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The Irish Experience (with Kyle Betit) | Episode 51 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Kyle Betit: We all kind of gathered around the peat fire.
• 0:02
  Kyle Betit: They showed us how they take heat out of the ground which was used to heat homes.
• 0:09
  Kyle Betit: You know there was kind of a storyteller there like you would have had in your family, and so it's kind of getting this sense of being in the 1840s.
• 0:21
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:29
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:33
  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.
• 0:41
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Kyle Betit.
• 0:45
  Crista Cowan: Kyle and I have been colleagues at Ancestry for years, but my favorite memory of Kyle is a trip that he and I took to Ireland together.
• 0:54
  Crista Cowan: I have Irish roots and he was the tour guide along with a bus full of people, and it was a trip I will never forget, because he is a brilliant storyteller and an incredible genealogist.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kyle Betit.
• 1:10
  Crista Cowan: So, kyle, thank you so much for being here.
• 1:12
  Crista Cowan: I feel like I haven't seen you forever.
• 1:14
  Kyle Betit: It's been a while, yeah, a few months.
• 1:16
  Crista Cowan: So I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
• 1:18
  Crista Cowan: I don't think I have ever heard the story of your entree into family history, so I would love to hear that.
• 1:27
  Kyle Betit: All right.
• 1:27
  Kyle Betit: Well, thank you very much for having me.
• 1:28
  Kyle Betit: It's great to be with you to reminisce and talk about my story and the stories of clients and of ancestry.
• 1:38
  Kyle Betit: So my start in genealogy was really when I was about nine years old, and I blame my grandmother for the whole thing.
• 1:49
  Kyle Betit: Really, my mother's mother, sarah.
• 1:52
  Kyle Betit: She was very into genealogy when I was young and I grew up in Alaska, so we were kind of in a rural atmosphere, but there was an LDS stake where you could order records from Salt Lake City and although she wasn't LDS, she became the librarian of the local library, a genealogy library there.
• 2:12
  Kyle Betit: So I started tagging along with her when I was about nine years old, researching my father's side of the family, because she had done my mother's, and so that I moved to Salt Lake City when I was 15 with my parents and we moved in January and I had a couple of weeks before I had to go to school.
• 2:31
  Kyle Betit: So I spent the first two weeks just at the family history library at every open hour researching my family.
• 2:38
  Crista Cowan: You were that kid.
• 2:42
  Kyle Betit: So I was delighted to move to Salt Lake City for that reason.
• 2:45
  Kyle Betit: And then, shortly after that, my dad said I think it's time for you to get a job.
• 2:49
  Kyle Betit: And I really had this aversion to working in a fast food restaurant or anything like that.
• 2:55
  Kyle Betit: So, although I was kind of shy, I got up the courage to call this local company named Lineages and say I know a lot about genealogy, I'll do whatever you want, I just need a job.
• 3:07
  Kyle Betit: And that's when I started working for Lineages, a local genealogy company that had been started by Johnny Cerny, and so I worked for them in the office and doing research when I was in high school.
• 3:21
  Kyle Betit: And then I went off to college and, like many of my colleagues in professional genealogy, I studied science, microbiology and genetics and I thought I might want to be a doctor or a scientist and experimented with those things, but I realized that genealogy was what I really loved and just kept coming back to it.
• 3:40
  Kyle Betit: Then, in about 2001 is when we started pro genealogists and it became part of ancestry in in 2010.
• 3:50
  Kyle Betit: So long time in the field.
• 3:54
  Kyle Betit: I know you had my my friend colleague George, on your podcast recently, and it was in 1987 when I went to work for lineages and I met him.
• 4:02
  Kyle Betit: So about 30 years of working together, um with with George and a lot of other great people along the way.
• 4:09
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's interesting because the the professional genealogy community is not large.
• 4:14
  Kyle Betit: No.
• 4:15
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and so, and especially here in Utah, we most of us know each other.
