Stories That Live In Us

A Phone Call From Heaven (with Jenny Ashcraft) | Episode 36

Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist Season 1 Episode 36

When Jenny Ashcraft joked with her dying father about needing a 'cell phone call from heaven' to start family history... that's exactly what she got. Just days after her father's funeral, a mysterious package arrived from a stranger who felt compelled to send her family records after reading her father's obituary. Follow Jenny's journey from a reluctant beginner to becoming part of the Ancestry team, including an incredible series of discoveries in Pennsylvania that proved family history is full of divine coincidences. This episode shows how even those who feel intimidated by family history can find themselves drawn into a puzzle more rewarding than they ever imagined.

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Jenny Ashcraft:

I'm living proof that if you've been intimidated and you think this is not for you, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it and my family. When my family gathers at Christmas, we love to do puzzles. If you are a person that loves to do puzzles, there is no better puzzle than family history.

Crista Cowan:

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm rista 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 everything as you listen to the podcast each week. You probably think that I'm a little bit obsessive about genealogy and certainly I am, and many of my guests have been as well but not everybody starts doing family history when they're a kid and makes it their career. My guest today is Jenny Ashcraft, and Jenny and I worked together at Ancestry, but she was not a genealogist. As a matter of fact, it wasn't until she was facing an empty nest and trying to deal with the imminent loss of her father that she even became remotely interested in family history the story she tells.

Crista Cowan:

I'm excited for you to hear it. It really is an example of what many of you probably recognize as a God wink, one of those moments where you're led to something that might seem like a coincidence, but if you follow it through, you discover something so meaningful on the other side of that, and Jenny is a beautiful example of that in her life and ultimately that became her family history journey. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jenny Ashcraft. So, jenny, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. You and I work together, but I don't know you very well. So I know you work on the newspaperscom side of the ancestry business, but I would love to hear a little bit about your journey to ancestry.

Jenny Ashcraft:

Sure, you know, I know you, rista started in this field at a very young age, at your, at your dad's feet. But for me it was a little later. My dad, about 15 years ago, was dying from cancer and I didn't know much about his family as much as I wanted to, and so I started asking him questions and I decided to record a life history. And so over a series of weeks I asked him all about his family history. His mother had died when he was rather young and there were so many unanswered questions that he didn't know, and I kind of started feeling this little stirring in my heart like I need to learn more about this. But I didn't want to. I fought it, I wasn't ready to jump into it and I joked with him one day and I said, dad, if you get to heaven and you find out that we need to do family history or there's something you want me to work on, you better take a cell phone and call me.

Jenny Ashcraft:

Because, otherwise I'm not going to do it. And he laughed and said, okay. And just a day or two after his funeral I went out to my mailbox and I had a big fat manila envelope from Heber City, which is a little city about 30 minutes from me, and I didn't recognize the name or the return address and I opened it up and out falls all of these pedigree charts and family history records and genealogies and I didn't know what this was all about. But it was from my dad's side of the family. So I found a cover letter and he just said I thought you might enjoy learning more about your dad's family history.

Jenny Ashcraft:

So I thought, well, is this a friend of my dad? So I searched for him on Google, I found his contact information and I called him and I thought, well, is this a friend of my dad? So I searched for him on Google, I found his contact information and I called him and I said were you a friend of my dad's or why did you send me this packet? And he said no, I actually didn't know your dad, but I was looking through the obituaries in the paper the other day and your dad's caught my eye and I started reading it. I had such a strong feeling that this family really has some family history work to do and I read through the descendants and I came to your name and I knew I had to send it to you. So I figured this is my little cell phone call from heaven and I better start jumping in and figuring out what to do.

Crista Cowan:

That's amazing. So that was your kind of interest or entrance into family history? Did you pick it?

Jenny Ashcraft:

up right away. And then how did you end up at Ancestry in the middle of all of that? So I didn't know much. I did not know much and in fact it was a little bit like a foreign language to me. So I started taking classes and studying and just diving in.

