Stories That Live In Us
What if the most powerful way to strengthen your family’s future is to look to the past?
I’m Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I created this podcast to inspire you to form deeper connections with your family - past, present, and future. All families are messy and life is constantly changing but we don’t have to allow that to disconnect us. I’ve spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
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Stories That Live In Us
It's Like Genealogy 3.0 (with Jenn Utley) | Episode 50
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She spent some time in London and then she ends up in Salt Lake City, utah. What was her journey? What was that like? Found her all over newspaper articles because Lavinia had a beautiful singing voice and the first time that Handel's Messiah was performed West of the Mississippi, lavinia was the soprano soloist.
Speaker 2:Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Krista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. And I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. 21 years ago now, when I started working at Ancestry, I met Jen Utley. At the time, she was working in the publishing arm of Ancestry. She eventually became the editor of Ancestry magazine, but when the publishing arm of the company was shut down, she found another role in the company. She is now the executive story producer at Ancestry, which means she gets to tell stories all day, every day, as part of her career, and she is a brilliant storyteller.
Speaker 2:Not only that, she is one of my dearest friends. We've been able to work closely together for more than a decade together. We've been able to work closely together for more than a decade together. We've been able to work closely together for more than a decade now. But we've also become close friends outside of work. For my 50th birthday, I took five of my best friends on a cruise, and so Jen and I have been on a ship together, and now we're going to share a story about a ship. Jen, I'm so glad you're here. I'm super excited to have this conversation with you for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is because you're one of my dearest friends. I love that. I get to work with you and sit by you every day, so I'm excited to see if I learned something new about you today.
Speaker 1:Well, and this is just like people coming and sitting next to us in the office and listening to us have a conversation all day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly what this is.
Speaker 1:Okay, I can do that Okay.
Speaker 2:So I think people would love to hear a little bit just about your journey into family history.
Speaker 1:Okay, love to tell it, because family's always been super important to me. My background is actually in editing and I always wanted to be a book editor. But I never wanted to leave Utah because I never wanted to leave my family behind. They were always going to be here. So it would have been more important for me to go to San Francisco or go to Chicago or go to New York, but I needed to find something that worked here. So I ended up at Ancestry, which is great. We published books and magazines. I worked on that for a while.
Speaker 1:But then, if you think about family history, when I first got the job here, people are like you're going to go do a magazine about dead people? Yeah, I think I'm going to go do that. So I was a little apprehensive. But when we got here I fully engaged in it. I started right before we launched the subscription of the website. I remember the day they turned it on and they came to all of us and they said okay, we need this thing called a GEDCOM file. Can you all go get some GEDCOM files and come bring them so we can upload them to the site? And I'm like, okay. So I went to my cousin Rhonda, I'm like I think you have a GEDCOM file, what is this? And she gave me one so I could upload something to our site.
Speaker 1:But they also had these charts in the warehouse, these big beautiful fan charts that had like a slick surface that you could write in the family history. And if you know anything about me, I like to write things on walls Right Whiteboard queen. Yes, so I totally got into, I want to fill out this chart. So I pulled out all the books of remembrance and I filled out my chart and so I was, you know, engaged in family history, interested at least.
Speaker 1:And then I spent a couple of years. You know Lou Zooks was my mentor. She introduced me to all the movers and shakers in the genealogy community, which was great to get to know them all, go to all the conferences and I learned genealogy, reading genealogy and learning from these great people who wrote for the magazine, learning what they had to offer, trying to come up with great things that people would want to read. But there's also this other phase in genealogy and I was sitting at a genealogy conference listening to this thing about mitochondrial DNA, totally, you know, cutting edge kind of stuff. Right when I was in college. I started out being a genetics major, so I've spent my first years at college studying biology and genetics.
Speaker 2:There's the first thing I learned about you today Did not know that.
