Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Bliss It Was In That Dawn To Be Alive (with Eric Allen) | Episode 3

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Bliss It Was In That Dawn To Be Alive (with Eric Allen) | Episode 3 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:03
  Eric Allen: Every single one of these has a story associated with it, and that's part of the puzzle, that's part of the fun.
• 0:11
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:19
  Crista Cowan: I'm rista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:30
  Crista Cowan: Today on the podcast, you get to hear from Eric Allen.
• 0:37
  Crista Cowan: Eric is one of the vice presidents of marketing at Ancestry and he has picked up an interesting little hobby over the course of the last couple of years as it relates to family history.
• 0:51
  Crista Cowan: He and I have a really great discussion about that hobby and about some of the things that he is learning and some of the stories he's discovering in kind of an unconventional family history approach.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: Eric, thank you so much for being here.
• 1:05
  Eric Allen: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 1:06
  Crista Cowan: You and I have worked together for a few years now at Ancestry, so tell me a little bit about why Ancestry.
• 1:12
  Crista Cowan: Why did you want to come to work for the company?
• 1:17
  Eric Allen: I don't know.
• 1:17
  Eric Allen: I loved Ancestry and I loved Ancestry before I even worked there.
• 1:21
  Eric Allen: I had started doing family history, helping my father-in-law, actually in like 2010.
• 1:30
  Eric Allen: And he'd had this mystery he was trying to solve and so I was helping him.
• 1:33
  Eric Allen: We signed up for Ancestry together and we were working on it and that was a few years before they'd even called me, and so when the opportunity came up, I was familiar with the product, I was familiar with how it worked and I just loved it.
• 1:45
  Eric Allen: I just love the family history concept.
• 1:47
  Eric Allen: Genealogy, dna like as a thing.
• 1:50
  Eric Allen: I like that like just started to come out and so I knew that was happening.
• 1:55
  Eric Allen: It seemed like going to be exciting, going to be a big thing, and so, yeah, it was.
• 1:58
  Eric Allen: It was super cool opportunity.
• 1:59
  Eric Allen: So, yeah, that was 2012.
• 2:02
  Eric Allen: So I'm coming up on 12 years there now.
• 2:04
  Eric Allen: So, yeah, it's been awesome and I just love the product.
• 2:07
  Crista Cowan: It's great stuff.
• 2:08
  Crista Cowan: So you had this interest, you had this exposure.
• 2:11
  Crista Cowan: What was it?
• 2:12
  Crista Cowan: That you were working with your father-in-law?
• 2:13
  Crista Cowan: Is that something you could share?
• 2:14
  Eric Allen: Yeah for sure.
• 2:15
  Eric Allen: So what had happened?
• 2:17
  Eric Allen: Was he at that point now, 2010-ish, 2009,?
• 2:22
  Eric Allen: He had started to digitize his family content, like things that they'd had and we were using like what we had available, and we were using his printer scanner or something, and he'd started to sort of gather this, these pictures, and during that process of like talking to his siblings and saying, hey, do you have this photo?
• 2:38
  Eric Allen: And so we're scanning it, these stories started to come out and these mysteries started to come out.
• 2:44
  Eric Allen: Who is this person?
• 2:45
  Eric Allen: Or you know, he had this one photo of his second great-grandfather and he said it's a great shot of him sitting in this chair, his long beard On the back.
• 2:58
  Eric Allen: It says you know, something like great-grandpa Stevens was his last name, 1901.
• 3:05
  Eric Allen: And my father-in-law said but no one knows where this person ended up.
• 3:08
  Eric Allen: It was in 1901.
• 3:09
  Eric Allen: So I'm like, come on, we can find this person.
• 3:11
  Eric Allen: And so actually just started digging and so we started building this tree and trying to figure it out.
• 3:17
  Eric Allen: I actually ended up finding a death certificate, not even on Ancestry, but on a different site.
• 3:23
  Eric Allen: That said, when he died and the family just lost their minds.
• 3:26
  Eric Allen: Everyone just couldn't believe it.
• 3:27
  Eric Allen: We closed this thing like found this person.
• 3:29
  Eric Allen: It was amazing, and so that just, we just got bit by the bug after that and so, yeah, like we, you know, we was recording all of his family stories and his photos and things like that, and so that just sort of created this passion that I've never since let go.
• 3:46
  Crista Cowan: I love that so much so you did that project with your father-in-law.
• 3:47
  Crista Cowan: Have you delved into that at all with your side of the family?
• 3:50
  Eric Allen: yeah.
• 3:50
  Eric Allen: So I so logically like I helped him and I was like, okay, you know we signed up together but now I'm gonna go do sort of my stuff as well.
• 3:57
  Eric Allen: Now my family history you know, well documented.
• 4:01
  Eric Allen: My paternal grandfather was a historian and so super passionate about genealogy and history and recording stories and and pictures and things and so like a lot of that we we felt pretty good about it and I was like I'll just go validate and build my own tree out.
• 4:15
  Eric Allen: And so you know, through the process of doing that, you know, I I came to either confirm things that he had found, which was a lot there, and then or disprove a few things which you know, no fault of his, what was available at the time he was doing a lot of this stuff was much different than what's available today was available to me at that point.
• 4:33
  Eric Allen: And so, yeah, it just became like I need to prove everything here, I need to make, validate these facts, I need to make sure, you know, we have the latest.
