The Stranger Who Was Family

Crista Cowan 0:00

What if the person next to you right now at work or in church or in line at the grocery store isn't a stranger at all? What if you actually share blood, history, or the same exact pieces of ancestral DNA? A few years ago, I was sitting at a wedding reception when a couple I had never met before sat down next to me. As we talked, their last name kept ringing this faint bell in my brain. I pulled out my phone, opened my Ancestry app, scrolled to a DNA match I had placed in my tree just the Sunday before, and turned the screen toward the husband. Is this you? I asked. His eyes went live. It was him. Within minutes, the groom and his best friend out on the dance floor realized they weren't just childhood buddies, they were cousins. Today kicks off National Family History Month, and I want to challenge the way you look at the people around you. When we explore our family history, we don't just connect to the past, we start recognizing all the invisible threads that tie us together, from college roommates to personal assistants to neighbors living two blocks away. We don't live in a world of strangers. And that's why you probably have cousins everywhere. Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family. Welcome to Stories That Live In Us.

Why October Changes How I Think

Crista Cowan 1:29

October is important to me for so many reasons. It's National Family History Month, it's when fall kicks in, and at the end of the month is all Halloween, right before we launch into the first week of November, which is my birthday, and D de los muertos, the day of the dead. As if I don't think about family history all of the time, this time of year just seems to amp it up a level or 10. But I've been thinking lately a lot about one of my foundational beliefs, which is this. When we explore our family history, we don't just feel more connected to our ancestors or ourselves or even our immediate living family. We also start to notice the unexpected ways we're connected to everyone around us. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've heard this in real time. Back in episode 128, my friend and boss, Eric Allen, came on the show and shared how he discovered that one of our co-workers had an ancestor who lived in the same exact house in Iceland, where Eric's ancestor lived. Both of those men ended up immigrating from Iceland to Spanish Fork, Utah at different times. Both ended up working for the railroad. Over a hundred years ago, these two men almost certainly knew each other. And today, their descendants work together every single day. Then in episode 121, Melissa Stafford shared how she now lives in a town in Massachusetts. She moved there as an adult to raise her family, only to later realize it was the hometown of one of her ancestors. The town even holds an annual celebration for this ancestor. And suddenly, Melissa felt deeply rooted in her community history. One of my absolute favorite stories I've ever shared was about my six times great-grandfather from North Carolina. He was a Revolutionary War soldier who lived an incredible life and had a tragic death. And when I put that story out in the world, I have loved watching the comment section on YouTube. Complete strangers have been saying, wait a minute, he's my six times great-grandfather too. People who had no idea they were related to me, and vice versa. And suddenly we're connecting over an ancestor from the 1700s. When you put those stories out into the world, those threads weave around and find a way back to you. I'll

When A Friend Became A Cousin

Crista Cowan 3:46

never forget the first time this happened to me. I was in my early 20s. It was the summer of 1994. I was working in Provo, Utah as a youth counselor for the Especially for Youth program through Brigham Young University. It was one of those unforgettable summers, busy, exhausting, really, full of high energy and faith-filled experiences and late nights and the forging of those enduring friendships. One of those counselors with me that summer was a woman named Nancy Lott. Nancy grew up in Oram, Utah, and we spent a lot of time together and became quick friends. You have to understand my perspective at the time. I had grown up on the West Coast, hundreds of miles away from Utah, but I spent my entire life listening to my dad tell stories about our family. And one of the characters who loomed large in those stories was my three times great-grandmother, Melissa Lott. Melissa's father, Cornelius Peter Lott, was a prominent LDS church figure in the early days. He was one of the captains of one of the pioneer companies that led the saints across the plains into the Salt Lake Valley. There's actually a rather notorious story about him, but I'll save that for another time. Now, Melissa was the oldest of 12 children. And if you do pioneer math from the 1800s with 12 children, you realize very quickly that Cornelius Peter Lott likely has tens of thousands of descendants scattered across Utah and Idaho and Arizona and California and far beyond. So one day when Nancy and I were hanging out, I said, Is there any chance you're related to Cornelius Lott? She paused and she said she thought so, but that her mom was the real family historian and would know for sure. So I got in touch with her mom and we cross-referenced our family trees, and there it was. Nancy and I weren't just co-counselors and fast friends. We were fifth cousins. That was over 30 years ago, and Nancy is still one of my dearest friends in the world. A few years ago, after she became an empty nester, she stepped into the role of my house manager and personal assistant. We talk and text almost daily. Our friendship was already deep, but knowing that we share a common heritage, that our family threads are woven together all the way back to pioneer days and beyond, it makes our relationship all the sweeter today. For me, that realization back in 1994 was something interesting. But then I tackled this descendancy research project that helped me understand how big this cousin web really is and really shifted my perspective about what it means to be connected. Now, let

