The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 250: Jessie Hagan—They Want You to Find Them

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Staff Genealogist for Sons of the American Revolution, Jessie Hagan forgoes his Derby party to school Mike and Chuck on their revolutionary lineage, why it matters, and why Knobel is a fitting name for Mike's whiskey. 

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Welcome to episode 250 of the way I heard it. Chuck, it seems like a significant number. It just dawned on me. 250, it's big and it's round and it feels like there ought to be some sort of parade or something. Well, you know what? I'm going to get right on that. We're going to have a parade right here in the second bedroom behind me. We're going to bring in the second line. There will be no parade. There will be no floats. But there will be a really great conversation with a guy I'm eager to introduce you to. His name is Jesse Hagan. The title of this episode is,

they want you to find them. It's a quote, kind of a thing that Jesse said as an aside in our conversation. I wanted to call this episode, I am my own grandpa, after the famous song, which I will recite for you

at some point in this episode. But Chuck said, you know, he said something that really speaks to what he does better than anything. And what Jesse Hagan does is wander through your past to find out from whence you came. He spends a lot of time in graveyards, a lot of time in clerk's offices. He's a genealogist, and he works for the sons of the American Revolution. Am I overstating it, Chuck? He's a fascinating dude. He really is. Not only is he good at what he does, because he put together some

stuff for me that rocked my world. Yeah. I know he did that giant book on you, but he did some stuff really fast for me. And it's not only what he does and how interesting it is, but it's his enthusiasm that I find infectious. He is almost giddy when he talks about this stuff because he loves it so much. He's so excited to uncover things. Yeah. And he uncovered something great, very interesting for you. But you should tell everybody how you meant. even in this conversation, I'm learning new things about my family. This is why I enjoy this format in the podcast. It gives me a chance to circle back and thank some people who have done some really nice things for me over the years.

What Jesse did for me is kind of amazing. If you follow the Facebook page, you might recall the story. This was, I think, back in 2018. But I was in Louisville, Kentucky shooting something or maybe giving a speech. and we had scheduled an episode of returning the favor in West Virginia. So I chartered a small plane and flew to West Virginia to shoot this episode. And when I landed in West Virginia, I took a selfie next to this tiny little plane that got me there. Because it was the kind of plane you look at and you go,

you know, maybe I don't need to get there as badly as I thought. Maybe I won't get on the plane, but the plane worked to my delight and surprise, and so I took a picture of it when I got off, and I posted the picture on Facebook, and I said, West by God, Virginia, where I'll be for the next seven hours returning a favor. And I did that, got back on the plane, flew back to Louisville, got off the plane at a tiny little airport outside of town. as I was walking toward the terminal, a man stepped from behind a bush and said, Mike Rowe. Now, at the time, we were dealing with some security issues here at Microworks. I was dealing with some overenthusiastic fans.

We've had a few of us. Yeah. So it was getting late in the day, and I was rushing back to my hotel, and a man steps from behind a bush with a bag. says Mike Rowe, I say, yeah. He says, I have something for you. He puts the bag on the ground and reaches into the bag.

And I'm thinking, okay, well, this is how it ends, just outside of Louis. Either that or you're getting served. I know, I'm getting served, I'm getting shot. Do I charge him? Do I tackle him? Do I run? A lot of, you know, fight or flight. But basically, I just stood there and hoped for the best.

And what this guy pulled out of his bag was a binder. about the size of the old white pages that you probably had at your house, a big, thick book. And on the cover, it read the genealogy of Michael Gregory Row. And that's when I learned who this guy was. He had offered to do this for me, Chuck, weeks earlier, maybe months earlier. And I ignored him. He wrote me a nice letter saying, this is what I do.

and I ignored him not to be rude, but because I know how much work it takes to do this. And I didn't want to just ask somebody to do that because they were a fan of dirty jobs. It seemed selfish. He did it anyway. He did it anyway. And then he went on my Facebook page and he saw the selfie of me next to the plane. And he zoomed in and found the tail number. And then he called the FAA tracking, whatever it is.

identified the plane, identified its location in West Virginia, got a hold of the flight plan, determined where it would be landing outside of Louisville, drove himself to this little airport, and took a position behind a bush waiting for me to get off this tiny little plane. That's who this guy is. So basically it's a stalker as a guest on the podcast. That's right. Except he's a stalker who also is a true fan of my. and a true fan of dirty jobs and an absolute lover of his chosen vocation, which he describes as a disease. Right.

That's true. He's the first to tell you, he is a true detective afflicted with going back many generations to help countless people not only understand their families better, but to connect them with soldiers from the American Revolution. That's what he does. and he did that for me. He went back 10 generations, and he found a man who served in the Continental Congress in 1780,

named Forbes, James Forbes, to whom I'm related. So this is one of the great gifts, the great unsolicited gifts that I've ever received. It took me a long time to circle back and thank him properly, but I hope this episode will do that. And I hope as you guys listen, you'll be inspired to take a deeper look into your own past. Chuck, I know it woke something up in you.

Absolutely. I thought that I was basically second generation American on both sides of my family, the German side, on my dad's family, the Irish and Italians on my mom's side, my grandmother who basically raised me. She was one of 11 children, the only one who was born in America. The rest were born in Italy. And my grandfather, too, I knew, was Irish, and I believe that he was not too far from fresh off the boat as well. But I could be a member of the sons of the American Revolution because Mr. Hagan found a relative of mine that fought in the Revolutionary War.

And in fact, provided me with a document from the Library of Congress in George Washington's handwriting that mentions Colonel Hopewell when he was a moment. major at this point, major Hopewell, is my guy. If you've always been puzzled as to why Ancestry.com and 23 and me and these other organizations have become so popular, listen to this conversation. It might awaken something in you. He's a fascinating guy. As he said when he walked through a cemetery searching for a bit of his own history, they want you to find them.

They do. Yeah. they want to be found. He found me. Scared the hell out of me. Jumping from behind that bush. But there's nothing scary about this. Jesse Hagan with a look in the Wayback Machine.

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Made. I was just telling Chuck that my walk this morning was fueled by an extra cup of coffee, but then ultimately doomed by that very same extra cup. It turned into a sprint and I made it home with seconds to spare

before the coffee worked its magic. Hi, Jesse. Hello, Mike. It's great to see you again. How are you? Doing just a pan. Thank you. I'm glad to hear it. You're in Louisville, I take it? Louisville, Kentucky. It's Derby Day.

How holy day here in Kentucky. You know what? I think I saw some back and forth, wherein Chuck said you were foregoing a derby party in order to have a conversation with us. Is that true? Yes. I'll be there in time for the race. What time exactly do you need to be out of here? Oh, I've got plenty of time. It's 2 o'clock here.

