The Story That Lives In Me | Episode 1

Stories that live in us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista 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. Stories that live in us is a podcast that I have had in my mind and in my heart for years, years. And I'm so excited to finally bring you the first episode. This is going to be a little bit about the story that lives in me, the one that helped me become a genealogist and inspired me about family history. So you're going to hear a little bit about my journey as well as the story of the ancestor that inspired me along the way. Carrie Inman was a single mother. It's one thing to be a single mother in 2024 with teenage boys and maybe no marketable skills. It's an entirely different thing when it's 1901. But that is where my ancestor Carrie found herself, with two teenage boys with no husband, with no parents, with no siblings and no one but herself, and a talent for dressmaking that she hadn't had to put to work since she was a teenager. She wasn't a stranger to hardship. She was born in 1861, the eve of the civil war. And when she was little, her older sister died and her father died. And then her mother died. And by the time she was nine years old, she was being raised by her elderly grandparents in a household with a spinster aunt. And that was the existence that she grew up in. And I don't know anything about that. I don't know anything about the love she may have had or not had. I don't know anything about the experiences of her childhood. All I know is this little snapshot of her from a census record when she was nine years old in 1870. And so I often, as I heard stories about her, worried about exactly what it was that she had in her life that kept her going. And again, like, I just want so much to know more about her, and I always have. I didn't know any of this 30 years ago when I first started looking for her. My father didn't know any of this about her 50 years ago when he started looking for her. I sat in a little breakfast nook with my grandfather, and he told me about his grandma, Carrie. He had only met her twice in his life, and the fact that that was his reality really bothered me. Even as a kid, I grew up knowing all four of my grandparents and the fact that my grandparents grandfather didn't know his grandmother really, really bothered me. He told me the few little pieces of information that he had. Some of those little pieces of information included the fact that he knew she had lived in Ohio and been raised there, but that she had died in New Orleans while he was off serving in world War two. He also had a couple of vague memories from his childhood of meeting her in Texas, which is where his mom was from. My dad had tried to extract information from my grandfather about this grandmother of his, but he hadn't had any success either. He did have one moment where he found a piece of information that was actually really exciting. He was sitting in the family history library in Salt Lake City. He had been scrolling through reels of microfilm of old newspapers, and he had come across a newspaper article, and I'm going to read this and make sure I get it right. The newspaper article was from 1887, and it was announcing the birth of Frederick Ross Cowan, second son of Park Cowan and Carrie Inman Cowan. The news of Frederick's birth made the newspaper because he weighed in at a whopping 15 pounds 8oz. Now, my dad showed that newspaper article very excitedly to his very pregnant new wife. And I don't think my mother took it well. I think it scared her to death. She was five foot seven, weighed 102 pounds, very petite, very pregnant with me, as a matter of fact. So a few weeks later, when I was born, coming in at a very petite five pounds 12oz, that was good news, because it meant that my dad now had a new captive audience for the stories that he was discovering and the stories that he wanted to be sure to pass on. And I became a captive audience, parked in my baby carrier under a microfilm reader on the Fridays that they would drive up to Salt Lake City to go to the family history library. He would share the new discoveries that he was making with me. So I was born into this environment of storytelling and story discovery and makes it kind of inevitable that I ended up where I ended up. I also was surrounded by family from the beginning. Stories with my grandparents, picture time with my grandmother, family reunions as a kid, as a teenager, that was always really exciting, listening to my mom send audio tapes back and forth with her favorite uncle as they'd made discoveries about their side of the family, would go to the family reunions, and I'd love to make sure I knew who everybody was. I could name all of my second cousins because we were that kind of a family that just was constantly surrounded by family activities and Sunday dinner and Thanksgiving for 75 people at my grandmother's house. My interest in family history seems kind of foreordained, but Carrie was always this mystery that needed to be solved. My grandfather's sadness over not having known her, his desire to find out more about her and her life, and his seeming inability to do so, the frustration that that caused for him, it planted this seed in me that made me curious. But also there was something about I wanted to make a promise to him, and I did, when I was a teenager, that I would find her. And so it became this quest that we went on, my dad and I. You know, it's interesting because as we started asking my grandfather questions, more little pieces of story would come out. He thought he didn't know very much, but it turns out he knew more than he thought he did. I remember once when I was 16 or 17, sitting with him in his kitchen, and he told me, oh, yeah, well, my uncle Bob did the same thing to his family that my grandfather did to his. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, he abandoned his wife and four kids. He was in the merchant marines, and he met his wife when they were down in New Orleans. And then he took her back to Ohio, and she was never happy there. This southern girl in a very cold state, and they had four daughters. And then he just up and abandoned her, took off for California, which is where his father was living. And his mother was so upset with him, so upset that she actually told her daughter in law that she would help her raise those four little girls and move her home to New Orleans so she could be around her people. And that's what she did. So that's one of the reasons my grandfather didn't know her very much, is because she lived in a place that they had no other ties to and no other connection to. He started naming those four girls in that family, his first cousins. He knew their names, he knew their birth dates, but he had no idea how to find them because he didn't know who they married. And all he knew was their maiden names. So I wrote that down in a little book that I kept with all the other little pieces of information that I was collecting about Carrie, because now the story wasn't just about her and her connection to my grandfather. It became a little bit broader. It was also about these grandchildren that she helped raise. And I was so excited to learn more about them as well. Little pieces of information that came out as I had these conversations with my grandfather, as I encouraged him to tell me stories and to embrace the memories that he had and make sure that he passed them on. In all of the information that he shared with me, though, the things that he never shared with me were things like what she sounded like, or how she smelled, or what her sense of humor was like, because those were things he didn't know. And those are the things that even when I start to find out information about people, I'm always curious about, particularly with Carrie, because I've always felt such an affinity for her and for the choices that she made, even with just the little bit that I knew about her. By the time I was twelve years old, having been raised in this environment with my family, I was obsessed with family history. It's no wonder I ended up in this career. But I also really wanted to know the stories. I think a lot of people who go into genealogy as a career, oftentimes they're meticulous about names and dates and places and source citations, and that's great. But for me, it was always about the stories. My dad set me up with a computer. My very first, I think it was a Compaq 64. He had loaded the very first DOS based genealogy software on it, personal ancestral file. And the task that he gave me as a kid, learning to use a computer for the first time was to take all the family history information that he'd collected over the years and to start to do the data entry on that. And I loved that. I loved seeing the neat little pedigree chart on the screen. I loved seeing the information just fill up. But there sat Carrie as the end of the line. It didn't go any further. So many of the lines in my family tree go further than her, and that one didn't. Around that same time, it was the 1980s. My dad went on a business trip to Ohio, and he decided to stay a little bit longer so that he could go and see if he could find information about her on the ground in Ohio. And he went to Ashland, which is where his great grandfather was from, and he found that there were other. There was information about the Cowans, but no information there about the inmans. So he went to the county courthouse to see if he could find a marriage record. No marriage record. He decided to visit the neighboring county. No marriage record. Went to another neighboring county. I think he ended up in Wayne County, Ohio, where he finally found a marriage record for park W. Cowan and Carrie A. Inman. And that was so exciting when he came home with that. And he opened it up and he laid it out on the table in front of me, and we started to look at it, and our excitement quickly turned to disappointment when we realized that that marriage record did not contain the names of their parents. It didn't even contain ages or residence information. It was just a really simple marriage record. So now we had a piece of information that led us to her, but it didn't give us any more information about her. And that was really frustrating for us, for sure. One summer, a few years after we got that marriage record, I was probably about 15 or so, my dad and I made a trip to Salt Lake City. We'd been living in California and then up in Oregon, and so we would come out to Utah to go to the library. Cause I'm kind of a nerd like that. And we planned this particular trip to look for the inmans. Now, we didn't know who her parents were, but we did know that if we could just start finding other inmans in that area, we might be able to make a connection. So we walked into the library armed with yellow legal pads and pencils, and the library at the time was filled with rows and rows and rows of microfilm, way more than are there now. And we had to go over to a plat map and find the enumeration districts for the census to see if we could find where the. Where we needed to be looking in the areas of Wayne county and Ashland county and surrounding areas. Then we had to go over to an index, a card catalog with actual cards, and we had to find which reel of microfilm had that enumeration district on it. Then we had to go down the long row of microfilm microfilm cabinets and pull the reel or two that we needed. We'd load them on the microfilm readers. They kind of look like movie projectors hand cranked. We'd load the film on there, and then we would sit and scan through page after page after page, looking for anybody with the last name of Inman in those counties. And every once in a while, we'd let out a little. Yep, like, yay, I think I've got one. And we would look over each other's shoulder, and we would hand copy the information down onto those little legal pads. And then we get to the end of that reel of microfilm. We'd get our workout hand cranking it back, and then we could go get another reel of film. We did that for days. It is not lost on me that if I had just waited a few years, the entire census would be available electronically on ancestry and the names that I so meticulously hand copied down on those pads of paper. After days of scrolling through reels of microfilm, those 39 names would have been found in just a simple search. But I'm glad I had that experience of doing that work and