Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Indiana: Been Here All Along (with Lisa Fanning) | Episode 100

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Indiana: Been Here All Along (with Lisa Fanning) | Episode 100 · Stories That Live In Us

0:00
Crista Cowan: You're gonna be our 100th episode of the podcast.
0:03
Crista Cowan: Wow.
0:04
Crista Cowan: That's a big deal.
0:07
Crista Cowan: Yes.
0:07
Crista Cowan: That's a really big deal.
0:10
Crista Cowan: Oh my god.
0:12
Crista Cowan: I don't know if we considered when we started this podcast that we would actually hit 100 episodes, but the fact that we are, that's amazing.
0:19
Crista Cowan: So yeah, yeah, I'm- I love that this is the story we're telling for the 100th episode.
0:24
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
0:25
Crista Cowan: Stories That Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
0:33
Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
0:37
Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
0:48
Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
0:57
Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover From Sea to Shining Sea the stories that live in us.
1:03
Crista Cowan: I never thought this day would come, but here we are, and it is a big deal, and I'm having a lot of feelings about it.
1:12
Crista Cowan: So I just want to say thank you.
1:15
Crista Cowan: Thank you for listening to us for 100 episodes.
1:22
Crista Cowan: We started this podcast back in May of 2024 because we wanted to share family stories with you.
1:30
Crista Cowan: Family stories from around the world and this season from across the United States.
1:36
Crista Cowan: And it has been a pleasure and a joy to share those stories.
1:41
Crista Cowan: I have loved the guests that we have brought on and been able to have share their stories with you.
1:47
Crista Cowan: But mostly I just want to thank you for supporting us for a hundred episodes, and hopefully, here's to a hundred more.
1:56
Crista Cowan: So today, my guest is Lisa Fanning.
2:00
Crista Cowan: And Lisa is on the board of directors for the National Genealogical Society.
2:04
Crista Cowan: She runs the DNA track at the Midwest African American Genealogical Institute.
2:11
Crista Cowan: And she is a brilliant genealogist.
2:14
Crista Cowan: She's also got a really unique story that connects to the state of Indiana in a way that you might be surprised by.
2:23
Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Lisa Fanning.
2:26
Crista Cowan: Well, Lisa, I'm so glad you're here.
2:28
Crista Cowan: I'm really excited to get to know you a little bit better.
2:32
Crista Cowan: We've kind of circled around each other in the genealogy community for years.
2:35
Crista Cowan: We have.
2:42
Lisa Fanning: I think it was Virginia, NGS Virginia.
2:45
Lisa Fanning: I bet you.
2:46
Lisa Fanning: And I was so excited when I saw you.
2:48
Lisa Fanning: I was like, oh my God, that's Crista Cowan.
2:50
Lisa Fanning: And so I had to come up and introduce myself.
2:52
Lisa Fanning: And then we just have been circling since.
2:55
Crista Cowan: Yeah, well, I'm so glad you did.
2:56
Crista Cowan: It's been delightful to get to know you.
2:58
Crista Cowan: And today I'm excited to get to know a little bit more about your family and your family story.
3:03
Crista Cowan: So why don't we just start at the beginning?
3:06
Crista Cowan: You live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, home of the Allen County Public Library.
3:11
Crista Cowan: Um, but you are from Indiana originally, yes?
3:14
Lisa Fanning: I am.
3:15
Lisa Fanning: I grew up in Indiana, um, in Richmond.
3:19
Lisa Fanning: Um, and Richmond is sort of central eastern Indiana, um, or sort central eastern part of the state, kind of near Dayton, Ohio, if you're familiar with that.
3:31
Lisa Fanning: Um it's historically those land, that land part of the state is um was occupied by the Miami Shawnee Lanape people.
3:44
Lisa Fanning: Um, but the Quakers moved in um in the early 1800s.
3:49
Lisa Fanning: Um so they settled Richmond.
3:51
Lisa Fanning: Um, so that's that's where I grew up.
3:54
Crista Cowan: I love that.
3:54
Lisa Fanning: And were your parents from there originally?
3:57
Lisa Fanning: Uh my mother was.
3:59
Lisa Fanning: Um, my father was from Cincinnati, Ohio.
4:02
Lisa Fanning: They met in Richmond at a party.
4:04
Lisa Fanning: I love poets.
4:07
Lisa Fanning: They're both poets.
4:08
Lisa Fanning: So you know, poets kind of like each other.
4:11
Lisa Fanning: They're on the same, they have the same vibe.
4:13
Lisa Fanning: So nice.
4:14
Lisa Fanning: I love that.
4:15
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
4:16
Crista Cowan: And how many kids in your family?
4:19
Lisa Fanning: Just me and my sister.
4:20
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
4:20
Lisa Fanning: So it's a small family, um, very small.
4:24
Lisa Fanning: And are your parents still living?
4:26
Lisa Fanning: My mother's passed on uh about seven years ago.
4:30
Lisa Fanning: My father's still living.
4:31
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
4:32
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
4:32
Crista Cowan: So tell me a little bit about growing up.
4:34
Crista Cowan: Did you, I mean, were you guys a big with with poets for parents?
4:37
Crista Cowan: Were you a big storytelling family, or what did that look like?
4:41
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, I mean, I would say my whole extended family, um, they were storytellers.
4:47
Lisa Fanning: Um, that's that's really kind of what sparked my interest in just family history because they would always um talk about um their relatives because we are not my family, it has been in Richmond for like a hundred years, but they originally are from Tennessee.
5:04
Lisa Fanning: So they would always talk about their relatives that came here from Tennessee, and they were very colorful characters.
5:11
Lisa Fanning: Um, and my family is very funny.
5:14
Lisa Fanning: They're very religious people, but they're very funny people.
5:17
Lisa Fanning: So they tell the kind of stories in, you know, in a way that you want to meet those people.
5:23
Lisa Fanning: Um, so that kind of um sparked my interest in in family history, just wanting to to know more about where we originally came from, uh, why why my elders had these kind of funny accents, which are not really funny, but to me they were funny because I was just used to Indiana accent.
5:42
Lisa Fanning: And so I knew we came from someplace else.
5:44
Lisa Fanning: And that kind of really sparked a lot of my interest in and uh, you know, figuring out what that was.
5:51
Crista Cowan: I love that.
5:51
Crista Cowan: Do you remember from like growing up what like an example of a funny story?
5:56
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, they talked about religion, uh, their their religious lives a lot, um, you know, things that would happen at the church.
6:04
Lisa Fanning: Um, and they would always talk about old Daddy Lum.