• 4:42
  Eric Allen: And I was able to move back even further than he was able to in a few places just because, again, the technology that became available.
• 4:49
  Eric Allen: So so, yeah, like my own family became a passion of how I record their stories, how I record their images and content became really important to me and yeah, and so, like you know, ancestry became that vehicle and I vehicle and I, just I just stayed with it still going with it, still not done, like nowhere near done.
• 5:09
  Crista Cowan: So yeah, we always think right like there's got to be an end somewhere.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: But there's mysteries to solve.
• 5:15
  Crista Cowan: Always there's new information to find, oh yeah totally there's.
• 5:18
  Eric Allen: There's plenty of mysteries.
• 5:19
  Eric Allen: I think I have, yeah, like a very vanilla tree, and yet there's still things in there where I'm like, oh, that's super interesting, I wouldn't have.
• 5:26
  Eric Allen: I wouldn't have like thought that about this person or known this about this person, and I, you know, put a couple notes in trees and things.
• 5:32
  Crista Cowan: But I feel like there's a little scandal there, maybe, or a little something you can share.
• 5:37
  Eric Allen: There's always scandals.
• 5:38
  Eric Allen: I no, I don't.
• 5:40
  Eric Allen: I don't have a deep, you know deep, you know, on my side anyway, a deep family history scandal that I've worked on.
• 5:46
  Eric Allen: There's a few on other trees that I've helped people with, but just like little things.
• 5:51
  Eric Allen: Like my maternal grandfather, you know, I found a record I love him, he was a wonderful man A record of him hitting a cow one night.
• 6:03
  Eric Allen: You know he was a truck driver, you know, and nobody knew the story.
• 6:05
  Eric Allen: But there's a, there's and I don't know like there's a picture of him in the newspaper.
• 6:09
  Eric Allen: You know, after hitting a cow, uh, another, uh, family members, grandparents, someone yeah, not mine hit a person and nobody knew that story, you know.
• 6:21
  Eric Allen: So a couple of little things like that where, like those stories sort of and it doesn't change the way you view someone, but it is like an interesting thing, we're like that no one ever shared that story Anyway.
• 6:31
  Crista Cowan: Well, there's something about rounding out people's personalities, though, right, like you're looking at a photo, right, and it's so one dimensional.
• 6:38
  Crista Cowan: And even when you hear stories, sometimes they tend to be a little two-dimensional.
• 6:41
  Eric Allen: Right.
• 6:42
  Crista Cowan: But the more you learn, the more they become a whole person.
• 6:44
  Crista Cowan: You bet Right.
• 6:45
  Eric Allen: Yeah, that's exactly it to me.
• 6:47
  Eric Allen: And even like helping my father-in-law with his photos yeah, you look somebody in the face and it totally changes who they become to you, right?
• 6:55
  Eric Allen: And so that's where that sort of passion really just like came out of me and I was like, yeah, I want to be the modern historian person relative to some of these people, like my grandfather, and I want to record photos and images and any content I can get about them that isn't just a fact on a record sheet or something became so important to me.
• 7:17
  Eric Allen: So that's how I sort of started down that journey.
• 7:20
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I love that.
• 7:21
  Crista Cowan: That's such a great Genesis story and not everybody comes into family history the same way, by any means 've shared my genesis story here.
• 7:27
  Crista Cowan: We've had other guests who've done the same, so I love this concept of artifact and historian and like owning that space in your family, yeah, um, so tell me a little bit more about your grandfather like he was the historian right, like what do you know about his journey into family history and how he approached his role as documentarian or historian in your family?
• 7:46
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I don't really know how he got started into it, because when I came into his life obviously he was an older person at that point and I just always knew him as sort of this you know, wise, sage man who was, you know, very, very heavy in documenting things and telling stories and having the facts and being, you know, being the we used to, as kids, used to quiz him to try and, you know, stump him on just random facts.
• 8:12
  Eric Allen: He was an avid Jeopardy person and so every night watching Jeopardy and we'd watch him just like beat the contestants every night.
• 8:19
  Eric Allen: So he was that kind of a person just obsessed with history and facts and information.
• 8:23
  Eric Allen: And so when I sort of came into that, you know, it was more just as a child, like sort of absorbing him as he's, telling stories and information about who we came from and all of that.
• 8:32
  Eric Allen: And then as I became an adult and got a little bit older, he and I started to really connect on some of this stuff and I'd had a actually had a work trip I think it was 2015 to Raleigh, north Carolina.
• 8:47
  Eric Allen: I was speaking at a conference there and I had, you know, in my tree, traced as far back as I could, on my Allen side that's my last name to this person that lived in not far outside of Raleigh, north Carolina.
• 8:59
  Eric Allen: So I connected with my grandfather I said, hey, what can you tell me about this person, what do you know?
• 9:04
  Eric Allen: And he said that's a Revolutionary War soldier who fought in the Battle of the Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina, which looks like it's only you know, maybe 45 minutes from where you're going to be.
• 9:14
  Eric Allen: So I rented a car and I drove out there and I mean it was just just an amazing family history experience for me because it was the first time like one of the first times that it just became so real to me.
• 9:26
  Eric Allen: And I found a worker at this museum that they put together there who walked me out to the battlefield.
• 9:32
  Eric Allen: You know.
