00:03 - Will Swenson (Guest)
It seemed cosmic, it seemed impossible. It was like it seemed like it was. It could have been a prank that someone was playing on us, because we're this theater family with a, with this crazy theater grandma who always dreamed that her biological mom was, was a famous actress. 

00:22 - Crista Cowan (Host)
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. Live in you can change everything. 

00:49
You don't know her yet, but my producer here on this podcast is Lisa Elzey. She and I have worked together for over a decade, and we had the opportunity years ago to kind of cut our genetic genealogy research teeth on a really interesting case with some kind of famous people connected to it, and so today I'm super excited to not only introduce you to Lisa for the first time, but also to have the opportunity, with her and some of the individuals involved in this particular family history story, to share the discoveries that we've made and the amazing connections and the crazy ride that this whole DNA journey took us on. We should start by talking about DNA, because DNA, for us, changed the face of the way that we do genealogy research, and that's actually kind of exciting. So take us back, lisa, take us back, take us back. 

01:47 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
I feel like I should do the. Yeah. So we had some projects at Ancestry that we were working on that really helped us cut our teeth into DNA, family history, how to use the product, the power of the product with family trees. So we had a couple of projects with Ancestry that we're working on that really helped sharpen those skills. And so I had a friend that his grandmother was adopted and I thought, okay, maybe my skills are good enough now that I can start trying to use this with people I know. So I spoke to him and asked him to take a DNA test and he's an actor. 

02:27
He's from my acting, you know, group of friends in theater that I went to school with and his grandmother is Ruth Hale. And Ruth Hale if you're in Utah you know who the Hales are with Hale Center Theater and she's just a character. She's just this woman that is fierce and spicy and spunky, and she had already passed away. So we couldn't take a DNA test with Ruth. So I thought let's talk to her family. So I spoke to her grandson and he agreed to take this test and he was kind of excited because it was something they'd always wondered. So, yeah, that was kind of the start. 

03:11 - Crista Cowan (Host)
I love that and it's so interesting to me because I have lived in Utah long enough now that I know who the Hales are, but I don't have the relationship with them that you do, and so I was kind of tangentially watching this story start to unfold. You had Will take a test. Several of the other siblings, or his aunts and uncles, then took tests, and so now we had this set of DNA to work with with Ruth's. I say we we. 

03:33 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
There is a we. Let me make that very clear. It was me first, and then I knew that I was out of my depth by myself, and I'm generally out of my depth. I am a really great sous chef. I love, I love working with you. I love working with Crista, and I know many of you listening are probably like I want to work with Crista. Well, I get to sit by her and work with her every day. But I recruited you. I said, hey, we have this thing, let's do it outside of work hours and just have it be our project that we work on on the side. And it was so fun. We had the best time. We had the most frustrating moments too, not with each other, but with the research, and it's hard, it's really hard. It's a generation removed, so we're dealing with that and, yeah, I was so excited to work on it with you and so, yes, it was definitely our journey, because boy was it a long one. 

04:20 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, and when she says outside of work hours, she means it that we would come in. You know, we would stay after work on a Friday night or a Wednesday night and we'd say, oh, we're just going to take a peek at the DNA matches in this family and see if there's something new that we can start to put together. And literally next thing we know it would be two o'clock in the morning and we'd need to leave the office. 

04:41 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yeah, we're like maybe we need to go home and take a shower. I very much likened it to going to the Titanic, the sunken Titanic. I watched a documentary where it takes hours for them to descend, to get to the bottom of the ocean, for them to have filmed documentary footage, and they only have an hour of time before they have to ascend back up, and for me that's what it was like. It took us so long to finally get to the treasure of what we needed to see, but then it was like we ran out of time and it's two in the morning as we have to ascend again, and so every time we looked at it, that's what it felt like. 

05:19 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah. 