getting to know those communities of people by looking through all of the names in those communities. It was a useful exercise that would serve me well later. My dad and I spent the next several years on and off trying to piece together all of those families that we had found. One of the things that we found in the process was four different Carrie inmans. And so I then spent a few more years trying to chase down each one of them, trying to figure out who was who. Now, in those days, it was a lot more difficult than it is now. I'd have to write letters. I'd have to figure out where to send them, what archivist, what librarian, what vital records office might have the information I need. And I'd send a letter, usually with a check and a self addressed, stamped envelope, and hope that they responded. And I would wait for the mail to be delivered and hope that that would come. And when it did come again, it would give me another little piece of information. I traced a few of those carries. A few of them. One of them in particular. She got married. She moved to Washington. Ironically, she ended up back in Los Angeles, but she was married to someone else, so that wasn't her. Checked her off the list. Then there were three. Chased the other one down, discovered that she married someone else, moved up to Michigan, checked her off the list. Then there were two. So I kind of whittled my way away at that list, and I landed on these two women. And then I finally realized, I think they might be the same woman. Two women in the 1880 census, 119 years old, living as a servant in a household occupation as dressmaker. Another 119 years old, living in a household with an elderly couple listed as their granddaughter. I couldn't prove they were the same person, and I couldn't prove that they were my carrie. But there she sat as a giant question mark. And maybe it was a clue, and that was something important. At that point, I decided to try something different. And I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. My grandfather had told me that he remembered getting word about his grandmother's death while he was serving in world War Two and that she had been living in New Orleans at the time. So I rode away to Orleans parish. I sent a check. I sent a self addressed, stamped envelope and asked them for a copy of her death certificate. And the letter that I finally got back after waiting and waiting and waiting, I opened it up, and it said, we regret to inform you that we do not have any record for anybody by that name. And then they listed the variations of her name that they had tried and the year range. To add insult to injury, they cashed my check because apparently you pay for the research, right? Whether it's successful or not. But I was devastated that I didn't have what I needed. You'd think that not being able to find her, that not having success for years. I mean, at this point, I'm in my early twenties. I am really still very passionate about family history, but I can't solve this one mystery in my own family. And so you would think that that would have put a damper on my genealogical pursuits, that I would have stopped, that I would have thought that I wasn't any good at this. It didn't. You don't know me well yet, so I'll give you that. But I turned my attention to other branches of my family tree for the next few years. I just decided it was time to kind of move on. And there's other successes to be made. There were other discoveries to be made, and I did. I made other connections. I found other stories. I was able to start sharing some of those stories with other family members. But Carrie was always there. She was always in the back of my mind. My promise to my grandfather. Each time I visited him, I was reminded that I hadn't kept it yet, that I hadn't found her yet, and that I hadn't found his first cousins yet. And as he was getting older in age, knowing that they were older than him, I also knew there was a clock ticking, that I was running out of time to find them before it was too late. Around that same period of time, ancestry.com went online. It was 1996. I became one of the first customers. Within about six months of the site launching in the spring of 1998, familysearch went online. And now, all of a sudden, I had access to millions of historical records from the comfort of my own home. I was so excited to be able to dive in at any time, to access records without having to go to the library, without having to write right away and wait and wait and wait. I made full use of all of those resources in those early years, as much as I could. I started helping friends and roommates and neighbors build their own family trees. And that was exciting. I volunteered at the local family history center and started helping total strangers build their family trees. So it was just really exciting to be able to do that again. Always in the back of my mind, every time I sat down to search, just about, I would check, is there something new that's going to help me find Carrie? Every time I would visit my grandfather, we would talk about it. The last time I saw him was in thanksgiving of 2000. And I remember him walking me out to my car and giving me a hug and telling me he loved me. And as my brother and sister and I drove away for the ten hour drive back to Utah from Los Angeles, my brother commented that that was probably the last time we were going to see him. And it was. He passed away the next month. And not only was I sad to lose my grandfather, but I just had this real, really overwhelming sadness about the fact that I hadn't kept my promise to him. Now, that promise was made from an eager teenager who didn't know any better, but I had wanted so much to be able to give that to him, and it just really upset me that I hadn't been able to. My grandfather and I were very close, and there are days I still feel him very close. From the time he died, I realized he probably had more answers than I did, but I still wanted to keep that promise to him. And so I kept going. I kept looking for, for Carrion, for what I could find about his cousins. About that same time, shortly after my grandfather's death, I became a little dissatisfied with the career path I was on. At the time, I