• 9:34
  Eric Allen: He looked up my ancestor and walked me out there and we stood and he said he would have stood right here with his gun facing this way and his group with him as they came over this ridge over here and started firing at each other.
• 9:49
  Eric Allen: And it was just one of those existential like, oh, wow, like, and this moment where he's standing there with you know, with his, you know his rifle loaded could go either way and I don't exist, you know.
• 10:06
  Eric Allen: And so it was just, it was just great moment where I felt really connected to this story and this person and my roots.
• 10:11
  Eric Allen: And so my grandfather and I really connected over that and and then I started going to his house when he was, he was getting up there in age and he started sharing more and more things with me and I think he really took to the idea that, ok, now I've got a keeper of the of the story, a keeper of the content, and I sort of became his conduit for the conduit for the future.
• 10:33
  Eric Allen: So, as a part of that process.
• 10:36
  Eric Allen: He just I would go over with a hard drive and he would just move everything he could onto my hard drive images, stories, you know, papers, anything he had digitized, and he digitized things sort of in the best way he could at any given moment.
• 10:52
  Eric Allen: You know, like he had digitized old photos, old slides in the 80s or 90s, I think at the time what they would do is they would put them on a projector and take a picture of the wall, you know and he was like, oh, here's this photo.
• 11:08
  Eric Allen: So I I just amassed this huge collection of all of his content.
• 11:12
  Eric Allen: When my grandfather passed away in 2019, um, we started going through his things, clearing out the house, and I had said to the family like, if you know, I'm happy to take this role on.
• 11:27
  Eric Allen: You know, grandpa and I sort of connected on this, and so if you have any of that content, I'll take it and we'll, you know, I'll digitize, find a way to get it preserved, get it shared with the family.
• 11:38
  Eric Allen: And so we're going through his house and just box after box after box of stuff, and, in particular, he had boxes of old 35 millimeter slides, and so I took those and I didn't know what to do with them, but I had these images he'd given me, which were bad copies of them.
• 12:01
  Crista Cowan: So these are the same slides that he had tried to digitize himself Exactly.
• 12:05
  Eric Allen: Yeah, and so he had lesser quality stuff, and so then I got into this like, okay, so now I've got modern technology, I've got modern equipment, modern tools.
• 12:14
  Eric Allen: I need to figure out how to bring this to you, know this quality, this modern.
• 12:19
  Eric Allen: I need to figure out how to bring this to you, know this quality, this modern.
• 12:21
  Eric Allen: And so I went really deep into researching how do I digitize this stuff?
• 12:25
  Eric Allen: What's the right mechanism, the right tools, the right?
• 12:27
  Eric Allen: You know research I need to do to understand the concept and just went to work I think it was.
• 12:33
  Eric Allen: I think he had like 7,000 to 10,000 slides, wow, and COVID hit not long after this, and so we were all stuck at home and so I was looking for a home hobby and it worked out great.
• 12:46
  Eric Allen: So, yeah, I just I just became incredibly passionate about digitizing all of these, this old content, and were you able to burn through it all.
• 12:55
  Eric Allen: I did.
• 12:55
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I actually burned through it, probably disappointingly quick, because I just got addicted to it and it was just such a.
• 13:01
  Eric Allen: It was so fun yeah you know, every single slide I'd stick in my machine would just pop up on my screen with this beautiful image.
• 13:08
  Eric Allen: And it was.
• 13:09
  Eric Allen: It became a treasure hunt right, they're all story.
• 13:12
  Crista Cowan: Everyone is a story, exactly everyone is a story.
• 13:15
  Eric Allen: So what I did?
• 13:16
  Eric Allen: I digitized, I went through every box that he had and then I set up a call with the family, because to me it's always really important to share this stuff and I don't view myself as a you know, I don't, I don't own the stuff.
• 13:32
  Eric Allen: I'm the facilitator of sharing the stuff.
• 13:35
  Eric Allen: Right, I only do it so that I can share it Like I love it, but I also want others to enjoy it.
• 13:40
  Eric Allen: So I set up this family call with my dad and his siblings and my grandma, who's still alive, and we did a zoom one night where I just clicked through thousands of photos and, uh, I'm proud of myself.
• 13:55
  Eric Allen: You'll be proud of me too.
• 13:56
  Eric Allen: I, I, I recorded it Very smart, yeah, uh, and I don't even know why.
• 13:57
  Crista Cowan: I was like you know what I'm proud of myself?
• 13:58
  Eric Allen: You'll be proud of me too.
• 13:59
  Eric Allen: I recorded it Very smart, yeah, and I don't even know why.
• 14:00
  Eric Allen: I was like you know what.
• 14:01
  Eric Allen: I'm just going to record this because I'm not going to be able to remember it all.
• 14:05
  Eric Allen: But now I have this like priceless video of just clicking through images and hearing my grandmother, who's in a nursing home at the time, just shouting out who's in the photo, you know, or what was the story, or when was this photo taken, or you know why, and and so now I've gone back and tried to catalog these things, because at the time I had no idea, I didn't know any of the context of these photos.
• 14:27
  Eric Allen: Right, I'm just digitizing them, sticking them through and then we click through, so anyway.
• 14:31
  Eric Allen: So so from there it sort of just became this passion of like I need to, I need to get all the content, like I need.