6:07
Lisa Fanning: And so old Daddy Lum was a name that I've you know known since I was little.
6:12
Lisa Fanning: And who that was was the matriarch of my mother's maternal family from uh Tennessee.
6:18
Lisa Fanning: Um and he became the center of my research when I first started.
6:22
Lisa Fanning: Um, so I got to know who old Daddy Lum was.
6:25
Lisa Fanning: And um, yeah, so just kind of funny stories when they would visit, um, they lived in a rural part of Tennessee, so you know, they would talk about they didn't have any lights at all after the sun went down, and and that was kind of scary.
6:40
Lisa Fanning: There'd be snakes around.
6:42
Lisa Fanning: And my mother would talk about she loved, she always wanted to be a ballerina, and she would like when they would go down south, she would be on their um the uh porch and she would she would spin like a ballerina, she would say.
6:56
Lisa Fanning: So just kind of funny stuff like that, you know.
6:58
Lisa Fanning: Just kind of kind of quirky.
7:00
Lisa Fanning: Kind of quirky, yeah.
7:02
Lisa Fanning: I love that.
7:03
Lisa Fanning: Where in Tennessee were they from?
7:05
Lisa Fanning: Um, they were from right outside of Dixon, Tennessee, which is I think it's like a couple hours from Nashville.
7:12
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
7:12
Lisa Fanning: Um, yeah.
7:13
Lisa Fanning: So kind of central Tennessee.
7:15
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, middle Tennessee, and that is where that accent came from.
7:19
Lisa Fanning: My um great aunt, because my grandmother passed away before I was born, she died when my mom was 12.
7:26
Lisa Fanning: So uh my mom and her sister, um, and in a lot of ways, they were raised by her, even though they didn't live with her, they lived with their father after she passed away.
7:36
Lisa Fanning: But my mom was very fond of her, so we would always go visit her like on Friday evenings.
7:41
Lisa Fanning: And she when when she would see us coming up the stairs to our house, she would say, Now you children, come in here and sit rotture.
7:49
Lisa Fanning: So so there was this accent that was so unique.
7:53
Lisa Fanning: And for me, it was melodic.
7:55
Lisa Fanning: And I I love languages, so I was just fascinated by that.
7:58
Lisa Fanning: And it was kind of like, yeah, we don't come from Indiana for sure, because no one speaks like that.
8:04
Lisa Fanning: Uh, but I loved it.
8:05
Lisa Fanning: And so I wanted to find out, you know, what Middle Tennessee was, why that accent I was.
8:10
Lisa Fanning: I did find out, Christy, you'll be amazed that that part of Tennessee was settled by people from southern England.
8:17
Lisa Fanning: So that that accent is an evolution of that southern England accent mixed with African, you know, accents from people who were brought over and enslaved.
8:29
Lisa Fanning: And so it's kind of a mix of all of that.
8:31
Lisa Fanning: But yeah, I finally went down that rabbit hole.
8:33
Lisa Fanning: I was like, I gotta figure out where this actually originated from.
8:36
Lisa Fanning: So I love that.
8:37
Crista Cowan: I find accents so fascinating.
8:39
Crista Cowan: I have a very um reflective speech pattern uh to have my whole life.
8:44
Crista Cowan: And so, like, I show up in Northwest Arkansas at my mama's family, and even just thinking about them, I start talking like them, and yeah, I just slide into it and it and it's completely subconscious.
8:55
Crista Cowan: Like I'm not doing it intentionally at all.
8:57
Crista Cowan: Right.
8:58
Crista Cowan: Um, but I and so I've made a little bit of a study of languages as well because I just find it fascinating how how they evolve over time and how when people, groups of people come together, how their language patterns affect each other.
9:10
Crista Cowan: It's fascinating is fascinating.
9:12
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, and they all they they did not lose that accent.
9:15
Lisa Fanning: I mean, they came when they were they were younger, but they didn't lose it.
9:19
Lisa Fanning: So yeah, I mean, it's the accent that my mother heard.
9:23
Lisa Fanning: Um, and there's certain words that she would say when she would be emotional or get angry, and you could hear that southern part come out of her.
9:31
Lisa Fanning: And the funny thing is it comes out of me too, right?
9:34
Lisa Fanning: Like if I'm really emotional, like I only I don't have children, I have a cat.
9:38
Lisa Fanning: So she gets on my nerves.
9:40
Lisa Fanning: That southern sort of like will come out of me.
9:43
Lisa Fanning: And I didn't even grow up there, so it it gets passed down.
9:46
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
9:47
Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, it absolutely does.
9:48
Crista Cowan: Those those early speech patterns get set when we're really young.
9:52
Crista Cowan: They do.
9:52
Crista Cowan: That's I love that.
9:54
Crista Cowan: So when did you get really serious?
9:56
Crista Cowan: Um, I mean, you've talked about what the spark was for how you got into family history or why, but when did that happen in your life and what did that pursuit of family history look like for you?
10:07
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, I mean, I think it was really again the the the interest in the stories.
10:12
Lisa Fanning: It was the the you know, wanting to figure out like where our family came from.
10:17
Lisa Fanning: Because growing up, I just always, you know, I thought in you just know Indiana, that's your neighborhood, you know.
10:23
Lisa Fanning: Um, but then um I left, I went to school in in Bloomington at Indiana University, and then I got a fellowship to study um at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
10:35
Lisa Fanning: And so I went out to um Maryland and and got my degree and started working in DC.
10:42
Lisa Fanning: I met a a friend of a person who became a friend of mine, and one day she was telling me that she had been to the National Archives and that she found her family in early 1900s um in this thing called a census record.
10:55
Lisa Fanning: And I was like, hmm, really?
10:58
Lisa Fanning: And that was it because because, you know, I had the interest all along, but I just didn't know, I didn't have the tools or I didn't know how to research my family, you know.
11:10
Lisa Fanning: So when she gave, that was like an entryway for me, um, like an open door, census records in National Archives.
11:18
Lisa Fanning: I live in Washington, D.C.
11:19
Lisa Fanning: Get down there right away.
11:21
Lisa Fanning: And I did, and I, and I had the information that I had about my mother's family, and I researched them to death.
11:29
Lisa Fanning: Um and then I eventually turned to my grandfather's family, and he's the his family is the family that has been in Indiana for almost 200 years, which I didn't even know that at that time.
11:42
Lisa Fanning: So that's what that's what got it all started.
11:45
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
11:46
Crista Cowan: What year was that?