• 4:19
  Crista Cowan: We've known each other for a lot of our careers and, and I love that, that, we have that opportunity to be colleagues in that unique way in a unique career.
• 4:28
  Crista Cowan: And a lot of the guests on my podcast are people who just have stories of their own family, but I've had a few professional genealogists on and so I think it's interesting, you know, for the listener to to kind of hear that journey and that that's that is a career, that there are people who do this for a living.
• 4:44
  Crista Cowan: So I would just love to hear if you've got like a favorite in your 30 plus years, a favorite client story that has just kind of stuck with you.
• 4:55
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, I mean there's, there's so many, right.
• 4:57
  Kyle Betit: But you know, my favorite thing is to travel with my clients and take them to see the places where their ancestors are from, and I've had some really extraordinary experiences with that, one that I can think of.
• 5:12
  Kyle Betit: That was probably just one of the best experiences with a client and with genealogy, and travel was in Switzerland.
• 5:20
  Kyle Betit: I have a client who, at the time we were starting Progeneologist, was already our client, and we spent a very long time just trying to figure out where in Europe precisely their family was from, had a very unique surname, was French, but we weren't really sure what part of France or was it from another French-speaking country, and at that time, of course, there was a lot less indexing to find records.
• 5:44
  Kyle Betit: So it took us a long time to figure out where they were from, and it turned out that they were from a French speaking part of Switzerland, and the Swiss records are absolutely amazing, even compared to other European countries, and so we figured out an exact town that they came from.
• 6:27
  Kyle Betit: And so we figured out an exact town that they came from and we took their entire family there two busloads of about 40 people, I think, total for to figure out how their surname originated, because the surname was originally the first name of the woman who started the family in the 1300s, and so lots of people in that town were related to them and had their surname.
• 6:42
  Kyle Betit: But nobody really understood after that amount of time how they were all related to each other.
• 6:47
  Kyle Betit: So we made big charts and spread them around this venue that we had a reunion from, and people came from other parts of Switzerland, and so there's just, you know, 100 people gathering to reconnect and see all of the stories of their family, all going back to one person that we could identify that far back in time.
• 7:08
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that's amazing.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: And it's interesting because you have this client and their interest and their willingness to go on that journey and I don't just mean the trip to Switzerland, but like that whole family history journey and investing the time and the money and the effort into making that discovery brought 100 people together and helped kind of restore some identity to maybe even some people that had lived in the village all along.
• 7:32
  Kyle Betit: Exactly.
• 7:32
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, they had never left, but they really had no idea when it started.
• 7:36
  Kyle Betit: Or, you know, they knew other people had their name, but they thought I'm not really sure if we're related, but it's back 10 generations, right.
• 7:43
  Kyle Betit: So yeah, it was absolutely amazing and, as a genealogist, when you do that much work and get that involved, you almost kind of become part of the family which is awesome, and so you have those same experiences they're having as you go along too.
• 8:01
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, well, that's amazing.
• 8:02
  Crista Cowan: As you go along too, yeah, wow, that's amazing.
• 8:08
  Crista Cowan: So, uh, there are probably dozens of client stories you could tell which I someday may need to hear more of.
• 8:10
  Crista Cowan: But uh, I think today, just because you know this is your first time on the podcast, I said first time, that means there may be more Excellent.
• 8:18
  Kyle Betit: Well, this is a great, great opportunity.
• 8:20
  Crista Cowan: I would love to hear just one of your family stories.
• 8:23
  Crista Cowan: Do you have a favorite family story?
• 8:46
  Kyle Betit: kind of stop doing very much research on our own families, and that happened to me for a while.
• 8:48
  Kyle Betit: But as Ancestry has indexed more and more records, I find myself going back and doing more research because now I can find more and piece things together.
• 8:55
  Kyle Betit: So I actually have found some interesting things lately.