05:19 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
So how long did we work on this? Okay, well, goodness, we worked on this piece for five years. That's right, five years. And when we started, there were a little over a million people in the DNA database that had taken the test. That's how long ago it was. We thought we were so excited. Like we have a million and a half people. We're so excited. And now what's our number? 

05:44 - Crista Cowan (Host)
25 million 25 million. 

05:46 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Wow, what it would have been like had we started today and in this time. But yeah, there weren't as many people that had taken the test, so some of it was a waiting game and we knew that sometimes we had to leave the research begrudgingly and just wait and hope that more people would take a test. 

06:03 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, so one of the first matches we found, however and this was long before we could sort matches out by maternal side and paternal side we had a match that was that shared quite a lot of DNA with Ruth's children, and we thought this person was from their father's side of the family, and it turns out she was actually from their mom's side of the family, and that was really the first big breakthrough we had, when we discovered what we were looking at was the DNA of someone who was a child and grandchildren of a woman we determined was Ruth's half sister. 

06:35 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes. And what was so hard about that? Well, ruth was born in Utah, she's adopted in the Salt Lake area and this match that we had, it was not her, it was her granddaughter or daughter, and we determined we were looking at the family. Things were not lining up with the tree, right. It was like what? This is not right. And then we soon realized that this match had an adopted ancestor, which ended up being Ruth's half sister. And that was when we came to that realization she had a half-sister. That was incredible. That would have been enough even for the family, the Hale family just to have that biological connection with someone was really outstanding. But we wanted to dig deeper. We wanted to dig deeper and find Ruth's parents, one of them mom or dad. 

07:22 - Crista Cowan (Host)
And in the beginning we didn't know what we were looking at. We knew she was a half-s. The beginning we didn't know what we were looking at. We knew she was a half sister, but we didn't know if she was a maternal half sister or a paternal half sister. So in the process of those five years what kind of unfolded was that this other family figured out who the biological father of that girl was, and none of that information lined up. So now we knew that these two women, ruth and this half sister, both long deceased, had the same mother, and that was a big clue for us. 

07:49 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes, and the idea that we had two young girls that are a year or two apart, both adopted, was insane, that we found this, and so I was able to go to the State Archives of Utah and I found the adoption papers for the half-sister, ruth. We could not find the adoption papers, but the half-sister she was left on the steps of the Salt Lake what was then the Salt Lake Orphanage as an infant. So it was an abandoned baby, which usually denotes someone in dire straits. There's a situation there, and so they had no information about the mom. So we were still kind of at square one. Even though we found this amazing connection, we still did not know what was up. 

08:32 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, and it's interesting because Ruth's adoption story is so different and when you're looking at now we know we're looking at the mother the fact that one of those babies was left by her and then the other one was actually placed with a family. That, for all the family stories that had been shared with us, was an intentional placement. 

08:52 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes, for sure. And she was with the Hudson family, her family, ruth Hudson, and they're from England, so they were English immigrants to Utah, very English proper family, very English proper family. And then, from what I've heard, it's you know, ruth is this dynamic, theatrical kind of firecracker girl and here you have this British family raising this sweet daughter and but yeah, that was her family. She was so happy to be a part of that family. They were her parents, but she always I know that Ruth always dreamed about who were my biological parents, who was my mother. She wanted to know who her mother was and I was so excited that we were on the trail to try to find that. 

09:30 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, and it's interesting because she wrote this whole play from her imagination about what it would have been like to have known her mother and have her mother show up. And I often wondered as we worked through this, like, what did she hear or what did she know? Like, did she overhear adult conversations as a child, because her placement with that family, with the Hudson family, was intentional? Like, did her biological family know them? Were they connected in some way? Was there a British connection? Like I had all those questions that came up as we started digging through these DNA matches and realized that some of them were, in fact, english. 

10:07 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes, they were, and what was really crazy about this is the matches that were, you know, in the DNA results. They were so small amounts of shared DNA. We didn't have any, you know, high sharing cousins like second or third cousins. They were very small and a lot of it was that way, and usually what that tells us is that you have recent immigration in the tree, and so again we thought, okay, are they from England? Where's the family? You know how do we find this out? But that's why it took so long as well, because we were dealing with very small shared DNA. 

