#35 Exploring Projectkin: A community of family historians hooked on stories with Barbara Tien

Imagine a space where the exchange of family history isn't just a pastime but a profound community experience.  Where inspiration flows freely. Join me, Melissa Kitchen, as I interview Barbara Tien and she introduces us all to Projectkin.org.

Barbara is the ringleader at the Projectkin community. She was one of the co-founders at Ponga.com where she was the product and customer champion. That experience gave her a deep understanding of the challenges of sharing stories with modern, connected software.
 
Today, she's focused on building Projectkin into a generous community where members can motivate and inspire each other with their family history projects of all kinds. The community freely shares creative inspiration, tips on tools, and “recipes” for proven projects created without regard to vendors or platforms.

Projectkin are hooked on stories and always looking to share what they've discovered in free online events, an interactive forum, and a new Members’ Corner to publish member stories.

For more general information on Projectkin, including their RootsTech activities go to https://projectkin.org/

http://projectkin.org/members-corner

Click here for all things RootsTech 2024 and to sign up for free!

This group is for people who are in the process of writing their own personal stories to preserve their past for their future. It’s a place to come for story writing inspiration, weekly writing-related events and memes, and continued support from me and the other members.

Join like-minded people and get your stories down on paper for your future generations!

Transcript

Melissa: 0:01

Welcome to the Preserve your Past podcast, where we'll explore all things related to the creative process of writing your stories for future generations. I'm your host, melissa Ann Kitchum, author, teacher, speaker and coach. I believe that your personal history is a priceless gift for family, friends and generations to come, whether you consider yourself a writer or not. We are discussing the topics that help you with every step of the process, like how to mine for the juiciest story ideas or how to refine them into polished final drafts you'll be proud to share. Let's face it sure, your stories can be overwhelming, but I've got you covered. We all have a lifetime of memories to share, so why not save yours to pass along? Let me help you leave your lasting legacy. Hi, my friend, and welcome back to the Preserve your Past podcast. I am so excited to be with you today to introduce you to my friend, barbara Teane, who I can't wait to share with you is going to be. We have Discovered, we're Soulmates. We'll talk about several different layers of what that is on this mission to help you preserve your past and share your stories, but I can't wait to share with you today about Barbara. I'm going to give her formal introduction and some of the resources she shares, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about what I know of her and how we met and we'll get into this lovely discussion. Thank you so much, barbara, for coming today. It's a pleasure to be here. So Barbara is the ringleader at Project Kin Community. She was one of the co-founders of Pongacom, where she was the product and customer champion. That experience gave her a deep understanding for challenges of sharing stories with modern connected software. Today she's focused on building Project Kin into a generous community where members can motivate and inspire each other with their family history projects of all kinds. I think you're starting to see the similarities. This community freely shares creative inspiration, tips on tools and what she calls quote recipes unquote for proven projects created without regard to vendors or platforms. Project Kin are hooked on stories and always looking to share what they've discovered in free online events, an interactive forum and a new members corner to publish their member stories. So again, thank you, barbara, for joining us.

Melissa: 2:56

I just wanted to let everyone know. So when we're doing episodes like this, we do have I do have a chance to connect with people. Barbara and I were just introduced by someone else. We've talked about how amazing and intertwined the community is when you have, when you finally identify your mission right and you start living in your mission and your purpose and speaking that to others, that your people kind of find you and you find them. So I love the reason why I wanted to kind of pull this out.

Melissa: 3:29

I love that you have gone from looking at this in a way that I want to pull out that in without regard for vendors or platforms, because a lot of times when people hear family history or ancestry or things, they're thinking of all of that software or different places where they could put their stories or that. So I love that this is without regard to that. But I also love that you're sharing all different ways between the forum and your events and your members corner. So please can you share a little bit about how you got well, first of all, how you got to started with family history, what led you in from what you can tell a little bit about what, how Ponga led into, led into Project Canon, and what your your purpose and your mission is for that. Wow, that's a lot all at once. Let me do my best. I know I'm going to hand in the mic over to you for a bit.

Melissa: 4:25

Yes, your story through your story of beginning, of, I guess, the origin story of, like what got you into family history altogether and then that creating this wonderful place for everyone to collect.

Barbara: 4:39

I think my own story into family history is a little different, I think, than many peoples because as it happens, I grew up largely overseas as a family. We moved to Latin America and then traveled a great deal. After that I was still in diapers so I didn't really know the United States. And then we moved, came back to the United States and we moved to Hawaii. So I grew up in Hawaii and then traveled a little. So my first experience on the mainland was really when I went to college here in California and I, as a consequence of all this travel, especially back in the 60s and 70s, travel and long distance phone calls were very, very expensive, so that didn't anyway. We still traveled. Other people paid.

Barbara: 5:25

So I didn't know any of my cousins. I didn't grow up with cousins. I didn't grow up with grandparents. I met my maternal grandfather once. That's it, and it's in retrospect. I just didn't know anything about any of them. I had the privilege when I came to college to live dear by my great aunt, my grandmother's younger, by 17 years younger sister, and she introduced me to her kids who lived nearby and then their kids. So my second cousins and I got into their whole family and it was really just to figure out who's who. Of course I had to go figure out what a second cousin was and it turned out that my grandmother had written a family history book, one of these rare self published books in 1948. And frankly, I don't think any of us would be offended to say it's not a great read. It's a lot of begets, but it has this thread through it. Now, of course, at the time I didn't understand what attribution was and all of the documentation and any of that. But just reading it you can see that she talks about visiting parishes and records and cemeteries. I mean, she's actually done something. I just have none of the notes, none of the records. So that was just always there and it became the occasional reference point when we're related to X or Y.

