Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Bit by the Bug (with Emily Pulham) | Episode 42

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Bit by the Bug (with Emily Pulham) | Episode 42 · Stories That Live In Us

0:02
Emily Pulham: It is worth it.
0:03
Emily Pulham: I cannot think of very many things in my life other than my children, that are going to outlast me.
0:07
Emily Pulham: This is going to outlast me.
0:09
Emily Pulham: My kids are going to want to read it.
0:11
Emily Pulham: Their kids are going to want to read it, even if they only skim through and look at the photos.
0:16
Emily Pulham: I mean, come on right, If they only just kind of get a glimpse at that.
0:21
Emily Pulham: I just can't think of many other things I've done with my life that are that important.
0:26
Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
0:34
Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online The Barefoot Genealogist.
0:38
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.
0:45
Crista Cowan: My guest today is Emily Pulham.
0:50
Crista Cowan: I'm excited for you to listen in on our conversation Now.
0:53
Crista Cowan: Emily was one of my students at Brigham Young University years and years ago.
0:57
Crista Cowan: She is now a young mother with a brand new baby, but she has spent the last several years writing a book about her grandmother's stories, and it's just so lovely the way that she has tackled this project and the importance that it has for her and for her children.
1:14
Crista Cowan: Emily, thank you so much for being here.
1:16
Crista Cowan: I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.
1:18
Emily Pulham: I'm so excited to be here.
1:19
Crista Cowan: Good.
1:20
Crista Cowan: Well, I would just love to hear a little bit about how you first got interested in family history.
1:25
Emily Pulham: Okay, wow, it feels like I have to dig into the cobwebs of my brain for that.
1:31
Emily Pulham: My grandma was always doing family history and genealogy.
1:34
Emily Pulham: She had a microfilm machine at her house so and I lived right next door so I kind of grew up watching that and then one time I was probably 12.
1:43
Emily Pulham: She took me to the Family History Center in Salt Lake with her and helped me look up a ship I think it was a ship manifest list and we found somebody in her German ancestry, like I remember finding the name, and she let me be part of that.
1:57
Emily Pulham: I was incredible, and so my grandma kind of sort of helped me, but she never forced me and so I think just by watching her I just gained that.
2:07
Emily Pulham: But then maybe 10 years ago I got, I did a little bit more of my own research and it just I got bit by the bug.
2:13
Emily Pulham: It's just I don't know how else to call it.
2:15
Emily Pulham: This is got bit by the bug.
2:17
Crista Cowan: So what is it about family history?
2:19
Crista Cowan: Do you think that is so compelling for you?
2:22
Emily Pulham: It's, it's the stories, and maybe like that you can feel the person you found.
2:28
Emily Pulham: So I'll tell the story of this newspaper article I found in Chronicling America.
2:33
Emily Pulham: I went to a class that was trying to help us figure out how to do more genealogy than just the records, and I found on Chronicling America an obituary for my second great-grandpa's sister-in-law.
2:45
Emily Pulham: She died in her 30s with six children in North Dakota, and I just I like felt like I knew her.
2:54
Emily Pulham: I just it was really profound and I just thought I need to keep doing this, finding the stories, finding the untold things and my grandma didn't know this story, and so it really helped me feel like I could do this and I could share untold stories that meant something and resonated, and so that to me it's the stories that you find.
3:18
Crista Cowan: And the story in that instance wasn't even necessarily personal, because you didn't have children at that point right.
3:22
Emily Pulham: No, I mean, I think I cried when I found the story, because when you think about the ages of her kids I think her youngest was one or two and then you know, leaving her husband.
3:34
Emily Pulham: I don't know if he got remarried I'll have to go back in and find that but yeah, the older I get and the more kids I have, then it's absolutely becomes very, very personal.
3:45
Crista Cowan: So you mentioned the more kids you have.
3:47
Crista Cowan: You just had a baby.
3:48
Emily Pulham: I just had a baby two weeks ago.
3:50
Emily Pulham: Number Number three, so my third, my third girl.
3:54
Emily Pulham: So, and genealogy is such a great hobby because I can keep doing it at home with kids, because the internet, I love it Sure.
4:01
Crista Cowan: Absolutely.
4:01
Crista Cowan: It's awesome, and your oldest is held Five, so tell me a little bit about the culture of storytelling you're creating in your family with your kids and the importance of that.
4:11
Emily Pulham: Oh, that is such a good question.
4:12
Emily Pulham: I think the artifacts you have around your home, the tangibles, help lead to those conversations.
4:17
Emily Pulham: So here's a story from my growing up there's a teddy bear that's like on the shelf, and my daughter wants to know why she can't play with this teddy bear, and so I tell her.
4:25
Emily Pulham: When I first took voice lessons, I really was afraid to sing, and so my teacher took this teddy bear and put it at the back of the church up high in the rafters, and I sang to the teddy bear because I was so nervous to look in people's eyes.
4:40
Emily Pulham: And so she, this teacher of mine, just really impacted me.
4:44
Emily Pulham: When I graduated high school she gifted me her teddy bear, and so then I tell my daughter this story.