10:41 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, and building out so many family trees? Yes, so many. 

10:46 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
We should probably share those with the families in saying we know who your third great grandparents were and where they were from. 

10:51 - Crista Cowan (Host)
But yeah, well, that's part of the process that was, you have to go through and sometimes put together other people's family trees, figure out how those matches are connected to each other, and we'd kind of landed on a couple of connections. So we landed on a British family that we managed to piece together and then we had another family from Tennessee that we'd managed to piece together, but we couldn't get either of them in Utah. 

11:13 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
No, it was really frustrating In fact. So I was working on one group and you're working on the other cluster. You know the other group and I had this guy last name was Singleton and he was in like Puerto Rico and in the Bahamas, but he was born sometimes in England and sometimes the United States and I could not place him. I could not find his group, his people, and I did figure out he was born in England. We did figure that out. But again, who is he connected to? Who is he related to? Who are the Sing singleton family? So we had that going on and then you had a whole different the blackburns from tennessee? 

11:52
yes, which was just kind of again small amounts of dna you're like, but they're in tennessee. 

11:57 - Crista Cowan (Host)
They've been in tennessee why is it so and have large families and you would expect there to be more matches and you would expect there to be higher matches. Yeah, and there just wasn't. 

12:06 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
And we didn't understand why. I very clearly remember us going what is going on. Why is everything so small? I mean, granted, the database was growing, we had more and more tests coming in, but still nothing, yeah. 

12:19 - Crista Cowan (Host)
So finally, one night, one night. One night, one night, one night. 

12:24 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
One late, late night in the office After many hours of work. 

12:26 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yes, yes and many years at this point yes yes, we were picking at it again, looking at new matches, and really decided to dig into the research Newspapers, trying to piece together that British family, trying to find a connection between the British family and the Tennessee family and figuring out how they all got to, how somebody got to Utah. That was. Those were the questions we needed to solve to solve this right Because, again, ruth was born in Utah. 

12:52 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
We knew there had to be something with Utah. Even if someone got sent to Utah to have a child, which could happen in that time, there's had to be a connection there, and so I will never forget. It was so exciting. So we had this singleton group that I was looking at and you decided we're like, okay, we're going to focus our energies Instead of being split focused, we're going to put both of our expertise or luck behind the same thing. So you were looking at a newspaper in Texas. In Texas it came up. It's a newspaper search for singletons. What? Tell me about that? Yeah, tell our viewers, I know about it. 

13:27 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Tell our listeners about it, yeah, so we had the names of these singleton family members and we were trying to piece them together. We knew they had come from England but we couldn't figure out how they were all connected. And then, of course, we were looking for that Utah connection. And so I just started going through the children in that family, and the oldest children was a son named Edwin. And so I typed in Edwin Singleton and we had some clue that the family had immigrated from England to Texas. 

13:56
And so when a Texas newspaper popped up, that was really a big clue and this article was about him as a grown man clue. And this article was about him as a grown man living in Utah, going down to Texas to visit his baby sister, who he had placed for adoption years earlier when their parents died shortly after they immigrated from England. And all of a sudden we had the Utah connection. We had the England connection, we knew we had the right family. We now understood why one brother ended up in Puerto Rico and one ended up in Seattle. And it was because they immigrated as a family from England and then the parents died and that those kids got split up. Yeah, and so now this man moves to Utah and gets married. 

14:40 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes, and. And so we immediately were like, oh my goodness, we know who we're looking for and it's. What's crazy is we had seen those names. We have done singletons in Utah and seen all the different names, but we had nothing to root it in any the time, saying that Edwin Singleton and his wife and their daughter had gone on a trip. Yes, and all of a sudden we had a daughter. 