• 14:38
  Eric Allen: You know, I jokingly call myself like a digital hoarder, like if you have old media that you know needs to be preserved, I feel passionate, like I'll take it, like you know, yeah, so so there's this interesting thing though right, Ten thousand images, yeah, Like that's overwhelming to anybody.
• 14:58
  Eric Allen: For sure.
• 14:59
  Crista Cowan: And was there an order to them?
• 15:01
  Crista Cowan: To begin with, I suspect maybe because of the nature of your grandfather's work and his passion on that side, but also then, as you share them, I love that.
• 15:10
  Crista Cowan: That's a beautiful story of having your grandmother involved in that, and the stories over the Zoom call.
• 15:14
  Crista Cowan: But then what's next with that content?
• 15:18
  Crista Cowan: Is there a format to put it in?
• 15:19
  Crista Cowan: Is there a story that they can tell together as a, as a collection of images?
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: Like?
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: What's next with all of that?
• 15:25
  Eric Allen: yeah, so I think there is.
• 15:28
  Eric Allen: I mean, every single one of these has a story associated with it, and that's part of the puzzle, that's part of the fun is figuring out well, okay, so I just scanned and yes, there was some.
• 15:40
  Eric Allen: There was like similar photos were grouped together.
• 15:44
  Eric Allen: You know, moments were clearly grouped together in my grandpa's cataloging, um, but there's still.
• 15:49
  Eric Allen: I didn't have full context on a lot of them, but so I I'd scan 15 photos of atlantic city in the 60s and go what are they doing in Atlantic City, you know, and I could see my dad here and he's I don't know 10 years old, 11 years old.
• 16:07
  Eric Allen: And so then it became I need to figure out what they're doing in Atlanta, Like, why did they go there?
• 16:11
  Eric Allen: What did they do while they were there, who was there with them?
• 16:13
  Eric Allen: What was you know, what was the circumstances?
• 16:15
  Eric Allen: And so what I started doing is I uploaded them all to Google Photos and put them in a Google Photos it just, and I would mark dates, you know, as best I could, and I would mark locations even as best I could, and then tag people in photos and there's a little section for notes you know that I would try to put in if I knew something you know, trip to, you know, or move across the country from you know New Jersey to Los Angeles and you know here's Yellowstone or here's wherever they were, and you know just trying to try to record that kind of thing and then sharing that with everyone right, tagging it and then sending out a.
• 16:55
  Eric Allen: I just always have a shared folder picture album that I'm always sending to the family.
• 17:00
  Eric Allen: So yeah so it's like that's why I feel like I'm never done, because I have thousands and thousands of these and you know some of them I have context on Some of them I still don't.
• 17:10
  Eric Allen: And it's just this, this game, this puzzle between you know, I got records that my grandfather wrote.
• 17:19
  Eric Allen: I've got, I've got audio that that my grandfather wrote I've got, I've got audio that he's recorded.
• 17:22
  Eric Allen: I've got, you know, pictures and some documents.
• 17:24
  Eric Allen: So, puzzle, putting all that together is really important and I'm still chasing that down all the time.
• 17:29
  Crista Cowan: Are there still stories coming out, like when you share those things out?
• 17:31
  Crista Cowan: Are there new stories that come out you haven't heard before?
• 17:34
  Eric Allen: all the time, yeah, yeah, for you know a lot with my dad as I connect with him.
• 17:39
  Eric Allen: You know, I scanned a bunch of photos not long ago, less than a year ago, of a family funeral in the 70s, and so I've shared it with my dad and so I'm simply saying who are these people you know?
• 17:54
  Eric Allen: And then they're able to input some stories.
• 17:56
  Eric Allen: I think this is so-and-so's brother and that's so-and-so's cousin, and we didn't really know them.
• 18:00
  Eric Allen: They just came to the funeral and, like you know, figuring out who people are, it just I don't know just creates some sort of a relationship to people, some of whom are alive, some of whom aren't, that I never could have otherwise connected with, and I just feel this you know lots of stories.
• 18:16
  Crista Cowan: I love that, you know, and it's interesting because when you start thinking about family history and family documentary history, like we have all these pictures and photos and artifacts and stories and it's not just family members in them.
• 18:28
  Eric Allen: No, exactly, I have so many photos of strangers, people.
• 18:32
  Eric Allen: I have no idea who they are, and that's part of the puzzle too for me is so, as I started to do this and I just started going around to the families saying, hey, does anybody have this stuff?
• 18:43
  Eric Allen: Like, do you have negatives, do you have pictures, do you have slides?
• 18:46
  Eric Allen: Like I want to know.
• 18:47
  Eric Allen: And so I just started grabbing them from everybody I could and I sort of became this.
• 18:50
  Eric Allen: Everyone was like, oh, you're the resource for this, dumping stuff on me and I started scanning.
• 18:55
  Eric Allen: It's actually my wife's grandfather, who lived in Hawaii in the 50s and he had all these.
• 19:07
  Eric Allen: He had some slides, and there's this one that I scanned, which was this beautiful image of these two little girls in Hawaii, and he'd written on it their first names.
• 19:17
  Eric Allen: And I was like all right, I got to see if I can find them.
• 19:22
  Eric Allen: I knew where he was.
• 19:23
  Eric Allen: He'd written their names and he wrote Hilo, hawaii, 1950 or 1949 or something.