Barbara: 7:01

Then fast forward a misspent youth in technology. I'm actually a died in the wool nerd, having studied, as it turned out, east Asian studies, art history and anthropology of mid 19th century Japan, and I'm a terrible student. I was very poor in the language. I struggled, but I was not very good at it. It did require a lot of nerdy skills, which I did acquire. I then later applied those nerdy skills into a career in networking and telecom, which back in the 70s and 80s 90s, turned out to be a good place to be, because in many ways so.

Barbara: 7:39

The internet, as we know, dates back to the 50s. The worldwide web itself was just in the early stages, as actually local area networking became a thing. And then wide area networking, which we used to call it, became a thing in terms of interconnecting homes, offices and so on in a practical network thing. And then poof, we have this internet thing. So all that time I found a role for myself in product management, which is I suppose I not thought about it this way storytelling between engineers and sales and marketing, but really the customers. What is it the customer really wants and why? And as Dr House used to always say, people lie, they don't tell you the truth. They'll tell you they want feature X, which is what the competition has, but that's not really what they want. So I learned just to ask the questions about what's the problem you're really trying to solve, what are you trying to do, why? And that I think I've locked into it.

Barbara: 8:42

I had good mentors along the way, but that sense of really scratched peel back scratched the surface. Why? Why is this important? What are we trying to get to? And the world of telecom is full of facts, not to mention a lot of acronyms, and so the facts are foundational. Without that, packets just don't get through, and so that idea is not new. But finding those pieces so in my own story it turns out, I think, coming back to that idea of travel and worlds and culture, all this networking, telecom stuff got me through it, because what I was really interested was not in the engineering, was not in the bits and bytes, but what was getting out the other end of the pipe. Why were we doing this? Well, we had to do all of that to get there from here. So it was interesting and I learned fundamentals, like it doesn't matter if I just sent a message. What matters is was it received? And then did I get the acknowledgement that it happened? So that's the cycle of communications, as opposed to strictly, I spit in the world and nobody heard me.

Barbara: 9:45

I started focusing on that and I started realizing that, as I had all those years been worried about packets flying around, suddenly, when I got my Mac and my iPhone in June 29th 2007, I bought it for myself for a birthday present. Here was a network device with a camera. It was terrible at the time but it seemed pretty cool and I started suddenly to think about how a digital device with a network attached was like packets, smacking onto a surface and telling me what it looked like. So every one of those was a packet, so it could go backwards and tell me what they were thinking. Well, no, not quite, but why not? So that was kind of an idea that I just I just obsessed about for several years.

Barbara: 10:33

Eventually, starting a company that became Ponga, and Ponga from the Spanish word Poner, which means to put, was about putting stories into a picture, putting that ideas, getting into that picture. We created ways at first to just put any kind of content from anywhere on the web into a picture, to the point that it's embedded, which was pretty cool. That company didn't work, didn't make it bolded. It bumped into. Some other co-founders founded a new company to build on that technology. We acquired that technology and added in the magic of facial organization, organizing your photos by the people who are in the photos. Notice, I didn't say facial recognition. So it's a separate thing, that's a separate step. So first we were looking at all the pictures that you just uploaded matching those that appeared to be the same person putting in front of you you recognize, put the name, any name you want, and then you move your mouse over the person's face and name you gave. It appears and that name appears in every other picture of the person. It was very, very cool. People loved it. Just not enough of them fast enough.

Barbara: 11:42

Businesses have many factors to have it take off and what I found, we also released the software in the middle of the pandemic, which was quite the challenge and all of those other kinds of factors. As we made the business decision to take the platform offline, I said to my co-founders hey, there's something really special in this. The people who come to our events over and over again. They've become not only become my friends, but they get me. So, if you don't mind, I'd like to give them an off ramp. So at first I called it post ponga. I had no idea what would happen. I wanted to keep this going, to keep the band together, and so we did, and we had the rare benefit to be able to take the platform offline while we could still afford to give refunds, to return archives and to invite people somewhere else. That became post ponga.

Barbara: 12:42

I'm a little embarrassed by some of the things I wrote early on as we were figuring it out. We found any kind of platform I could find to host the forum components of it, the conversational bits of it. I knew events had to be an important part of it, and how could I do that in a way that would be self-sustaining? By late summer, just last year, I had one of our regular members say to me what is this ponga thing you keep talking about? Okay, we have, we've moved on and I had to come up with another name. It was actually our membership that I tossed a few names around and somebody came back and said you know what? You're always talking about projects. Maybe that should be part of the name. And that ultimately led to Project Kin.

Barbara: 13:31

I love that Kin, of course and you've seen this in the language I use on the site is not only is Kin, your people, also not specific to bloodlines, which I kind of like, but it's your people and it's also all of us together. We have a shared set of values, we have a kinship, exactly. So sometimes I'm sort of getting a little flippant now and I refer to, hey, project Kin. But that's why, and so that's what Project Kin has become. Is this place to share that? And the other thing that's really important and you sort of mentioned this is that Platform independence.

Barbara: 14:08

I have to tell you that, after a career in technology, more recently a 12 years spent building a software platform, or we would have heated arguments about a difference between a platform and a tool, for example, I'd like to say sophisticated understanding of what a platform does in terms of bringing people in and trying to keep them, because, frankly, that's a business model. Hey, I totally respect it. But I'm also defensive about what we as users of these tools and by that I mean everything from the phone to the lights, to the computers, to the software that's run on top of them how are we using them to accomplish our objective, our why, our purpose? And that's where, again, from my technology background, I am intense about things like standards. You could not have the internet today without the IEEE, ietf and the W3C, all of these components that have defined standards, protocols, jpeg, mp4, mp3, all of these things that have defined standards to ensure interoperability.

Barbara: 15:27

So it's sort of the opposite of a platform. When you pull your things into the platform, they don't want you to, they don't want to give it back, and so I wanted something that could ensure long-term 100-year, long-term while at the same time creating a digital way to integrate context, have it be meaningful, have it be meaningful to today's lives and take full list advantage of what the protocols can do today. Media media is not just about having a Yadda Rasmetat social media post. Doing what we're doing now is capturing, recording voice and audio and movements that will have a means and opportunity, a potential of being preserved in the future. That's what I think is so important, so transformative.