15:11 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, we had a daughter and a wife and a wife, and when we dug into the wife we discovered that she was a Blackburn from Tennessee. 

15:19 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
A Blackburn, we had a Singleton and we had a Blackburn. 

15:22 - Crista Cowan (Host)
And they have a daughter. 

15:23 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
And they had one daughter, only one child, one child, that's it. And I will never forget that moment where we just kind of said wait, it's singleton, it's Blackburn, there's a daughter, they're in Utah. Did we just solve this? And it was. It was 1130 at night where there was no one in the office. We had stayed at the office late to do it at the office and we just started. I started hooting and hollering. 

15:47 - Will Swenson (Guest)
I was so excited. 

15:48 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
I was like we I think we solved it. I think we solved it. I get chills now even thinking about it. 

15:52 - Crista Cowan (Host)
After even waiting so long for something to come to pass and to find and to get a break, we finally got that break, and her name was Lucille and not only that, we then had to set it aside because it was the middle of the night and I remember coming back into the office the next day and trying to like talk through and decide did we really solve this? Is this really right? Let us tell someone else and make sure our logic makes sense. And we talked it all out and we were sure Lucille was the person. Lucille is Ruth's mother. And then we started digging into Lucille's life to understand more about her, and that uncovered a whole other set of surprises. 

16:28 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yes, so as you were shoring things up, I got really impatient. 

16:31
And I'm like as I do, and we need to find out more information about Lucille. And so I started looking at newspapers, which is the most fantastic place to find story and all of a sudden Lucille was in every paper. Every paper it was 1913. Across the country, across the country Nationally, and I'm going what is going on? 1913. So what happened? Let me rewind a little bit. 

16:54
So Lucille had given birth to Ruth. Ruth was placed with the Hudson family. Mom took daughter to New York and that was in 1908. Yes, 1908. Ruth was born and dad was a miner, like had a mining company and that's why they were in Utah, I'm thinking copper mines. But he also had gone to other places all over and so dad was off doing business. Mom took daughter Lucille to New York and was living in New York, put her in a school like a boarding school for women, for girls. Didn't last long. And then all of a sudden there was a newspaper article about how Lucille was studying music in New York. It's like, okay, well, musical family, the Hales are a very musical family, that tracks. That doesn't mean you know a surprise. 

17:39
But then National News, 1913, lucille had been in a car accident with a young man who was part of the Vanderbilt family and there was a scandal. There was a whole scandal. She claimed that Herman Ulrichs this man who was part of the Vanderbilts, very wealthy law student at Columbia, had stabbed her in this car accident. And there was a trial. There was testimony about what happened and she thought his name was something else. And then he took her on a joyride and they got in an accident right on Broadway and this big. They even had a sketch. There was a sketch of Lucille and in that article it not only told about the scandal, it told my favorite thing. I think I gasped, I think I remember telling you, Crista, and you went what? And I said Lucille was a Ziegfeld Follies dance girl. I lost it, I lost my mind. 

18:42
My friend Will the beginning of all of this. He is a Tony-nominated actor on Broadway. He lives not far from where this accident happened. Where Lucille lived, the family owns one of the most you know prolific theaters in Utah. They have a hail in Orem. They have a hail in Sandy. The family has been in 30 plus years. It's amazing. It's amazing that this grandmother, great grandmother, is a woman that spent her career dancing on Broadway. So we have the Ziegfeld Follies girl, the scandal that rocked America apparently in 1913. And she even had a stage name, lulu. Right, they called her Lulu. So I for Lucille, just totally shocked. I just could not wait to tell the family. 

19:32 - Crista Cowan (Host)
But we waited to tell the family, yes we did and it's interesting because in those newspaper articles, now that we had that information and those details, we were able to chase down other little bits of things, like her dad coming from Texas now and picking her up and taking her home to Texas. We were able to find out that her mother had passed away shortly before that accident and maybe that's why she kind of went a little wild, a little rogue and then she retracted her statement. 