11:47
Crista Cowan: Um, would have that would have been 1995.
11:51
Lisa Fanning: Okay, so right literally like two years before the census started being put online, right?
11:55
Lisa Fanning: Exactly, exactly, exactly.
11:58
Lisa Fanning: So so everything kind of worked together, you know.
12:01
Crista Cowan: Yeah, and so you think about you, you're just on that cusp of like the digitization of the records that have made them so much more accessible to people.
12:10
Crista Cowan: How have you then seen, because you started right before that evolution, and how has that changed the way you approach family history?
12:18
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, I mean, um, back in those days, as as you know, it was it was really um local libraries, it was um archives, sending, you know, getting forms and filling them out and then sending a check with a research and query to the staff of an archive.
12:39
Lisa Fanning: Um, it was joining your local um genealogy society if you had a had one.
12:45
Lisa Fanning: Um I used to, when I would travel, if I went to a place where my ancestors um came from, I would take time, go a little early or stay a little later to in the visit the archive or the library.
13:00
Lisa Fanning: Um and that worked really well for me for a long time.
13:03
Lisa Fanning: Um so, you know, for me, it's it's obviously much easier to do research now.
13:09
Lisa Fanning: Um, you know, it's right at your fingers tips.
13:12
Lisa Fanning: But I am glad that I kind of straddle both research environments because I feel like I have an interesting perspective, you know.
13:20
Lisa Fanning: Um, and and I think I became, I really became a researcher starting out at that time because you had to, it's almost like driving a stick shift versus an automatic.
13:31
Lisa Fanning: Like you really understand what you're doing and how to do it, what to do, uh, versus just, you know, sort of typing in something.
13:39
Lisa Fanning: I mean, it's it's great to have what we have now because I'm I mean have access to the world in a sense, but uh but yeah, that's that's that's definitely evolve, you know, a lot.
13:49
Lisa Fanning: And then with DNA, Lord, that's I love that.
13:55
Crista Cowan: Okay, so your mom's mama's family was from Tennessee, but your mom's dad's family was from Indiana, and you knew your grandpa.
14:04
Lisa Fanning: I did.
14:05
Lisa Fanning: He um until I was 16.
14:07
Lisa Fanning: He passed away when I was 16.
14:08
Lisa Fanning: He was born in 1897.
14:10
Lisa Fanning: Your grandfather.
14:12
Lisa Fanning: Yes.
14:13
Crista Cowan: Wow.
14:14
Lisa Fanning: So he um he had my mother very late.
14:18
Lisa Fanning: I she was one of the the kids that that back in those days, you know, she she came way after everybody else came.
14:26
Lisa Fanning: And so he was much older.
14:27
Lisa Fanning: My grandmother was still within her uh, you know, the the time where she could give birth, but towards the end of that, so here comes my mama.
14:35
Lisa Fanning: And um, yeah, so so he, you know, he I had him for 16 years.
14:41
Lisa Fanning: My grandfather was a very quiet, content man.
14:46
Lisa Fanning: He didn't really talk a lot.
14:48
Lisa Fanning: He was a minister, so you had a reverence and respect for him.
14:52
Lisa Fanning: You asked questions when you needed to.
14:55
Lisa Fanning: You know, he wasn't like a chatty Kathy, and he really didn't talk a lot about his family much.
15:00
Lisa Fanning: We knew who they were.
15:01
Lisa Fanning: We we um interacted with them um periodically.
15:06
Lisa Fanning: They lived in Indianapolis.
15:08
Lisa Fanning: His father was still living.
15:09
Lisa Fanning: Um he died, gosh, I can't remember when he died, but it wasn't it wasn't long after, I think he was like 101, 102, something like that.
15:18
Lisa Fanning: Very, they live very long lives, my my grandfather's family.
15:21
Lisa Fanning: But yeah, he didn't really talk about his family.
15:23
Lisa Fanning: So I absolutely knew nothing about my grandfather.
15:27
Lisa Fanning: So tell us, tell us how you found it, what you found, walk us through that.
15:32
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, so um basically, again, 1995, I dive into my mom's dad, uh my mom's mother's family, go as far as I can with that, and then I think, oh, I want to find out about my grandfather's family.
15:45
Lisa Fanning: So I call his youngest brother, um, and his name was Roscoe, and he and I said, Hey, Uncle Roscoe, great Uncle Roscoe, can you tell me about you know your family?
15:58
Lisa Fanning: So um he told me that his mother um family came from a a settlement in southern Indiana called Lost Creek, and that it was an Indian settlement, and that um his grandparents were part of a caravan of um seven families, six, six or seven families that came from North Carolina.
16:24
Lisa Fanning: And when he said caravan, I was like, Caravan?
16:27
Lisa Fanning: What do you mean a caravan?
16:28
Lisa Fanning: It's like covered wagon horses, and he's like, Yeah.
16:33
Lisa Fanning: And that they came from North Carolina in the early 1800s and they settled and you know, they basically built this settlement called Lost Creek.
16:43
Lisa Fanning: So, of course, that was intriguing to me.
16:45
Lisa Fanning: First of all, when he said Native American settlement, because I'm like, we're African American, and what is that?
16:50
Lisa Fanning: Then um Southern Indiana didn't know anything about that.
16:54
Lisa Fanning: Of course, the story about the covered wagon was way out there.
16:57
Lisa Fanning: So I was like, wow.
16:59
Lisa Fanning: So um I started doing research on that, and wasn't I wasn't able to get too far because you know they came so early in the 1800s.
17:10
Lisa Fanning: I was like, I, you know, I I I started to find them, you know, in the census records.
17:16
Lisa Fanning: Um and I had to reach out to people who had been studying um the story of African American um settlements in Indiana for longer than myself.
17:30
Lisa Fanning: So what I learned was they were one of actually many um settlements of free African Americans that migrated from North Carolina to Indiana.
17:38
Lisa Fanning: I think there were like 30 throughout the state, which was fascinating to me.
17:42
Lisa Fanning: I didn't learn this in school, right?
17:44
Lisa Fanning: So um, and I gave this this uh uh the this man, his name was Coy Robbins.
17:52
Lisa Fanning: He's very well known in African-American uh genealogy communities, passed on, but he was the president of the Augs chapter for Indiana.
18:02
Lisa Fanning: Again, this is the 90s.
18:04
Lisa Fanning: And I told him the last names of my what I uncovered about my grandfather's family.
18:10
Lisa Fanning: He says, Yeah, I think, I think those are people that came from North Carolina.