Speaker 1:So I was interested and they were talking about mitochondrial DNA. And you inherit your mitochondrial DNA from your mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's, Like everyone on the bottom part of that pedigree chart. And I sat there at the conference and I was thinking, okay, I only have one brother and my mother has one sister who only had one son, and my grandmother had no sisters. Okay, and my great grandmother had one older sister, Flora, who had nothing but boys. And so what I could do in my head which pretty good that I could go back that far and figure it out but I got to a point where I was like I don't know any living woman in my family that can pass on the same mitochondrial DNA that I can, and at that point I only had one boy. So I thought this is falling to me to pass on this mitochondrial DNA. So I had to find other people who had passed it on. So I kept going back and I had to get back to my third great-grandmother and she had a bunch of sisters, but I was trying to figure out stuff about her and how many other kids she had, and I couldn't find her passenger list. I looked everywhere in Ancestry, couldn't find it. I knew when she came and I knew which boat she was on. She was not there.
Speaker 1:So one of my favorite family history tricks is, when you can't find the person you're looking for, find one of their siblings that has the most interesting name. So she had a sister named Lavinia. Lavinia had a cool name. Also, I knew a little bit about Lavinia because she would what I'll call her the most famous of the siblings. There was a reason why other people knew about Lavinia. So I thought, okay, I'm going to try and find Lavinia and just to go back when I started on this journey to try and find these people who are the mitochondrial who could pass on.
Speaker 1:That's when I got bit with the proverbial genealogy bug. Right, you hear that a lot. There's a time where a lot of people are interested in family history, right, Like we hear about 70, 80% of people want to know about more of their family history, but how many are actually doing something about it? I feel like I was here and I did something, but when it really turned around for me is when I found out about this mitochondrial DNA. And then it's when I found Lavinia. And I found Lavinia on a passenger list on Ancestry in five minutes, Easy to find. But the interesting thing about her is Lavinia came to America in 1863 on a boat. She was between 16, 17, traveling with an infant by herself. I just couldn't understand that at all.
Speaker 2:So many questions, and that's what usually causes the bug to bite. Is that I have questions I need answered?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what is she doing? Traveling alone with an infant? And I was thinking I wouldn't let my kid go to the grocery store alone at 16, right, I mean I would, but what about letting a kid go across the ocean with a baby by themselves? It kind of just blew my mind. So I needed to learn everything about Lavinia.
Speaker 1:So I spent all this time digging into Lavinia. What's going on with the baby? What happened when she was born on the Channel Islands? She spent some time in London and then she ends up in Salt Lake City, utah. What was her journey? What was that like? Found her all over newspaper articles because Lavinia had a beautiful singing voice and the first time that Handel's Messiah was performed west of the Mississippi, lavinia was the soprano soloist. So I've always loved Lavinia. She dies a horrible, tragic death that you learn about in the newspapers, but she became this person that I was just obsessed with and I credit her. I hope when I get to heaven that she's kind to me when I tell her story so much. But she's the reason. She's how the genealogy bug bit for me and how it changed it from just this is what I do as my job to probably what changed me into becoming a family historian.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. I've heard you talk about Lavinia for years, and not just the role that she played in your family history, passion and pursuit, but also there are fascinating stories about her, and so tell us a little bit more about, like, who was the baby? What do you know about her? Did she have more children, like what happened with the?
Speaker 1:rest of her life. So Lavinia comes to Salt Lake. She ends up marrying a man named George Careless. George Careless is a very accomplished musician and ends up marrying a man named George Careless. George Careless is a very accomplished musician and ends up becoming the leader of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She becomes a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Her father comes to America. He's a member. Most of her sisters sing with it. It's something that was passed down in my family. We're all musicians and so we all have this fondness and this affinity for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So she does that. She and George have two other children. One dies as an infant, so that's always a sad thing to see that happen.
Speaker 1:The baby who travels with Lavinia across the ocean her name is Hannah Jane, and an interesting thing I found out is Hannah Jane leaves Lavinia and George's house and goes back to Iowa to live with Lavinia's older sister, who I found out later on that passenger list. Lavinia was not traveling alone. The woman underneath her name is Jane Marshall. Jane is her older sister, but I didn't know what Jane's married name was, so they had different last names. They had different last names. There was nothing that tied them together, so they didn't send a teenager on a boat with a baby by herself.