• 19:30
  Eric Allen: It's super high res, beautiful images, two girls in flowery dresses.
• 19:36
  Eric Allen: And so I went on a search and you know I'm using everything I can.
• 19:40
  Eric Allen: I can come up with Google, ancestry, you know Facebook, whatever it is, and I'm searching and I happened to find, after I think it'd been hours, a man who passed away, who had two daughters with those names in Hawaii.
• 19:54
  Eric Allen: And so from there I was like all right, now the chase is on, and started searching around.
• 20:00
  Eric Allen: I'm looking for Facebook, I'm looking for obituaries, and you know, it took me days and I finally got to the point where I got some courage and I'm like I'm going to be a little bit creepier.
• 20:09
  Eric Allen: I'm going to start reaching out to people when I can and say, hey, I have this photograph To me.
• 20:14
  Eric Allen: It would be very valuable if someone had it of my family.
• 20:18
  Eric Allen: Don't mean to be creepy here, but if this is of yours, I want you to have it.
• 20:21
  Eric Allen: I don't, you know, I don't want anything, I just want you to have it.
• 20:29
  Eric Allen: Eventually chased down a Facebook, someone on Facebook who is the granddaughter of one of these women, and I sent her a note with long I'm not trying to be creepy and it took 30 seconds and she responded that's my grandma.
• 20:41
  Eric Allen: I can't believe this.
• 20:43
  Eric Allen: I've never seen a photo of her at that age and that's her sister, who passed away a few years ago.
• 20:47
  Eric Allen: And she said my grandma lives down the this.
• 20:48
  Eric Allen: I've never seen a photo of her at that age and that's her sister who passed away a few years ago and said my grandma lives down the street.
• 20:51
  Eric Allen: I'm going to print this off right now and I'm gonna take it to her house.
• 20:54
  Eric Allen: She's gonna love it and and I left it there.
• 20:57
  Eric Allen: That was it.
• 20:58
  Eric Allen: Yeah, but you know, for me that is what makes it all worth it, because I think for those those people there's an experience there of, you know, priceless images that happen to be in a random box that happened to land, you know, at my house that I was able to digitize and then and then share with them.
• 21:20
  Eric Allen: And yeah, I'm always chasing that, that same feeling now.
• 21:24
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 21:24
  Eric Allen: Yeah.
• 21:25
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's interesting because I think so many of us have this embarrassment of riches and I find myself in a similar position thousands of photos, slides from grandpa, both sides of my family.
• 21:34
  Crista Cowan: I have slides and photos and negatives, and I mean my great grandmother kept photo albums from the early 1900s that I have inherited, like so much, and there are people in there who I don't know, and there are also people who, like this woman, never has seen a photo of a family member at that age, may not even know photos exist Like, and so it's almost a it's almost an obligation.
• 22:00
  Eric Allen: Right, right, I feel a ton of pressure right.
• 22:03
  Eric Allen: Find these people.
• 22:04
  Eric Allen: I started doing that.
• 22:05
  Eric Allen: When I can figure out who someone is, I will upload it to a profile on Ancestry or FamilySearch or something.
• 22:14
  Eric Allen: It just in hopes that someone eventually happens.
• 22:17
  Eric Allen: I don't know any of their descendants, you know, but like I hope at some point someone can get some, you know, meaning out of that.
• 22:22
  Eric Allen: The other thing that was interesting is I actually have a lot of photos Not a lot of photos, not a lot, but I found several, maybe a dozen or so, maybe a little more of people who died young and never had, you know, posterity, and because of that I feel an obligation to create their profile and to put their photo on, because, because my grandfather was that person to everyone else, the way I am, people just bring him stuff and so literally old photos that were like early 1900s, where you know I'm looking up the person because their name's on the back, and it turns out they died young and you know that they're that famous saying that you, you die twice, once when you really die, and once the last time someone says your name Right, and so I feel like then it becomes my obligation, obligation to keep that person alive for a little bit longer in that scenario, upload their photo, tell their story, even though no one directly descended from them will ever have that, because they don't.
• 23:21
  Eric Allen: They never had kids, but family around it.
• 23:23
  Eric Allen: I still think there's a story there and an experience there that's worth having yeah, for sure we get to do the coolest things, eric we do it really is like our.
• 23:33
  Eric Allen: You know, genealogy is so it has so many different angles that just can't find in a lot of things.
• 23:41
  Eric Allen: Yeah, so much fun.
• 23:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I love that and I love that you like.
• 23:44
  Crista Cowan: I mean, your career is marketing.
• 23:46
  Eric Allen: Sure.
• 23:46
  Crista Cowan: But you're, you've found this passion and this doorway into family history that dovetails beautifully with the work that you do, which, like, not everybody, gets to do.
• 23:54
  Crista Cowan: That, yeah that's right.
• 23:55
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I do count myself lucky that way.
• 23:58
  Eric Allen: Like you know, I get to go to work and some days, you know, when I have a break or I'm really tired of meetings, just pull up Ancestry and nobody gets to question what I'm doing on Ancestry, because I'm doing product research.
• 24:11
  Eric Allen: I'm working on our product, you know.
• 24:12
  Eric Allen: But some days, you know that's how I get by.
• 24:16
  Crista Cowan: Right, it's a lot of fun.
• 24:18
  Crista Cowan: Okay, let's nerd out a little bit.