Jenny Ashcraft:

I built my first ancestry tree and I thought it was super easy, it was intuitive to me. I just added one person at a time. I didn't want to bring a tree over from anywhere. I wanted to start fresh and I started building a tree and I realized, as I attached these records, these census records, and I could look and I could see my dad as a little boy and then I could see him as a teenager, and then I went back another generation and I started to fall in love and I just loved it so much and I loved learning about these things that even he didn't know about, and so often I would find something. I think, oh, I wish I could call my dad and tell him what I just found, but I just really realized that it's addictive and I loved it so much.

Crista Cowan:

It is a little bit addictive. Did you have children at home at the time Like how much were you devoting a lot of time to this? A little bit of time Did you?

Jenny Ashcraft:

have children at home at the time, like, how much, like, were you devoting a lot of time to this, a little bit of time? So I have four daughters and they were. A couple of them were gone, but I still had a couple of daughters at home. My youngest are twins and they were. It was about their senior year and I would work on this all the time when they were at school and they would come home and they would joke mom, we need you among the living now. So I would close my computer and focus on them.

Jenny Ashcraft:

But I started realizing I've got to figure out what my next step is in my life. These girls are going to be leaving for college, and what does my life look like next year? What am I going to do? How am I going to fill my time? What's the most important, most meaningful thing that I could do?

Jenny Ashcraft:

And I kept thinking, boy, the dream for me would be to work at Ancestry, because I had become such a fan of the product and it was something I interacted with every day and I'd gotten very comfortable with it and found it so easy to use. And I thought, boy, if I could do anything, I would want to work at Ancestry but I thought really, who's going to hire me? I have been a stay-at-home mom for 25 years. I mean, I had my education, but then I was focusing on motherhood and I thought there was no chance in the world that I would ever get hired. But I came across a job listing one day. But I came across a job listing one day, took a chance and sent in a resume. I got an interview and then a couple of interviews and for some crazy reason they hired me.

Crista Cowan:

And that's how I'm here. Well, there you go, and we have been very lucky to have you. You've been with us about seven years now, yeah, and you run the social media account for newspaperscom?

Jenny Ashcraft:

Do you also run the one for Find a Grave? I do for Fold3. And my colleague does for newspapers, and then I write blogs for the newspaperscom and for Fold3.

Crista Cowan:

Okay, and I just delight in the stories that come out of your little team. I think it's amazing that you take those little bits of information and you really figure out what the story is behind it, Because really that's what family history is about.

Jenny Ashcraft:

That's and it's what we love, right, it's those stories that bring our ancestors to life that just are the hook where we want to know more and we, and they're so inspiring, right, you, you realize that you stand on the shoulders of grit and determination and sacrifice and you learn from mistakes they've made and you feel connection. And I mean, what a gift to give to our children and our grandchildren to help them feel the connection that comes from those that have gone before. We truly stand on their shoulders.

Crista Cowan:

Yeah Well, so through your work you have the opportunity to share all kinds of stories, but personally, as you've been going through your own family history, is there a favorite story or a favorite experience with family history that just really has cemented this for you?

Jenny Ashcraft:

I have so many. I have so many. But a more recent one. I have a lot of ancestors in Indiana County, pennsylvania, and I really wanted to get back there. I had kind of exhausted what I could find and I knew I needed to get to the cemetery, I needed to get to the genealogical society there, I needed to do some digging and so my sister and I, just like you, work on this with your dad. My sister and I love to work on this together and so we decided to plan a trip and we had things we wanted to see and do.

Jenny Ashcraft:

But I really had two main goals for this trip. My ancestors had attended a little church in a young Township and it was called West Union Presbyterian Church and there was a little church and a little graveyard and the church was long gone. It had been torn down many years ago. The graveyard was still there and I wanted to find records, because it was almost a family graveyard and a family church, because everybody was kind of interconnected and I wanted to find those cemetery records and those church records and that was my goal and I had been looking for years. I had reached out to every source that might have an idea and had just been told they had probably been destroyed and that they probably weren't available. So we were going to head out there and see what we could find.