The races at 6.30, 7 o'clock. They keep moving it. Yeah, but the parties. The parties start around now. Well, he's already started. The party has started. This is the party. Let's see.

It's impossible to know where to begin with a professional genealogist because your entire life seems to be focused on the beginning of things or finding the origin of things. I've explained to the listeners already the circumstances that brought us together, but I don't know if I've shown this off before. There it is, man. Wow. I'm glad you got that.

I mean, I didn't know what was in the bag. I just knew it weighed about 40 pounds. And for those of you who are listening and not watching, I'm holding up a binder. The cover says, the genealogy of Michael Gregory Rowe. Look, full disclosure, this is a long overdue thank you. A lot of people have done a lot of nice things for me over the years, many unsolicited. Your offer to track my family name, I was hesitant to take you up on it because I know how much

work that involves, but you did it anyway, and then you found me on the road, and then you presented me with, well, with my family, basically. And I just, thanks doesn't seem to be enough, but that's all I got at the moment. So thanks for doing that. Well, you're very welcome. It's a labor of love, and it's something that I enjoy. I'm now holding up, it kind of looks like the final four picks. Like a bracket. And it starts with my name and it goes back and then it goes back. and you basically traced my family back 10 generations. Sure. And that's a pedigree chart.

That's what we call it, just like in horse racing and dogs. But we start with you and we work your way back through all of your family. And your family has been here for quite a while, mostly in Gloucester, Mass. Is it Gloucester or? Gloucester. Gloucester. I don't know that that's a question anybody can ever really agree on. But if I didn't tell you before, I knew some of what you shared with me because I had an aunt

named Betty, who I think was obsessed in the same way that you are and most people who do what you do. You're basically detectives. But this was back in the 70s and 80s. So she was driving all through the Northeast. She was getting on planes. She was taking photographs of gravestones. All that stuff, it just took her years and years to put together.

a version of what you did. But I imagine the internet has dramatically simplified your task. Oh, very much so. I'm lucky that I started prior to the internet. So I had the experience of actually going into courthouses and opening up those dusty old books and looking through and flipping through indexes and finding those documents. The internet has made it so much easier. A lot of them are just out there on ancestry sites like Ancestry.com, family sites. search footnote. And you can go out and you can actually find copies of these original documents. And it's just made everything infinitely more easy. How did you get into it? I mean, at what point did you decide this is for me? And talk a little bit about the Sons of the American Revolution and

how you wound up with them in particular. Okay. So I started out probably at age 35. When I was younger, my older brother worked at the library, and I was an avid reader, and I would go into the library quite a bit. One day, he showed me a coat of arms in a book, and this was when I was about 12. So years later, I was on my lunch break. I was downtown. I liked to go to the library, and I said, I'm going to find that coat of arms in that book. And of course, I did, and if you look at the bookshelf, the armorial section is here, the geneal section is right next to it, I look over and I see census records for Nelson County, Kentucky, which is where my father was from, and I opened it up, and there was my father on the 1920 census. And from there, it just snowball.

It just kept going and going and going. I looked for a marriage record, and genealogy is a disease. and you never finish. Because as soon as you find a new person, you've got two more people to find. Right. You've got to find his parents. Right. So I started with that and I just kept going. And I did my family.

About 35 years ago, I worked on a book on my father's side of the family. And on my lunch break, I would go to a place here in Louisville called the Philson Historical Society. And they had lots of genes. genealogical records there. And I would go in on my lunch break and sit there and pull all these records together. And finally, I had enough to assemble a book. And my book is about an inch, inch and a half thick. And it's almost all documentation. So when I finished it, I happened to be sitting there at the table with a lady who I converse with on my lunch break a lot. And her name was Doris Bush. And Doris said, can I take this? And I had no idea where she worked.

anything. So she took it and the next day she says come with me we have somewhere to go. And she took me into the office at the Sons of the American Revolution which was three blocks away and she introduced me to the executive director and she said this is who you need to hire to replace me. Wow. And that was in 1991 and she was retiring at that point and they hired me. I started April 1st. The joke was on me, 1991, and I've been there 31 years. Some people may not know what the Sons of the American Revolution is. Most people have heard of the D.A.R. Daughters is the American, yeah. The Daughter's the American, yeah. The Daughters of the American Revolution. And the Sons of the American Revolution

is the male side of that type of organization. Everyone has to trace their family back to someone who provided some type of service during the Revolutionary War. Right. And the headquarters happens to be here in Louisville, Kentucky, the national headquarters. It started in 1886 in Washington, D.C. And about 1978, they decided they wanted their building to be an embassy in Washington, D.C. And they basically told them they had to go. They didn't mess with the ladies. The ladies own a whole block in D.C. And they didn't mess with them. So why was it that the daughters preceded the Sons in this case. What was the enthusiasm that led whomever to start the D-A-R? Well, the D-A-R actually in the beginning was a part of the S-A-R. If you go back to our early records,

we have several women who were members of the S-A-R in the very beginning, and then they broke off on their own, which was bad for SAR because actually back then in the 1880s, 1890s, the ladies were doing all the genealogy work. The men were out running banks and, you know, different fighting wars. Organizations. Yeah, fighting wars, doing things like that. So the ladies went off and started their own organization and they are now 10 times larger than the SAR. They have 10 times more member than we do because the ladies were the ones who were doing the genealogy. So what happens from a membership perspective? What do the sons and daughters of the American Revolution do when they gather? People join for many different reasons. Some people join just to get

their lineage on file so that people can find it at a later date. Some people join for patriotic reasons. Some people join for historical reasons. The SAR locally does a lot of things like grave markings. and they'll go out and find the graves of soldiers who died in their area, and they'll mark those graves. They have color guards who participate in different functions in a, you know, memorial day here at Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. The SAR color guard is front and center, always a part of that. So at the meetings, we have oration contests for children. We have essay contests for high school kids oration contests. They have contests where they can draw posters, things like that, and they can earn scholarships to college.

And they compete at the chapter level, the state level, and then the best of the best are sent to the National Congress in July to the National Society, Sons American Revolution. And those people win scholarships. It's such an interesting mix of history, curiosity, detective work, patriots. Really? It would be very difficult to do what you do and not have genuine love for the country, I would think. Oh, very much so. My daughters will tell you that they hated to go on vacation because we were constantly tracing through graveyards. We went to a lot of Christian music concerts with our girls growing up. And one thing that stands out is we went to Springfield, Illinois. and it's Sangamon County.