18:15
Lisa Fanning: They settled, first settled, settled in Orange County, Indiana, and then eventually made it up to Lost Creek.
18:22
Lisa Fanning: Um, and he gave me some resources to look at.
18:25
Lisa Fanning: One of them was Paul Heinrich's book, Free African Americans.
18:28
Lisa Fanning: And that was a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, because Paul had studied um colonial black family, free black families for forever and wrote this book.
18:39
Lisa Fanning: Amazing book.
18:41
Lisa Fanning: It's like a Bible for people whose ancestors um were free, became free, bought their freedom, uh, were never enslaved.
18:50
Lisa Fanning: You know, it's sort of that free people of color is a mix of all those people.
18:54
Lisa Fanning: But what's unique about them is that they tend to be triracial.
18:58
Lisa Fanning: So they descend from African, Native American, and European families.
19:03
Lisa Fanning: Because, you know, you have to think about back in the day, people coexisted.
19:08
Lisa Fanning: You know, it wasn't sort of this completely breakdown of racial, you are over here, you over there, we don't like you, whatever, you know.
19:17
Lisa Fanning: And um, so when people coexist, they create families.
19:21
Lisa Fanning: They have children, you know.
19:23
Lisa Fanning: Um, but but they had to be insular also because they weren't enslaved.
19:28
Lisa Fanning: So they were free.
19:30
Lisa Fanning: And and so then they just married within each other's families and they create this huge, huge, huge group of people.
19:38
Lisa Fanning: And so my so what I found out through connecting my family to the the research that Paul had done on many, many, many, many families is that um basically the the group of of uh the community that my family comes from was a big community.
19:58
Lisa Fanning: They were in North Carolina, they were looking for a place to to resettle because North Carolina racial climate was changing all the time, and it was just a mess.
20:08
Lisa Fanning: And so it was just like we need to go someplace where we could be settled and no one, you know, people leave us alone.
20:15
Lisa Fanning: So they sent a man, his name was um, I think Bowen, Bowen Roberts, to find a new place.
20:22
Lisa Fanning: This is the story, right?
20:23
Lisa Fanning: That to find a new place for for them to settle.
20:26
Lisa Fanning: Um, and somehow, this is in I think 1827.
20:32
Lisa Fanning: So there had been in Lost Creek, there were already like 20 families uh living in Lost Creek at the time.
20:38
Lisa Fanning: So it had already started to become a place where free people of color started to migrate.
20:42
Lisa Fanning: And you know, the Quakers were there.
20:43
Lisa Fanning: So I think that had a lot to do with it, right?
20:46
Lisa Fanning: So then in 1827, he um goes out there and he comes back, and and this is what he said the fat hogs are roaming the forest with knives and forks sticking out of their bags.
21:01
Lisa Fanning: And that was basically to say the living is good and let's go, right?
21:08
Lisa Fanning: So um, so then a couple years later, there were six families.
21:13
Lisa Fanning: They were the Roberts, the Stuarts, the Chavises, the Travons, the Archers, and the Andersons, um, all packed up, got a caravan and went from North Carolina to southern Indiana.
21:27
Lisa Fanning: And I descend from four of those families.
21:30
Crista Cowan: What?
21:30
Crista Cowan: Yep.
21:32
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
21:33
Crista Cowan: Okay, I have so many questions.
21:34
Crista Cowan: This is fascinating to me.
21:36
Crista Cowan: So, okay, so where in North Carolina were they from, do you know?
21:41
Lisa Fanning: So I I think they were in different places, but I know that they ended up in in in Bertie County.
21:48
Lisa Fanning: They were in Chowing County.
21:50
Lisa Fanning: Um, a lot of the Andersons were in Granville.
21:52
Lisa Fanning: So you have there's a whole nother sect of Andersons, you know, it's a huge family because they had a lot of children.
21:59
Lisa Fanning: And it's like what you find in the free people of color community, there are certain families where that family will definitely be a part of their family, like the Evans, the Andersons, the Stuarts.
22:12
Lisa Fanning: They're you can find them, all of those families, and almost every free person of color family.
22:17
Lisa Fanning: And so my Anderson is Jeremiah.
22:21
Lisa Fanning: And Jeremiah descends from George.
22:23
Lisa Fanning: George descends from Jeremiah.
22:25
Lisa Fanning: Jeremiah descends from George.
22:27
Lisa Fanning: And his mother was Kate.
22:29
Lisa Fanning: And I know we're gonna talk about Kate because that's a whole nother story.
22:32
Lisa Fanning: But Kate was the original Anderson, and she was born in the late 1600s.
22:37
Crista Cowan: Oh my goodness.
22:38
Crista Cowan: Okay.
22:38
Crista Cowan: And so, and so these families in North Carolina and in the 1820s, like North Carolina, like everything we all learn in school growing up, North Carolina is a slave state.
22:51
Crista Cowan: So, how do these groups of people become free?
22:55
Lisa Fanning: So my family became the Anderson family actually became free in 1712.
23:01
Lisa Fanning: And do you know how?
23:04
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, because the um the man that had enslaved him, his name was John Folker.
23:10
Lisa Fanning: In his will, he freed them and gave them 600 acres of land.
23:19
Crista Cowan: Okay.
23:19
Crista Cowan: And so they've been living free for over a hundred years in North Carolina, but now the tide is changing as far as laws, as far as local sentiments.
23:30
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
23:31
Crista Cowan: All of that.
23:32
Crista Cowan: And so that's when they see this need essentially to leave to protect their families.
23:38
Lisa Fanning: Exactly.
23:39
Lisa Fanning: But they actually started in Virginia.
23:41
Lisa Fanning: So that's really where the Anderson story begins.
23:45
Lisa Fanning: And um, they call it Lower Uh Norfolk County, or call it was a colony at the time.
23:51
Lisa Fanning: So 17, we're talking like 1712.
23:53
Lisa Fanning: So it was Lower Norfolk Colony.
23:57
Lisa Fanning: And so he um descends from like a British uh captain who was given land by the king of England to settle land in in America.
24:12
Lisa Fanning: He goes to Lower Suffolk, uh Lower Um Norfolk County.
24:15
Lisa Fanning: He marries a woman who comes from an equally prominent family.
24:19
Lisa Fanning: Her father was part of the House of Burgesses or something like that.
24:24
Lisa Fanning: Um and and the Fokker's father was uh uh also a sheriff.
24:30
Lisa Fanning: So they were prominent families in that part of Lower Norfolk County.