Jenny Ashcraft:

And I was sitting in the airport waiting to board the plane and I had my laptop open and almost simultaneously I got two messages. And the first one the subject line, said West Union Presbyterian Church Records. And I thought what? And I clicked on it and it was a woman from the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society and they had been closed for two years for COVID. They are located at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and they had been closed and were still closed. But somehow a message that I had left probably two years ago, had made its way to her and she was calling to say we actually have those church records, but we have never. They are not digitized, they're not available online. And I said oh my goodness, I am sitting at the gate ready to board a plane. I'm going to be in Pittsburgh tonight. And she said well, I will meet you at the library tomorrow and unlock it and you can see them. So we were just beside ourselves, excited.

Jenny Ashcraft:

And then the second message that came in was from a colleague at Find a Grave and he said I know you don't usually write blogs for us, but we are in a bit of a bind. Could you maybe write a find a grave blog? And I said, well, I'm just heading out on a family history vacation for a week, but let me just see if anything inspires me on this trip and let's talk when I get back. And he said, okay. So we were giddy, excited about the church records. We headed to Pittsburgh the next day, arrived at this closed, locked up Carnegie Library in 2021. And she opened it up and there are these church records that I have been searching for for five years. And you know what a thrill that is. It's so exciting. So we're taking pictures with our phone of every page and just can't wait to get back to the hotel and start to to go through this information. And we spent the next you know days just just soaking it in and going to every location and taking notes and looking at resources that weren't available online. And, as I asked around, quite a few people said when I asked about the cemetery records because I'd found the church records, but when I asked about the cemetery records, they said you ought to talk to Jerry and I thought I don't really know who Jerry is. And let me back up a little bit.

Jenny Ashcraft:

About a month before our trip. I got a message on Ancestry one day from another customer and he had been looking at my tree and had realized that we had a distant mutual ancestor. And he reached out and he said I see, we're connected. And I said, well, yeah, and he explained how we were connected. I could see that. And he said, well, yeah, and he explained how we were connected. I could see that. And he said, you know, I live in Philadelphia. Now I'm older, I have a terminal illness, I'm dying, and I suddenly am interested in my roots and he said I wanted to know. If he said I'm not so much interested in those, my ancestors, but I want to know, do I have any living relatives? And I decided I wanted to help him. So I built a tree and I filled out this tree the best I could with living relatives, and that's a little different, you know, than than going back, but I did it the best I could send it to him and kind of forgot about it. So fast forward, a month later and we're after.

Jenny Ashcraft:

Like the third person said, you should talk to Jerry and see if he has cemetery records. And I said, who is Jerry? And they said, well, he's an older man but he pays to have the lawn mowed at your family cemetery. So I was able to get some contact information. I called and Jerry, who I think is still alive he's about 87, lived in an assisted living center in Indiana. And I called and I said I hear you may have some cemetery records and he said, oh, I don't have any records. And I said, oh, okay, but he said tell me who your ancestors are. And I said, well, my maiden name is Miller, it's the Miller family.

Jenny Ashcraft:

And I hear papers flipping and he goes oh yeah, I see here Robert Miller. And I said, well, can I ask you, what papers are you looking at? What have you got? And he goes well, these aren't the records, these are just some papers. Because I kind of mow the lawn and I have some papers. And I said would it be OK if we possibly came and looked at your papers? And he was a little hesitant we're still coming out of COVID, he's older. So he agreed, a little bit reluctantly, but he agreed to let us come the next day.

Jenny Ashcraft:

So we set up an appointment and we went to his little apartment and we put on our masks and we knocked on the door and we stood way back. We wanted to make him as comfortable as we could. And he came to the door and we started chatting at a distance and he was telling us a little bit about his life. But I noticed behind him a large oval picture, an old-fashioned picture, and I said that is the neatest picture. Who is that?