And I remember getting there and thinking, I have an ancestor who was from Sangamon County. His name was Philip Crowder. I got there and I pulled him up on the internet. And two weeks before, an Eagle Scout had located his grave alongside one of the major thoroughfares there in Springfield, Illinois, and had cleaned it up, marked it, put a sign in everything.

everything. And two weeks before I was there, they had an unveiling of this gravesite. And it was a mile and a half down the road from my hotel. So, holiday-taging car, drive down, turned a corner, and go in, and I find this cemetery and start taking pictures of it. And we constantly did things like that while we were on vacation. And what do they call it geocaching today? This seems to predate all of that. And certainly in 1991, there was no Ancestry.com. There was no 23 and me. What did you make of that when the curiosity that you've always harbored in this way

was suddenly ignited in millions of people? Did it feel like, well, welcome to the party, America, see what you've been missing? Or was it like, well, there goes the neighborhood. Now everybody's going to be rooting around cemeteries. Well, genealogy has always been a very popular hobby, even before the internet. There were lots and lots of people doing it. I think I heard a few years ago it was the second largest hobby behind gardening. And there were lots of people who were doing it.

It just made it easier for us to come together and share. Before, one of the early things that I did, I belonged to a society called the Society of Mariliterers who came. to Kentucky. And all of my ancestors, or most of my ancestors on my father's side, are from St. Mary's County, Charles County, Maryland. No kidding. Yes. So after the Revolutionary War in Maryland, land was starting to get less available. And people were packing up to leave. And in 1785, there was a group called the Maryland League. And they traveled as a group to Nelson County, Kentucky. And they all settled together and formed a community in Nelson County, Kentucky. And it's now called the Holy See of Kentucky, and it was the site of the first Catholic

Church west of the Allegheny Mountains. And they all came together, and then more people came and more people came, and the whole area down there is settled with people from Maryland. And in 1991, when I went to one of these meetings, it's a three-day meeting, And we get together, and back then we would put a table. Everybody would have a table, and they'd put a sign on it. And the sign would have the names that they're researching. And around the room, they would have three or four copy of machines,

and people would come in and bring their boxes and set them on the table, and you'd look over and say, oh, he's got a Bevin. And you'd run over to his table and say, what do you have on Joseph Bevan? And they'd root through their folders, and they'd grab it, and they'd hand it to each other, and you'd run over the copy machine, you make copies of it. And you just learn to share everything.

And most genealogists are very happy to share everything they have. Oh, well, I can vouch for that. You jump from behind a bush holding the story of my life as I was trying to exit a small airport in Louisville. Scared the hell out of me because, you know, as I think I wrote on Facebook, there's a fine line between a stalker, a detective, a fan, and a genius. And it took me a minute to figure out which capital. You got a little mix of all of them, doesn't he?

Not dangerous. I just like what I do. Well, you're a dog with a bone, and that's the thing that really interests me about hobbyists. You just compared this to gardening, and on the surface, they don't seem to have much in common. But when you put three or four gardeners together in a small place, suddenly you see a kind of enthusiasm emerge that is very similar to. barbershoppers or square dancers or anybody that has that crazy love for a thing. Those kinds of passions, that's part of what I wanted to do with that show. Somebody's got to do it, right, that came after dirty jobs.

I wanted to find people who woke up kind of agitated because there was unfinished business to do, even if it was in a fairly arcane pursuit. and you exemplify that. It sounds like you, well, you called it a disease, and clearly you're afflicted. Very much so. It's funny that you bring up somebody's got to do it, Mike, because I was thinking, you know who it reminded me of

was the woman who had the hair museum? Yes, exactly. Have you ever come across this, Jesse, people who collect hair of relatives? I have heard of that, yes. I've never seen it personally. I have seen it. Just outside of Independence, Missouri, I think it's called either the international or the National Hair Museum.

And the woman who runs it is obsessed. She's similarly afflicted with wanting to understand our past, but she does it through this very strange obsession with famous people's hair. And I guess that was a thing, right? Back in the 16, 1700s, a lock of hair. hair was often included in your particulars. Sure. And interestingly enough, last night on the news, I saw that someone had a lock of Marilyn and Rose hair.

And they ran a DNA study on it and they finally identified who her father was. Really? No. So all her life, she never knew who her father actually was. Well, she did because I said that it was who she thought it was. his name was Giddings, and they were able to prove it just recently, like in the last two months. I want to get into some of the particulars in my family, but I don't want to bore anybody because everybody's got their own family and, you know, we could talk forever.

But you did sort of a quick look at Chuck. We were talking offline a little earlier. If I remember it right, you said you hadn't seen anyone's family so heavily concentrated in one area before. It happened to be Baltimore. Yeah, it happened to be Baltimore. And I have worked on a lot of lineages, but I have never seen anybody where everybody in their lineage was from one place. And Chuck's lineage is 98% from Baltimore, and the other 2% is from, I think it's Dorchester County, Maryland.

Well, that explains a lot, hon. Before that, they all came from somewhere else. You have a lot of German and Italian and different places that they came to. But every one of them settled in Baltimore and stayed there, I guess, until you left pretty much. And that's when the inbreeding stopped. And it's kind of the same for me. My family started out in Charles County, Maryland. 1785, they moved to Kentucky, settle in Nelson County.

In Charles County, my family lived within a five-mile radius of where they landed. In Nelson County, they lived within a five-mile radius of where they landed. In 1948, my father moved to Louisville. When I started working on my father's side of the family, I had to go to Nelson County and to St. Charles and St. Mary's County, Maryland. Had two places to look for all the records. What was the reason that the families left Maryland to go to Kentucky in particular? The land in Maryland was starting to wear out. Back then, it was the law of primogeniture where the first son inherited everything. So if you were the second, third son, and a lot of times these families had seven and eight, ten kids so they had enough people to work

the land. And those later children weren't inheriting land. So to get land, they had to move out. And after the Revolutionary War, it was possible for people to cross the mountains and start moving out. And a lot of them moved here to Kentucky. When you first presented me with all this research, you hadn't identified a relation who had fought in the revolution. But you went deeper. I think you went back ten generations? Ten generations. And it was Forbes, right?

James Forbes. He was a legislator from Maryland to the first and second Continental Congress in 1778 through 1780. And he actually died in service in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1780. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people. who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do.

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The smartest way to hire. Was that the second or the third Continental Congress? I think that was the second Continental Congress at that point. So that was the same Congress that was basically churning out the declaration? No, the declaration was prior to 76. So, yeah, that was 76. So you figure James fought in the war? I don't know that he fought in the war because he was fairly old at that time.

He was a legislator. He was a judge. He served his country by going to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. So the qualifications to be a son of the revolution are either a direct line to a soldier or a legislator or somebody who was in the government at the time? someone who provided service during the Revolutionary War. They have broadened it a bit now if you did patriotic service. In some places where taxes were considered after 1778, you had to take an oath of allegiance to be able to pay your taxes. And so now SAR considers that as patriotic service if you paid your taxes after 78 in some of the time. states where the legislature in those states prescribed that you had to take the oath to pay your taxes. How little taxes would we collect today if people had to declare an allegiance?

