that. It's a passion for you. And my question is, why did you get involved in ancestry? Well, you know, from day one, when you didn't know much about it until what you know now, what drew you to it? Well, I think part of it was that, you know, unfortunately, and you know this, our family was sort of a hodgepodge. I mean, we knew we had cousins. And uncles and aunts, great uncles, great aunts. But how it all fit together was mind boggling. And unfortunately, our parents were not careful to help us understand how it all fit together. I think it was only a couple of years before our father died that I finally sat him down and interviewed him and made notes and made very rudimentary drawings trying to identify, you know, who was related to whom and how. And interestingly, he had very good recall. You know, anybody who has gotten to become a senior citizen knows that you can remember things that happened 50 years ago and 60 years ago better than you can remember breakfast the day before. But I was quite, and I'm increasingly startled, actually, about the depth and basic accuracy of what he was able to tell us, even about not just his family, but our mother's family and the extended families all around. So that was very satisfying. I've held on to those very rudimentary drawings that I've made. And I do refer to them from time to time. And occasionally, I'll stumble across something that he had wrong or things that, let's say, he was economical with information on. And I think that's a very human trait. I, you know, at times it's just infuriating. But and I'd love to have a second chance to sit down and say, say, dad, you know, was there something more that you wanted to tell me here? And but that's that's not going to happen. So by and large, it's a very rewarding, I'll say hobby, but it's more than a hobby. I mean, you know, people collect stamps, they collect autographs, they collect signed baseballs. Every I have a dear friend who collects automobiles. But this is this is satisfying. And if you're if you have that sort of infantile completion urge of wanting to paint in the painting, you can keep at it. And by the way, you're never going to finish. That's the thing you're just never going to finish. Dang, that cousin just had another kid, you know, dang, that kid just got married or whatever. So, you know, if you don't take it, if you take it seriously, but not too seriously, there's a happy medium there. And I think I'm probably at that point, at times you think, well, this is kind of diminishing returns. But then you start thinking about any, you know, you as a lawyer and litigator know this, you get curious. Well, just one more question, Mrs. Vanderbryft. I just, whatever did happen to Uncle Max. So, you know, it's there are worse ways to spend your time. And I know people and it's just interesting. There are people for whom none of this is of the slightest interest. People who are living in the moment. I wanted to mention, I see a sign curve here. You know, father's generation, family was very important to them. That's why you could go to him and at least get some information, you know, beyond his personal family and experience. He knew he visited with them. They talked about it. Subject of discussion. You know, I remember that. And so in that generation, it was a community of family, but all the stories that went somewhere along the line, you may have a better handle on when somewhere along the line, the generations in at least our greater community and maybe the country and maybe the world, you know, began to forget all that. Family was not a community. And it was nuclear. And you didn't stay in the old neighborhood. You went anywhere and everywhere you traveled. You got distracted with a million things about career and, you know, academia, whatever it was. And you didn't think too much about family. So in that period of the generational shift, wasn't much going on in terms of interest in family. And you say, there's a lot of people don't care about it. And I think it's that generation that forgot about it, doesn't care about it. Now, enter ancestry.com and 23andMe. I don't know if there's any others that might be. Oh, there are. Oh, there are. So, so now they're here. They're all here at the same time kind of they all arrived the same roughly the same time. And what I find really interesting is that it's a nostalgic experience. They're helping you connect with things that are nostalgic. They're helping you jump over that the generation that didn't look at this and finding the generation, one generation ago, two generations ago that did look at it. And now you can connect up and you can rebuild the family community using these programs. I mean, that to me, that's the attraction of it. And from what you say to you, that's the attraction too. Oh, that's absolutely right. And of course, you know, having a computer file, or something, you know, in the cloud is, is not, you know, let's be, let's be blunt. I mean, that is not the same thing as having meaningful relationships with your kin. I mean, that's the meaningful relationships that are the real, the genuine article here that we should value. And I, I think the value of the genealogy programs, aside from the obsessive compulsive dimension, is to facilitate rebooting those relationships. And sometimes, of course, it's too late and that's tragic. And sometimes things are irreparable. Sometimes you may be willing, but your second cousin once removed may think, you know, the family wasn't so nice to my Uncle Max. And I want to be as far away from the family as possible. But that doesn't stop you because I think one of the elements here is, you know, you can build this schematic from various directions. So if this particular member of the family with the Uncle Max is, you know, not happy with the family wants to distance himself, there's