24:35
Lisa Fanning: Well, he John, so then John Fokker, he enslaves my family, and there were a couple of other families, not a not a huge group, but several different families, but they were apparently extended family members, so part of the same uh overall family, right?
24:53
Lisa Fanning: And um, he frees them in 1712 in his will when he passes away, gives them that all of this land, and of course, there's an uproar in the colony because that is not going to happen.
25:05
Lisa Fanning: First of all, they don't want other people who were enslaved to kind of start to say we want their, you know, we want our freedom too, and sl, you know, uh manumit us.
25:17
Lisa Fanning: And then he gives them all of this land, which I don't know if you've been to Sewells Point or you know about Sewell's Point and Norfolk.
25:25
Lisa Fanning: That is the land that they were supposed to have.
25:26
Lisa Fanning: Oh my goodness.
25:28
Lisa Fanning: That's where the Naval Academy.
25:30
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
25:31
Lisa Fanning: So um that was his land.
25:33
Lisa Fanning: That was the land they were supposed to have.
25:35
Lisa Fanning: There was an uproar in the colony.
25:37
Lisa Fanning: So it was so much, so much so that um the executor of the will um decided to go to court and then exchange that 600 some you know acres of land for a swamp land, swampland like that was 300 acres in North Carolina.
25:56
Lisa Fanning: And my family was like, mm-mm, no, no, we're not gonna take that.
26:01
Lisa Fanning: So they were in court.
26:03
Lisa Fanning: There's like documents about this fight that they had.
26:07
Lisa Fanning: They they ultimately didn't win.
26:09
Lisa Fanning: Um, and they ended up in North Carolina anyway.
26:13
Lisa Fanning: I mean, it's really a sad story if you think about it, because it was rightfully theirs, it was legally theirs.
26:19
Lisa Fanning: Can you imagine?
26:20
Lisa Fanning: I mean, that you talk about generational wealth.
26:22
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
26:23
Lisa Fanning: If they had had those 600 acres, like, yeah.
26:27
Lisa Fanning: But um, but you know, they were dignified people, they had a lot of pride, and they were like, okay, you know, we we tried, it didn't work, so we're going to North Carolina.
26:35
Lisa Fanning: And then ultimately that they decided to leave and they wound up in southern Indiana.
26:40
Lisa Fanning: But what I've learned, Crista, um is that it wasn't just the, I mean, so there's the group of families that I'm talking about that ended up in Loss Creek, and there were the settlements throughout Indiana.
26:53
Lisa Fanning: But what I've learned is that um so many of the families that were freed in North Carolina, Virginia migrated to the Midwest.
27:06
Lisa Fanning: And they're so you find them in Ohio, you find them in Michigan, you find them in Wisconsin.
27:12
Lisa Fanning: And you know how I know that?
27:14
Lisa Fanning: Yes.
27:16
Crista Cowan: How do you know that, Lisa?
27:18
Crista Cowan: DNA.
27:19
Crista Cowan: Of course.
27:21
Crista Cowan: And there's really this interesting numbers game.
27:25
Crista Cowan: You talked about a lot of descendants and people of uh free people of color being related to the Andersons.
27:31
Crista Cowan: I think people often can't wrap their head around the numbers.
27:35
Crista Cowan: Um, when you do ancestry research, you have two parents and four grandparents and eight great grandparents, right?
27:41
Crista Cowan: Like the number doubles every generation and it gets big really fast, but it's a math formula that we all can kind of wrap our brain around.
27:48
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
27:49
Crista Cowan: When you do descendancy research, that's a whole other game.
27:53
Crista Cowan: And there is no math formula because somebody could have had zero children or they could have had 25 children.
27:58
Crista Cowan: Right.
27:58
Crista Cowan: And and when you start researching, you don't know how many children you're looking for.
28:03
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
28:04
Crista Cowan: And you know, you don't know you're done finding all the children until you're done finding all the children.
28:09
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
28:09
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
28:10
Crista Cowan: And and it's interesting because you think like somebody born in the 1700s, like this family was freed in the 1700s.
28:19
Crista Cowan: And if they have enough money to be prosperous, that prosperity often allows them to have larger families.
28:28
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
28:29
Crista Cowan: Because they can support those larger families.
28:32
Crista Cowan: And, you know, within a generation, you can have 10 or 12 children.
28:36
Crista Cowan: By the second generation, you're going to have 60 or 70 grandchildren.
28:41
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
28:41
Crista Cowan: By the third generation, you're going to have, you know, a couple hundred great-grandchildren.
28:47
Crista Cowan: And you're still only 60 or 80 years into this.
28:51
Crista Cowan: And we're talking, you know, over a hundred years.
28:55
Crista Cowan: And now these families are starting to migrate to the Midwest.
28:59
Crista Cowan: Yeah, there's going to be a lot of them.
29:02
Lisa Fanning: A lot of them.
29:03
Lisa Fanning: And and the and with the DNA, like with those families in particular, like I was, I was fortunate enough to get my great uncle's DNA.
29:12
Lisa Fanning: He, every time I asked him, hey, Uncle Roscoe, would you take this DNA test?
29:16
Lisa Fanning: You know, because you won't want to get in all the pools, right?
29:18
Lisa Fanning: He's like, Yeah, sure, no problem.
29:20
Lisa Fanning: And so he's in all the pools.
29:22
Lisa Fanning: And I can tell you, when I get to, especially with ancestry, when I get to shared matches for people that are also free people, you know, descend from free people of color, it's like 15 pages of people.
29:37
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
29:38
Lisa Fanning: What year was Michael Roscoe born?
29:40
Lisa Fanning: He was born in, I think, 1922 or 23.
29:44
Crista Cowan: Good for you for getting his DNA tested.
29:46
Crista Cowan: Get those older people tested.
29:49
Lisa Fanning: Exactly.
29:50
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, because he on he unlocked the mystery through the information that he gave me, but he also his DNA also unlocked so much more.
30:02
Lisa Fanning: I mean, because you know, it's not just sort of like the Virginia, North Carolina story, but you know, through his DNA, like there's this little piece of like DNA segment from Sardinia that keeps popping up and all throughout all the tests, you know.
30:20
Lisa Fanning: His haplogroup or his maternal haplogroup is not African at all.
30:26
Lisa Fanning: It's from the British Isles.
30:29
Lisa Fanning: We were completely blown away from that, uh, you know, when we found that out because it wasn't expected.
30:35
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
30:36
Lisa Fanning: Um, I think you do expect that a little bit more with African um Y DNA or with uh Y DNA from African-American males, uh, because of what happened during slavery and the number of uh children that were born from from those um, you know, from what you know, what happened in slavery.