20:00 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
She ended up retracting what she'd said, that they determined that the cuts that she received were from the glass of the vehicle and I'm wondering if she was just a scared young woman in over her head. There was some drinking involved. Again, this is 1913, new York City. So dad came and got her from Texas and took her home to Texas and then we followed her life after and she did marry, but she just life. And to see that in. 

20:27
Ruth, her daughter, and then to see that Ruth had imagined her whole life who her mother was and what I just thought. What if Ruth had known? What would she? Oh, of course, you know what if Ruth had known? Ruth would have said I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. But I will say, in this whole process, I felt Ruth present. I felt her egging us on, urging us on, cheering us on, wanting us to find this information to share with her family, because I know she's proud of it and I know she wanted them to know. And we were led. We were led by one one way or another and I really believe that I believe strongly in the ancestors being there and guiding us and supporting us in many different ways and I love that Ruth was there and just I could feel that excitement. I really could. 

21:39 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, I did not know her in life, but I also felt that and just yeah, the connection to her, the connection to that story, the similarities between the personalities of those two women. As we started to uncover more about Lucille and her family, and then looking at the way Lucille's life then played out, the fact that she had no additional children, all of a sudden it made sense that we didn't have any close DNA matches because she had no other children, she had no siblings. So we had to go back even further in time in order to make those connections. And, yeah, it all made sense then it did the Blackburns too. 

22:17 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
I mean, they had a lot of kids way far back, like four generations back, but then those kids only had one or two, and then those kids only had one, and so there just were not as many people to be able to test and to give us that DNA evidence. But we found it. It took a very long time and now we were going to, you know, tee that up to tell the family. 

22:40 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Yeah, so telling the family, like I think we played around with lots of different options for how to do that. But Will, who was the one who really, with you, started this journey, we felt like it was his, we should tell him first and that he should be the one to decide how that news got spread to the family. So, even though he's a grandchild and some of Ruth's children had tested for us in this process, we wanted him to kind of be able to own that experience, and so I was making a business trip out to New York. I was sad you weren't going to be involved, but Zoom is a thing. 

23:13 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Zoom is a thing. This is before COVID. This is before COVID, so we were pioneers here. 

23:19 - Crista Cowan (Host)
So we set up an opportunity or a time for me to go to Will's house in the city and to meet with him. It just so happened that he had family in the city at the time, so they came to the house and then I remember sitting in the room we had you on a Zoom, on a laptop, and then two at least two family members were holding phones with FaceTime on them so other family members could participate, and then somebody else had a tablet or a laptop across the room zooming in more family members. 

23:52 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
So we were surrounded by the Hale family, as you and I got to in that moment, then share this news with them. Yeah, and I crafted a presentation, the way we do on Ancestry. We're not just going to dump it in your lap, we're going to tell the story. We're storytellers. And so we started out, you know, giving little bits and pieces, little bits and pieces, and telling about the sister. That was the first big surprise. And then telling about finding Lucille and her name and the family, and that was emotional moment. And then talking about her being a Ziegfeld and tears, tears flowed, it was, it was so. I knew it would be emotional, I just didn't know. I mean, you were there, you probably felt it was. It was a lot, yeah, in a good way. 

24:35
And I remember very clearly I had a, I had a clear view of Will and, like I said, and I'm really good friends with Cody, will's brother, cody, like all these people I've known for so long and done shows with them and been in school with them, and I'll never forget Will just crying and just saying it's thank you Papa, it's thank you Papa, and they all just hugged and they didn't want us to leave, they just wanted to keep talking and they wanted to get to know Lucille, yeah, and we were the vehicle or the vessel to help them get to know her. Because in our helping them get to know her, it was like Ruth was there again. It was, she was present and they all felt it and they just, they just wanted to keep talking because it it brought their mom and their grandma back into the room and it was a beautiful moment, it was absolutely a beautiful moment. 