Melissa: 18:13

So interesting. Bringing that up and kind of transitioning to that discussion. When I speak with people, oftentimes it will come up that they will ask for how ways that I suggest for them to collaborate with family members. Right, and a lot of people that I know, including family members, do assume that what they put on some of the social media sites so that they can have their photos and their stories somewhere belongs to them. And we know it doesn't. And from a business standpoint, I know that more so than I would even think about it as a personal person. But there's been times when those social sites went down and people had nothing, no access to all of those items that belong to them, right? So I totally.

Melissa: 19:04

This is another reason why when I started looking at and I don't know if we mentioned this, so Project Cannes, hosted on Substack, which I say hosted but is living on Substack, but we can bring in any, like you mentioned, any of your media can be your media. How you are meeting with other like-minded people is through these many different avenues you have created. So there were, like you mentioned, you have some courses or workshops. There is great places to have conversations. I love it and I love Yep, go ahead, I'm sorry.

Barbara: 19:45

I want to make one important thing very clear, and it's confusing because we're doing something very different than most platforms out there. We are not a platform, we're just a community. So when you say Project Cannes hosted on Substack-.

Melissa: 20:01

Yeah, I knew it was it's hosted on Substack for now. Community for now.

Barbara: 20:06

It's a community and we're hosted there for now. It's like saying we're a club and we meet at the Marriott.

Melissa: 20:13

Yes, yeah, that's a great way to. That's an excellent way to exempt.

Barbara: 20:18

yeah, that was hard to and one of the yeah, one of the reasons as I shopped for platforms, I was looking for something where I can take our content as a community, put it up and take it down. The other important, so within Substack as compared importantly compared to Facebook, which provides a great way to bring people to me, no question, but I don't own the names. That's just abominable in my book Plus. I don't. My members, my users, my participants don't own the content that they're putting up there. If they delete their account, it can stay, and that's fundamental to any platform where collaboration and sharing is fundamental to it.

Melissa: 21:04

And it's when we're talking about historic documents that we want to preserve and have access to.

Barbara: 21:11

Exactly, or you discover that some of the documents that you've posted have some inappropriate compromise to somebody else for example, who's living or reveals somebody's story that wants to keep it private, et cetera, et cetera.

Barbara: 21:28

So one of the things that we're doing on Project Kin is, as Project Kin it is a community, it's a club, it's not a platform and in fact, people don't have to post their stories with us at all. It's a community about learning how, learning from each other, inspiring each other to how we do all of that. So a large part of the workshops, courses, ideas, things that are tossed around these project recipes are about how to do it, how to yes, they're not the stories. So the project recipe we had this month just had me in tears because it was. It is wonderful to see them keep building on each other, keep getting better. This one was just breathtaking. I'd encourage anyone to go see it. I have actually. This one is I'm freely sharing it projectkinorg slash 5Gen 5-GEN. We'll put that in the show notes too. So thank you, it was such a great example.

Barbara: 22:31

And Carrie Carney, who was our speaker, a professor at Oklahoma State University who works with really new first time college students, kids who are at risk for any number of reasons, tells a story of putting together a multi-generational family history cookbook. Nowhere is the cookbook published on my site the names are all blocked out. There are a few pages that she's referencing and how she did it in the video. And I produce a recipe, a actual printable PDF, downloadable. None of the names appear and we do that for privacy reasons, so it's sort of untangled from the let me tell the world about my story. Let me tell you how I did my story and why and what I learned. What would I do differently? And that's a huge difference. Now there's a lot of people that want to tell their stories so their cousins can find them, and then that's all about SEO and context and find you know, including those. And when I realized that so many people are on Substack and, frankly, other platforms trying to do that and one of the reasons I'm on Substack is, frankly, the sharing components are breathtakingly good. They're really best practices for public sharing and stuff. So that's why I put together this member's corner.

Barbara: 24:02

Like you know what you want to tell a story, but you don't want to deal with all the technical blah, blah, blah about SEO and blah. Why do I have to worry about that? I'm like you know what, just drop me a drop, give me a doc, a Microsoft Word file and a few JPEGs. I'll take care of it. And, of course, they have final review. They have decision whether to do it or not. They can cross post it anywhere they want, but that's what I'm trying to do there. Those are stories about stories. Those are actual. Let me tell you about my gradient route, and that's. I just proposed it like two weeks ago.

Melissa: 24:39

So idea of the shower. So then, the main part that makes again that the main name project can being. It is about the projects, it's about the kinship and the community, and however you want to do them or talk about them when you're doing them, or get inspiration to do them, is all available through those conversations and from the club, from the community. I love that, that's beautiful and so, yes, so a lot of what. So would you say that From that, as you worked through that, there were pieces that surprised you, that you didn't expect, oh yeah.

Barbara: 25:29

Lots of them. I guess a dozen years in the startup world. You learn a certain. You get over that white-knuckled feeling that pity your stomach that I'm hitting the publish button. You get over that because one of the first things I study about anything is how to delete. I can't delete, I don't try it. So, yeah, there's lots of things that I figured out and that's why I was laughing earlier about gosh.

Barbara: 26:02

It's embarrassing to think about the first things that I said about what Project Kin is. I have chucked, written and chucked about three websites so far and it's only been six or nine months. The good news is I've discovered some really simple tools to just get it done and that has allowed me to really focus on the ideas, probably the biggest surprise to me Again, a little embarrassing, but as I started out I've always thought of myself as a nerdy one that would figure out how you do something, and early on we started doing these Project Clinics and that's carried forward, that's. We actually do two a month now, one for the Atlantic time zones and one for the Pacific time zones, and we do those as I mean, I don't prepare at all, we just show up. There's another one later tomorrow on our Atlantic edition on Wednesdays and the Pacific edition on Tuesdays, and we you know people come with ideas. I don't know how to do this. So I have my grandfather and he wants to tell these stories and I don't know how to capture that. What would I do? So then we talk about. You know, do you want to do a video or do you want to do audio? Is video awkward to get? Have you tried doing a Zoom session? It's a great cheat to get a movie studio and record them and they don't notice it, etc. Etc. So that's what those are about. So I kept thinking it was all about technology.