Speaker 1:They go back to Iowa. She lives there and I was actually able to trace the descendancy of her and find some other people who are descended from her. Because I have never figured out who Hannah Jane's father is, I wrote and got her birth certificate from the UK. It's blank, but there is a way we could figure it out. I mean, maybe one day I'll be back here saying, hey, we used DNA, I tracked down her descendants, they gave me access, we figured it out and we know who the father of Hannah Jane is. But that's something that I'm always interested in learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. So she did have another daughter that stayed here in Utah. Yes, and was your family connected to their family at all? Like, do you know? Like I mean, lavinia is the let's see, if I've got this right the sister of your three times great grandmother. Yes, and so her daughter would be the first cousin of your two times great grandmother. Like, did the family stay in touch? Are there stories that get passed down?
Speaker 1:Not really Like. I don't know any of the other because it's so far back that at some point the families do grow apart. I don't know. I know who she married. I've done some research but I've never successfully traced her descendancy to living descendants. I have traced descendants of some of Suzanne. Suzanne is my grandmother. She is a Livinia sister. They've got three, four other sisters and I have traced them. I ultimately found a woman living five miles from me who has five daughters who are actively passing down this mitochondrial DNA that I've always wanted to do. So it is being taken care of and I'm glad that I found her. It was fun because I went and saw her and she showed me this little picture. She's like look at this picture I have of the family and I'm like we brought that with us here. Look at this big framed, beautiful original photo we have of it. So we were able to get that to her. So that's amazing. It was fun to meet someone and to meet someone who was so close, really, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you have photos of a photo or photos of Lavinia.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, well, and I also found them in the BYU special collections. She was. She was well known because of her voice and being in the newspapers. She sang at the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, so she was well-known at her time and then dies tragically. Yeah, wow.
Speaker 2:Okay, you talked a little bit about Lavinia being such a brilliant musician and her husband George being instrumental in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and this thread of music in your family, as you look at that, she was famous for it and he was famous for it. But how has that continued in your family, that tradition?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, music is important everywhere. She was the soloist in the Messiah. If you open up an LDS hymn book and you look at the very first hymn, his name's on the bottom of it. In fact, every hymn where the women sing by themselves on the third line, my husband will lean to me and go it's one of George's. So yeah, they were into it, all the sisters. Her father when he died in the. I found a newspaper article about his death and the headline said the father of the choir has died and he was your four-times great-grandfather.
Speaker 1:So he was like the old guy there, the elder statesman. He sang with the choir. That passed on throughout that whole family, throughout that whole family. My grandmother she wanted to learn to play the organ. In her 60s bought herself an organ and learned how to play on it because she wanted to be able to be the organist in the temple. My mother has taught piano lessons for 60-something years.
Speaker 1:I became a piano teacher at 15. I would take the kids to a certain point and then I'd pass them to her before I had my own set of students. So I just love playing for people and I love that when I sit down at a piano and you put the music in front of you, it's another language that I speak. I wish I spoke other languages, but I do speak that language very proficiently and that I'm grateful for.
Speaker 1:So we have this family history of music being important. And when it comes to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, my family had a tradition that we would go down to listen to the Christmas choir and it was long before they were the big productions where they brought in everybody, you know, when it was back in the tabernacle. We went for 30 years straight and so much for that. Like before they sang, they would say we'd like to welcome the JW Nielsen family to our choir performance today because that was so important to us. So we have a Christmas party that's called the Choir Party. So it's very much. We're very much a musical family.
Speaker 2:So love that. I think all of us have a relative like somebody in our family tree that we are just fascinated by, and I've loved hearing stories about Lavinia over the years and watching the things that you continue to learn about her, which just reminds me always that there is always more to learn. Oh, you're never done, yeah, and I think so many people focus on racing back in their family tree or, you know, finding more people that we sometimes forget how deep we can go into the life of a single person, and so I love that you've done that. A couple summers ago, you were at a family gathering and had a conversation that connected you to Lavinia in kind of a funny way. Do you want to tell that story? I love it.