• 9:00
  Kyle Betit: And my own surname, bt, is how we pronounce it now, although you know, we had a family reunion probably 10 years ago and we took all the oldest members of the family this was in Vermont and asked them how they pronounced their name and there was five different answers even among the family.
• 9:19
  Kyle Betit: So I never I never really get very upset how anyone pronounces my name because it's French and it just gets butchered.
• 9:26
  Kyle Betit: So originally our family came from Normandy to Quebec, and so a couple of years ago we started expanding our heritage travel program into doing virtual tours where either, basically, you don't have to physically be there in order to experience this place that your ancestors are from, because there's somebody there with a camera who's showing it to you In this case, I was there in France, but there were about 100 members of my family again who were, you know, dialed in through Zoom to this experience about three or four hours experience of the town, the parish, the area that our ancestor came from in Normandy, who went to Canada in the 1750s, and it was an extraordinary experience because we all got to connect number one.
• 10:24
  Kyle Betit: But also I learned a lot about my family that I didn't know and I had been researching these people for 40 years by just going there.
• 10:35
  Kyle Betit: That's something I tell people.
• 10:36
  Kyle Betit: A lot about ancestral travel or heritage travel is you should prepare as best as you can, but things happen.
• 10:49
  Kyle Betit: Just because you go there you learn things that you couldn't have predicted by going to the place.
• 10:55
  Kyle Betit: So in my case, as we started researching our family, I knew that they were fishermen.
• 11:01
  Kyle Betit: But what I didn't know was we discovered that my family was buried inside the Catholic church that they went to, whereas normally you'd be buried in the churchyard around it, which means that they were basically local gentry, and I was really surprised by this because they were fishermen.
• 11:28
  Kyle Betit: But the reality was in this Granville area of Normandy everyone was in the fishing industry where they were going to Newfoundland and other parts of Canada to bring back.
• 11:40
  Kyle Betit: There was a whole industry around this, so they were kind of minor nobility, which completely surprised me.
• 11:47
  Kyle Betit: And then, as we looked at the records.
• 11:50
  Kyle Betit: I had a local French genealogist help me with looking at more records in the archives there and I knew what parish they were from.
• 11:57
  Kyle Betit: I'd known that since I was 10 years old, but I didn't know where in the parish and we were able to find this road, which was basically a little settlement within the parish where we could say, yes, this is where they came from.
• 12:09
  Kyle Betit: And so during the virtual tour, we drove there with the cameraman and the guide and we stopped on the road and we realized, oh, there's a house here that's old enough to have been their house probably, but I need to do some more research to really for sure.
• 12:25
  Kyle Betit: But I stepped out of the car and I realized, oh, I'm having the experience that I give my clients all the time of.
• 12:31
  Kyle Betit: Oh my gosh, I'm here and this is where they lived 250 years ago.
• 12:37
  Kyle Betit: I hadn't really expected that it was going to happen and so amazing to happen, along with my whole family being, you know, dialed in having the experience with me.
• 12:47
  Crista Cowan: There is something about standing in places where they've stood, and until you've experienced it it's hard to to convey that to people.
• 12:56
  Crista Cowan: But anybody who can do that should do that.
• 12:59
  Crista Cowan: And it doesn't even like I mean.
• 13:01
  Crista Cowan: I remember the first time I moved.
• 13:02
  Crista Cowan: I live in Pleasant Grove, utah, and I grew up in California and Oregon and Washington and went to school in Idaho and like had never intended to live here in Utah, but here I found myself and my great grandparents.
• 13:15
  Crista Cowan: One was born in Pleasant Grove and one was born in Lehigh, which is where the ancestry offices are.
• 13:20
  Crista Cowan: And I remember the first morning after we moved in I walked out onto the little balcony of my condo and I looked up at Mount Timpanogos and it just dawned on me that every day of my great-grandparents life they stared at that mountain Right and there's like that connection is so visceral to just have that moment of this is a place where they were.