Barbara: 27:25

And then a dear friend of mine from college, from grad school, reached out to tell me about a new project that she's working on. She's finished her first memoir, which was a hit. She's a journalist, a beautiful memoir as a matter of fact, it's right here Whoops memoirs of a mask maker, catherine Graven, and she is working on another story. So I said, oh, could you join us? So it's a fascinating story. And she said yes, and then all of a sudden I said wait, wait, wait. There's no tech in this. She's a writer, she's a published, established writer, doesn't give a hoot about technology and she's working on another memoir. What's that got to do with us? It's got everything to do with us. Everything, because she is a very experienced storyteller. She's not only a journalist. She has been teaching in journalism at Columbia School of Journalism. She gets it stories and crafting a story.

Barbara: 28:27

And now she's working on another one, having found success with her first one, and I realize, oh yeah, we are family historians hooked on the stories Stories. Yeah, to paraphrase or to break Mark Twain's, never let your school get in the way of your education, don't let technology get in the way of your story. And so often we sit there and say, oh, I want to be in family history. Now let me go to ancestry. Ok, you can push a button and AI will take care of the story part for you. Ok, I'm done.

Barbara: 29:07

I think you missed something. Yeah, you missed the heart. Yeah, you missed the heart and soul. Yeah, we missed the why. We missed the why because, if one of our great writer memoir coach members named Karen Ray joined Punga for one of our events a long, long time ago and I'll never forget that you know she went around and showing people how you could just you could tell the narrative of someone's life as that complete, absolute, perfect string of events that happened like a diary, like a person tracker that did every single thing they ever did. First of all, is that interesting? I don't think so. I know what about it, and it's the what about it that makes it a story not only interesting, but it also gets to the life. It gets to why it mattered. Why are we here?

Melissa: 30:03

Yep, what is it doing? That's exactly where you and I intersect, also, and talking about evolving as a purpose. When I first started, it was about written stories mostly, and now I'm realizing that stories come in like preserving our past, preserving those family histories. Our personal stories can take many forms right, can be, it's always going to be about the story, but the story might be initiated from an object or from a memory surrounding a location, or so then it became. That's what I love, even being a former teacher the word project that you have in there.

Melissa: 30:51

I mean, we did in November, we did recipe story starters, and one project that I work on with clients is collecting their family recipes and working on the stories behind or around or because of those recipes. Right, because once we gather and we look at things, recipes are so universal for people. That's just one item, but there's so many ways you can take in your world and your artifacts and create something that's comfortable to you and tell that story without even necessarily being a master storyteller. With a few, I think you nailed it. It doesn't need to just be step by step by step by step by step, which is one of my mission parts.

Melissa: 31:40

I've used the word mission a lot, but part of what I've worked on with my listeners and in the podcast and in my classes is how can we make those stories interesting, how can we make them feel more real, to be better stories, to be more apt to be received by our family? So it's not just factual stating of history, so that you know how are, what are the ways that we can create better stories around. Whatever the project, I love the project piece of it. That's something that I also have definitely worked on. My themes per month are based on things like that and coming up with projects that you can bring into your everyday.

Barbara: 32:29

Yeah, you are a teacher.

Melissa: 32:30

But I love so that talk that then to tell again for everyone on here to then talk about our similarities but then thinking about the differences. In that I am the teacher, right. So my platform is let me speak to you, let me teach you, let's do it together. But the community that you're creating in the, we could then go over to project. Can't everybody do all that you know? Then people could be over there saying how can I? I'm doing this, have you done this, sir? You know that same conversations we're having within my Facebook group as we speak that's kind of where those conversations are happening or through email. But it is interesting to see there is so many ways that you can find people that are doing what you're doing and that's only going to help you as you begin the process of being more, more you know, doing it more often and sticking with it Instead of just you know a lot of people feel overwhelmed, don't know how to maintain it for the long term when they want to to work.

Barbara: 33:38

Yeah yeah, you know, I think so often people come into this feeling like it's a chore and obligation. Oh, I got all this stuff, that stuff, you can actually sort of see it and it's it's like it's my burden, I got to do it, I have to do it, and so when you know we had facial organization, ah, yay, Computers will do it for me. And yes, I I like, as I've evolved on this myself too, Maybe I'm a recovering nerd. Anyway, I think of this as not about the. There's one whole part of it, which are the facts. It is important to get the facts right, and you know what technology provides so much more of the facts today about living people and even access to the facts that are knowable about people who have passed generations ago then are ever possible, ever have been possible, and there's every reason to believe that that will continue in the future to even greater degrees of depth. So again, what's our job? I think our job is in like a historian, in a micro level. It's about wrapping context around it Around.

Barbara: 34:56

You talked about picking up an object. You know, picking up an object of of meaning right next to you. That was, in fact, a little exercise that that same memoir coach did Karen Ray again, she asked everybody in the group to. I think she intended to just have like one person pick it up, but everybody was like and it was such an incredible exercise because people would find an object. You know, this is where I keep my paper clips. It's not about the paper clips.

Barbara: 35:27

There is a story in my heart about this object and I think back. Is it important to my history? No, Does it really matter to long term? Well, no, but why it's important to me says a lot about me, and that's what I would want my children to know. The object was acquired by somebody else in a faraway place that happened to have it around in that collection of giftings to give somebody because they felt obligated to give a gift, which was very nice. But the meaning to it is what is so much more important. And I think it's also true when we think about wrapping context around something, the context of history. And, again, technology that we see every day, whether it's technology of a Polaroid camera, or the technology of how lights were handled, or the technology of computers and iPads and whatnot. Any one of us. Technology has moved so fast in our lifetimes, and even the last 15 years. If you pick up a computer and look at a screenshot of Computer Currents Magazine which was a thing here and you look at the gigantic CRT tubes and go.