Speaker 1:Sure, I'm happy to. So it was a family gathering of my husband's family and my sister-in-law. When I got there, she waved me over and said come here, I've got something to tell you. I'm like, okay, now, this sister-in-law she loves telling jokes, she loves listening to my brother-in-law's jokes. They're always joking, they're going for the laugh every time. So she says I've got a family history story to tell you. And I'm like, okay, let's hear this, because I always want to hear the family history stories, please tell me. She says so I was doing some research on my family and found my great, great grandmother.
Speaker 1:I found her passenger list. I'm like good job, was that fun? She's like, yeah, it was fun. But what I learned is is that my great, great, great grandmother and her husband came to America on the ship the Amazon, which must be why I love it when Amazon ships me things. Exactly Now, when I tell the story in a group of people, the joke slays like everyone gets it.
Speaker 1:The whole Amazon shipping things. I mean, we're on a podcast, there's not many people here to laugh at the joke. But hey, danielle, your joke slays, which she always appreciates when I come back and say I told your joke again and people loved it. But when she told me the joke and she wanted me to laugh, I didn't laugh, which now I feel bad about. I didn't laugh because when I heard that her people came over on the Amazon, my brain likes to make connections. I'm always making connections between things. That's one of my StrengthsFinder strengths.
Speaker 1:I turned around and I said Danielle, I have people who came over on the Amazon and so I said which sailing was it? What year was it? We started? We pulled up hers, we pulled up mine. It was the sailing in 1863. And I'm like my great, great great aunt, lavinia, and her daughter, hannah Jane, were on the Amazon, which I knew because I'm obsessed with Lavinia, I know all the things about Lavinia.
Speaker 1:So when I hear the Amazon, I'm like aha, I know, I know this. Like your people and my people came to America together. They knew each other. Now, how awesome is it that we're sisters now? It's just a lovely moment of connecting and realizing that we're all connected. I don't know. It was just really great. And so we had a moment. I came into work the next day and we're going to lunch, so going to lunch with you and with Lisa and I said I got to tell you this funny story because I thought you guys would get a laugh and so I said, okay, my sister-in-law, danielle, she told you people came over on the Amazon. That's why Amazon, I love it when Amazon ships me things and I waited for you guys to laugh.
Speaker 2:And Lisa laughs a little and I did not laugh because my ancestors also came on the Amazon.
Speaker 1:Which we've known each other for a really long time. Yeah, and we sit next to each other and we've got all these things categorized in our heads, but you don't sit down and say, hey, did people come on this or this? Like, how do you make that connection? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You had told me stories of Lavinia for years. I had heard you, I had seen you research her. Every time You'd pull her up in the tree and you'd look at it and the ship she came on was never a subject of conversation. And so when you told that story and I realized my ancestors also came on the Amazon, my ancestors also came on the Amazon, and we immediately after lunch went back to our desks, pulled up the passenger lists to make sure it was the same sailing of the same ship. And it was. And that was kind of an incredible thing to realize. Yeah, we've been colleagues for nearly two decades at that point and had never made that connection Right Because can you name all the ships that your ancestors came up, no only?
Speaker 2:a few Right, and here's why I knew about that ship. So my story is in preparation for that summer I was taking my dad, two of my siblings, five of my dad's first cousins and his only living aunt. We were going on a family history trip to Scotland. Now I was going to be spending a week in London before that at a genealogy conference and my dad and my brother and sister were going to come and tour London and, you know, hang out while I was at the conference. Then the cousins were going to all converge.
Speaker 2:I rented a 15 passenger van You're crazy, I know I am crazy. I drove it. It was a stick shift. I drove it on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car with, you know, 10 of my most precious people in my life in it. It was a little insane. But I decided we were going to drive from London up to Glasgow and Edinburgh and then up to Inverness and we're going to do this whole Scotland tour.