• 13:41
  Kyle Betit: I think an important thing that I realized over the years is, in addition to just saying connection, I think it's also reconnection.
• 13:49
  Kyle Betit: Also reconnection, and it's so often about people having to leave or leaving things behind and they're being kind of unfinished business in a way, and so when you know, a few generations later, you go back.
• 14:06
  Kyle Betit: Yes, you're connecting with the history and the place, but you're also healing something, you're bringing something full circle.
• 14:14
  Kyle Betit: That, I think, is an important part of that kind of inexplicable feeling that you have when you go to visit places.
• 14:22
  Crista Cowan: And for me it was just, you know, a couple generations removed, but I've had that experience stepping off a train platform in Glasgow, and then I've also had that experience in Ireland with you.
• 14:33
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 14:40
  Crista Cowan: Amazing trip that we had.
• 14:40
  Crista Cowan: So I would love to know about your connection to Ireland and then maybe we can talk a little bit about that trip.
• 14:43
  Crista Cowan: So what like do you have family connections to Ireland?
• 14:45
  Crista Cowan: I know you've taken lots of clients and tour groups there, so tell me a little bit about that.
• 14:50
  Kyle Betit: So I had a colleague that I met about the same time as I met George Ott, have a colleague, dwight Radford, who kind of got me into Irish research, for which I'm very grateful, because he had already been pioneering in that area.
• 15:02
  Kyle Betit: So he took me to Ireland when I went for the first time and then we started publishing a journal together that was pretty popular in the genealogy world for about six years, called the Irish at Home and Abroad.
• 15:15
  Kyle Betit: So I kind of just immersed myself in Irish research in order to be able to help clients in a part of the world where records have been destroyed many times and the sort of strife that exists in Irish history between Catholics and Protestants and the British and the native Irish has meant that it can be much harder to trace people there.
• 15:40
  Kyle Betit: But I really got fascinated by that whole history of conflict and religious division and I personally have ancestors on both sides of all of those conflicts.
• 15:53
  Kyle Betit: When you look back a number of generations, which for me was fascinating to know, these people were really deeply in conflict and yet I'm descended from all of them, and so that's kind of how I got involved in Irish research and I just kept doing it because I got so fascinated by it and then, you know, traveling there, it became kind of like a second home for me in a way, especially Dublin, to go there and research other people's families.
• 16:26
  Kyle Betit: On the first trip that I did to Ireland there was one story that happened that I think really kind of illustrates a lot about the Irish and going back to your place of origin in Ireland, which was for a client and their ancestors were from County Limerick and their name was Regan.
• 16:47
  Kyle Betit: And typically in Ireland, even though a lot of records have been destroyed, there's very detailed tax records and maps that go with them that you can usually use to find the exact place where the house was that they lived, which I think is kind of the ultimate experience in Irish ancestry really.
• 17:07
  Kyle Betit: And so in this case I knew exactly where this house was supposed to be on the map and I could find that place and I went there but there was nothing left.
• 17:17
  Kyle Betit: A lot of times there will be something there it could have.
• 17:21
  Kyle Betit: They could have taken the old house and made it into a shed or even if it's fallen down, there were some, you know, rocks left.
• 17:27
  Kyle Betit: Where you can get that real experience of this is the exact place where they spent like all of their time.
• 17:34
  Kyle Betit: This is the view that they had of the things around them in the landscape, and so I was a little bit disappointed.
• 17:45
  Kyle Betit: But I I kind of wandered down the road and wanted to talk to somebody, because often if you talk to a local person in one of these townlands in Ireland, they'll know a lot.
• 17:56
  Kyle Betit: So I found this fellow along the side of the road near his house, and his name happened to be Jimmy O'Regan, and I said I'm looking for this house from the 1850s, you know, and you expect people to be like you're what.
• 18:09
  Kyle Betit: And he said and I said well, this is, this is where it should be, but it's not there.
• 18:16
  Kyle Betit: And he said oh yeah, we took it down five years ago.