No, it's the opposite today. Yeah, it would be the opposite. It's like, I'm not paying that. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. You must have done this countless times, but what kind of reactions do you see when you're able to call someone and say, I found it. I found the link. It must be like winning a prize on a game show or something. It is for me, and I love that. I love the feeling of being able to show someone what they have.

But more than that, I like to sit down with people who have a genuine interest in it and teach them how to do what I do. And I do that on occasion. I really like to show people, here's my secrets. This is where I find my records. This is how you look for them. This is where you search the index and how you find them by going to this page. And for me, that is more exciting than actually doing the work for them.

I love doing the work for them. That's the fun part for me. My job at SAR is when someone does what I've done for you and I fill out the application, when they fill out their application and they want to become a member and they turn in their application with all of their documents, I have to go through their documents, I have to go through their documents and make sure they did it right and make sure that the lineage is correct. I feel like I'm kind of a teacher grading somebody's homework. And that's my least favorite part of the job is because when you have to tell somebody

you know they didn't do it right. At our place, it's usually about 10% of the ones that come in have issues with them that have to be overcome before they can complete the membership process. that's the not so fun part but one of the things that I get to do because I've been there so long people want to join and they will hire S-A-R to look for their family for them and I'm the one who gets to do what they call research request and that's my love I love to go out and find the stuff for them and do the work it's more fun to do the work than grade the work Is it more common or uncommon to find the connection that people are hoping to find?

I guess I'm asking how many people are descended directly from Revolutionary War soldiers today? Millions, millions and millions. If you have family who were here prior to the Great Migration in late 1800s and early 1900s, If you have people who were here before that, it's almost guaranteed that you're going to find at least one person who served in the Revolutionary War. It's those people who came over from Italy and Ireland in the late 1800s, early 20th century. If you have four grandparents that were immigrants, it's not going to happen. But if you have one grandparent who was, which is what happened in Chuck's case, almost everybody in his – family came from Germany or Ireland or Italy. And I was able to find one person and trace that line

back and found him an ancestor who was a colonel out of Dorchester County, Maryland. Isn't that something? Yeah. Colonel Hopewell. William Hopewell. Who was the one who didn't immigrate? Who was the one that made all that possible in Chuck's lineage? It goes through. That was my grandfather, right? Lewis Rosen, Bush, Rooley. Yeah, Charles Samuel Ruelly, his wife or his mother was Francis Alexina Marshall. And the Marshall family goes back.

Actually, it's Worcester, Worcester, County, Maryland. Worcester County, yeah, there you go. Worcester County, Maryland. And Francis was the daughter of Stephen, who was his son of Thomas. who married Elizabeth Hopewell, daughter of William Hopewell, Colonel William Hopewell. It's kind of like Louisville. Louisville, Louisville, Louisville. You guys are right across the street from the Slugger factory, aren't you? From the Bat Museum, yes.

Yeah. I can look out my window and see it every day. See that giant bat? Not now. In five more weeks, I get to go back. It's so ironic when you first reached out, I realized I was staying in a hotel, literally on that street. I forget what it was called, but we'd walk out of the hotel and I'd see the Louisville Museum. And you guys are right there. I can't wait to come back and drop in on you unless you're retiring.

I heard there's a rumor you might be, you know. I think it's 304 days, not that I'm counting. So, and I don't know if Chuck told you right now I'm actually working from home. I had an unfortunate accident at my daughter's condo helping her. I fell off of a one foot step ladder and fractured my hip. Oh, my. One foot. Isn't that always the way? It's the last foot that always gets you. I've fallen down lots of stairs. The foot always gets. Yeah. It's the last foot or the first foot.

Well, I hope you heal up quick. Let me ask you this. Aside from the curiosity of it all, why is it important? Why devote so much of your life to finding out about the past lives of strangers? For me, I grew up in a home where I probably saw my father three times in my life. And it was that yearning to know. If you don't know where you come from, you don't know where you're going. And I just had this yearning to know about my father's family. And like I said, once you start, you can't stop. And it transferred into other people.

I love to find something for someone that is a breakthrough, that breaks through that brick wall that they haven't been able to get through. It's a lot of work, and sometimes you've got to dig deep. Most of the time you'll find that in a family Bible that's hidden somewhere or in a deed. You'll have people who died and didn't leave a will. So trying to find and prove who someone's father was in the early 1800s, when there's no will, is almost impossible, but the thing you have to realize is if they didn't leave a will, there was usually a court case and somebody was fighting over that piece of property. Right.

And that's where you find the hidden names of those kids and you can then take it back another step. And once you take it back another, you've got another another another. It never ends. I mean, of the many, many, and I just can't overstate this, there's just hundreds of pages and documents in this binder that you put together. for me. But one of the things that fascinated me was a will. You included a copy of a will from a Lewis Hogan, rather, who I barely knew. I mean, I knew his descendants, of course, but just the very beginning of this is so interesting. I, Lewis Hogan, rather, of Queen Anne's

County, State of Maryland, being of sound and disposing mind, memory, and understanding, do make this my last will and testament in manner and form following. That is to say, first, I direct that a very plain head and footstone shall be erected at my grave. The number one thing is the kind of gravestone. And it goes on, you know, there are many codiciles and this and that. But of course, there's a picture of the gravestone. It's a book of graves. I have to ask a question.

Was that a typed version of the will or was that the handwritten? This was the typed, but that was going to be my next question. the other fascinating thing about this collection of documents. Two things. The first is the ridiculous font size that exists in newspapers 100, 200 years ago. I don't know how people read them, Chuck. I mean, even with my glasses on, I'm looking at pages in this book that just challenge. It's impossible. The smallest little type you can imagine. The second thing is, in the handwritten portions, which are voluminous, you'll see handwriting that boggles the mind.

Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful handwriting. Beautiful. Some of it. Some of it not so beautiful and very hard to read. That's a very recent thing that we've lost in our society. Because my sister has excellent handwriting. She's about 10 years older than me.

She has excellent handwriting. I have terrible handwriting. My brother has terrible handwriting. But like my mom, my grandmother, everybody, everybody else who's much older, just, kids don't write cursive anymore. I can't write cursive anymore. If you think about it, they're not teaching cursive in schools anymore. Right.

Yeah. What are we going to do for genealogist in 25, 30 years? If nobody is learning cursive, how are they going to be able to read these old wills and these old deeds? It's a struggle for me too. You don't see much cursive. And then all of a sudden, in a compendium like this, you see it page after page. It's not that it's small that makes it difficult to read. It's just you're just not used to looking at it.