Descendancy Research And Big Numbers

Crista Cowan 6:34

me explain how descendancy research works. Normally we start with ourselves and we work our way backwards to our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents and so on up the family tree. Descendancy research flips that entire process on its head. You pick one ancestor back in time, and you attempt to identify all of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and you keep tracing every single branch of the family tree all the way down to the living descendants. Way back in season one, episode 28, I shared the story of my three times great-grandfather Samuel Mulliner. He was a Scottish immigrant who joined the LDS Church in Canada, migrated to Ohio and then Illinois, eventually made it across the plains to Utah Valley, where he helped settle one of the communities here. My mom and I were so fascinated by his life, we actually wrote an entire biography about him. And knowing that the 200th anniversary of his birth was coming up in 2009, I had this bright idea that I wanted to hold this massive family reunion for as many of his living descendants as I could possibly identify. So back in 2005, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work doing this big descendancy project. And my first problem was the math of it all. Samuel had 18 children, 98 grandchildren, and from there the numbers just exploded. So after about three years of research, when I needed to send out the Save the Date cards for the reunion, I had to stop researching. And by then we had identified over 6,800 living descendants. Since then, with new babies being born and missing branches of the family tree, I discover every time I dive back in, with ancestry DNA matches filling in the blanks, we have now identified more than 11,000 descendants of Samuel Moner. And out of those 11,000 people, there have been countless connections made between me and some of them, between some of them and each other. But one of the first connections in that family floored me. Back

My Roommate Was Related To Me

Crista Cowan 8:39

in the summer of 1992, I was roommates with a girl named Julie Faldmo from Oram, Utah. She was sweet and kind and one of those people who was adored by everyone on campus. And I looked up to her so much and learned a lot from her that school year. Now, this was back in the days before cell phones and social media. So once college ended, we weren't great about staying in touch. But whenever our paths crossed over the years or we would leave a comment on each other's Facebook pages, there was always a really deep, genuine affection. So, fast forward to 2007, I'm in the middle of the Samuel Mulliner descendancy project, entering names into the family tree, when I come across a record for one of Samuel's great-granddaughters, a woman named Irma Brunt. And listed right there as Irma's husband was a man with the last name of Faldmo. I mean, how many of those can there be in the world? I immediately reached out to Julie and I said, Is this Irma Brunt who married Norman Faldmoe related to you? And she immediately responded, Irma was my grandma. And I couldn't believe it. My college roommate, this girl I had shared a tiny apartment with 15 years earlier, was my half-fourth cousin. When I asked Julie if she knew anything about Samuel Mulliner's incredible life story, she said she didn't know much at all. She told me she was now living out in California with her husband and sons. And she asked me, she said, the next time you're out in California visiting family, will you come over and spend an evening sharing Samuel's stories with me and my boys? One of the genuine regrets of my life is that I never made the effort to make that visit happen. Life got busy and time slipped away, and now all of Julie's boys are grown men. But even with that regret, finding that connection fundamentally changed something about how I view the work of family history. Knowing that I was tied by blood and history to Julie and her dad and her siblings, people I had met and admired years before I ever saw their name on my family tree made me feel deeply connected to her in a brand new way.

