Stories That Live In Us

How many times have you hesitated to dig into an old family mystery because you were terrified of what you might find? In this episode, I sit down with writer and photographer Erika Hanchar (host of the Granddaughter of Immigrants podcast), who inherited a cryptic bedside stack of untranslated Ukrainian records at nineteen and spent twenty years unraveling the silence her grandparents took to thei...

What will your family remember about you when you're gone? And how do we keep the stories of the people we love alive for generations? When I pulled over on an empty desert road near Utah Lake and handed my 18-year-old nephew the keys to my convertible, I felt my late Aunt Rhonda sitting right there with us. She was a larger-than-life woman who never had children of her own but left an unforg...

How many times have you sat across the table from a child or sibling who sees faith completely differently than you do, and felt an aching gulf between you? In those moments, our first instinct is usually to defend what we believe, but my guest today is here to help us flip the script. Playwright and BYU theatre professor Shelley Graham joins me to share the incredible stories behind her verbatim...

"When I noticed a yellowed piece of paper physically taped over a portrait in an old family book, I knew there was a secret waiting to be found." My guest today, author Deborah Holman, set out to uncover that hidden identity and ended up spending two years untangling the unbelievable life of her husband’s great-grandmother. We’re talking about a 19th-century woman living under dozens of...

What if the secret to breaking through your own genealogy brick walls is stepping away from your family tree entirely? In this episode, my dear friend, colleague, and podcast producer Lisa Elzey joins me to explore how researching strangers' family trees—from solving the dark mysteries around the 1950s Georgia "Hicks babies" black-market adoptions to uncovering the immigrant roots o...

What if the person sitting next to you right now (at work, in church, or at a wedding) isn't a stranger at all? When I started doing descendancy research and checking my DNA matches, I realized we are constantly crossing paths with living cousins in the most unexpected places. From college roommates to the groomsmen out on the dance floor, our ancestral threads weave us together in ways that...

When a 150-year-old German brick wall kept my friend Jenny Ashcraft stuck for nearly two decades, she decided to stop pushing straight backward and try a completely different research strategy. By fanning out to document all ten of her ancestor's children, the floodgates opened—leading to an unbelievable library encounter with the author of the exact emigration index she needed, a mysterious...

Growing up, my guest Rhonda Budge spent hours sitting beside her grandmother, staring at a massive framed portrait of her great-great-grandfather, Johann Christian Hansen. Family lore claimed he heroically rescued neighbors from their rooftops during an 1872 Danish flood, lost his ship, and gave away his reward money. It’s a story that sounded almost too extraordinary to be completely true. But wh...

How do you take dry facts on a family tree and turn them into something your kids can actually feel? In this episode, Eric Allen joins me to share how a trip from a pioneer monument in Spanish Fork, Utah, to the volcanic coast of Iceland transformed his family's connection to their roots. From discovering heritage food traditions in the kitchen to an unbelievable workplace coincidence involvi...

When Suzanne Hoffman sat down to help her daughter with a middle-school history project, she never expected to uncover a radical rebel in her own family tree. In this episode, Suzanne shares the remarkable story of her great-grandmother Eva, a 15-year-old Jewish immigrant who spoke six languages, led street marches for working mothers, and spearheaded the famous Boston Meat Wars boycott when food...

When Victoria Robinson’s father stepped in to defend an elderly coworker at an Arkansas sawmill in 1952, he had to run for his life. Shaken and hiding in the dark balcony of a segregated movie theater. A chance encounter there saved him and sparked a powerful family legacy of military service and resilience. Join us on Stories That Live In Us as Victoria shares her father's harrowing escape,...

When I handed an adoptee a paper with his biological siblings’ names, he burst out laughing. Turns out his long-lost brother was his neighbor! After connecting with an AncestryDNA cousin match looking for his biological family, I spent hours piecing together census records and city directories to identify his biological parents. But nothing prepared either of us for the moment he read the name of...

When my guest Bubba Page walked into the studio holding his grandfather’s 1960 vinyl record album, I knew we were in for a special conversation about legacy. But after facing a painful divorce that left him with his eight children 50% of the time, Bubba turned his family’s roots in music, faith, and Depression-era resilience into a daily blueprint for intentional parenting. Join us as we discuss S...

Long before mobster legends took over New York, Italian immigrants were riding in rodeos, surviving coal mine massacres, and brewing bootleg wine in the Colorado mountains. In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, best-selling author and journalist Linda Stasi joins Crista Cowan to uncover how her family survived the horrific 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Pueblo, Colorado, fled to Red Hook, Brooklyn,...

Growing up with a world-famous uncle whose book transformed American history, Chris Haley spent decades pursuing stage lights and applause before realizing his true calling was waiting inside dusty archives. In this deeply moving conversation, the nephew of Roots author Alex Haley shares how making cold calls to phone book listings led him to face hidden family truths, discover a Civil War ancesto...

What if a national TV crew showed up at your door to reveal a family secret? Have you ever felt a missing piece in your family tree that you couldn’t quite place? In this episode, I sit down with Melissa Stafford, who thought her family history stopped with her immediate grandparents until an unexpected email from Ancestry® and a visit from Good Morning America changed everything. From driving pas...

Shared ancestors make us related. Shared stories make us connected. Can I tell you a secret? My absolute favorite part of family history isn't just discovering people who lived hundreds of years ago. It's what those stories can do for our living relationships right now. Welcome to the Season 3 premiere of Stories That Live In Us ! In this episode, I’m sharing a powerful realization I had...

What happens when you spend a year chasing family stories across all fifty states? I'm Crista Cowan (known online as The Barefoot Genealogist ), and for this special Season Two retrospective, I’m pulling back the studio curtain. I’m sitting down with my longtime friend, producer, and editor, Lisa Elzey , to look back on our epic cross-country journey—from a 150-year-old sourdough starter in A...

How close did America come to losing its foundational words forever? In this episode of Stories That Live In Us , host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) takes us to Delaware—the First State—as our countdown to America’s 250th birthday reaches its finale. Our guest is Anna Crowley Redding, an Emmy Award-winning investigative television reporter turned acclaimed children’s book author. Anna sh...

What happens when a simple hint on your family tree uncovers a decades-old secret? In this episode of Stories That Live In Us , host Crista Cowan (The Barefoot Genealogist) sits down with nurse, history lover, and content creator Jessica Rae to discuss a discovery that changed her life forever. While researching her maternal line, Jessica stumbled across a U.S. federal census record that listed he...

Imagine diving into your family tree to discover that your ancestors left you a secret message more than 300 years ago, encoded into the literal names of their children. I follow a trail of meticulous Quaker records from a genealogy brick wall in Ohio all the way back to 17th-century Boston to discover the story of Richard and Abigail Lippincott, my 10-times-great-grandparents. Together, they surv...

A dapper playboy, a broken plantation safe, an embezzlement scheme, and a grandfather who completely vanished. What happened to William H. Wheeler? 🕵️‍♂️🔍 When an 83-year-old client named Jane came to Julie Merrill, an accredited genealogist with Ancestry ProGenealogists, looking for clues about her missing grandfather, she had no idea the search would lead away from Washington state, straight pa...

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼...

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼...

Four months pregnant, two babies already buried in German soil, Anna Maria Niccum boarded a wooden ship in 1749 and crossed an ocean she'd never seen. Not for a revolution but for a foothold. My six-times great-grandmother made an extraordinary journey from the exhausted Rhineland Palatinate to the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland's Toms Creek, where she would hold the line for near...