And then you go back a generation and another generation and another generation. And it gets even like more flowery, really. I mean, there's stuff in this book, Back Ten Generations. It's so beautiful. it's hard to believe just some random person sat down to do this. But it just really makes you. I remember the teacher when I was in second grade telling us that penmanship class was finished. She wasn't going to do it. Like they affirmatively stopped doing it and started teaching something else. It's kind of a shame. Yeah. And I had teachers when I was in the fifth grade tell me that I have learned the cursive, but I can't

do the cursive. And they told me to go back to writing in block letters so that they could read my writing. And I did that all through high school. All of my work was in block letters because teachers could not read my cursive. You mentioned earlier that one of the things that gratifies you is to get people on the right track, which makes me think there's not a lot of proprietoriness in what you do. So what can people listening right now do to start a quest and maybe some advice to keep them from making the sorts of mistakes that I imagine most people make? Go to your oldest relative who's still living. Take a tape recorder, write down everything that they can tell you and ask questions, what dates, places, where did they come from? get as much information as you can, and then you can go to Ancestry.

Ancestry, you can sign up for a free two-week trial. But plan your search before you sign up for that two-week trial. Get as much information as you can going into it, and then look up as many names as you can. There's another site called FamilySearch.org. Familysearch.org is run by the Mormons, and they have... have been microfilming records since the 1930s, going into courthouses all over the country, and microfilming wills, deeds, marriage records. And they've made them available, almost all of them, for free on FamilySearch.org.

You just have to learn how to go in and find them. And that, for me, I use it every day, even on the weekends. I'm on Family Search. because I do this at work and I come home and I do it until 12 o'clock midnight because I've been doing it for 31 years and I love the thrill of the hunt. When you find that missing piece, everything lights up and I love it. I got to say something else too. It's such great advice. Find your oldest living relative.

Show up with a tape recorder and talk to them. not only will that give you a good jumping off place to start your search, it'll change that person's day and maybe even their life. Yes, it will. I watched my mom walk across our yard for years when my granddad got very old, and she would go over there with her yellow legal pad, which she was never without, and she would sit down with him and literally interview him. And, you know, he was going blind at the time and inward as will happen so often. And this constantly pulled him out of the shadows. It awakened him. His memory of his family in his younger days was so much sharper than his recall of recent events.

And just that kind of interaction, I think, you know, whether you're interested in genealogy or not, is a valuable thing to promote. Well, on that note, one of the things that I found for you, and I know Chuck has talked to you about this, is your Noble family and George Werner Noble. And I thought this was so interesting, because I know if you move just a little bit, there's a box behind you that says Noble whiskey. It certainly is a lot. I've seen it many times. and your ancestor, George Werner Noble, immigrated in 1854 from Hesse Kassel in Germany. And he's from a town called Essen. And if you follow the nobles back in the town of Essen, many of them, you go back, there were like six generations of them, were mayors of the town of Essen in Germany.

So your Werner Noble immigrated in 1854 to Baltimore. And one of the most interesting things I've found is if you find him on the 1870 census, he is listed as a liquor dealer. Isn't that crazy? Oh my gosh, you have no idea. That makes me feel so good, Jesse, because, you know, I wanted to honor my pop in some way because his name is pretty unusual, isn't it? They're not a lot of nobles. No, I can't imagine that there are. There were quite a few who immigrated from that town to Baltimore.

There was a George Werner Noble who came in about 1832, but it's not yours. Yours came later on in 1854, and he was a tailor for most of his life, but in 1870, and I know it's him because he has the same wife and same kids, he is listed as a liquor dealer. Just blew me away. I was so happy when I found that. What's his first name? George Werner Noble. I believe it's pronounced Werner.

Verne. George Werner Knobble. And he then would have been my grandfather's... Grandfather? Fifth generation. My grandfather's grandfather was a liquor salesman. My grandfather, for whom my Noble Tennessee whiskey is named, wasn't exactly a teetotaler, but he was not...

much of a drinker, and that made me feel a little awkward. In fact, I called my mom when I said, look, I want to name this whiskey after pop, but I know he wasn't a big whiskey drinker. You okay with that? And she's like, oh, sure, Michael, I'm fine with that. Your grandmother certainly did enjoy the whiskey. I said, okay, that's close enough. But now, now I've got a direct line to a liquor salesman with the noble name who is related to me. That's the, the symmetry of that is pleasing. It is. And you find things like that all the time when you're doing genealogy.

One of my favorite things is I have several times been in cemeteries and go somewhere and drive into a cemetery that's the size of a city block. This happened with one of my ancestors. I drove in. It was a big loop. The cemetery was a loop. I mean, drove in through the central part, I turned right and went halfway around the loop and parked. I was six feet away from my ancestors tombstone and I had never been in that

cemetery in my life. It was like he was calling me and things like that happened. It's like they want you to find them. That's happened several times. It's like they're reaching out saying, I'm here. Come find me. And you find things like that with documents and things. It's incredible. What is the most consistently useful document that you rely upon when you're trying to stitch together the past? Probably census records. And census records, well, they go back to 1790. Between 1790 and 1850, they just listed the head of household and the number of children. Starting in 1850, they started to list the head of household wife and the children.

And in 1880, it started to list the relationship. which made that even more valuable. And it would also, starting in 1880, it told you where the parents were from. So it would say that I was born in Kentucky and that my father was born in Kentucky and my mother was born in Indiana. That was very valuable because starting in 1880, you could start to say, oh, this guy wasn't born in Kentucky. He's born in another state and it gives you a clue where to go find him. And they release the census every 17th. years and just the first of April, they've released the 1850 census or the 1950 census. A lot of genealogists are just licking their lips, just can't wait to get it. It's been released. Places like Ancestry and Family Search have mountains of volunteers going through and transcribing the information from the handwritten census records so that they can be indexed and put up on family search and ancestry and places like that. I so get it. listening to you talk right now and all

I'm thinking about is when we're done, I'm going to call my mom right away and say, Pop's grandfather sold hooch for a living. And I'll tell you something else too. I said at the top that I wanted to thank you, not just for doing this, but over the lockdowns, obviously it was difficult on everybody, but I was worried about my parents. You know, they're 3,000 miles away and they were spending an awful lot of time inside. My dad was just getting up to speed on the whole Zoom thing. I called him one day, and he doesn't like to talk on the phone, and, you know, he's kind of hard of hearing, and he just doesn't really, you know, it doesn't spend a lot of time doing

this kind of thing. Well, we were talking, and I pulled out this binder, which I hadn't really dove into in a proper way. I'd had it here for a few years, and I looked at it, but locked down, I had some time. And with my dad, I showed him all of your work. You know, I had the binder open, and so I was taking out the pages one at a time and holding them up to the screen. And, you know, this 89-year-old man became engaged like I really haven't seen him in decades. And it was just like my mom talking to her dad.

Suddenly, I'm talking to my dad, and he's asking me questions. And I should have written them down to ask you, but the answers are all in here. And so I'm going to sit down with him in person next time I see him and go through all of this. A long clunky way to say thanks. I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but the fruits of your efforts, they touch people in ways that you're just never going to see. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure.