Barbara: 36:44

But you look at those in historical photographs and, boom, you can use it to nail the time zone, the time range and, just like looking at the snow and know the season, you can date things by those kinds of historical objects and, as we so ironically I think, try to get those things out of the frame of pictures because it seems inappropriate. And why would anyone need to know? Think like a historian and think in hundred year time frames. I have the really distinct privilege right now to be working with my 96-year-old father-in-law. He just celebrated his 96th birthday and he is very committed to getting his family story out. He is sharp as a tack.

Barbara: 37:38

Sharp as a tack and committed to the family story from the boom from China the second, so-called second wave of Chinese to come here after the Chinese Revolution and the stories the family takes back not a hundred years, not 200 years, 3,000 years of past on family lore, not a lot of documentation back that far, but enough. And there are elements and pieces that are carried forward that they can map back to the. I don't know things like DNA to give some clues as to bits and pieces, but how to pass that to a new generation and anticipate another, at least a few hundred years. Yeah, it doesn't matter what platform we use. Any platform that we use is just about experience right now and I want those platforms that I invest in now to use it with my effort to succeed. But they know they too will be evolving in the future and that's a good thing. That's a very good thing.

Melissa: 38:46

Yeah, no, and the purpose to looking at when you were talking about, like wrapping the concept, wrapping the history around the object, like enveloping it with what's the meaning behind it, what's the story behind it, what's the where did it come from and why is it important? The context, thank you. But that context, part of everything right, is really the magic behind our stories and the storytelling, right. So there's a pieces of the layers, of the magic, of the continuity that, even though we go through generations, there are lifetime things that we will all go through. So that's pieces of what's really magical when you look back at those stories and you go back generation. But also the context of of it all is what makes it not just be something from AI or something on TV or something like that.

Melissa: 39:48

I didn't. That's kind of everyone knows that listens to this and I've heard me. We didn't have a lot of stories in my parents own words and I have items that have some meaning and context to me based on what I remember as a young child, but that context and what I would have learned if my parents were older. So my I was a senior in high school and my mom passed the stories and the love layers and the level of depth of truth and depth of reality of what what stories were is going to be very different when you tell someone at a young range than what you can have, those conversations that would be had later on. So just that context for me now, for my boys, is to find ways that I can start putting down, connecting back to their childhood, because I would love that for myself.

Melissa: 40:46

Right to know what was it like to be a mom at the time when we were running around being crazy kids and you know my dad was working two jobs and my mother was, you know and just knowing those secret behind the scenes stories not secret, but at the time when you're younger, not asking for those because you think you're witnessing it all and you're only seeing it from your view. But it's just that whole idea of, yeah, the context is really important, that's the secret sauce, that I think there's two factors come into.

Barbara: 41:19

That was I love this idea of paying attention to stages of life. As you hear stories, as you write stories, I think those of us who, where our children are, grown and reach a stage in life where we can turn to this kind of historical interest often it's later in life, but we have something that the younger kids don't, which is that older perspective on what it's like to have been there, even though we don't know what their life is like now in this crazy world. We went through it. I largely went through childhood without TVs, not to mention, you know, social media and the rest of it. The second thing that comes to mind in a little bit was the conversation about artifacts, and I started to think about how, when you write a story, you leave for lack of a better word your DNA on it, you leave your stamp on it, you leave a piece of yourself behind, even if it was something not about yourself at all, even if it's anonymous, because there is. You know the choices that you make, certainly in terms of how to tell a story and where it is, but there are pieces of yourself that you leave along the way, even though that wasn't at all what you were trying to do. I lost my mom. We talked about this. I lost my mom just a couple of years ago. She was an important part of my story for Ponga and for a number of reasons, not the least of which she found her way into being my model A lot of pictures we have.

Barbara: 42:52

So what if you sat with your grandmother mom do this, and I was? You know, there's a lot of ways. Now I look back at those pictures that, yeah, I kind of took for kind of promotional reasons to sort of tell a story of what if I was selling a platform. But it takes on a whole new meaning now looking back at those and I was thinking about how I'm actually. There's a few bits on our site that include my own family pictures not very many of them and I hadn't even thought about that, but I think the reason for that is I felt very strongly about using actual family photos, not generic. You know clip art, and I still feel strongly about that, but I think it.

Barbara: 43:47

I have been very, I'm very private about my own stories and I'm very serious about wanting to keep those things private and keeping away to keep those private. So now that we're actually talking about telling the stories, I can tell you about how I do it. But I'm not sharing my own actual stories Because I think that's I used to say in pitching Waipunga was private. The story that you tell in your living room is a very different story, and that's story you tell at a microphone at the town square, once performative, and it should be.

Barbara: 44:26

And yet so much of our technology has, for business model reasons, focused on the public because the entirely wonderful place to have those private conversations doesn't make anybody money. That's okay, we got it. The servers are expensive, I gotta tell you. So having understanding where that slice works and why it works that way isn't about good and bad. Hey, look what Facebook has done. Some wonderful, wonderful things, no question, not the least of which is the ability to bring people together who may never have known where those connections are. That's fabulous.

Barbara: 45:08

There are certain aspects of why the business model works the way it does, which necessitates behaviors, and then, of course, there's decisions that they've made or not made. But with my tech background, I can at least help people see that and ask the right questions to come to better outcomes and better answers. It doesn't mean that Substack is better than Facebook or Facebook's better than Substack or Podia or any other platform that we might use and choose, and so on. Business models. Well, the real world does run on economics, which, by the way, is why, when I decided to call it projectkinorg and get serious about it, I realized that I'm not making this be my business. Yeah, it's a business as far as the IRS is concerned, as being a little DBA for me, but I want it to be self-sustaining and I'm not big enough even to ask for contributions because I don't have anything to give, but I will eventually.