• 18:19
  Kyle Betit: And I was like you what?
• 18:23
  Kyle Betit: Uh, because it had fallen into disrepair and you know, like we're just not going to keep this around.
• 18:28
  Kyle Betit: So again, second level of disappointment, I'm five years too late.
• 18:32
  Kyle Betit: But he said, however, we knew that eventually somebody from Australia or the US or Canada was going to come looking for that house, because people are so used to that happening with you know, the Irish have gone everywhere and people come home.
• 18:47
  Kyle Betit: And he said so we kept some bricks and a piece of the fire grate.
• 18:52
  Kyle Betit: So here you go, and so I took that home to my client, who was very happy to have that piece of their history.
• 19:02
  Crista Cowan: Wow, wow.
• 19:03
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing that they had that foresight, that they expected that and planned for it.
• 19:10
  Kyle Betit: They're right, these crazy Americans are going to come looking for that house.
• 19:21
  Crista Cowan: They're going to want to that house.
• 19:22
  Crista Cowan: That's incredible.
• 19:22
  Crista Cowan: Well, so in my own family history, I know who both of my parents are.
• 19:24
  Crista Cowan: I know who all four of my grandparents are.
• 19:24
  Crista Cowan: You know, I've always known who all eight of my great-grandparents are, but I have a great-great-grandfather named john o'brien oh right, this is the thing about irish names, right?
• 19:34
  Crista Cowan: yeah, good heavens, very common yeah, how many millions of john o'briens are there?
• 19:38
  Crista Cowan: And the other problem with john o'brien was that he was a bit of a storyteller, yeah, and so no two records agree.
• 19:46
  Crista Cowan: Um, he was born in 1832, or 1837, or 1842, depending, depending on which record you believe he claims to have served in the Civil War.
• 19:55
  Crista Cowan: We finally did find proof of that.
• 19:57
  Crista Cowan: It was on his tombstone.
• 19:58
  Crista Cowan: So we assumed it was probably true that he was connected in some way.
• 20:02
  Crista Cowan: But we did find his enlistment papers and his service record.
• 20:05
  Crista Cowan: But then he also claims he was born in either Iowa, which is where he enlisted in the Civil War, or Ohio or Ireland, and there was this story he would tell his daughters about coming from Ireland with his dad as a little boy.
• 20:20
  Crista Cowan: And yet every record we had in the US says he was born in either Ohio or Iowa.
• 20:24
  Crista Cowan: And so we've researched him for 40 years trying to figure out, you know, was he really born here in the States?
• 20:32
  Crista Cowan: Was he born in Iowa?
• 20:33
  Crista Cowan: And of course, when you do the math like if he was born in the, you know early forties, that was the beginning of the potato famine, lots of Irish immigration to the United States at the time, so that would have made some sense.
• 20:45
  Crista Cowan: But but he's been.
• 20:46
  Crista Cowan: He's been our brick wall like, and to have a brick wall like relatively recently for somebody with US ancestry is super frustrating.
• 20:54
  Crista Cowan: All my other lines go back very far, even my German line.
• 20:58
  Crista Cowan: They're my most recent immigrants.
• 21:00
  Crista Cowan: I can trace them back into Germany.
• 21:02
  Crista Cowan: But John has just been this hill to climb for me and I have been very unsuccessful at it until I took a DNA test.
• 21:12
  Kyle Betit: I was going to say this is our lately.
• 21:15
  Kyle Betit: This has been our hope for some of these Irish brick wall right.
• 21:18
  Crista Cowan: So both my mom and her sister are living and they both took DNA tests and then we started testing my mom's first cousins on that side of the family.
• 21:27
  Crista Cowan: We found a half sister of my mom's, which actually ended up being brilliant because we could start to sort out matches a little bit and we've now got two clues.
• 21:36
  Crista Cowan: So I still haven't solved John O'Brien, but here are the two clues that I have.