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Well, and I shared some things with Chuck prior to this meeting so that you could have some visual aids to look at things. So there is a PDF of that 1870 census. There are said here so long, my computer shut off. But you still have a tumbling. of whiskey nearby. What can I ask, are you enjoying today? Actually, I'm drinking Amaretto. Back in my younger days, I drank a lot stronger and had a few lost weekends, and I had to tone it down a bit. I understand. I like a nice, something I like just for the taste of it to sip on. So, very civil. But I sent him chart. I sent him a copy of his S-A-R application and your S-A-R

application. We hope down the road that at some point you will become one of our illustrious members. And I can say this, we've had 16 presidents who have been S-A-R members. And George H.W. Bush actually joined prior to becoming president because he was interested in his family. He had his genealogy done and became a member of the Sons of the American Revolution because he was interested for patriotic reasons. That's Bush 41? Younger Bush. Is that 40? Oh, 43. 43.

Yeah. Is it 43? Yeah. My father's HW isn't it? Yeah. Yes, that's what I thought you said. Okay, so it's George W. Bush. George W.

Okay, okay. Yeah, H.W. He has an aircraft carrier named after him now, and it's probably the most potent in our fleet. We just featured it on an episode of how America works. It just made me think, boy, to see your family name on an aircraft carrier, it's a an aircraft carrier. That's when you know. You know what? I come from pretty interesting stock. He is a member. Let's see. I sent Chuck some stuff on the immigration cards for your George Warner novel. I sent wall charts. I sent Chuck Bible pages for his family. This is an

interesting story. Baltimore, the newspapers print obituaries. In the old days, they almost all follow the same format. There were about six or seven lines. They told when the funeral would be, who he was, when he died. Very rarely did it ever give a date of birth. Sometimes it gave the name of a spouse. It never told the parents. And I was so frustrated with trying to find things for Chuck's family. And I have a friend who does genealogy in Maryland. His name's Chris Christo. And he is a big genealogist up there. And I called him, I said, Chris. I said, I'm having trouble with this. And he told me how to go to the archives of Maryland

and how exactly to find the death certificates for Baltimore up through 1920. So I'm talking to him about this. And I'm looking for stuff on Chuck's family and I'm trying to tie down one broken link in his Marshall line to get back to William Hopewell. And I'm online and I find, a transcript of a Bible page, and it has the one link that I need. And I'm looking at it, and it was in the Maryland Historical Society Bulletin in 2006.

It was transcribed for the Bolton by Chris Christo. The man I had been talking to that morning, and I pick up the phone, and I call him back, and I said, Chris, did any of those names sound familiar to you? And he goes, yeah, they did a little bit. I said, I'm sitting here looking at a Bible page that you transcribed in 2006. He goes, oh, I remember that. Too funny. So that's one of those serendipity kind of things that happened with genealogy.

This Bible page wanted me to find it so I could get checked the information he needed to have his patriot work. So is it fair to say that you really, like you couldn't do what you do without census, without gravest, without gravest, without Bibles, these very, very basic things are the sort of the tent poles that guide you. Yeah. There's a site out there called findagrave.com. And find a grave. You can go there and you can look up, you can put in the name and the date and the place. And someone else has probably already been to that cemetery and taken a photograph of that tombstone and posted it.

Many times they'll tell who the parents are and things like that. You can't really trust all the familial connections that they list. It's kind of like Reagan, trust, but verify. You see it until you find a census record that proves it or a will that proves it, you can take it as a hint, but there are a lot of bad hints out there. Always try to verify your work or verify someone else's work. Don't take this as a homework assignment. please, but I am curious. I don't know if you saw this post on my page, but about six or seven

years ago on Memorial Day, I was searching for something relevant to write. And I don't know that I went to find a grave, but I googled my last name next to the word grave. And what came up was the grave of a guy named Nick Rowe. And I had an uncle named Nick Rowe, and that made me think. But then I read this guy's biography, and he was a Vietnam War veteran who escaped the Viet Cong and survived for weeks in the jungle and eventually made it back. And today there's a whole training program. I forget the acronym, but it was put together by this guy, Nick Rowe. And there's a school. more or less named for him that deals with how to survive, if you're lucky enough to escape, a POW camp. I was blown away by what this guy had accomplished and what he had endured. I mean,

the torture is just unspeakable. So I posted a picture of his gravestone, along with a brief biography of him and some thoughts about how, I guess if you go back far enough, I mean, I must be related to this guy. in some way, shape, or form, it seems like. And so I guess my question is, everybody can probably find their name on a grave somewhere and go down some sort of rabbit hole. Oh, I'm sure. And find a grave is perfect for that. The other site that I use practically a daily basis is called newspapers.com.

And you can go there and search for obituaries. Chuck, in the stuff I've sent him tons and tons of obituary. And those are great because a lot of times they'll tell you who the father is, who the mother is. You can find wedding announcements. A wedding announcement almost always tells you who the parents are. I've done a lot of work for different celebrity types, people that SAR wants to get in. And a lot of times I will start with their Facebook page. And I'll look for a post that says, happy birthday to my mother.

So then you find out when the mother was born, you go look for someone with that last name on that date. And I have started with just their name and taking people back 10 generations and done things like that. I've done work for SAR a year and a half ago, two years ago, I did Ricky Skaggs, Country Music Hall of Fame. Someone you know, Bill Koch, he's a member of SAR. I did his grandson this past year. Liam, who is actually a son of Kevin Costner. No kidding. Did he know that?

Yes. Because that would have been a surprise for Kevin and probably everybody. Yeah, I'm sure it is. But who else have we? Lance Burton. Did you do a Dirty Jobs episode with Lance Burton? Why is that name's Lance Burton? Something to do with his birds.

Lance Burton was a magician in Las Vegas. He had a big show there for a long period of time. Yes, I did. I think it had something to do with his birds. Yep. Yeah. I've done Mitch McConnell, Jennifer Lawrence, people with Kentucky connections. I like to work on Kentucky people.

Another interesting note. What's that? My next door neighbor, her father, and I can't remember his name off the top of my head, the episode you did where you moved the house. Oh, geez, yeah. Yes. That was her father. He's from New Jersey.

He comes down here once a year and helps with their house. He came down a year and a half ago and built a beautiful front porch on their house. And I thought he looked familiar. Is his name Wayne? I think it is, yeah. I think it's Wayne. Chuck, this guy, Wayne, had like six different machines he used in the course of a single day to jack a house up out of the ground.

put wheels on it and drive it down the road. It was the most hazardous, ill-advised, I mean, fraught. This environment was fraught. It was a love letter to safety third. That's statistically impossible. But please tell him I said hello, and thanks for not letting the house fall on me.