Barbara: 46:14

I thought about making it a formal 501C3, blah, blah, blah. But you know what. It costs so much money to do that I'd have to ask for a lot of money in donations to pay for the paperwork. That's just ridiculous. Maybe some future day and I'm keeping everything nice and separate so that it stays that way, but I'm a product manager, I've got tech skills. I'm gonna go do that. I've learned stuff for what I do, so don't worry about B. This I'm doing out of passion and I want it. It has to be free so that people can feel comfortable coming in. I think we can create ways. I'm gonna create a cookbook, probably some future day, of all of these project recipes. So they're all written down in the same format. They're all done with a share and share alike creative commons license so that you can just continue to add to it all of those kinds of things. That's the long-term goal for this. But it's not a business, it's not a platform and it really is just a community. It's a club, and you know anyway.

Melissa: 47:18

Yeah, no, I love it. So that brings us to because we are coming up. The reason why I invited you this week is because we do have RootsTech coming up and for those who are listening or watching this on YouTube, rootstech is going to be this year, 2024, coming up on the 29th through March 2nd and we're gonna have some links because Barbara and Project Kin are going to be doing some exciting activities and have some really neat presentations. But for those of you on here, rootstech is a conference that's virtual and live. Do you wanna talk about that, barbara? And then what you all are doing? Sure.

Barbara: 48:09

RootsTech is, I think, the world's largest family history genealogy conference. It's been going on for years and years, funded through FamilySearchorg, which is itself funded by the LDS church, and it have an expo hall and all of the markings of a straight up convention conference kind of thing. It's a huge number of courses, the kinds of things you would pay for as courseware for people participating on site. It's only like 120 bucks, something like that. It's very inexpensive for participation.

Barbara: 48:43

During the pandemic, they rushed actually everything shut down within a couple of weeks at the end of their 2020 conference, so they had a full year to prepare for 2021. And it was entirely online. 2022 was entirely online. 2023. They attempted their first hybrid model, so this would be their second attempt at a hybrid model, which I expect is what they're going to do going forward. Last year, I think they had over 3 million people online and I don't know 20,000 or 30,000 in person, so the online version is huge and that's free. Right Online is completely free. You just sign up at rootstechorg and you have full access to all of that, which is really kind of awesome if you're at all interested in family history and even if you don't have time right now, just sign up because you get a full year of watching anything. So that's a very good deal. So we're a little nobody. No one's ever heard of us. So it's not like I'm spending money on advertising, but I thought it would be an opportunity to create a little noise, help people see what we're doing and also, you know what. There's so many of us watching this online. Let's reinforce that community idea.

Barbara: 50:02

So I came up with the idea of doing as many events as we could possibly muster and I decided it was two per day for three days, a total of six events at time zones ranging enough to cover Western Australia through Sweden, where our various members live so far, and we quite figured out the Indian Ocean we're working on that but to just a wide range of times so that people could chime in and like all of our events. Everything is always recorded and all of the events are free to any member to watch. And, by the way, to be a member to watch it means you gave me an email address. That's kind of it, and things like this project recipe from last week I am sharing right now, just so everybody gets a sense of that you could see the events. You not only can see the recording. You can see a transcript of the recording that's searchable, so you get to the good part. Click that and you can watch it. That's a very, very nifty features. That's, you know, platform stuff. That's what I get out of Substack and one of the reasons it's nice to use that as a hosted spot. So I'm very excited about that.

Barbara: 51:14

Plus, I'm announcing and this will go live just as I'm announcing it is this new program that I'm pretty excited about. I call it the members corner. So we've had a series called Kathy's Corner Since last year. It was actually originally a Ponga program where Kathy Stone, a very well-respected, well-known photo organizer, coaches people along the way of their journey of going from photos and prints and artifacts to some kind of archive and all of the technical things related to making that happen. So I realized you know what? We could have a members corner where people could actually get to the actual stories, not about the story. There are a lot of writers on Substack eager to write, but now if we have all these audio and video features as well and, of course, photographs, there's no reason we can tell any number of different ways to tell stories. So that's what I'm thrilled with your support to have this program to be one of the first of our cohort of members corner contributions and I know you are a Substack Substacker as well, and it means that you can easily find the other members that are there. Everybody can join in a chat and in notes and all these other kinds of places to mingle, get to know, ask questions and learn from each other.

Barbara: 52:40

So I expected to have maybe five, maybe six first articles and I gave them all the way until the 22nd so I would have a little bit of time to do the editing.

Barbara: 52:51

Oh, my goodness, let's just say it's well above that and I haven't even gotten to my deadline yet. So the response has been terrific. My rule is it's a family history story and you're giving it to me on Substack. Get a few other requirements like that Only one submission per month per person, but you can submit every month as long as I can manage it. I may change the rules a little bit over time and the past articles stay there so they're searchable, and it has all of the great sophisticated SEO functionality that's built into Substack. I'm your editor a little light editing and I'm no writing coach. My English teachers would be horrified, but thanks to things like Grammarly, I can catch errors and get it done. I have a few skills relating to SEO and how to make sure things can be found on the net, so we try to make full advantage of that to help each other out, because a lot of people just want to tell the story, and I want them to just tell the story too. That, to me, is what's so important, yeah.

Melissa: 53:57

And I think when you start sharing in and reading other stories, it reminds you of layers of your own story, like it's fascinating to read those stories. So, yes, going in to share and learn about other people and life and then to be able to look as a right, you know, as someone preserving the past, as someone working on their family history, to then realize how many corners and avenues they could go down to find even more and to do the research I love, love, love. That Excuse me. So, wow, so much to talk about through that. So I'm very excited.