• 21:40
  Crista Cowan: One is that we have a group of O'Brien matches.
• 21:45
  Kyle Betit: Yeah.
• 21:45
  Crista Cowan: And they all come from the same county in Ireland.
• 21:48
  Kyle Betit: People who have O'Brien in their tree.
• 21:49
  Crista Cowan: O'Brien in their tree, and the matches are high enough that we suspect that they're related through either John's parents or grandparents.
• 21:55
  Crista Cowan: But their trees don't go back far enough either.
• 21:59
  Kyle Betit: Right.
• 21:59
  Crista Cowan: Right, Like they've all got the same problem.
• 22:01
  Crista Cowan: A couple of them are in Canada, Several of them are here in the US.
• 22:04
  Crista Cowan: The second clue and this has been just fascinating with Ancestry DNA they don't just tell you you're Irish.
• 22:16
  Kyle Betit: Now we have these journeys that show you exactly, maybe where in Ireland you have a journey, somebody has a journey.
• 22:19
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that goes straight to the same County.
• 22:21
  Crista Cowan: So they have this, they all have this same Irish County, that's showing up it's County Cork.
• 22:29
  Kyle Betit: I was going to say it has to be County Cork.
• 22:31
  Crista Cowan: Now here's the funny thing 20 years ago, 25 years ago, my mom and my sister and I took our very first trip to Ireland.
• 22:38
  Crista Cowan: We'd actually been in England and we got a wild hair that we were going to just go to Ireland for the weekend.
• 22:43
  Crista Cowan: And so we took a train to Wales and then we hopped on a ferry overnight ferry and went to southern Ireland.
• 22:50
  Crista Cowan: And it was just because that was the easy place to reach for the weekend, not because we knew where in Ireland we were from at the time, but we ended up in County Cork and that's where we spent the weekend.
• 23:02
  Crista Cowan: And so now here, 25 years later, to have that DNA confirm.
• 23:06
  Crista Cowan: This is where we think John probably is from, and we still haven't figured out who his parents are or where exactly he was born, though I suspect it was Ohio.
• 23:17
  Kyle Betit: He liked the Irish story.
• 23:18
  Kyle Betit: He did.
• 23:20
  Crista Cowan: To have a connection again to a place is just so impactful and so meaningful.
• 23:26
  Crista Cowan: And so then, several years ago, to have been able to take that trip with you and that tour group that we went with, and to visit some of those same places again with a family history lens, was a very different experience than a weekend with my mom and my sister shopping.
• 23:41
  Crista Cowan: So, um, tell me a little bit about, like, how you put that trip together and and if you have any memories from that particular trip, and then I can share a few of a few of mine.
• 23:51
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, Awesome, that was uh kind of early in our program to bring heritage travel more widely to to our clients, and so, uh, we we partnered with a with a tour company for these group tours.
• 24:10
  Kyle Betit: Uh, I think we probably had about 25 people or so on that tour, and so it was a great way to pair having a genealogist and other history, culture, heritage related elements in a tour with a group.
• 24:32
  Kyle Betit: That kind of made it more affordable, but each person could have a certain amount of connection with their own personal family history and the places where they came from.
• 24:46
  Kyle Betit: Because we kind of covered, you know, three quarters of the islands in those 10 days and I think some of the things that are most impactful to me and to clients are the places that are kind of designed to take you back in time, In addition to visiting any specific house or street or church your ancestor might have been associated with.
• 25:13
  Kyle Betit: You know, on that trip we went to the Cobh Emigration Center and we went to the Dan O'Hara homestead in Galway, Both very good examples of this.
• 25:23
  Kyle Betit: You know, in Cobh they have set it up to give you such a detailed understanding of what it was like to leave Ireland and what people went through in different time periods and what people went through in different time periods, what the ships would have looked like and the conditions were and how people would have lived in Ireland before they left and where they went in America and other places.