What a tiny, tiny world it is. It's a tiny world. And you're making it smaller. That's the thing. Let's get right to it. I mean, my earlier question, I still want to talk more broadly because I get the incredible personal connection and the incredible personal desire to do this. But how can genealogy and how can a better understanding of where we come from on this personal level maybe inject a little sanity into the madness in which we find ourselves currently residing? I think it helps when you realize that we're all connected, that when you start to find out how connected you are to everybody else, it makes it hard to hate everybody else.

One of the things here in Louisville, Louisville's been here since the late 1780s, and there is this core group of families who were the rich and the elite in the very beginning. And I worked with a guy who owns a car dealership. And he told me the first thing he tells a new salesman is be careful what you say about anybody because they're all related. Don't say anything bad about anybody because that person is probably related to them somehow if they live here in Louisville. That brings an interesting question of what Mike said before about the guy Nick Rowe. And Mike said, I assume we're related.

What are the chances that they are? Is he related? You know, definitely, R-O-W-E? Was he from Maryland or Mass? I think he was from New England, if I remember. But I asked my dad about him, and he said, I don't know anything about that. If we are, then it's tangential.

I tend to think we probably aren't because he was a contemporary. And it seems like you would know. It depends on how far back. Well, that's what I'm wondering. It's like, where does that name begin? It may be six generations back. Come forward. And you may be fourth or fifth cousins, but you may be related. An interesting thing in my family when I first started this, my great-grandmother was a Hagan who married a Hagen. She was born in Kansas. And when I talked to the old-timers when I went out and started looking for this, they said, oh, she was a Hagan, but they weren't related. Well, it turns out that just two generations before, her family had packed up and left Nelson County and gone to Missouri and then Kansas. And then her parents died and she wound up moving back to Nelson County, Kentucky and marrying her third cousin. I am my own grandpa. I am my own grandpa.

That's the song you should. Yeah. That should be your theme song. Wow. Well, I mean, what an interesting bit of news to deliver to someone. Yeah. They were related. And things like that happened.

They do. And back then, it wasn't so unusual for a person to marry their second or third cousin. You married as far as you could walk. Right. Not for you people in Baltimore. No. You people in Baltimore, you had immigrants from everywhere. But if you were in Nelson County, Kentucky out on a farm and it was a one-lane road that went for four miles in either direction, if the girl down the street was your second or third cousin and she looked good, that's who you went after.

Better believe it. Geographically desirable. With regard to geography, Jesse, are there parts of the country that pose a greater challenge? Like, for instance, I mean, forgive me if it's stereotypical, but Appalachia, where people, or like you said in Nelson County, does that make it easier or harder to walk back? Some of it is. In Appalachia, especially, there were lots of coal mining accidents, people who died and you've got a wife who was married to somebody this month and married to somebody else next month

because they had to live. You know, you start tracking these people and you run into different names and you have to sort out and you get back to the original maiden name to find out who her family was. One of the common threads that I seem to find in doing S-A-R applications is it seems like people with divorces in the line. You go back two and three generations. It seems like there was a divorce, three generations back, four generations back. As you come through the kids because they didn't have a stable family life to look up to, there are. are divorces that seem to follow in a chain through those families. And that makes it difficult

when you have people who were married three and four times. What else have you learned or noticed that you didn't really expect to find in the course of your work? Things you might be able to conclude about the species in general, more broadly. That's kind of a hard, but it's just that people were incredibly hardworking. You had people who were farmers. Most of my people I deal with are rural. With Chuck's family, it was all Baltimore. But people were incredibly hardworking, and they worked to survive, you know, unless you get up into the nobility class, people were just scraping out a living day-to-day. And that's why they had lots of kids. Right.

Yeah. Most lifespans early on were 50 and under during the Revolutionary War, but you find people who, certain lines that have people that consistently lived 70 and 80 years old, that's an interesting thing. Sometimes I'll see an application come across. Most SAR applications are eight to nine generations. And you'll see these people who were having kids at 50 and 60 years old. and all of a sudden I'll come across a paper that's five generations to a revolutionary ancestor

because you'll have four or five marriages late marriages and having kids at 60 years old you've been able to find a descendant in just five in five generations yes that's pretty amazing that's amazing how far back have you gone do you have like a record for my family it goes back to 1662. My Hagan ancestor came into Maryland, St. Mary's County, Maryland, as an indentured servant in 1662. He came from Barbados. He was one of the white Irish. If you take him back into Ireland, he was born in 1635, I think it was. Cromwell came through 1640, 1650, somewhere in that time period. period. And in Ireland, there had been wars between the Protestants and the Catholics every 20 years. And Cromwell came through and said, I'm not putting up with this. And he started rounding up the kids. When they turned 10 years old, especially if they were children of troublemakers, they would ship them off to Barbados because he didn't want to do this again in 15 years.

They pretty much shipped away a whole generation of children, of the boys especially. To become indentured servants. To become indentured servants in Barbados and the Caribbean. So he in 1662 came into Maryland as an indentured servant. His master took him into court. There was something about some something to do with some tobacco that was coming in. And there was a fight over that. and he had him as a witness for that.

But he also came in to prove his indenture. He was proving an indenture of two years. And when he came into court in Maryland, they were supposed to land in Virginia, but they landed in Maryland. And when he went into court in Maryland to prove this indenture, it was illegal in Maryland at that time for the master to covenant with the servant.

He couldn't make a deal with his servant at that time for more time. He had already had his deal with him for seven years to get him to Barbados. When his seven years was up, he got him for two more years to bring him to America. How common was that, Jesse? The whole indentured thing. The indentured was probably more common than you would think, especially in that time period, the 1660s, 1670s coming in from the Caribbean, because there were a lot of the Irish who had been shipped over there.

Like I said, Cromwell was cleaning house. And there were a lot of those people who did come into the United States as indentured servants. I got to ask you, too, before I let you go, I know the derby's coming. Oh, I'm good. Does the name Spencer Wells ring any bells with you? Not particularly, but. I think you would really enjoy his work. He's a pretty famous geneticist.

And about 20 years ago, he got a show that was funded, I think, part by the National Geographic and maybe part by the BBC. He had identified markers in the blood that occurred, gosh, I forget, something about the Y chromosome, I think, and every 20 years you could find this marker. And as you found the marker in people alive today, you could more or less trace their migration patterns. So the project was called The Journey of Man. And Spencer Wells, aside from being a really brilliant geneticist, is a really good host. And he takes you on this amazing trip around the world where he attempts to prove through the markers in the blood that a small group of people left the interior of Africa about 2,200 generations ago, I guess, and populated the world.

he goes through Alaska and he goes into Asia and he goes, you know, he takes the routes that he believes people would have broken apart to take, right? And he basically takes tens of thousands of samples of people's blood and then puts together what appears to be proof positive of how the world was populated and how China and Indians in this country and we all came to be. And it's really an interesting look at how creation myths evolve and why people believe what they believe. And to your earlier point, it leaves you convinced that we are, in fact, all related. All related. And it does leave you, well, persuaded that the wars and the craziness and how many times have we fought our relations and not even known it?