Speaker 2:But there were a few places along the way on the drive that I wanted to stop and one of them was this tiny little town called Radley it's in Berkshire and the church where our three times great grandparents and four times great grandparents and five times great grandparents. They lived in that village for a very long time. The church where they were all baptized was still standing and there was a historical section of town that had been preserved, and I was so excited to take them to this little village. I was so excited to take them to this little village and, in addition to just walking where our ancestors walked, I also wanted to learn more, see if there was more we could learn while we were there, and so I had been doing research about Rachel Smuin and her family, and one of the things that I had attached to her in the tree was a passenger list. But, like you mentioned, that had attached to her in the tree was a passenger list, but, like you mentioned, like I never paid attention to the details of who else was on the ship with her, what was the name of the ship, were there any unusual circumstances about the crossing of the ship, and so all I had done to that point was I knew the name of the ship and I knew that she was, I think, 19 when she came, and she came with one of her siblings.
Speaker 2:This is a family that ultimately, four generations of the family ended up immigrating, but they did it over the course of about 20 years, and so they just kind of slowly came. And I remember thinking at the time because the date that they came was in 1863. And they were coming to America when America was in the middle of a civil war, and I remember thinking that's insane, who leaves the security and safety of their family in a place where their family has lived for generations very securely and comes to a country that's in the middle of a civil war? Now, granted, they were coming to Utah, which technically at the time was a territory and kind of outside of the bounds and not affected by the civil war. But if they were coming into New York the ship came into New York Harbor, they would have to get through the country.
Speaker 2:And so all of that was kind of swirling in my brain because I literally, like a week and a half before you and I had that conversation at lunch, had just done that research. So again, I think one of the reasons we were able to make that connection wasn't just because I knew the name of the ship, because it was immediately in my memory, I didn't have to dig it out and so yeah. So when we had that conversation at lunch and you mentioned that you had family who came on the Amazon, and I knew that Rachel and her sister had come on the Amazon, we pulled up the passenger list. Sure enough, it was the same sailing. And then you said something to me that just gave me even more fodder for research. You said have you heard about the Dickens letter?
Speaker 1:Well, because we were sitting there and you've been planning this for a while and we'd kind of like watch you plot it and all. But then sometimes for me I just have to sit and think about things and then the dots connect. And so I turned to you and I said do you know that? This is the sailing that Charles Dickens meant? Because he wanted to go and see what those strange Mormons were doing immigrating to America and he wanted to report on them and he wrote about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I had not heard about the Dickens letter. I knew nothing about it, and so I was able to find it and read it, to find it and read it. And so that summer, when I took my family to England, we sat in the churchyard where the family had been baptized and married for generations and I read the Dickens letter aloud to them and it was one of those moments, like it's one of those payoff family history moments that you're like. I do all this research and I find all these things and I never know if people care in my family or not about the stories that I'm discovering. And as I sat there reading that letter and looking around at those people I love and watching them, just weeping and feeling that connection, and then I finished reading the letter and they all just kind of sat there in stunned silence and then for the rest of the drive to Glasgow, nonstop questions.
Speaker 2:My dad had the Ancestry app open on his phone, so we had a family tree while we were driving and they were asking questions. That was the moment they were all in and that moment would not have happened for my family had you and I not made that connection, because I wouldn't have known that that Dickens letter existed. I wouldn't have known anything about the details of that crossing because I probably wouldn't have thought to take the time to dig into it further. And so, like this the serendipity of that. I love it so much when it happens. But Ancestry is doing something really interesting now to help serendipity along a little bit.
Speaker 1:That's right and this is something we've talked about a lot, because we tell stories about family history and our ancestors are more than just names and dates on a chart, and I always like to tell people if you don't know them more intimately, you've missed out on something. Right. Like if you know that, know them more intimately, you've missed out on something. Right, like if you know that they've lost a child early or they were near a battle or like there's all kinds of ways. This is how the story gets better, and so that's a really important component of family history and when you think about it, you need to understand these other groups of people that they had something to do with, whether it's a school class or a military unit that they were with. Like my father served in Korea in the military and he was up on this lone hill. Who are the other men that were serving with him? Right, those people know things about him. Those people took pictures. These people know a part of the story that you don't know and can fill in some of the gaps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think we sometimes get so focused on you know who are the parents and who are the parents and who are the parents.