DNA Threads That Change Your Kindness

Crista Cowan 10:53

And that was the exact moment I started looking at the rest of the world differently. I would be standing in a grocery store or sitting in a church pew or chatting with a coworker in the hallway, or just passing someone on a sidewalk. And I would wonder could we be related? I began to realize that we're not just isolated individuals floating through life, that we are who we are because of the choices, right? The migrations, the hardships, the triumph of all the people who came before us. But now I realize that some of us, without even knowing, share those exact same people. That sounds so silly to say out loud. Like, duh, Krista. Um, I think most of us, though, go through life thinking about everything in relation to ourselves, right? Like, this is my mom, these are my siblings, those are my friends, here are my ancestors. But realizing that everyone has their own story, and that tiny threads of those stories work their way through each and every one of us and into the lives of others, and that hundreds of years can separate those stories, but that thread still weaves its way through and connects us to each other. Sure, as friends, maybe as total strangers. And it's something really interesting to contemplate. And then when you start working with DNA as part of your family history journey, you realize that we are literally walking around with shared pieces of the same ancestral DNA in ourselves. They are physically part of who we are today. And when that truth really sinks into your head and your heart, for me at least, it changed how I treat people. Not that I was a jerk before, but it's made me a little kinder, a little more curious, a little more generous, a little more patient with the stranger in front of me. It also lit a fire under me and made me want to put more of my ancestors' stories out into the world. Because I realized that when you put those story threads out there, they wind through the world and eventually come back to you connected to new cousins or new friends or a fresh way of seeing the world around you. And once you start looking for those threads, they show up everywhere.

Finding Cousins Through Research And Chance

Crista Cowan 13:12

Since that mindset shift, I have continued to find cousins in the most unexpected ways and places. Sometimes those cousins come through intentional research and DNA testing, like my Louisiana cousins, who I shared with you in episodes one and 101. Way back when my dad and I had that brick wall of Carrie Inman, and then found the obituary from a Google alert and a little bit of Facebook stocking that connected us with an entire branch of the family that we had been looking for forever. I love having pictures and stories of Carrie, but even more than that, it has been one of the great joys of my life to come to know and love Arlene and Catherine and Marlene and Sharon and Lynn and Betty Lynn. They were missing names on a family tree, and now they are relationships that I am so proud to call family. Other times, these discoveries might happen in your own backyard with people you know and love. Back in episode 23, I shared how I discovered that my dear friend Julie Taggart and I are fifth cousins, also through Cornelius Lott. But the story didn't stop there. Later, we realized that Julie's husband Todd is also related to me, half-sixth cousins through an entirely different branch of my family tree. Johannes Balthasar Heiner was born in Thuringia, Germany in 1777, died there in 1837. Fast forward a couple hundred years, and two of his descendants live just two blocks away from each other in Pleasant Grove, Utah, as friends. And now I get to be related to Julian Todd's kiddos in two different ways. And then there's complete surprises. Back in the summer of 2022, I went to the wedding reception of one of my second cousins. Dallin Mulliner was a newer friend. I had grown up spending Thanksgivings and summer family reunions with his dad in Southern California. And since nobody else from my side of the family could make it to Dallin's wedding, I wanted to go and represent. So I asked how they knew the bride and groom. They explained that their son was the groom's best friend and was one of the groom's men at the wedding. They started sharing stories about their son and Dallin growing up together, and we were all laughing over the antics of teenage boys. But in the back of my head, I was spinning through all of the reasons why this man's name was so familiar when his face was completely not. And then it hit me. If you follow the podcast, you know that every Sunday night, my dad and I spend hours over FaceTime going through our new ancestry DNA matches, trying to figure out where they fit in the tree, using them to solve family puzzles and just enjoying some time together. Literally the Sunday before this wedding, I had placed a new DNA match onto our tree with the same exact name as this man sitting next to me at this wedding. So right there at the table, I pulled out my phone. I opened up my ancestry app, I scrolled to the place in the family tree where I had put this match, and I turned my phone screen around toward him and I said, Is this you? And this man and his wife looked at me like I had two heads. But I quickly explained the connection. And as we talked, the realization hit all of us at once. If he and I were related, that meant his son and my cousin Dallin, two boys who had grown up together as inseparable best friends, were actually cousins too. This couple immediately ran out onto the dance floor to tell the boys. And a few minutes later, the groom and his bride came over to the table to confirm the news with me. And the joy in that room was palpable. Two best friends suddenly realizing they were related. My most recent experience with this happened with another college roommate. After that summer with Julie Faldmo, I moved apartments for the rest of the school year and lived with a girl named Marilyn Scott. Marilyn was smart and sporty, and she was from Northern California. Her mom, Eleanor, came out to help her move into the apartment, and I fell in love with Eleanor. She was feisty and delightful and warm. And in the days before cell phones, whenever Eleanor would call our apartment landline, she was never in a rush to get her daughter on the phone. She would stay and chat with whoever answered. So over time, I learned that Eleanor was a nurse in rural Northern California. She was also a pilot who would fly her own plane back and forth from Trinity Lake to Reading to work at the hospital. And I adored her. At the end of that school year, Marilyn and I moved on. Three years later, we randomly found ourselves living next door to each other in Provo, Utah, where she was finishing her degree at BYU. We renewed our friendship. I got to meet some of her Utah cousins and hang out with them. And then she moved back to California after graduation. We stayed in touch on Facebook, but life goes on. A few years ago, Marilyn posted that her mother had passed away. And she shared Eleanor's obituary. And as I read the first paragraph, I could not believe what I was reading. For the first time, I saw that Eleanor's maiden name was Hacking and that she had been born in Vernal, Utah. Back in 1996, the name hacking wouldn't have meant anything to me. Marilyn and I would hang out with her hacking cousins, didn't mean anything. But by 2022, I had added a whole bunch of DNA matches from Vernal, Utah with the last name of Hacking, connected to me through a set of six times great-grandparents from England in the 1700s. Turns out that Eleanor, that feisty pilot flying nurse, was the fifth cousin of my own feisty grandmother. Looking back at all these stories from youth camp and college roommates to wedding tables and next door neighbors, the pattern is undeniable. We do not live in a world of strangers. When we take the time to look into our family history, we aren't just uncovering names and dates in old census records or passenger lists. We're uncovering the living, breathing threads of connection that surround us every single day. That's