• 25:47
  Kyle Betit: And then over in Galway in that Dan O'Hara homestead where we all kind of gathered around the peat fire they showed us how they take peat out of the ground which was used to heat homes.
• 26:02
  Kyle Betit: There was kind of a storyteller there, like you would have had in your family, and so it's kind of getting this sense of being in the 1840s at the time of the famine, to see how people really lived.
• 26:16
  Kyle Betit: So those kind of living history opportunities I think are an extraordinary part of a journey like that.
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I agree.
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: I think for me there's something you know.
• 26:27
  Crista Cowan: We talked earlier about walking in the footsteps of your ancestors, but I remember sitting in that John O'Hara home and that smell of that peat fire is so distinct and it has become a core memory that I associate with Ireland, is that smell.
• 26:42
  Crista Cowan: And again, that's something you don't get, looking at a video, as great as it is that we have that technology or but actually being in that space and having that experience, that was really impactful for me.
• 26:53
  Crista Cowan: And then you know, watching them do the demonstration of cutting the peat and the cold and the like, the, the view and the mud, and that like it's just becomes this very visceral experience where you can almost put yourself in 1840, in the place of your ancestor, and I think that's important.
• 27:14
  Kyle Betit: And that area where that homestead is and the Connemara, that's important and that area where that homestead is and the Connemara, it's like the wild west of Ireland and it's just such extraordinary landscape.
• 27:22
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, but I agree with you that there really isn't a substitute for going there yourself and experiencing with all your senses what that place is like, and it even, I think, helps you with your research because you really understand more about the context of what you're even trying to find or what life was like.
• 27:44
  Kyle Betit: What records would there be?
• 27:45
  Kyle Betit: Why would they have kept them?
• 27:46
  Kyle Betit: Why would they have been destroyed?
• 27:48
  Kyle Betit: What records wouldn't there be because of how they were?
• 27:50
  Kyle Betit: I mean, you just get such a context for being able to go back to your research in the library as well from being there physically.
• 27:59
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely, the Cobh Museum was a great experience, but interestingly enough, one of my favorite things from that entire trip was the Dublin Museum.
• 28:09
  Kyle Betit: Oh right, sorry, I forgot to mention that.
• 28:11
  Crista Cowan: That immersive experience, like it's all very you know 21st century very interactive, like it's all very, you know, 21st century very interactive, very multimedia, but they have put such thought and such care into every one of those displays to help you understand the lives of these people and the choices that they've made, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes forced to make Again.
• 28:37
  Crista Cowan: That was just a really impactful experience because of the broad perspective that it provided.
• 28:39
  Crista Cowan: And when we're researching our family history or looking for stories about our ancestors, it's not very often that you find a piece of paper that tells you the story of your ancestor Right.
• 28:51
  Crista Cowan: But when you can understand the lives of people who lived similar to them, it gives you the story.
• 28:57
  Crista Cowan: Because of that context and I think that's what that particular museum did for me was it helped provide this sweeping context for the Irish experience, such that I then had greater understanding for my own ancestors.
• 29:12
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, yeah, the story, yeah.
• 29:14
  Crista Cowan: Well, I could probably sit and talk to you for days, for sure, and we may need to have you come back and tell more stories, but before we go, I would just love to know if you have a hope for the future, whether it's the future of family history or heritage, travel, or your own family history, what is it that you kind of look forward to?
• 29:41
  Kyle Betit: you kind of look forward to.
• 29:42
  Kyle Betit: Yeah well, I think my hope for the, you know, heritage travel space is really that it continues to grow in a way that's diverse and in a way that's helpful to the world.
• 29:53
  Kyle Betit: By diverse, I mean, you know, we started doing heritage travel in Europe where, you know, it's kind of like Europeans have the, have the, have had the bug for a long time for for genealogy, but we're, you know, we're expanding now into Asia with you know trips we've done to Japan this year and to South America and to West Africa, where so many African-Americans have ancestors and we learn about the records as we go along to do that, because they can be very different experiences of how to find information about your family.