was working in software support. I had gone to school for business management. It had never occurred to me that genealogy could be anything more than a hobby. But I had this spark of an idea that I could just hang up a shingle and become a full time genealogist with my own research firm. And so that's what I did. I quit my job. I started doing family history research full time. Within just a couple of years, I decided to go to work for ancestry. During those years, ancestry was uploading a new database almost every single day. And I still remember a day in late September 2002 maybe, that the New Orleans death index went online. And I did not waste a single minute. The night it went online, I was searching it, and there she was. What? Like they had told me they did not have a death record for her. And I searched the death index, and there she was, Carrie Inman Cowan. It listed her age, 84, that she had died October 1945, volume 221, page 56. 78, right. I found her. Sort of. The problem was it was an index only, which meant that was all the information that I just read to you. That was all the information that existed in the index, which meant that I had to send away for a copy of the death certificate. I was so frustrated with the people who had originally cashed my check and told me the record didn't exist. It made me wonder if they'd even looked because she existed under the exact name. I had told them. Now everything I needed to order the actual death certificate was now available to me. So I wrote another letter. I included another check. I sent another self address stamped envelope in the letter and hand delivered it to the post office. And then I waited. Not at the post office, but, you know, life goes on, and you're thinking at some point, they've got to respond. I waited and I waited and I waited. And I remember the exact moment after days and days and days of checking the mailbox, that my self addressed, stamped envelope was returned to me. I dropped everything else on the ground and ripped it open right there at the mailbox. Skim, skim, skim. Name of Carrie, address where she died, cause of death. And then it said, names of parents. Father unknown, mother unknown. That was it. No parents names. I looked at the name of the informant, and it was the husband of one of her granddaughters. So, of course, he didn't know. He had never left New Orleans. As far as I could tell, he had never known her parents. Her parents had died years earlier. But did that mean that she never talked about them? Did that mean that they didn't know anything, not even their names? That led to a whole nother set of mysteries for me. That was exciting, but also super frustrating. Now, I had the name of the husband of one of the granddaughters. And so I decided, I'm gonna start looking for them because maybe they're something they can share with me. And they did. Here's how this went down. Google came out with the ability in the early two thousands, mid two thousands, to put up Google alerts. So you can type in anything and ask Google to alert you whenever anything about that keyword or phrase comes up. So I entered the name of every single one of those four first cousins of my grandfather into a Google alert. And again then it was just a waiting game. Nothing was found for a while. But one day, I got an email that said that there had been an alerts on one of those names and my last name, Cowan. It's just unique enough that I thought for sure, this has to be it. And when I opened up the link and found out that it was an obituary for a woman living in New Orleans, I knew I had hit pay dirt. The youngest of those four cousins had just passed away, and her obituary had been published online. Google had indexed it and notified me almost immediately. Now, in that obituary was listed the names of her parents. So I knew I had the right person. It had the names of her children and some of the names of her grandchildren. Facebook had also just kind of become a thing at that time. They had just opened Facebook up to the general public. When it first started, of course, it was only available for universities, but now it was available to more people. And in those early days, people were rushing to Facebook as a platform to connect and reconnect with family members and old schoolmates and coworkers. It was just this rush of information and people connecting. And so I hopped on Facebook and I started one by one, doing searches for the children and grandchildren listed in that obituary, and found several of them. Now, they didn't know me, but I had their grandmother's last name. We had the same maiden name. And so I hoped that they wouldn't think I was a crazy person as I sent them messages that just said, hi, you don't know me, but your grandma Betty Jane and my grandpa Fred were first cousins, and I would love to know more about your side of the family tree. And several of them accepted those Facebook requests. They friended me, but they didn't really respond to any messages. They didn't share any information with me. My mom and dad and I decided to drive cross country to go to a genealogical conference out east, and we decided to take the southern route. We went through Dallas, where we found the graves of my grandma Cowan's parents. And then we drove down to hill country, and we got to learn more about their side of the family. And then we were going to head over to New Orleans. And so I sent Facebook messages to these cousins and I said, hey, you know what? On this particular weekend, we're going to be in New Orleans for just a day and a half. We would love to just come by and meet you or meet you somewhere. They very graciously responded. They invited me to their home on Mother's Day for dinner with my parents. They invited some of the other cousins. And the oldest woman in attendance at that gathering was Carrie's great granddaughter. She had grown up with Carrie. She's about ten or twelve years older than my dad. And she and Carrie actually shared a bedroom when she was a little girl. And she talked about brushing her hair late at night and braiding it before bed. She talked about how she smelled. She talked about her sense of humor, and then she brought out photos. And her daughter