Jenny Ashcraft:

And he said well, this is Maria Teresa Calhoun. She's my grandmother. And he said that and something in me just paused. I'm like wait, I know that name. Why do I know that name? And I sat down my bag, I pulled out my laptop, I pulled up my tree and Marie Tree's Calhoun is in my tree that I had just created for this gentleman, like a month before. And as I worked my way down, I'm like there's Jerry right there in my tree. I have Jerry in my tree. I said Jerry, we're related. And I turned my computer around and I showed him here's your grandmother, here's you, we're related. And he's like get in, here, come in, come in. So we spent the next hour chatting with Jerry and he went to the back and he retrieved a manila file that was about three inches thick, of historic cemetery censuses and records of burials, and in his mind those weren't the cemetery records, but it was exactly what I was looking for weren't the cemetery records, but it was exactly what I was looking for.

Crista Cowan:

That is the most amazing story. Those kinds of serendipitous opportunities. They happen more and more as you get involved in family history, and so I love that you had that experience. But you also were making the effort. You were making the awkward phone call to the total stranger and showing up and doing the legwork. I think that's a really beautiful example of that. So in the midst of all of this in Indiana County, pennsylvania, did you find the cemetery?

Jenny Ashcraft:

Well, I found the cemetery and in my chatting with people around the county I heard a story and I heard that an adjacent cemetery in a small little town nearby called Salzburg. They said have you heard that? An adjacent cemetery in a small little town nearby called Salzburg? They said have you heard about what's going on in Salzburg? And I said what's going on in Salzburg? And they said well, there's an old, old cemetery there that a local man is restoring. And I said what do you mean restoring? And they said well, it was just covered with poison ivy and trees and the headstones were all turned on their sides or buried underground.

Jenny Ashcraft:

And a man decided somebody's got to do something about this, and why can't it be me? And he started one grave at a time trying to restore the cemetery. And I remembered the message I'd gotten back about you know if something inspires you for Find a Grave and I thought I need to meet this man and interview him because this is such an amazing gift that he's given people and I would love to hear more about it. So I made arrangements to chat with a man named Chuck and went to this old Salzburg cemetery and it's just incredible. Part of it's restored and part of it is still just in shambles. And a lot of the headstones were illegible and he was one at a time cleaning them, resetting them.

Jenny Ashcraft:

In his work as an engineer he's familiar with ground penetrating radar and he was finding headstones and unburying them and resetting them all just out of the kindness of his heart. And I was so inspired by him and I chatted with him and I said tell me a couple stories of what's inspired you. Tell me something that you found that's awesome. And he said well, here's an awesome story. I found a headstone lying on its back covered in debris and leaves, and as I brushed it off, it was just lichen. I couldn't even read it and I started to restore it and I started to see beautiful engravings and carvings. And then I saw the name was revealed and it was a woman named Maria Hawkins and he said I've done a little checking and her maiden name was Elric. And I said wait, maria Elric, that's my ancestor. Stop it.

Crista Cowan:

She's my ancestor.

Jenny Ashcraft:

She is one of nine children of my fourth great grandparents. And I just was speechless. And he said well, that's not the whole story. And I had Maria in my tree. I knew she had died, approximately when she had died, but I didn't know where she was buried. And he said well, as I was trying to reset her headstone, I was digging into the dirt and my shovel hit some stone and I started digging out and under several feet of dirt was another small headstone of Maria's baby and they both died the same year. We assume probably complications of childbirth, but I didn't even know about that little girl. And so here, here is this wonderful man doing this service, and I didn't even know it, but I was the recipient of his kindness. Wow, that's amazing.

Crista Cowan:

Okay, now I'm crying. The only reason that works, though, is because you already had started exploring your family history. You could have been interviewing him for that blog post and had that conversation and never known he was talking about your family member, if you hadn't already had that somewhere in your brain.

Jenny Ashcraft:

Yes, yes, that is so true. And I think that sometimes just our little efforts are magnified and we take those records and we put you know, we assemble what we can. We take those. I remember when I first started I would look at a census record and I would see okay, here's the family in 1840 and here they are in 1850. But then, as I became a little more comfortable in the records, you would go a little step deeper. You'd say, well, who's next to them in 1840? Families weren't moving around a ton.