• 24:20
  Crista Cowan: So you talked about this setup at your house, that you've got to scan things, like what can you tell people, like, if they want to do this themselves?
• 24:26
  Crista Cowan: Or like is that the best route to take Should they find someone like you in their life?
• 24:30
  Crista Cowan: I?
• 24:31
  Eric Allen: mean there's a lot of different ways you can go.
• 24:33
  Eric Allen: First of all, there are a lot of companies out there that will digitize your old family history, media artifacts and I think they're great.
• 24:40
  Eric Allen: I've used some of them in the past as well.
• 24:42
  Eric Allen: So if you, if you can find one of those there's a lot of local companies, people will do it in their local area.
• 24:46
  Eric Allen: There's some bigger names out there in the space that you can look up and you'll send them your stuff and then they'll digitize it and send it back.
• 24:55
  Eric Allen: That never really sat right with me, and not because I'm.
• 24:59
  Eric Allen: I mean, I think they're trusting you can trust them.
• 25:02
  Eric Allen: I don't think that's a problem, but for me I just maybe it's part of the journey, maybe this is like Curse of Genealogists, like because like the journey is part of what I enjoy out of it, and so I'm like you know what I have to just do this myself, and so, yeah, so I went out and started acquiring equipment myself.
• 25:18
  Eric Allen: So and it's not professional grade, I wouldn't call it, but I would call it high-end home, you know, residential grade you know, and amateur grade.
• 25:27
  Eric Allen: So I got, you know, a device off of Amazon that will scan a slide at you know, 7,200 DPI, which is really high, like ridiculously high, more than anybody would ever need, I think the human eye sees at like 800 or you know, maybe even less, and so you don't need to scan an image that big, but I do a lot of times because I care about that quality.
• 25:48
  Eric Allen: I have a sickness there, I think.
• 25:49
  Eric Allen: So I bought one of those and then from there, as I started to just get more and more content, started just acquiring this, you know, this equipment trove.
• 26:00
  Eric Allen: So I went to eight millimeter video, you know, digitization equipment and audio reel to reel and VHS and cassette, and I've done 35mm slides, 35mm negatives, medium format negatives, so that on a flatbed scanner all the way down to like you remember, 110 negatives.
• 26:22
  Eric Allen: No, they were like these little cameras in like the 90s, 80s and 90s.
• 26:24
  Eric Allen: Oh, yes, that were like these little cameras in like the 90s, 80s and 90s.
• 26:26
  Eric Allen: That were like flat and long and you snap the negative ends up being about the size of my pinky nail.
• 26:31
  Eric Allen: It's really not a good quality image like it never is.
• 26:34
  Eric Allen: I think about them as like polaroids, like it's the best I'm gonna get out of it, but yeah, all the way to digitizing that kind of stuff and creating a copy of it.
• 26:41
  Eric Allen: So yeah, I mean, I don't know how deep do you want to go?
• 26:44
  Crista Cowan: Well, no, I mean, you start thinking about that and it gets a little overwhelming.
• 26:48
  Eric Allen: It is overwhelming, right, I can admit that, and I think you know.
• 26:52
  Eric Allen: My advice for people would be start with a company.
• 26:54
  Eric Allen: Sure, you're going to pay a little bit more.
• 26:56
  Eric Allen: You're going to get the best quality possible, though, and it's, you know, it's something.
• 27:03
  Eric Allen: Yeah, and what people don't realize about this stuff, which I'm super passionate about, is that it's going bad, and that's the scary part about it to me is the stuff sitting in your basement or your attic or your garage is actually eroding and what your ability to turn it into something digital is going away.
• 27:21
  Eric Allen: I don't know how long the life of these things are, but I mean, I have eight millimeter video.
• 27:26
  Eric Allen: You know, that was from the fifties, and now we're 70 plus years late.
• 27:31
  Eric Allen: I don't imagine we have a lot more time where that's going to be able to produce a high quality image, and so, yeah, I feel some urgency around that too.
• 27:39
  Eric Allen: So I would suggest you know, if you have stuff sitting around, you do what you can do, what you can send it.
• 27:45
  Eric Allen: I'm at costco, I've heard, does a great job with some of this stuff.
• 27:48
  Crista Cowan: You know there's there's ways to do it, um, but just do it yeah, for sure, and not only is it at risk because of the degradation, but also it's just at risk in general right right, I mean you and I have a co-worker who whose family lost everything in the paradise fire in california years ago and and lost everything like all the photos all the yearbooks, all the family letters, and that is heartbreaking.
• 28:10
  Crista Cowan: It is yeah.
• 28:10
  Crista Cowan: I mean, I have family in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina.
• 28:13
  Crista Cowan: We lost like tons of family artifacts because of that.
• 28:17
  Eric Allen: That breaks my heart.
• 28:18
  Crista Cowan: So the process of digitization is?
• 28:20
  Crista Cowan: There is an urgency?
• 28:21
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, there is.
• 28:22
  Eric Allen: And that's the other part of it too.
• 28:23
  Eric Allen: Multiple copies is really critical here, so I always keep a copy in the cloud and a copy on a hard drive, and then I keep a copy in my safe on a hard drive as well, in a fireproof safe.
• 28:36
  Eric Allen: Now, that's probably maybe overkill.
• 28:38
  Eric Allen: I don't think the cloud is going down.