other ways to find out about him. And that I think that's a special opportunity for the technology involved. Why did you select Ancestry as opposed to 23 and me or the other ones you mentioned a minute ago? Well, first of all, nothing is forever. And I've dabbled in various kinds of, various of the, you know, the options. I've stayed with Ancestry the longest, but for example, I have a file somewhere that connects to Ancestry from a vendor called Family Tree Maker, which was a resident file, a resident program that they then connected up to Ancestry. They made some kind of deal so you could change enter data on your laptop or desktop and it would show up on the online version and vice versa. So that's brilliant, brilliant bit of technology. Ancestry, the key when I was originally shopping was which program had the most information? It was as simple as that. And for reasons that are peculiar to Ancestry, Ancestry was way out in front and it has to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formerly known as the Mormon Church, which places great store in genealogy for, you know, liturgical reasons. I mean, for reasons of religious dedication. You know, on that note, Jean, my wife and I, we went to Salt Lake City a few years ago and we wanted to see what the Mormon Church was doing about that. And they led us into a huge room of people who had come from all over the world who were on, you know, state-of-the-art computers at the time, which accessed the Mormon, you know, database. And they could, you know, look at their families and they could enter data on their families. They could do research on their families and they would make a trip out of it. They would spend days in this very large room with all these computers. And it strikes me about Ancestry or 23andMe or any of the others that the Mormon Church doesn't need that room anymore. Matter of fact, that room wouldn't be nearly as helpful as one of these database programs. What do you think? Are they still doing that in Salt Lake City? I believe they are. I mean, I don't know what COVID-19, for example, has done. My assumption is they had to take some serious precautions. God forbid, you know, people show up and then they, it turns out that's a super spreader site. I don't think it is. But, you know, you would want to be responsible with a facility like that. But it's a, as I understand it, a really very user-friendly, creative, smart set of resources, including being able to connect people with genealogists, really experts. And, you know, you're going to have to pay for that tender loving care and people walking you through stuff. But I think the need exists for that and will continue to exist. But there's a variety of other, I'm sorry. We live in a world of nuclear families where people don't have family communities to speak of. I mean, you talk about being remote because the other person is on the computer. How about being remote because the other person is on the other side of the world? And you're not likely to get to see him or enjoy a personal relationship for years and years at a time. And then you can do that virtually. You can do the research on the computer and then it can make a Zoom call the computer. You know, it's not the same thing as breaking bread together, but it's not that far away from it. I wanted to point out, by the way, that Ancestry.com, which I looked at this morning in preparation for the show, and 23andMe, which I also looked at, are different, just in terms of the way they present themselves. First of all, Ancestry is twice as expensive. Ancestry is built on the notion of finding your fathers, so to speak, and making those schematics and identifying all the people from generations upon generations. And as what you do is getting information about their personal stories, which may be the most attractive thing of all, it's a million stories. Now you go on 23andMe, and it's not as expensive. And it talks a lot about the DNA analysis. It talks about the fields that you would find in a DNA sample for a medical situation. I remember a guy here in Honolulu who was selling genetic sampling to big pharma for testing anonymously. And then one day he said, I really moved up in the world. Now I don't send them the specimens in a slide or a test tube. I just make fields, and I have a few hundred fields to identify every sample of DNA that I'm sending them, and that's all they want. They don't need the specimen gets old anyway. All they need is this database, and I'm sure that's the way both of these guys work. However, if I go on, I'm going to go on it now for a minute, if I go on 23andMe, I see the whole thing is about healthier choices, eating a healthier diet, setting healthy goals, increasing exercise. It's not like a fitness program. That's what it sounds like. They also do the genealogical charts, of course, but it's different. They're really mining the DNA, and they're giving you advice about your DNA. I don't see the same kinds of things on Ancestry. Do you use Ancestry for that? Well, I'll describe my tools. I use Ancestry both for genealogical purposes and for DNA purposes. And Ancestry has a PSI on no stock in any of these companies. Ancestry has an innovation as of a couple of years ago called Through Lines, where they integrate their DNA data, and I believe their genealogical data, and they will say they will present you a list of DNA-confirmed connections. And you can find, for people who are in their database, you can find all the people who are descended from your great-great-grandfather. And many of them, depending on how much work you've done in this and how intact the family has been over the decades, ring a bell, and some of them don't. So that's one tool, and it's very exciting. And Ancestry DNA has a very large database. I mean, it's a popular program, and the more popular it is, the more