Melissa: 54:38

So we're gonna make sure that we put all of the links to Project Kin that you've shared. I'll put the RootsTech information in this. We'll all be sharing that on my socials also. So we'll have all the links in addition to what you might do in a timely way of February of 2024. There will be items in those links that will be continuously useful. So even if you are listening to this and it is not, it is time has passed since we first originally posted and recorded those links will be there to take you to the tools and tips that Barbara shares in Project Kin. So those are gonna be available to you while I'm still dealing with this through.

Barbara: 55:27

That's fine. I just want to add this members corner is a corner about our members. It's absolutely publicly available to anyone anywhere. It's at projectkinorg slash, members hyphen corner, members corner and the articles you gave. While you're cleaning your throat, you gave examples of articles around byways. I was thinking of Emma Cox's story she's just submitted. As a matter of fact is, in fact, about finding a place that isn't there on maps anymore, based on new tools to find it to old maps based on what was in a baptism record, and another story about an invisible, how women have always been invisible, and teaching about how to bring women in, and a wonderful device used in the story told by Robin Stewart, as one of the ones that's.

Melissa: 56:17

I mean it's great that this will be in the same Members corner with all of those stories as well, and those are just the ones that I was editing today, so I'm really thrilled that's going to be exciting to see the different layers, levels of storytelling, diversity of topics and, just to let people know, even geographical diversity, because Barbara had just mentioned Emma Cox, who is in the United Kingdom, and she's another person that I actually she's who introduced us, which is really. It's funny how our big, bigger circle pops around, but we also have Cindy as a mutual friend and colleague and, yeah, memory minder.

Barbara: 57:02

I think that's a great example of how the power of community and taking the time to make introductions and see those connections and introduce people. I was just chatting with Emma that two of my speakers and now you as one of our writers, and she will be contributing writing. It just keeps snowballing and it's where that paying it forward, as we say in the tech world, which has been a long phrase, long, long time in startup world is what makes it come together, and it is.

Barbara: 57:35

It takes a risk You're taking a risk to do that and it's scary, and we're here to help each other get there from there.

Melissa: 57:44

But it makes it so much more real. It makes it more exciting. It helps to feel like you're not just especially, I think, with family history can feel like you're with your information and you're by yourself and you can put a lot any kind of research. You can definitely get isolated feeling and part of what's lovely is when you do start following through and interacting with people that have those similar and different. All of us have very different twists on it, but connect over similarities. That's really exciting. So, yeah, I appreciate you joining today and sharing all of that.

Melissa: 58:28

I have a few questions for everyone who is listening. We know that for all of my guests that come to join me on the podcast, I have two questions that I ask each and I will let you all know that I do not surprise people with these questions because it's funny. December I had my brother and sister on and we did a flashback look from a point of view at a family memory of our Christmas shopping that we used to do every year with my father and we each gave memories of talking about five senses or visuals, or did we do this or what, and we took turns. So we were listening also, which is another important part when you're telling, it's always also to receive and listen.

Melissa: 59:17

But when I got to this part, neither of them could come up with it. They were like no, that's too much. So I said, well, I always give people an option to think ahead. I don't want the listeners to think that I am doing this at the last minute. But, barbara, do you have a story that's from your past that you wish you knew? But it's just one that was not preserved and you don't know what. That story? Yeah, and you don't have to tell.

Barbara: 59:48

Obviously you don't need to tell the whole story, but if you can give us an idea of what that might be, I gave the description earlier of how many stories in my own life are very private and I have no intention of sharing those publicly. But key parts of my own family history and story relate to those secrets. There are stories that are unknown. There are stories that are secrets. In my family there were, as it turned out, several secrets and the details almost don't matter to the rest of the world because now I know actually this is pretty common.

Barbara: 1:00:27

The 50s and 60s really did a number, especially on women and it relates to divorce and children and had a wedlock and stuff like that. And those facts I have since unearthed and had the adulthood to be able to wrap my head around and understand and come to terms with. But I would just love to really understand. There is a story of a drive my dad and my mom took before they were married that I just would love to know what happened in that conversation. And it's like this scene in a movie, as I've heard it told. I wanna hear that movie.

Melissa: 1:01:13

And I never had a chance to do that.

Barbara: 1:01:15

I lost my dad. Now I don't know that story, but it's the kind of story that is laden with emotion, that will be told from multiple perspectives. I will never know the full story, but now in time and history it's going to take on these multiple layers which, by the way, we're gonna come back to that different views of the same story. You know the movie Rashomon and the Rashomon effect, which is a samurai movie, all about telling the same story from different voices.

Barbara: 1:01:48

It's a Wikipedia thing. We'll talk about that later. Okay, that's gonna be a future project.

Melissa: 1:01:53

That will be a future project and we will definitely be talking. Yeah, you had another question. Yes, so the next question is of your stories, or family stories, that you know the story but you wanna preserve it and make sure that that story is passed along.

Barbara: 1:02:13

Yeah, and this is one that I feel like I don't even have maturity and experience and storytelling skills yet, but maybe one day I will. In all of this venture, I mentioned casually that we lived overseas a lot when I was a kid which is true Latin America mostly and I came back to the United States on April 5th 1968, having lived overseas pretty much to memory. I was in diapers when we moved to Latin America and I arrived at Dallas airport. My family and I arrived at Dallas airport the day after Martin Luther King had been killed. I had all kinds. I mean, we were on Pan American Airlines, I was coming to the United States of America.

Barbara: 1:03:03

I had such visions of what this experience would be and it was not what I expected and I didn't even understand. I didn't know who he was. I had no idea what this was all about, what the problem they were all talking about was. I just couldn't even understand it and the experience of processing that and understanding it. And then, by the way, about less than 60 days later, we packed up and moved to Hawaii, which had been a state for less than a dozen, a 10 years at that point. They became a state in 1969. And it was just whiplash to put all of those kinds of things together and understand that. So I don't have a skill set, the cultural understanding, the subtlety to handle that story with the respect it deserves. I still get goosebumps and tear up to watch King's speeches to understand the context that was happening at the time. Those are the ways that those periods of history start to send tingles up my spine.