• 28:40
  Eric Allen: I think this is here to stay, but it's important to me to have all of these.
• 28:48
  Eric Allen: And then I'm you know, because I'm this way with media I never throw it away Like I can't.
• 28:50
  Eric Allen: I can't bring myself to throw away a slide.
• 28:51
  Eric Allen: So I bought boxes that I have just stacked up, you know, but but they've all been digitized and so I'm comfortable with that, knowing that I have a digital copy of it, no matter what.
• 29:00
  Eric Allen: Sure, and I'll say I fumbled my way into this like being good at it, because it's just been, you know, so many, so many, so many times.
• 29:10
  Eric Allen: So now I've got this whole process all the way from scanning, you know, I use scanning equipment, scanning tools.
• 29:17
  Eric Allen: I use a, you know, I store it in the cloud.
• 29:20
  Eric Allen: I use Photoshop if I can't get a little scratch out of it.
• 29:23
  Eric Allen: I do have tools to clean negatives and slides.
• 29:27
  Eric Allen: And then, you know, even go so far as there's this wild product, edval no Scratch, which is a little bottle about the size of like a fingernail polish that you can put on a scratched slider negative makes it look perfect.
• 29:40
  Eric Allen: But that stuff is not cheap.
• 29:42
  Eric Allen: It comes in this little tiny bottle and it is very expensive, and you know.
• 29:47
  Eric Allen: So you go through all that.
• 29:48
  Eric Allen: Then I Photoshop.
• 29:49
  Eric Allen: I've gotten to the point today now where occasionally, I'll drop it in an AI as well and get a really clear picture out of one of those.
• 29:57
  Eric Allen: So the technology is also moving rapidly here and I'm comfortable that in the future it's going to be even easier for people to do this um and and get you know this stuff preserved at the best possible quality, color, all of those things.
• 30:12
  Crista Cowan: So is there any um concern about, like, migration of technology?
• 30:16
  Crista Cowan: So you've digitized things, yeah, but now, like, if you've got it on a hard drive, like, is there any concern that that should be accessed every once in a while to make sure it's still readable by the current technology?
• 30:26
  Eric Allen: yeah, that's what I do.
• 30:27
  Eric Allen: I do pull those hard drives out every once in a while and just create a backup of it.
• 30:31
  Eric Allen: You know, I I think my grandfather in 1990 would have been like, hey, I got it covered, like I've digitized all this stuff and that's part of why I can't get rid of it, because I don't know what's coming right, I don't know where we're going, um, but I'm comfortable, you, you know where I am today with this stuff and then you know where I can put it, store it.
• 30:49
  Eric Allen: I think it's, you know, it's a generation or two, it's probably safe, and then we'll see what happens.
• 30:54
  Eric Allen: Sure, you know, I don't know.
• 30:55
  Eric Allen: So, yeah, I'm comfortable with what I have today, but it is something I'm constantly keeping up on and then creating new backups and new copies of.
• 31:03
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, this is important creating new backups and new copies of yeah, this is important, so I love it.
• 31:09
  Crista Cowan: I love a good nerd out over technology.
• 31:10
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's fantastic.
• 31:10
  Crista Cowan: Well, um, so it's.
• 31:11
  Crista Cowan: There's this really interesting like story arc almost of your journey, right, your grandfather and his experience and your experience with him, and now you've kind of taken over the reins and and so what's next like are you looking to like preservation, is this legacy of him?
• 31:25
  Crista Cowan: And now it sounds like for you, like, are you looking to like preservation, is this legacy of him?
• 31:28
  Crista Cowan: And now it sounds like for you, like, are you looking forward at all for what?
• 31:30
  Crista Cowan: What's next there?
• 31:32
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I'm, I'm always looking for the next best way to preserve it and share it.
• 31:37
  Eric Allen: And so, you know, for me at this moment, yeah, I'm using the best mediums I have available to me.
• 31:43
  Eric Allen: Like I said, I'll upload to Ancestry or you know another genealogy site.
• 31:47
  Eric Allen: I'll share with family where I can text, et cetera, and then I just make sure I always have that copy.
• 31:53
  Eric Allen: And then I don't know what happens down the line, if I'll have a son or a grandson or a nephew or a niece who will develop the passion and I'll do what my grandfather did and be able to sort of complete that same journey of, hey, this is now in your hands and I want you to, you know, be the be the keeper of it and store it.
• 32:09
  Eric Allen: So, yeah, as far as like my, my personal situation to it, I don't feel I'm even close to done with it.
• 32:16
  Eric Allen: I'm, you know, I feel I've, I'm barely scratching the surface of what I want to do with all this stuff, even after it's digitized, because you know how I preserve it, how I share it, how I clean it up and tell the stories behind it, still looking for the right mediums to be able to do all that all the time and so anyway, yeah, I mean I'm, we'll see how things change, how technology changes, and but but yeah, I don't, I don't feel like I'm anywhere near done, you know, with what I can do here.
• 32:45
  Crista Cowan: So I hope not.
• 32:46
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, no, for sure, that's awesome.
• 32:47
  Crista Cowan: Okay, let me just wrap up by asking you this is kind of where we ask all my guests this question which is your hope for the future?
• 32:59
  Crista Cowan: When you think about story and how those stories evolve and how they get passed down and what that means is that story kind of comes through you to the next generation or the one after that, what do you hope for the future?