A Garden Memory And A Simple Ask

Crista Cowan 20:10

a fun one. And then we moved to Oregon, and my dad is just a brilliant gardener. He grows strawberries and grapes and tomatoes and peppers. And he just always has a really, really abundant harvest. But I live in Utah. And so here in Utah, I have a garden space in my backyard. And I have tried repeatedly to grow things. But the key is when you live in a desert, you have to water things way more often than you do when you live in Oregon or California. And I have never been around long enough in the summer, because I travel for work or because I work long hours to either remember or see that the watering gets done. So as much as I love the taste of a fresh warm tomato straight out of the garden off the vine, I just have never quite been able to make that happen. But I do, or have at least, been able to enjoy the fruits of my dad's gardening because when they come to visit, he always brings me a mason jar full of his grape juice or his uh marionberry jam or some other treat from his garden. He just moved to Utah though. So I'm hoping either he will teach me something or that I'll be able to walk over to his house a few blocks away and take things out of his garden, maybe without his knowledge. So there you go. That is my garden story. I would love to hear your garden memory. So if you're watching this on YouTube, put it in the comments. If you are listening to this on a podcast app, post your story. Post it on Facebook, post it on Instagram, tag me so I can read it. But more important than that, share it with your family. I think that's so important. Well,

Put Stories Out And Watch Them Return

Crista Cowan 22:25

as we celebrate National Family History Month throughout the month of October, my challenge for you is simple. Start looking at the people around you differently. Ask that friend about their family surname. Look a little closer at your DNA matches from the same hometown. Put your ancestors' stories out into the world through a conversation or a blog post or a social media caption or a shared photo or right here in the comments on this YouTube video. Because when you put those story threads out there, you never know who's going to pick up the other end or what brand new cousin might be sitting right next to you.