30:55
Lisa Fanning: And uh so you expect that, but you don't expect, you know, European um mitochondrial DNA.
31:03
Lisa Fanning: Um, but then when you do study the story of free people of color in this country, it makes more sense.
31:09
Lisa Fanning: And Paul's book, again, illuminated that because there were a lot of um women from the British Isles that were indentured uh in this country.
31:19
Lisa Fanning: And a lot of times they had relationships.
31:21
Lisa Fanning: Again, people are people, people live next to each other, they have families, they have kids.
31:26
Lisa Fanning: That's just that's just how it works.
31:28
Lisa Fanning: And a lot of them had relationships with um triracial men or African men or Native American men, and and they had children, but because they were free, their children were free.
31:41
Lisa Fanning: And so there, that is why a lot of times you have that that that explains why you can have so many free African Americans in North Carolina or Virginia, because a lot of times when you trace back to their maternal line, um they descend from from women from the British Isles who who were indentured, but they were free.
32:01
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
32:01
Crista Cowan: Wow.
32:01
Crista Cowan: So so as you so as we kind of just talk through this concept of free people of color during that colonial era and then into the into the early 1800s, you've got individuals who were freed typically by someone who freed them after death, right?
32:17
Crista Cowan: Like as part of their will.
32:19
Crista Cowan: You've got individuals who are born free because the law at the time states that the enslavement condition follows the m the mother.
32:27
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
32:27
Lisa Fanning: Um, and then are there other reasons that depending on when they were born, you know, what era it was in this country, they might have been able to buy their freedom.
32:38
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
32:38
Lisa Fanning: You know, so those are kind of like the the three of the conditions.
32:43
Lisa Fanning: There may be more, but those are the ones I know the most.
32:46
Lisa Fanning: Um, and in in my family, um, I I don't know anyone had that bought their freedom, but we definitely, you know, the Andersons were were mostly African in ethnic origin.
32:58
Lisa Fanning: They weren't triracial at all.
33:01
Lisa Fanning: Their children married into the uh the Nansemen tribe, the Bass.
33:09
Lisa Fanning: There's a lot of Bass who were Nansen.
33:11
Lisa Fanning: And so a lot of their children ended up being sort of, you know, Native American, African, um, and they have different identities.
33:20
Lisa Fanning: You know, that's the interesting thing also with free people of color, is um you find, I'm sure you know this, a lot of people will, you know, that phenotypically look white, and then they've got the ancestry test bag, and it's like they they're not all white.
33:36
Lisa Fanning: It's kind of like, what?
33:38
Lisa Fanning: Where where'd that happen?
33:39
Lisa Fanning: You know, and usually it's because someone in their family was from a, you know, was part of this community and they married a white person or they passed into the white, you know, world or whatever.
33:51
Lisa Fanning: And but the DNA always ends up telling the story, right?
33:54
Lisa Fanning: It's it's it's the one thing that you can't escape.
33:58
Lisa Fanning: Um, the Stuarts that I descend from, their ancestor was um their make the matriarch of the Stuart and uh the Stuart line was uh uh an indentured white woman.
34:12
Lisa Fanning: And also Mary Underwood.
34:14
Lisa Fanning: We had to talk about Mary Underwood, that's a really important figure in my story.
34:19
Lisa Fanning: And actually, her daughter married an Anderson, so that's um how she factors into this.
34:25
Lisa Fanning: But she was a um triracial woman born in 1792.
34:33
Lisa Fanning: Um and she um she is she is the the focus of my research in 2025.
34:42
Lisa Fanning: Like I'm unlocking her story even more, but but yeah, she was um um, you know, a woman that just her origins were completely unknown to us until my great uncle took a DNA test and you know did the mitochondrial test, and he traces maternally back to her through his mother, and that's where that H1M1B one comes from, the haplow group.
35:08
Crista Cowan: And this is Mary Underwood?
35:10
Lisa Fanning: Yes.
35:11
Crista Cowan: So was she part of the group that ended up in Lost Creek as well?
35:14
Crista Cowan: All of her children.
35:15
Lisa Fanning: All of her children went to Lost Creek, yeah.
35:18
Crista Cowan: So tell me what you've discovered about Mary.
35:20
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, so so yeah, so all of her children went to Lost Creek.
35:23
Lisa Fanning: She stayed in Richmond County, so she was born and raised in Richmond County in uh North Carolina.
35:30
Lisa Fanning: Um, she, when I find her as I'm researching back that line back, she's I find her in like 1810 and she's like early 20s, she's got three children, and she's living in a house.
35:43
Lisa Fanning: And I'm thinking, okay, that's odd.
35:46
Lisa Fanning: Like, um, but I'm thinking, okay, she's she's she's running her own life, you know, she's doing her own thing.
35:53
Lisa Fanning: And um she must have money or whatever.
35:57
Lisa Fanning: But then um, you know, I'm trying to sort of figure out who she's attached to.
36:04
Lisa Fanning: This underwood last name has to come from something, right?
36:08
Lisa Fanning: So I have to go on a deep dive into the underwood family, and I sort of recruit uh cousins to who are also descended of Mary.
36:18
Lisa Fanning: She was actually, she has two sets of children.
36:22
Lisa Fanning: There's three from her first set.
36:24
Lisa Fanning: I come from that.
36:26
Lisa Fanning: And then she married Mr.
36:27
Lisa Fanning: Russell, and she had a whole lot of other kids, right?
36:30
Lisa Fanning: So And did all of her children come to Indiana?
36:34
Lisa Fanning: Most of them.
36:35
Lisa Fanning: Some of them um are in different other places, but the majority of them migrated to Indiana.
36:41
Lisa Fanning: But yeah, um 1810, you know, find her in the census by 1820 or so.
36:49
Lisa Fanning: I think she's married, she has more children.
36:51
Lisa Fanning: Um, and then she's there at 1830.
36:54
Lisa Fanning: And I think she leaves and goes to Indiana around 1830, 1840.
37:01
Lisa Fanning: So then she's in Indiana and Vigo County.
37:05
Lisa Fanning: Um, she passes away there.
37:08
Lisa Fanning: But um recently, I because the family searches full text, I started looking for her a little bit more because I was just like, there has to be something about her before 1810.
37:22
Lisa Fanning: Like I just can't believe there's nothing there.
37:26
Lisa Fanning: Um, and I just kept digging and digging and digging.