• 33:09
  Eric Allen: yeah, I hope it just gets easier and easier and I hope that the world becomes more and more connected and, in particular, you know, I, I even have stories.
• 33:18
  Eric Allen: This, I mean silly little things.
• 33:21
  Eric Allen: My third great-grandfather was killed by a bull.
• 33:27
  Eric Allen: It was a crazy story there.
• 33:29
  Eric Allen: He was gored in the neck by a bull and died in a field.
• 33:33
  Eric Allen: I think he was in his late 60s or early 70s.
• 33:37
  Eric Allen: He was supposedly a stubborn old man.
• 33:39
  Eric Allen: That's a story.
• 33:43
  Eric Allen: That's a crazy story and, by the way, I still use that as a cautionary tale with my children.
• 33:46
  Eric Allen: Like you know, we have stubborn in the jeans, right?
• 33:48
  Eric Allen: Like you know, don't be dumb, don't go walking through the bullpen, you know, because that you might get gored in the neck.
• 33:55
  Eric Allen: I Don't know how many descendants that person has, but it's got to be in the thousands at this point.
• 34:01
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I always wonder how many of them know that story.
• 34:04
  Eric Allen: I'll bet it's not that many.
• 34:06
  Eric Allen: And so for me, what I hope for the future is a place and a connection, a way to connect with others, to share those stories.
• 34:15
  Eric Allen: So we all have, you know, that power of a story.
• 34:18
  Eric Allen: And now that's a silly one, maybe silly, I mean it's.
• 34:21
  Eric Allen: You know he died, but there are many, many stories like that that are powerful and important, and so my hope would be finding ways for people to connect with one another around this and then, you know, unite against those with, along with those stories.
• 34:39
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, that's my hope.
• 34:41
  Crista Cowan: I love that Beautifully said.
• 34:43
  Crista Cowan: Okay, before we go.
• 34:44
  Crista Cowan: If people want to follow along on your journey or learn from your tips and tricks, where can they find you?
• 34:50
  Eric Allen: Yeah, I do have an Instagram and so you know, like I mentioned, as I've been collecting a lot of content, I've also been collecting some strangers' content, as people don't know what to do with it.
• 34:58
  Eric Allen: They're like I'm going to go to that guy.
• 34:59
  Eric Allen: So I've been digitizing a lot of old content and uploading it to an Instagram that I have.
• 35:04
  Eric Allen: It's called Bliss it Was, and that's Bliss underscore.
• 35:08
  Eric Allen: It underscore was it's an old Wordsworth poem Bliss it Was, and that dawned to be alive, you know.
• 35:14
  Eric Allen: And so I post stuff on there.
• 35:16
  Eric Allen: I have posted some tips on there as well and some of my stories about how I digitize things, and then there's just some.
• 35:22
  Eric Allen: Really, I try to post what I think is very interesting old content, so you'll see pictures of, you know, San Francisco in the 50s, or I have you know, Paris in the 60s, you know, as I've digitized stuff.
• 35:33
  Eric Allen: So I think you know there's some interesting, fun content on there to engage with.
• 35:36
  Eric Allen: I don't, it's not a business, it's just a hobby, it's just fun.
• 35:39
  Eric Allen: But you know, if anyone wants to follow along or reach out and ask questions, by all means I'm happy to take them over there.
• 35:45
  Crista Cowan: Love that.
• 35:46
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for offering that Absolutely Well.
• 35:48
  Eric Allen: Thank you Appreciate you Absolutely Right, thank you.
• 35:50
  Crista Cowan: We work together every day and I feel like I know you better now, after 30 minutes.
• 35:56
  Eric Allen: Yeah, my pleasure.
• 35:57
  Eric Allen: This was fun, it was.
• 35:58
  Eric Allen: I love it, and I appreciate being able to spend time with you, and I appreciate our relationship at work as well.
• 36:04
  Eric Allen: I learn from you and your other genealogists around you every single day.
• 36:09
  Eric Allen: It's part of why I love my job so much.
• 36:11
  Eric Allen: Again, I have this passion, and so it's really nice to be able to glean what information I can when I can.
• 36:16
  Eric Allen: So thank you.
• 36:17
  Crista Cowan: Hey, we're going to get the message to the world that they all need this right.
• 36:19
  Eric Allen: I think so, I hope so.
• 36:22
  Crista Cowan: I'll do this.
• 36:22
  Crista Cowan: You do what you do.
• 36:23
  Crista Cowan: We got this.
• 36:24
  Crista Cowan: We're trying.
• 36:24
  Crista Cowan: Well, that's all I've got for you on this episode of Stories that Live In Us.
• 36:30
  Crista Cowan: But here's some great news One of the most valuable things you can do to help me and other potential listeners to find this show is for you to both rate it and leave a review.
• 36:41
  Crista Cowan: So, as a special bonus, if you write a review, take a screenshot of it and email it to stories that live in us at gmailcom and I will send you a free ebook with my top tips for discovering and sharing your own family history stories.
• 36:57
  Crista Cowan: Also, please share, share, share this podcast with anyone you think might enjoy it.
• 37:03
  Crista Cowan: Until next time, remember that sharing your family stories means better perspective, deeper connections and a more empowering identity for you, your children and your grandchildren, maybe even for generations to come.