Jenny Ashcraft:

And maybe I'm at newspaperscom which has been a huge help for me in piecing together my family tree and I find an obituary and it says that the daughters came and Mrs Henry came as a daughter. And all of a sudden, there I have this is the Henry family that was next door to them in the 1840 census. This is their daughter living next door. And you start to look a little deeper in those records and you make connections and things just come together and I think our little efforts are magnified to become this beautiful story and picture.

Crista Cowan:

Yeah, it really is, and that's one of the things that I love about family history. But I also love about just this process of piecing together the lives of our ancestors. Their lives were super interconnected because of the way that they lived and you know, you think about rural Pennsylvania. When did this family live there? 1800s, okay, yeah, so rural Pennsylvania in the 1800s, and they're reliant on each other for survival and hard things happened, you know losing, losing a child, dying in childbirth. Now you've got a husband with children who has to raise them, like there's so much wrapped up in their lives and their stories and as we start to uncover them, sometimes our lives feel very disconnected from that experience. But there are threads of connection that can give us inspiration and that can give us resilience and I just I love the whole process of it. And so to hear your story about these serendipitous connections, like that's a real thing and that really happens in family history way more often than I think in any other avenue of life.

Jenny Ashcraft:

I completely agree and I love that you use the word resilience, because I feel that resilience and I'm trying to teach that to my children and my grandchildren. I want them to understand that they came from people who did hard things and managed to rise above it. And hard things happen to everybody all the time, but we just take those hard things and we just keep going and we just keep doing our best. I love that.

Crista Cowan:

So, before we wrap up, one of the questions that I ask all my guests is what do you hope for the future, whether it's the future of your own family history journey, or a discovery that you have yet to make, or something about your family?

Jenny Ashcraft:

Well, I am so excited about what's happening right now with handwriting and AI. I love pension records, I love wills and you look at these manuscripts written with quill and ink and they're amazing. And you look at newspapers that are being digitized that you can search them in seconds and the resources that are opening up. I was looking at a sixth great-grandfather's Revolutionary War pension and these are amazing records. They're on Fold3 at Ancestry and you can go into them and he's listing all of his children and who they're intermarried with. And remember these census records. At this time they just have the head of household and tally marks and so you have no idea really who some of these children are and it's right there in a manuscript, but some of them are very difficult to read handwriting and read through newspapers and extract those things that make them searchable that I think it's just going to blow open the doors for discovery.

Crista Cowan:

Yeah, absolutely. I remember when I was probably in my late 20s so I was just my first career was not in family history because it never occurred to me this could be a job, and so I was kind of at the dissatisfaction point of my first career and really like starting to consider getting into family history professionally. And I came across a quote that said that if there is a record to be found anywhere about one of your ancestors like, if you'll make the effort, you'll find it- I know this quote it's it is.

Jenny Ashcraft:

it's my anthem. I love this quote.

Crista Cowan:

Clearly that is the experience that you have had, and sometimes I think it just takes patience, but with that you're right. With the explosion of technology that is available, that is helping make more and more records available, there are records that are going to come to light for people from all over the world that were never available before or readily available before, because not everybody can take a trip to Indiana County, pennsylvania, and meet with a Jerry who's spent time and effort collecting records and so anywhere that those records can be made more readily available to people I think is just such a really exciting it's an exciting time.

Jenny Ashcraft:

It is an exciting time and I'm living proof that. If you've been intimidated and you think this is not for you, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. And my family. When my family gathers at Christmas, we love to do puzzles. If you are a person that loves to do puzzles, there is no better puzzle than family history. It is so fun to put that those pieces together and what emerges is this beautiful family story.

Crista Cowan:

Yeah Well, thank you so much for being here. It's been delightful to get to know you a little bit better and to hear your stories.

Jenny Ashcraft:

Thanks for inviting me, rista.

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