Not even known it. Yeah. How many people are doing that right now in Ukraine? Good grief. Mind-boggling. Another interesting point in one of my family lines. Before you say that, Jesse, you were going to say something else about the court, the guy testifying in court your descendant. And I want to make sure you got to the end of that. The judge set him free and released him there on the spot.

And he went on to have eight kids. They are the root of the Higgins in Maryland. and Kentucky, Missouri, on to Texas and California. You can trace those people in there. It's a very large group, and they all go back to one man, an endangered servant from Ireland. Who did what he did because of a court order, essentially. That judge goes the other way, and maybe we're not having this conversation right now. That's right.

One of my ancestors is Christopher Gist. I don't know if you recognize that name. I do. Christopher Gist was a frontiersman, explorer, in Maryland, North Carolina. He was George Washington's guide to Fort LeBuff in 1753 to tell the French to get out of the Ohio Valley. And he, on that trip, saved George Washington's life. George Washington was 22 years old. He fell off of a raft into the Yogahana River, and he pulled him out of the water back onto the raft, he wound up getting frostbitt, and he saved George Washington's life.

On the way back, there was a Indian that was killed named Jamonville, and it's called the Jamonville Rocks, right there along Braddock's Road in Maryland. So when my daughters were studying George Washington in the fifth grade, I put together a pedigree chart similar to what you have, showing their lineage back to Christopher Gist. And I have pages from George Washington's journal and Christopher Gist's journal describing this event where he fell off the raft. There's a pen and ink drawing that supposedly represents Washington and Gist on the raft. And I tell them to say, well, if it wasn't for their relative, there may not have been a father of our country. They may not have been a country.

And the interesting thing is Christopher Gist's mother was a Cromwell. so I am related to Cromwell and an Irish indentured servant that Cromwell sent away to Barbados. Well, this is really going to blow your mind, Jesse. Next week on this podcast, we're probably going to sit down and chat with a guest who is a rancher and a race car driver and a guy who came into our radar through a very strange set of circumstances through one of our work ethic scholarship winners, woman named Chloe Hudson. This guy's name is Matthew Hagen. Spelled the same way. Okay. And he's from Kansas? No, he lives in Virginia. Yeah, he's got like 1,800 head of cattle in Virginia. Probably a relation. I'll probably look into it.

you're probably doing it right now. I can't see what you're doing with your hands there. I'm pretty sure you're Googling. Matthew Hagen. Good grief. It's probably your cousin. When this is over, I'm going to send Chuck, and I've got to find a way to send a very large file

because I have a new chart for you and a new digital copy of the book that you can share with your parents. And I've got the same thing for Chuck and a pedigree chart up to date. And I'll probably continue to work on both of them a little bit. I'm just that obsessed. All right, well, I'll help you out with that for sure.

So it's digital, Jesse? You're going to be able to get me a digital version of basically what's in this giant binder? Take basically the paper copies and scan them to a PDF and send it to you digitally so that you can share it with anybody, your brothers, your mom, your dad. Right. They can sort through the book. Very cool. I know you don't imbibe so much anymore, but would a bottle of noble be out of the question if we were to be able to get it to you i would love a bottle of noble all right good grief consider that done because you know what i got to leave you with this too i never memorized these lyrics but since we were talking about it earlier now many many years ago when i was 23 i was married to

a widow who was pretty as could be this widow had a grown-up daughter had hair of red my father fell in love with her and soon the two were wed this made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life My daughter was his mother because she was my father's wife. To complicate the matters, even though it brought me joy, I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy. My little baby then became a brother-in-law to dad. And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad, for if he was my uncle that also made him the brother of the widow's grown-up daughter, who of course was my stepmother. I'm my own grandpa. I'm my own grandpa.

It sounds funny I know, but it really is so. I'm my own grandpa. I don't know if that's possible, but I love your professional opinion on the likelihood of such series of events. Oh, I could tell you stories. Don't ask me to talk about my wife's family. It's fun. I love what I do.

I don't know if you can tell that, but I absolutely love what I do. It was clear the moment you leapt from behind that bush armed with the story of my life, and it's clear today, here you are. You could be at a Kentucky Derby party, but you're talking to me and Chuck, and we're grateful for your time, for your passion, for what you do. I don't know how to break it to you, but I've looked into the future, and you're never retiring from this affliction.

I hope when I do retire, to keep my fingers in it at me. work. I will be doing this for other people for the rest of my life. I love what I do. Any parting words of advice for people? I mean, you've given many great websites. Chuck, were you jotting those down as we went? I did. Yeah, I jotted down the websites. Jesse, I know we talked about this earlier, but if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how would they do it? Jay Hagan Genealogy at gmail.com. And that's J.H.H.A. G-A-G-A-N. Hagan is the Irish spelling.

H-A-G-E-N is the German spelling. Oh, you better spell genealogy because that's a tough one. You know what? G-E-N-E-A. And that's how you weed the herd. Okay. It's in the herd. Yeah.

So after your post on Facebook the last time, I had hundreds of people wanting me to do work for them. And I was full-time raising two kids and just did. didn't have time to take on that many. But some people may contact me, and I may not be able to do anything for them right away, but 304 days. Right. 404 days you might have some time with your hands.

I hope to go to cut down to two days a week at work, and who knows what will happen at that point. Well, I can't imagine anybody does it better than you. But who is your mentor slash hero in this space? Was there somebody who just set the bar? There was a priest. who started when I started out. And he shared with me 240 pages of information on my family. His name was Father Thomas.

And there's another Father Harry who's Father Harry Hagen. Both of them were instrumental in the group that I talked about, the Marylanders who came to Kentucky. And Gerald Thompson was a member of this group. And there are so many genealogists. out there who brought me in and taught me how to do this. And that's why I said, I love to teach more than to do. And if you have a general interest in it, I would love to sit down and show you, this is the

website you go to. And this is how you do what I do. And anybody can do it. It just takes some time and learning. Well, obviously, there's never been a better time in our history to do this. pools are remarkable. Everybody has access. And yeah, if you share Jesse's affliction, by all means, reach out and take a deep dive. It's a fascinating end of the pool in which to wallow. You enjoy the Derby and thank you again. And I can't tell you again how flattering it was

that you reached out, took an interest, and persisted on behalf of my mom and dad and my pop. We appreciate it. When you're in Louisville, we'll sit down and we'll share a drink. Deal. Either later, I'll come to Baltimore. Either way. That was terrific. Thank you. Really fun.

This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on Lassa Review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge, but in this world the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two.

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