37:29
Lisa Fanning: You know how you I'm I'm one of those kind of people that I believe if you just keep changing the search terms, you'll eventually get what you want.
37:37
Lisa Fanning: Like I don't stop at just, you know, so I'm like putting in different search terms, different positions of the search terms.
37:44
Lisa Fanning: Like I'm like determined.
37:46
Lisa Fanning: And here she comes one day, and she's eight years old, she's she's indentured apprentice to the man next door at eight that she's living next door to in 1810.
38:07
Crista Cowan: What you have a black woman, a black woman, black woman child in a record prior to 1800.
38:18
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
38:20
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, yeah.
38:21
Lisa Fanning: And and so it's kind of like what happened?
38:25
Lisa Fanning: You know, so it changed it, she completely shifts the story, right?
38:28
Lisa Fanning: Because I see her as 1810, she's got three kids, she's living by herself, she must, you know, handle her business, she's got money, she's good.
38:36
Lisa Fanning: But then I realized 10 years before that, she's eight.
38:40
Lisa Fanning: Or she, yeah, she's eight.
38:42
Lisa Fanning: So she's living as an eight-year-old with this family um that has promised to feed her, house her, teach her, give her a Bible, teach her how to read and write or whatever.
38:57
Lisa Fanning: So that shifts the whole story.
38:59
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
38:59
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
39:00
Crista Cowan: And indentureship is an interesting concept that a lot of people probably aren't very familiar with.
39:04
Crista Cowan: Um, I have ancestors who were indentured.
39:07
Crista Cowan: For a lot of people, it was a way sometimes to just support their family.
39:13
Crista Cowan: Like if they couldn't afford more mouths to feed or more children, they would indenture that child to a local family to learn a trade or to, you know, work in the house.
39:25
Crista Cowan: Or and the family agreed as part of that indentureship to do those things, right?
39:29
Crista Cowan: To feed them and clothe them and educate them in a way that um, you know, you hope that they actually carried out the promises.
39:36
Crista Cowan: But often there were those contracts drawn up to help ensure that they hopefully would fulfill those promises.
39:43
Crista Cowan: And so indentureship was just a kind of a part of the economic fabric of the United States at the time, in and the way that, you know, families were raised and children could be indentured at a very young age.
39:57
Crista Cowan: Eight is young.
39:58
Crista Cowan: I've seen children as young as four and five being indentured out.
40:01
Crista Cowan: I've seen children as old as 16 and 17 being indentured out.
40:04
Crista Cowan: And I think it just kind of depends on what was happening.
40:07
Crista Cowan: So the fact that this record exists is amazing and that you found it.
40:11
Crista Cowan: It is well done.
40:12
Lisa Fanning: It really is.
40:13
Lisa Fanning: And she um they're also in North, I think I it might be for all free people of color, but I know specifically in North Carolina, all free children of color, and it that's noted on her on that um apprentice document, um, or that indenture, that uh they all would be apprenticed, like all of them.
40:36
Lisa Fanning: It didn't matter whether they had parents, with they if they were orphaned or, you know, of not of a lot of financial means, they were, you know, but for me, seeing that was like, wow, there is another, a whole nother story here because you know, um, it meant that she did probably have parents.
40:59
Lisa Fanning: Um, I'm I'm currently trying to figure out there is a family there that are underwoods, I think, because of DNA, that is her family.
41:08
Lisa Fanning: And I do know that we do unwe do descend from this very large, prominent Quaker, Pennsylvania Underwood family.
41:20
Lisa Fanning: That I know just because I'm also a genetic genealogist.
41:24
Lisa Fanning: So so I share, they share all of their DNA with me.
41:27
Lisa Fanning: So I literally have a smorgased board of DNA to look at when I'm doing, you know, this research because everybody wants to know.
41:35
Lisa Fanning: So I can tell that they are all also descending from the same Quaker, Pennsylvania prominent, you know, family.
41:42
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
41:42
Lisa Fanning: That's amazing.
41:43
Crista Cowan: Well, yay.
41:44
Crista Cowan: So that's Mary Enderwood.
41:46
Crista Cowan: We need to talk um about Kate Anderson, though.
41:48
Crista Cowan: So tell us about her.
41:51
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, so Kate, you know, is a really interesting figure.
41:55
Lisa Fanning: Um, I know that she had, you know, several children, mainly boys, I think.
42:02
Lisa Fanning: Um, and then um, you know, the the story, which I don't know how true it is, but it's what you know is out there.
42:13
Lisa Fanning: You know, I'm still trying to understand it, but is that she and John Folker had a relationship.
42:19
Lisa Fanning: Or it's hard to say relationship because obviously she was enslaved by him, right?
42:25
Lisa Fanning: Right.
42:25
Lisa Fanning: But when he dies, he leaves everything to her and the few other families that he enslaved, he leaves absolutely nothing to his wife and son.
42:37
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
42:39
Lisa Fanning: Right.
42:41
Lisa Fanning: So the speculation, because I don't think there is, you know, there is nothing to to prove that they had a relationship.
42:49
Lisa Fanning: But um, and I mean it that's not to say, I mean, it's kind of like the power dynamic makes you believe like how could it have been a relationship when you know he technically legally owned her, but uh, doesn't mean that they didn't have something.
43:05
Lisa Fanning: I don't know, but um, but anyway, she raises these these boys, um, and she's part of this fight, you know, to to get the land.
43:16
Lisa Fanning: I don't know when she dies.
43:18
Lisa Fanning: I haven't been able to figure that out, but um, but her children, you know, go on to um do a lot in life, you know.
43:26
Lisa Fanning: They, you know, migrated to North Carolina, they end up in Indiana, and then to sort of kind of push things just a little bit forward to sort of follow the line of Andersons that are kind of pioneers and innovators or whatever, my my uncle, great uncle Roscoe's daughter, who is you know a descendant of the Andersons, she ends up becoming the first African American and the first female attorney general for the state of Indiana.
43:58
Lisa Fanning: That's amazing.
43:59
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
44:01
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
44:01
Lisa Fanning: It really is.
44:02
Lisa Fanning: I mean, when you think about the whole story, right?
44:05
Lisa Fanning: Yeah.
44:05
Lisa Fanning: They lose all of this land.
44:08
Lisa Fanning: You know, they were enslaved.
44:09
Lisa Fanning: They lose all this land in Virginia.
44:12
Lisa Fanning: They get to North Carolina, they rebuild, and then they come to Indiana and actually really prosper.