Speaker 2:And then there's this moment in your family history journey where you realize, oh, I should also be looking at who are the siblings and who are the cousins and the nieces and nephews, and you start to look at the broader family and this just takes it another step beyond that. Who were the other people in their life? Who did they work with and worship with and immigrate with and serve with? And understanding that network of the people in their lives not only helps you understand their life experience better, but it could open up avenues for more stories, more photos, more resources, more context, more understanding, and I geek out over that so hard and I know that you're right there with me and we have. We've talked about this for years, and so I'm so excited that Ancestry has now launched this new networks feature that is going to allow people to make these discoveries. I think it's I'm hopeful of and excited to see what kinds of connections people make. I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And if you think about how the internet has revolutionized genealogy altogether, using computers and all of this information that we've been putting in to take it to this next level, it's like genealogy 3.0. It's like this is a new way of doing genealogy that could be just as revolutionary, Right?
Speaker 2:So you and I have decided, as one of our first networks, that we are going to take the Amazon with all 900-ish passengers. Those 900 passengers are very well documented, but I'm super curious to see what we're going to find, because when you start looking at the descendants, the children and the grandchildren and the great grandchildren and who else in that group of people that those descendants of those passengers have been sitting next to each other at work for 20 years or married into you know their husband's family or like how many other ways are we connected to each other now that we don't even realize?
Speaker 1:It's a shared history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm excited to see what we're going to find. I can't wait. Well, as you think about kind of the future, your hopes for the future, I know you have a hope for figuring out the father of Lavinia's child. Anything else you kind of hope for, oh?
Speaker 1:boy Other things I hope for Boy. Can I go there? Yeah, you know what I hope for.
Speaker 1:So a couple years ago, you and I were asked to speak in an internal conference where they asked us to read the book the Infinite Game and present about genealogy and the infinite game.
Speaker 1:And as I read that book, you're supposed to come up with a big goal that you could never actually make, but as you work towards it, you can move mountains right. It you can move mountains right. And one of the things that's super important to me is, if you think about, during the Civil War, there were 4 million African Americans who were enslaved, and my big goal is how can I help Ancestry and the members of Ancestry, the people who are using Ancestry's tools, to learn the names of as many of those people as possible? And I think networks can be one of the main ways that we can do that. There are so many records out there that tell names, but they're not all consolidated, they're not all easy to find, they're not all indexed, they're all in different archives all over the place. I want to bring them all together and just make it especially for African Americans researching their family history that they can find the names of those people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you and I, for the most part, have grown up because of the way our families have taken care of our family history, knowing exactly who our third great grandparents are.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:But many people in that community have no idea.
Speaker 1:Right and there's real value to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is, absolutely so. Yeah, I'm also excited about how networks can prove that out and give those people an avenue and those individuals who enslaved their ancestors who have some of those records. This becomes a platform where that information can be shared and the connections can be made.
Speaker 1:Well, and the thing I'm most excited about is we've got an idea of how it's going to change the way we do family history research right, we're going to do the military folks and we're going to do the passenger lists and the people who lived on this block and the things that we've thought of for networks. What I'm most excited for is what the world's going to do with this. When they have this tool, what are they going to realize? Oh, I can finally do this. I can make these connections that aren't necessarily familiar familial connections, but they're important connections nonetheless. So I'm really excited to see what people do with it. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:Well, jen, I love talking to you, I love your stories, I love working with you.
Speaker 1:I hope so, because you have to work with me all the time I do and I talk to you a lot.
Speaker 2:It is one of my favorite things and I also love that we're in this together with Lisa and, you know, our team of people, amazing colleagues at Ancestry who have, you know, built these tools and listened to us go on and on about it for years, so excited to introduce it to the world and to have the connection with you that I have, not just here and now, but also because of Lavinia and Rachel, and I like to think that you know among those 900 passengers on that ship because they were a little closer in age.
Speaker 1:Maybe they had some connection, I hope so We've made connections on a boat before. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you for being here. Happy to be here.