• 30:32
  Kyle Betit: And the virtual tours are helping with things like going to Nigeria.
• 30:38
  Kyle Betit: It's hard to physically go to Nigeria, but a virtual tour can be a good way of getting an experience there you can do with with ancestry, dna or, like your example, with with what we can do with irish irish immigrants now.
• 30:59
  Kyle Betit: But with west african immigrants we're now getting more and more matches to people who either live in in africa or their parents lived in africa and being a, and so we're starting to be able to go to specific places in in africa based on those.
• 31:16
  Kyle Betit: So I have the hope that we'll have, you know, the kind of land tours that we did, people who go on cruises that have a genealogy element, the virtual aspect that those kinds of things will expand and people of diverse backgrounds will be able to experience it, and kind of tying into what George Ott said when he was here with you about kind of the hope for bridging differences, and I've always thought of genealogy kind of as a peacemaking tool as well, and I hope they, you know, use this kind of ancestral aspect to connect deeper to places they're are going and that as we do that, we'll understand each other better um around the world.
• 32:06
  Kyle Betit: On a lighter note, um, for me personally, my hope, uh, in the next 20 years is I want to solve an outstanding, um ancestral mystery that I still can't figure out, because I mentioned my grandmother being my inspiration for starting all of this, and she got to see me, you know, be involved in the who Do you Think you Are?
• 32:29
  Kyle Betit: Tv program and be on TV with celebrities, and she loved that.
• 32:34
  Kyle Betit: But she would often say to me you know, it's great that you can find these famous people's ancestors but you still can't find out where our Lupro ancestor came from.
• 32:45
  Kyle Betit: This is my mother's maiden name.
• 32:47
  Kyle Betit: It's kind of like your Irish story where he said he was French but everything says he was born in Pennsylvania.
• 32:52
  Kyle Betit: So we're not even really sure he's changed his name.
• 32:55
  Kyle Betit: So we're not even really sure he's changed his name.
• 32:57
  Kyle Betit: But it's not going to be the most comfortable situation if I get to heaven before I figure out where they're from, because she's going to have a few things to say to me about it.
• 33:06
  Kyle Betit: So hopefully the DNA I'm inching towards it with the ancestry.
• 33:15
  Crista Cowan: DNA with clues.
• 33:16
  Crista Cowan: But yeah, that's something I hope for.
• 33:18
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 33:18
  Crista Cowan: Who's the brick?
• 33:20
  Kyle Betit: wall.
• 33:21
  Kyle Betit: What generation?
• 33:21
  Kyle Betit: Uh, he was born in the 1820s.
• 33:23
  Kyle Betit: Okay, daniel lupro.
• 33:24
  Kyle Betit: He just appears in the 1840s in pennsylvania.
• 33:26
  Kyle Betit: Nobody else has the name lupro, basically anywhere in the world right the story is that he changed his name, which is probably true, but was it something like Lupo or was it something completely different?
• 33:37
  Kyle Betit: Was he really French?
• 33:38
  Kyle Betit: Just a huge mystery that we can't really find any documentary evidence to figure out.
• 33:47
  Kyle Betit: But I'm starting to get some clues from all that cousin match analysis that I'm hoping eventually Did you DNA test your grandmother?
• 33:57
  Kyle Betit: I did yes.
• 33:57
  Kyle Betit: I did yes, absolutely.
• 34:00
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 34:01
  Crista Cowan: I loved hearing that little brick wall story because, you know, even genealogists face our own brick walls.
• 34:08
  Kyle Betit: Yeah, absolutely.
• 34:09
  Crista Cowan: Well, I wish you all the best with your looper brick wall.
• 34:11
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much, my John O'Brien.
• 34:14
  Kyle Betit: Yes, hopefully we'll get those solved.
• 34:17
  Crista Cowan: Fabulous Thanks for being here.