44:18
Lisa Fanning: Because I think my my um my ancestor Jeremiah, he had over 700 acres of land.
44:25
Lisa Fanning: So that's even more than when he was, you know, at one point in in uh Lost Creek, which is more than the land that was, you know, um given to Kate and her descendants.
44:38
Lisa Fanning: Um but yeah, so so Kate is just, she's my eighth great grandmother.
44:44
Lisa Fanning: I'm still researching her, you know.
44:47
Lisa Fanning: Um, but I think she was probably an incredible woman, you know, to live through that.
44:52
Lisa Fanning: I mean, I don't know that she had a husband that doesn't ever come up.
44:55
Lisa Fanning: Um and, you know, but she raised her sons and she fought for what she was due.
45:02
Lisa Fanning: It didn't work in the end, but um, but yeah, she's the hero to me, you know, for for my family.
45:08
Lisa Fanning: Absolutely and she she puts us in this country in the 1600s.
45:15
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
45:16
Crista Cowan: I love that.
45:16
Crista Cowan: I love that you can I love that you have her name and that you can speak her name.
45:20
Crista Cowan: I think that's important.
45:21
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
45:22
Crista Cowan: And the fact that her sons carried her name on, um, like when probably, you know, they knew who their father was, but they chose to use her name instead.
45:32
Crista Cowan: That actually says something.
45:34
Lisa Fanning: Exactly, exactly.
45:36
Lisa Fanning: And, you know, um I think they were a very well-respected family.
45:41
Lisa Fanning: Uh, I I get that feeling from them.
45:44
Lisa Fanning: And um, you know, I believe that, you know, they had a lot of respect for her.
45:49
Lisa Fanning: And so they stayed in in Norfolk for a really long time.
45:52
Lisa Fanning: I think the fight to to claim what was rightfully theirs, but then eventually they they let it go and and moved on to to do even you know greater things.
46:02
Lisa Fanning: But yeah, I mean, knowing your eighth-grade grandmother in America is is not so common.
46:07
Lisa Fanning: That is not common for anyone.
46:11
Crista Cowan: Certainly not, certainly not for African Americans.
46:14
Crista Cowan: And so the fact that you have done that is incredible, that you have not only had access to the scholarship and research that was done before you, but that you have tapped into that and it sounds like expanded that.
46:26
Crista Cowan: Um, I think that's just beautiful.
46:28
Crista Cowan: You've got this migration from, you know, Virginia to North Carolina, from North Carolina to Indiana.
46:34
Crista Cowan: And then as as you look at the family that um the family that settled in Lost Creek, where has your family kind of gone from that?
46:43
Crista Cowan: Like who who is it in your family?
46:45
Crista Cowan: You said you're descended from four of those families.
46:47
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
46:48
Crista Cowan: Like what gener is it great great grandparents?
46:50
Crista Cowan: What generation is it to you that that is that migrant for me?
46:54
Lisa Fanning: It would be third great grandparents.
46:56
Lisa Fanning: Okay.
46:56
Lisa Fanning: I descend directly from Archibald Stewart and Anna Anderson.
47:00
Lisa Fanning: Anna was the daughter of Rhoda or Rhoda Underwood, who was the daughter of Mary Underwood.
47:04
Lisa Fanning: I did not know any of this.
47:06
Lisa Fanning: Like in school, like I was not taught any, you know, anything about um African Americans being a part of the state for such a long time.
47:15
Crista Cowan: The sweeping saga of it all.
47:17
Crista Cowan: It's so fantastic.
47:19
Crista Cowan: Um, and so appropriate for this particular podcast.
47:24
Crista Cowan: Um, for this season, you know, we're focused on America 250.
47:28
Crista Cowan: And as you kind of think about what you've uncovered since the 90s when you started doing family history, as you think about this, like how does uncovering all of this information change your view of what it means to be an American?
47:44
Lisa Fanning: Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm really excited about America 250.
47:48
Lisa Fanning: Um, I think, you know, um, you know, it's it's a really, it's a really great time.
47:54
Lisa Fanning: I mean, I think celebration is important and necessary anyway.
47:57
Lisa Fanning: And so, you know, we we've been building up to this for a while.
48:01
Lisa Fanning: So I'm really excited about it.
48:03
Lisa Fanning: Uh, we have such a rich history as a nation, and it's worth, you know, celebrating um in all the ways that make it great.
48:10
Lisa Fanning: I think when it comes to my family, it really does also say that those 250 years are nestled inside a continuum, right?
48:21
Lisa Fanning: And that there are people who were here before that, and there'll be people that will continue on.
48:27
Lisa Fanning: And I think what's important, and I what I hope happens throughout the year of 2026, 2026, is that we hear all of the stories, right?
48:37
Lisa Fanning: Like, that it's not just a certain group of people who should be celebrated or that represent America.
48:45
Lisa Fanning: Um, as you can tell from from my own history, like we were here long before 1776, okay?
48:53
Lisa Fanning: And and that is an important story.
48:56
Lisa Fanning: It's it's part of the fabric of this country and it should be visible and it should be known.
49:03
Lisa Fanning: And and I'm hoping that, you know, whether I have an opportunity to tell it again in some other way or other people do, that that whole year is full of everybody's story.
49:14
Lisa Fanning: Because we're all Americans, we all have stories, we all contributed to this country, and you know, 250 years, you know, is full of full of all of those stories.
49:25
Crista Cowan: So I love that.
49:26
Crista Cowan: Lisa, thank you so much.
49:28
Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing your story.
49:30
Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing Indiana.
49:31
Crista Cowan: Thank you for educating all of us, and thank you for honoring your ancestors, not just with the life you're living, but with the stories that you're uncovering and making sure are told.
49:42
Lisa Fanning: Thank you so much, Crista.
49:43
Lisa Fanning: I've I've enjoyed all of this.
49:45
Lisa Fanning: So of course it's been a pleasure.
49:47
Lisa Fanning: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.
49:51
Crista Cowan: Well, that's it.
49:51
Crista Cowan: That was episode 100.
49:53
Crista Cowan: Thank you again for being here with us through this journey.
49:57
Crista Cowan: If you like this podcast, one of the best things you can do to help us grow the podcast is to, if you're listening to it on a podcast app, rate and review the podcast and then share it with your friends.
50:11
Crista Cowan: If you're watching us on YouTube, be sure to like the videos, subscribe to the channel, comment.
50:17
Crista Cowan: All of that engagement helps us drive more listeners to the podcast.
50:23
Crista Cowan: And I don't know about you, but I think everybody needs more family stories in their life.