The Heirloom Portrait & The Danish Flood: Verifying Family Lore (with Rhonda Budge) | Episode 129

Growing up, my guest Rhonda Budge spent hours sitting beside her grandmother, staring at a massive framed portrait of her great-great-grandfather, Johann Christian Hansen. Family lore claimed he heroically rescued neighbors from their rooftops ...

From Utah to Iceland: Passing Living Heritage to the Next Generation with Eric Allen | Episode 128

How do you take dry facts on a family tree and turn them into something your kids can actually feel? In this episode, Eric Allen joins me to share how a trip from a pioneer monument in Spanish Fork, Utah, to the volcanic coast of Iceland transf...

From Belarus to the Boston Meat Wars: Uncovering a Rebel Ancestor (with Suzanne Hoffman) | Episode 127

When Suzanne Hoffman sat down to help her daughter with a middle-school history project, she never expected to uncover a radical rebel in her own family tree. In this episode, Suzanne shares the remarkable story of her great-grandmother Eva, a ...

How the Air Force Saved My Father’s Life (with Victoria Robinson) | Episode 126

When Victoria Robinson’s father stepped in to defend an elderly coworker at an Arkansas sawmill in 1952, he had to run for his life. Shaken and hiding in the dark balcony of a segregated movie theater. A chance encounter there saved him and spa...

The Adoptee, The Next Door Neighbor, and The DNA Twist No One Saw Coming | Episode 125

When I handed an adoptee a paper with his biological siblings’ names, he burst out laughing. Turns out his long-lost brother was his neighbor!After connecting with an AncestryDNA cousin match looking for his biological family, I spent ho...

Raising 8 Kids After Divorce with Music, Faith, and Family Roots (with Bubba Page) | Episode 124

When my guest Bubba Page walked into the studio holding his grandfather’s 1960 vinyl record album, I knew we were in for a special conversation about legacy. But after facing a painful divorce that left him with his eight children 50% of the ti...

Bootleggers, Mine Massacres, and Brooklyn (with Linda Stasi) | Episode 123

Long before mobster legends took over New York, Italian immigrants were riding in rodeos, surviving coal mine massacres, and brewing bootleg wine in the Colorado mountains. In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, best-selling author and jou...

Alex Haley is My Uncle: The Rest of the Story of My Family “Roots” (with Chris Haley) | Episode 122

Growing up with a world-famous uncle whose book transformed American history, Chris Haley spent decades pursuing stage lights and applause before realizing his true calling was waiting inside dusty archives. In this deeply moving conversation, ...

A National TV Crew Showed Up At My House: Discovering a Lost Legacy (with Melissa Stafford) | Ep 121

What if a national TV crew showed up at your door to reveal a family secret?Have you ever felt a missing piece in your family tree that you couldn’t quite place? In this episode, I sit down with Melissa Stafford, who thought her f...

Stories That Connect Us (And Why DNA Isn't Enough) | Episode 120

Shared ancestors make us related. Shared stories make us connected.Can I tell you a secret? My absolute favorite part of family history isn't just discovering people who lived hundreds of years ago. It's what those stories can do ...

Fifty Nifty United States (with Lisa Elzey) | Episode 119

What happens when you spend a year chasing family stories across all fifty states?I'm Crista Cowan (known online as The Barefoot Genealogist), and for this special Season Two retrospective, I’m pulling back the studio cur...

Delaware: Courage to Save the Words That Built America (with Anna Crowley Redding) | Episode 118

How close did America come to losing its foundational words forever? In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) takes us to Delaware—the First State—as our countdown to America’s 250th birt...

Pennsylvania: Stashed-Away Secrets and Forgotten Family (with Jessica Rae) | Episode 117

What happens when a simple hint on your family tree uncovers a decades-old secret?In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) sits down with nurse, history lover, and content creator ...

New Jersey: A Sentence of Survival | Episode 116

Imagine diving into your family tree to discover that your ancestors left you a secret message more than 300 years ago, encoded into the literal names of their children. I follow a trail of meticulous Quaker records from a genealogy brick wall ...

Georgia: Two Lives, Two Coasts, One Massive Secret (with Julie Merrill) | Episode 115

A dapper playboy, a broken plantation safe, an embezzlement scheme, and a grandfather who completely vanished. What happened to William H. Wheeler? 🕵️‍♂️🔍When an 83-year-old client named Jane came to Julie Merrill, an accredited genealog...

Connecticut: The Windsor Witch | Episode 114

Massachusetts: From Rags to Riches to Ashes to Starting Again (with Laura Tasse) | Episode 113

Maryland: A New Kind of Identity | Episode 112

Four months pregnant, two babies already buried in German soil, Anna Maria Niccum boarded a wooden ship in 1749 and crossed an ocean she'd never seen. Not for a revolution but for a foothold. My six-times great-grandmother made an extraordinary...

South Carolina: Ancestors Leading the Charge in Battle and in Life (w/ Anne Mitchell) | Episode 111

A wounded soldier refuses to dismount. His boot overflowing with blood, his hat riddled with three bullet holes, he rallies his troops up a South Carolina hill in Pennsylvania Dutch. History turns on a single moment. Anne Mitchell, a South Caro...

New Hampshire: Chosen Family, Jewish Roots (with Nancy Kotz and Lynne Snierson) | Episode 110

Chosen family and Jewish roots run so deep in New Hampshire's Lakes Region that two families spent generations wondering where one ended and the other began. In this episode, Jewish genealogy researcher Nancy Kotz and award-winning journalist L...

Virginia: One DNA Match and a Woman Who Didn’t Want to Be Found (with Nicole Palsa) | Episode 109

What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back? After Nicole Palsa heard her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking story, she spent the next twenty years searching fo...

New York: A Melting Pot of Resilience (with Scott Pratt) | Episode 108

What would you do if a single letter revealed that everything you thought you knew about your family was only half the story? Scott Pratt walked into a historic Brooklyn church as part of Ancestry's powerful documentary

North Carolina: Buried Treasure, Buried Stories | Episode 107

He buried a fortune in gold under a bent white oak. Then he died before anyone could find it.My 6x great-grandfather Abraham Kuykendall lived 93 extraordinary years. He survived colonial America, fought in the Revolution, crossed the fro...

Rhode Island: A Spirit of Independence (with Maureen Taylor) | Episode 106

What can a single vintage photograph tell you about your ancestors? Maureen Taylor, know as The Photo Detective®, has spent decades proving that old family photos can solve family history mysteries in pretty fascinating ways. Born and bred in R...

Vermont: Conversations of Green Mountain Kingdoms (with Mike Brousseau) | Episode 105

Ever wonder how a "Hallmark movie" setting shapes a family for generations? In this episode, Mike Brousseau shares stories from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It’s a place so deeply tied to his family that there's literally a mountain bearin...