proceeded to pull out things that had been written by other members of the family and share those with us. This woman had not only raised these girls and some of their children, but she had loved them and been such a central figure in their life that they had all of the stories that I had been craving to hear for so long. What I didn't expect in the middle of all of that was that they had also been craving a connection in stories to our side of the family, to what had been disconnection for them from their perspective. They didn't know what had happened to their great grandfather or their grandfather, both men who had abandoned them and left and gone out to California. They knew they had cousins out in California, but they didn't know anything about them. They didn't even have names. And so in that moment, as we sat there in that living room in New Orleans, we were able to reconnect this family, not just immediately, and now we have these new relationships, but also this reconnection of information from the past that came out as stories that helped us get to know our ancestors better, that helped us get to know each other better, and ultimately, I think that helped us get to know ourselves better. I was first inspired by Carrie because she was a mystery to be solved. That was the thing, right? Solving that, however, gave me this confidence to continue in the career that I've chosen. When I found Carrie's parents names finally, which I did right after finding the New Orleans death Index, I found a little family history book that had been published in, like, 1897, about the community Carrie had grown up in. And in that book, in just two little lines, it listed that Carrie Inman, who had married Park Cowan, was the daughter of Joseph Inman and Mary Beaman. That's it. Two little lines. But that book had been written at a time when she was alive and when her family was still a member of that community. And so I knew I could trust that information. I then took those little clues and all the little pieces of census records I had collected a decade and a half earlier or two decades earlier, and was able to identify that she was, in fact, the 19 year old in the 1880 census listed twice that those were, in fact, her grandparents, that all of the information that my dad and I had collected about all of the inmans in that community connected me to her and to a larger family tree, which led me back to New York and then to New Jersey, to a deep, deep set of Quaker roots in New Jersey with the Lippincott family, to a deep set of Connecticut roots with the Beamon family. That one connection to Carrie's parents and then to her grandparents opened up a floodgate of information for me in my own family history. But she was the person who was lost and then was found, and her story was the story that was so important to me to discover. And I keep discovering it. I keep discovering it over and over again. I just visited New Orleans again this past summer and was able again to meet with the cousins who, since the time I first met with them, had found a box of photos that they thought had been lost in Hurricane Katrina. A bunch of stuff had been packed away in a storage unit, and they were cleaning it out, and they found this box of pictures. And in that box of pictures, they found a hand sketched portrait that was labeled Joseph Edmond. It was Carrie's father. He had died when she was a little girl during the civil war. But she had kept that little picture, carried it with her through her growing up years, carried it with her into her marriage, carried it with her from the loss of her marriage, carried it with her down to New Orleans, where she raised those grandchildren. And it told me something else about her, something about her resilience, something about her strength, something about her love of family. That connection was so important to me to be able to start to understand her more through just something as simple as the fact that she kept a photo of her dad. I am so inspired by her resilience and her love and her patience, the hope that she offered to her children and to her grandchildren. I just. The more I get to know this woman, the more I love her. First, she was a mystery to be solved. Then it became a connection that I made to other people and other stories. And now I'm just so inspired by her and the kind of woman that she was and the things that I can take from that, about the kind of woman that I am and the kind of woman that I want to become. As my parents and I drove away from the cousin's house on that mother's day after we first met them, I remember turning to my dad and saying that I kept my promise. That was so important to me. He was so excited about the relationships and the stories and the information that we had received, and I was, too. But more important to me, I think, in that moment, was the fact that I had finally kept my promise to my grandfather. I found her. I'd found Carrie. I'd found his cousins. I had all that information. I talked to him. I still talk to him once in a while and feel him near, and I hope he knows that that was important to me to do that. That's the story of how it all began for me. That's the story that lives in me and continues to live in me and through me. That is why we are doing this podcast, and I'm so excited to bring you along on other journeys, not just my own, but those of so many guests that I'm going to have for you over the season of stories that live in us. Well, that's all I've got for you on this episode of stories that live in us. But here's some great news. One of the most valuable things you can do to help me and other potential listeners to find this show is for you to both rate it and leave a review. So as a special bonus, if you write a review, take a screenshot of it and email it to storiesthatliveinusmail.com and I will send you a free ebook with my top tips for discovering and sharing your own family history stories. Also, please share share share this podcast with anyone you think might enjoy it. Until next time, remember that sharing your family stories means better perspective, deeper connections, and a more empowering identity for you, your children, and your grandchildren, maybe even for generations to come.