Barbara: 1:04:15

Similarly, moving to Hawaii, which Vietnam War was a complicated thing for the entire country, the whole year of 1968 was also remarkable in many, many ways for those of us. Yeah, and Vietnam War meant a lot to some place like Berkeley, where I live today, that I didn't live here then and I don't really have the context, for it was years later that I came out here. But in Hawaii, where this was the last place many soldiers were before they shipped off to war, it was the first place they came back to or were on R&R. We saw it everywhere and we live very near Kaniwa Marine Corps Air Station now Marine Corps Air Station. I think it was an Air Force base at the time and it was an experience that was very real and I was nine as an amazing age. It's just when you look up to the world and you the fifth graders, fourth graders, sixth graders, that age before adolescent hits you and yeah, yeah, it was remarkable. Then, of course, we still travel a whole lot more.

Melissa: 1:05:20

Yeah, well, I think you bring up an amazing point that I love to think about and this was something that came up in that conversation with my sister and brother. When we talk about those memories and we look at our own history within history, there's layers, right, so we can do the research on the history and then telling it from our viewpoint of a nine-year-old is something still to be honored and explored and even that to be preserved of what did I feel or what do I remember? For what we can remember right, because that was the other piece that came up in our conversations as siblings was what do you remember? And we remember different pieces of it, because when you're that age, all of that sensory information coming in parts of it are very much photographed on your memory, but not again the word context, without the context of really understanding the deeper meaning of maybe what was causing what we were witnessing.

Melissa: 1:06:28

I can only imagine, like again, talking sensory and talking visuals, and you taking that flight, even thinking as I think pan am exciting, I'm flying, you're picturing the women, I'm picturing it 1960s, when everything was like it's America and we're being and you're welcome and you're coming into DC and then this and then witnessing the wailing and the pain because that was 1968. That's a lot of that. And then again, like you mentioned, in going over to Hawaii and then witnessing all of that layers of not really understanding the Vietnam War or who these people were or where they were with Hawaii, yeah, wow. So yeah, I think for me parts of what I like to do is to go back to just look at it very simply from what I can picture separate, and then do the research around what was kind of going on the outside part. Yeah, it's very hard to do both at the same time.

Barbara: 1:07:39

Yeah, it's funny. Today's word, I think, is layers, layers and context, layers and context, although I can't help it but think about donkey and shrek.

Melissa: 1:07:51

Yeah, the lion, exactly Layers. Okay, so we're gonna. Before we end then, okay, donkey and shrek. And now you and I have another like analogy, but one of the things that we talked about and I'm gonna bring this up. So I often will say to my guests are there any questions or conversation pieces that you would like to have? And we do need to finish shortly because we are.

Melissa: 1:08:17

We definitely have a lot of meat packed into this one, but one of the ones was, as we were talking, and we were talking about our kindred spirits and I'm using kin and kinship that I have always saw myself as kind of this old soul person who loves old houses and old things, and that in my mind I was picturing myself when I picture myself as a writer, that I'm gonna be the Angela Lansbury and be typing on my table in Cabot Cove doing all my backscouting. And the funny part about that, barbara, after we got off the call and I was thinking that you and I both connected over Angela Lansbury and that show Murder she Wrote was that I grew up doing my family vacations up in Maine, so we lived on Cape Cod and we did all our family vacations in Maine. Never saw a murder up there. But it wasn't even filmed in Maine, it was filmed in California. Oh that's amazing or was it Oregon?

Melissa: 1:09:23

wait, was it one of the other northern coast ones? Maybe the Oregon coast?

Barbara: 1:09:27

So it might have been further not be there.

Melissa: 1:09:29

yeah, it might have even been further up, but it was funny, because when you watch them I'm like that doesn't like Maine it does, until they come to a certain point and you're like you don't have those trees out here, Like when we watched Hawaii 50 in the 70s.

Barbara: 1:09:43

we were always saying you can't get there from here? Wait, that's not where that road goes.

Melissa: 1:09:49

So, yeah, so now we have our onions and Shrek moment, but I thank you again so much. Thank you for sharing about Project Kin and sharing about your passion for creating this community, which is really the main part is giving people a place to ask the questions, to come and share their stories, which that member's part is going to be so amazing. So we'll definitely put links into the member's corner because, as Barbara said, whether you decide to share there or not, you can take part of like consuming and reading and being entertained and inspired by the people that do, and it does sound like you have some amazing talent. That will be part of that, so that will be exciting to participate in.

Melissa: 1:10:38

All the links that we have are gonna be linked to the show notes from here and also we host everything. It'll be so, let's say, all the places so everyone knows where to look At the podcast. We'll have the links. We're gonna have a YouTube version of this. If you're now listening to the podcast, we have this as a YouTube version if you would like to see our lovely faces as we have this discussion. But links will be linked there also and then we will have the show notes and the link to the podcast on my blog. So that is always where we put everything. But I will be sharing Barbara's information, Project Kin's information and the information we shared about RootsTech. But I do encourage people that is free and I did not realize that you have that information and for the future, so if you get a year's worth of being able to look at that content in those workshops, that's an amazing part. But mostly I really appreciate you taking the time to join me for this conversation today.

Barbara: 1:11:40

It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Melissa: 1:11:42

Thank you, and I know there will be more mini topics that we will be discussing in the future. So thank you and thank you everyone for joining us and, as always, I appreciate you and welcome you and encourage you to preserve your past and share your stories. Wasn't that a fun episode? I enjoyed our conversation so much and if you would like to continue our conversation, be sure to follow this podcast and share with friends. This helped share the mission of preserving the past with stories. Want more tips, tools and inspiration? Head over to Melissa and kitchencom and, as always, let's get writing your powerful personal stories.