valuable it is. I'm also a subscriber to 23andMe for DNA purposes, and I use it kind of as a check to see who's popped up, and 23andMe will suggest that a person is a second cousin, a second cousin once removed, a fifth to sixth cousin, a remote cousin, and so forth, a distant cousin. And I can then correlate and see if that person has shown up on my Ancestry DNA data. Some people are in one set of data, one program, some are in another program, so you're trying to catch as many as possible. In a perfect universe, there'd be only one, but that has other dimensions that are kind of scary. Those scary dimensions, you know, I suppose you don't know who your family is, your parents, you don't know. Maybe in vitro, adopted out without a record from any place in the world. So if I put my DNA in there, am I going to be able to find my true parents? Maybe. Maybe. It might help if they're in the system. Or if a descendant is in the system, you may be able to track back if you have a very high shared DNA that would tell you something. Now, some of these things can be pretty interesting. There's been some journalism committed on this subject, but I remember some years ago, I got an email from a person who sent me a screenshot of, I think, a 23andme screenshot that showed a list of women who showed up as her second cousins. And it included my name as well. And none of these names meant anything to me. I mean, you know, second cousin, in my case, I'd know the names of second cousins. None of it resonated. And these four women appeared to be one another's half sisters. And it turns out that they were produced through artificial insemination with the common father. And that common father must have been somebody who was a cousin of mine. They may have thought I was the common father, but I'm sure that I wasn't. But they wanted to know, well, did anybody in your family work at or study medicine at a particular hospital or a medical school at the end of particular year, and trying to figure out who their common father was? The woman I was in touch with told me that the four half sisters had gotten together. They all live in the metropolitan New York area. They had no idea about any of this. And I think it was quite a startling experience. It certainly was for me, too. I've also pursued a number of clues generated by one of the DNA programs or the other where somebody looked like she was a very close relation of mine, a cousin. And I have interacted with a couple of people in this category where the name meant nothing, whatever. And it turns out you'd hear stories like, well, yes, my mother was always vague about her early life or her first marriage or something like this or never talked about it. And whether it was a casual one-night stand or a relationship that either or both families greatly disapproved of, for example, and these things emerge sometimes quite painfully, I think. But at other times, in ways that are very enriching and purpose-serving. Well, you've created a community with literally hundreds of people that you didn't know before. And talk about resurrecting family communities that has enabled you to do that. And I know from watching the email that this is a great experience for all of them, although I suppose there's a few that drop off the side not interested. Those of them seem to be very interested. Yeah. Interestingly, of all of the relations that I've sort of connected with, and for our mother's family particularly, it's an enormous clan. They were very productive in past generations, be fruitful and multiply, with a single exception of a couple in their 90s who were probably depressed and dealing with health issues and so forth, and didn't want to have any contact with anybody. With that sole exception, people have been very welcoming and, oh yeah, put me on the list. And as you know, several times a year I send out emails to the family with various seasonal greetings. One real benefit of that is that, although in the case of our family, very little was handed down as oral tradition, except the towns. The tradition was not to hand it down. That's true. That's true. Pretty much that's true. But in any event, I was able to connect with cousins whose parents and grandparents were less parsimonious with information. One member of the family had, her mother had written down a real good history of her subpart of that family, which reached back to the generation that was common to all of us. And that was tremendously rewarding. And when the time came for me to make some field trips, my wife and I went to Ukraine one time and then I went to Poland to visit the shtetl from which the last quarter of our family immigrated. I was anxious to share the fruits of those roots trips with cousins. And I think people appreciated it. I hope they did. But if they didn't, I did. I just felt, okay, I'm a little better situated than I was. You're enriched. It's the stories of people who actually you have a kind of interest in knowing, but I wanted to ask you one other question. But hold on before you do. What is interesting is there is clearly a spectrum. There are people who, for whatever reason, feel that their personal lives began with themselves or with their emancipation from their parents or with the move or going away to college or going into the circle, whatever it is. There were people who want to sort of start everything again, whether it's assimilation or whatever, personal frictions, it happens. And the last thing they want to know, at least for a while, is who cares about great grandpa? And at the other end of the scale, you have people who are quite, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but basically fanatical about it. I mean, dedicating enormous amounts of time, that is very rewarding activity for them. People who are really burning to learn more about, learn as much as possible. I