25:30 - Crista Cowan (Host)
We still have a whole other parent. We do? 

25:33 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
I don't want it to take five years. 

25:36 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Well, and now we have 25 million people in the Ancestry DNA network and we have more tools available to us now, oh my gosh the tools and more tools coming, so super exciting. A little bit of a secret there. 

25:47 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
For sure I love it. I do too. Thanks for going on this journey with me. Thanks for saying yes, yeah it's been super fun. It's been frustrating and fun. Yes, which is family history? It is Absolutely. That is the core. 

26:02 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Frustrating and fun. That's the new tagline. Thanks, lisa, appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, it's such an amazing story, but it doesn't end there, because I had the opportunity to go to the home of Tony-nominated Broadway actor Will Swenson, who is Grandma Hale's grandson, and share this story with him and his family, and I've gone back and re-interviewed him about what that experience was like to hear that story, surrounded with his family, and get his reaction. So what did you know about Grandma Ruth's family history? 

26:42 - Will Swenson (Guest)
When I was growing up, we all knew that Grandma was adopted. She wrote this play about being adopted and about how she had this grand idea that her biological mother must have been a famous actress because she had the acting bug so bad. So that was always. Everybody in the family sort of knew that. We knew the play Thank you, papa and we always wanted to know, you know, who her biological parents were, but we could never figure it out. 

27:06 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Can you tell us a little bit about her growing up and that acting bug and how that played out in her life and in the lives of her children and her grandchildren? 

27:14 - Will Swenson (Guest)
Yeah, so when Grandma was growing up, she, just out of the blue, you know, as an adopted kid, just had the acting bug, just loved it, loved singing, dancing, acting and and couldn't figure out why because she was adopted by these, you know, these farmers growing up on a on a farm in West Valley, utah. 

27:35
So she just, I think, always harbored this curiosity about who she was biologically and to the extent that she wrote a play about it. And you know she, because she loved it so much, she made a life out of it and, you know, wrote plays and started theaters and just just went for it and where, where she could have stayed, you know, uh, in in utah, on a farm, um, she's. You know she was always an example to us of like, well, go for whatever you love, because, because it's possible, if you love a, b or c, go chase a, b or c, because you can do it. So I mean, it was always an example to us and while it was a weird upbringing growing up in a theater, I wouldn't trade it for the world and Grandma was this fearless leader that just made life amazing and fun and crazy and spontaneous and creative and it was the best upbringing I could have asked for. 

28:38 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Did she ever, to your knowledge, look for her biological family or make an effort to find out more about them? 

28:45 - Will Swenson (Guest)
I don't know if grandma ever personally charged down to the adoption headquarters in Utah and said I want to know. I have a feeling that I remember vaguely somewhere that story. I think she went to the church because the story was that she was adopted in the halls of the temple, that someone came to her dad, will Hudson, and said we have a baby, will you take her? And he said yes, so the idea was that it was all taken care of through the Mormon church. So I think, if I remember right, the story was that grandma had gone to ask the church if she could get her biological parents made known to her and they said that her records were sealed. That was the story that we got. I don't know if that's something that the church does or if that's just how she remembered it or if that story never happened, but that was the. That was the Lord. 

29:35 - Crista Cowan (Host)
At what point were you interested in learning more about her family? 

29:39 - Will Swenson (Guest)
I think we always wanted to know who grandma's parents were. Um, it was just such a mystery because it was so clear that grandma came from something vibrant. She, you know, to the point where she was 90 years old, she would come upstairs in the morning and tap dance on the kitchen floor and say good morning, you, just a life force. And, by all accounts, the parents that raised her in West Valley City were very far from that sort of energy. And because grandma's love for the theater was so vast and because so many of us have stayed in the theater for our livelihood, like, I think we were all just like super hungry to know. And and then also just wanting to know your DNA, just your, your, you know, your, your history, what countries your people came from, and and you, know, for me that being my grandma. 