have a sister-in-law who's an anthropologist. Well, not surprisingly, she's quite interested in this stuff, and she has become one of the active genealogists in her part of the family. So what motivates people? Could be a variety of things. So earlier we talked about what happens if the person on the other end, the missing link, so to speak, in the family tree, the schematic, isn't available, isn't on the system, on any system. And furthermore, if you talk about these ethnic migrations, what about countries that are beyond the pale, and nobody there has gone on the system? Well, a couple of things. First of all, and whatever program you're using for genealogy, and there are programs that's something called Gini, G-E-N-I, there's something called MyHeritage, that's a host of these programs. Whatever system you're using, there's an email function, an internal email function that permits you to communicate with others. Jewish genealogy is another one that has a wealth of information. But if the other party is not reading his or her email regularly, or is simply unresponsive, I mean, I've had the experience of sending emails through the internal ancestry system, and you can tell how frequent the user, the other party is, and it may be somebody who hasn't gone online in two and a half years. So you're not going to hear back necessarily, not only real time, you may not hear back for months or ever, and that's very frustrating. But I want to add one other thing that is quite interesting, I think. There are records. First of all, it's kind of astounding that given the turmoil that the world has experienced over the last 100 plus years, that any records have survived. World War I, World War II, the Communist Revolution, the Un-Communist Revolution, all these things, it's a miracle. But in fact, public records, which may not be state of the art, maybe they're state of the art in 1875, but it's a miracle that anything has survived, and yet a lot of stuff has survived. In that connection, there are records that are not digitized now, they're not in English, and they may never be digitized. Who's going to do that? And so there are times, and I have done this, when you want to find a researcher in country who will go to the archives, who will check the records, and who can then report back to you. And I will say that I'll mention his name, there's a fellow named Alex Denisenko, who was not only my archival researcher in Ukraine, but also with our tour guide when we made a Ruth's trip. And I learned things and confirmed things that I never could have done without somebody laying eyes on the czarist era paperwork. I have a few minutes left and I wanted to turn to the dark side at least briefly. And the dark side just brings out a piece on 60 minutes, I guess three or four months ago, over Ancestry's sale of your DNA, of the database of the fields of your DNA, and then possibly the sale of those schematics as well. Through social media, who knows where it goes, and they didn't treat themselves as obligated to any privacy standard, so this may have happened with 23 and Meek 2, I don't know. But there's certainly a dark side to that. Maybe they're not doing it anymore after it was exposed on 60 minutes. Maybe there are other ways your DNA is getting into the global profile that each of us have, hither and yon. And I'm reminded also that there were some cases involving people who were charged with crimes, who were convicted on the basis of DNA, that came from these Ancestry-type programs. And so when you put your DNA, when you take that swab and send it in, when you connect up with your family, you may be exposing yourself to lurkers, government agencies, who knows what, that do not have your best interests in mind. What do you say in response to that change? Well, two things. Number one, the programs that I'm familiar with do permit you to maintain privacy, various levels of privacy with respect to the data that you have entered. And so there may be personal data about, you know, tragedies within a family that you don't feel like sharing with anybody or causes of death or stuff like that. So you do have to be alert to that. And of course, if you're on the lam from a bank robbery years ago, I'll give a little legal advice. Don't do a DNA test. Because there's some vigilante out there somewhere, pouring over things and looking at wanted posters. And these days, it may be good really at using these tools in a law enforcement way. So, you know, I think people who are potentially in trouble with the government will be well advised to not dabble in this. But for, I'll say normal people, you know, people who haven't robbed banks or robbed the post office, you know, as long as you're aware that to some extent, what you're doing here may become public or at least known to third parties. That's a known risk. It's a known risk to ride a bicycle. Of course, life has your risks. You wear a helmet. Then the question is, the benefits and costs. Now, if the benefits in terms of satisfaction and knowing your family, suppose you're a person who's been deprived emotionally of the support of an extended family, well, that's a pretty strong value. So that's a really considerable benefit that the tradeoff is. Well, some nutcase may hassle you or try to fool around with your credit rating or some, you know, some 21st century hassle. Yeah, okay. Do it with your eyes open. But if you want to be part of the family of man in this era and rather than simply, you know, one person alone in this kind of existentialism sense, then this is a valuable and remarkably productive tool, I think. So that's my thought. Okay. At a time, my brother Gene Fidel, I'm talking about Ancestry and 23andMe and all of the possibilities with these DNA schematic companies, really fantastic that we live in these times. Thank you so much, Gene. My pleasure.