30:30
That's a quarter of my ancestry that I just had no idea about. So yeah, we were always super curious. 

30:36 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Well, you had talked about how you had gone and looked for records at, I think, utah State level at the archives. So did you actually go look for those, or was it just grandma that had gone and looked for them? 

30:49 - Will Swenson (Guest)
We did once go to the family history library and just said, look, here's the situation, what's our best course of action? And you know we searched for a bit and you know, just hit a, hit a brick wall, and was like, well, I guess you can't do anything. And I think one of my aunts, I think Aunt Sherry or Aunt Tanny maybe made a fledgling effort maybe 10 years ago to try to figure it out and you know we just hit a brick wall every time we tried. 

31:21
And then when you started, you know, getting involved in the ancestry and we crossed paths again, I was like, well, lisa, let's try and figure this out. You, if anybody, has the resources to dive into this. So I mentioned it to you and thank heaven that you jumped in. 

31:41 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yeah, and it was very fortuitous. It was happening right at the time that AncestryDNA was coming online, and we had lots of people in our database, and you were willing to take the test, so that was a really, really wonderful beginning. At that time, though, did you know if any other family members had taken a DNA test at all? 

31:58 - Will Swenson (Guest)
I didn't. I didn't have any idea if any of my family members had taken the test. 

32:03 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
Yeah, and then I would check with you about I don't know every eight months or so, just to let you know that we were still on the case. We were still on track because it was very, very long time going. And so what were you Will, what were you hoping you would discover? I mean, anything at all? Were you anxious about it, or did it leave your mind at all? Did it come back and haunt you? What were you thinking? 

32:25 - Will Swenson (Guest)
I think the quest for figuring out grandma's family history was just the stories. You want to know where you come from, and it means something different to everybody. 

32:38
But, like, for example, audra, my wife got her DNA tests back and when she got it back it was an emotional thing for her to see how much of her ancestry was African and that just meant so much to her. To, to, to, for whatever reason. It's just knowing where your people come from, where your story originated. It just fills in a gap somehow, I guess. For me anyway, part of it was the theater, part of it was grandma's energy, part of it was that I was very close to grandma Hale and the stories that come with it, and already the stories that arrived with our information about who who grandma's biological mom was, are incredible and you know, sort of beyond my my wildest imaginings of what, what the answer might've been. Just just crazy and amazing. 

33:34 - Lisa Elzey (Guest)
So touching on that that night that we were able to come over to your house Crista in person and me via zoom and have so many of your family members in person and on camera and then share the story of your grandmother's ancestry. What resonated with you Like, what were you feeling? What was going on in your mind during all of that? 

34:02 - Will Swenson (Guest)
on in your mind during all of that. I mean the night that we all sat down and and you guys showed us your basically your amazing kind of work and slideshow and reveal uh was was mind blowing. Um, it seemed cosmic, it seemed impossible, it was like it seemed like it was. It could have been a prank that someone was playing on us, because we're this theater family with, with this crazy Theater, grandma who always dreamed that her biological mom was was a famous actress. I'm getting emotional again. Every time I talk about it I get emotional. But then to have you guys reveal that her mother Danced in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City, a mile from where I live, it was just crazy and it seemed impossible. It was just awesome. 

34:48 - Crista Cowan (Host)
Now I'm getting teary, and it's not even my family. That's been. The really interesting thing for both Lisa and I and I think I can speak for her is that we spent five years digging into your family history, learning about these people, before we made the final link that finally clicked into place that said, here's Grandma Ruth's mother, and we came to know these people and to know their stories and so to hear your reaction and to see it and to feel it. That is super meaningful to us too, because it validates the work that we do. 

35:21 - Will Swenson (Guest)
Well, it means the world to me and to my entire extended family. As word has gotten around the family, they're all just ecstatic about the news. You guys are amazing and I can't thank you enough for all of this. 

35:33 - Crista Cowan (Host)
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 stor that live in us at gmailcom 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.