4:49
Emily Pulham: She loves that story, she wants to hear it all the time.
4:52
Emily Pulham: So that's, that's a, that's a my story example.
4:55
Emily Pulham: But I have other artifacts and I think that for a five-year-old, a young, a young child, little things like that, physical reminders, tend to help lead to those conversations the most, and then they'll, they'll grow into other, they'll ask more questions as they grow.
5:10
Crista Cowan: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, and a teddy bear is an easy conversation starter for a five-year-old.
5:15
Crista Cowan: Yes, yes, for me, one of my main goals in life is to see a family tree hanging in every home, because that also can be a conversation starter as they get older, as those names are in front of them all the time, it leads to questions, which leads to stories, and that's that's really important to me.
5:35
Crista Cowan: So, yes, surround your children with all of the things that lead to those stories.
5:39
Crista Cowan: I'm a firm believer in that.
5:41
Crista Cowan: At some point you decided you wanted to share your grandmother's story.
5:45
Crista Cowan: Tell us about that.
5:47
Emily Pulham: Well, she's been telling stories since I was growing up.
5:50
Emily Pulham: So I mentioned my one grandma that I grew up next to and that this is another grandma that I didn't grow up around as much, but when she was 12, her family immigrated from Denmark to the United States and that Danish identity has been just a huge part of my growing up.
6:08
Emily Pulham: We always had Danish Christmas parties in December and my mom kind of helped to, you know, continue that tradition, even though it's from my dad's side of the family and I've known my grandma's a big writer, but she just needed some help to get over the finish line.
6:25
Emily Pulham: She's in her 80s now and I just I don't know.
6:28
Emily Pulham: I felt that that was my next job.
6:31
Emily Pulham: My next genealogy project was I needed to help her.
6:33
Emily Pulham: I needed to get out of research mode and get into help grandma.
6:38
Emily Pulham: So I took a bunch of stuff from her house and said give me all your stuff so I can scan the things.
6:46
Emily Pulham: And she sent me all of her things she had written over the years and I kind of helped become the person to collate it and put it together in a overarching story that started maybe a year and a half ago, almost two years ago.
7:02
Crista Cowan: So almost two years ago, you had a newborn.
7:05
Emily Pulham: Then too, I did, I did, and a three-year-old.
7:10
Crista Cowan: And you've got all of these, you know, ephemera of a life right, photos and, I imagine, clippings of things and pieces of paper.
7:17
Crista Cowan: How do you set up a space and a time to do that when you're raising small children?
7:25
Emily Pulham: Miracles happened, literally.
7:30
Emily Pulham: If someone were to ask me this I can't even tell you I found the time I would wheel my then infant with me into the Family Search Center in Lehi because it's near my home, and then sometimes on Saturdays I would take my other daughter because they have a play area and I'd say you play there while I do some scanning.
7:46
Emily Pulham: And so having a supportive spouse who's willing to let me leave with these giant boxes was really a big thing for me.
7:54
Emily Pulham: You know, after bedtime, sitting down at the computer, I'm sure my husband would have his own version of this story of how I wrote the book, this story of how, how I wrote the book.
8:07
Emily Pulham: But but yeah it, I would say it took a lot of personal sacrifice, but I I love it so much that it really didn't feel like that much of a sacrifice.
8:12
Emily Pulham: So pretty much every waking moment I had free I had what's my next goal?
8:15
Emily Pulham: Oh, you know, scan, scan this pile, write this story, take this story and put it in third person.
8:22
Emily Pulham: You know, I just set little tiny goals for myself and kept moving forward.
8:27
Crista Cowan: That's amazing and a lot of work.
8:29
Emily Pulham: It was it is.
8:30
Crista Cowan: Yeah, but totally possible and important enough to make the sacrifice to do that.
8:36
Crista Cowan: I think a lot of times these kinds of books don't get written until after that person has passed, and in your case, you had this experience of writing it while she's still with you, while her memory is still accessible.
8:48
Crista Cowan: How involved was she in that process?
8:51
Emily Pulham: Yeah, Um, that's a really good question because I had a ton of clarifying questions for her.
8:55
Emily Pulham: She is the last family link to Denmark and to all these family memories.
9:01
Emily Pulham: She only had one brother.
9:02
Emily Pulham: He passed away, uh, maybe 15 years ago, and so she she's the memory keeper and memory holder and so I was like I need to ask her all the questions I was texting her.
9:13
Emily Pulham: I asked her if I could interview her and record.
9:16
Emily Pulham: She didn't like that idea, so I went with what she was comfortable with, which she actually is good at texting, and I would call her occasionally.
9:25
Emily Pulham: But she did have quite a bit written.
9:28
Emily Pulham: So I took what was already written and kind of put it in format and then this summer, so maybe like five months ago, I said, okay, I think I'm ready to send you my draft so that she could read it through, and I asked her permission if I could change it from first person, like her voice, to third person and she said, yes, her story does read kind of like a novel.
9:49
Emily Pulham: I love that.
9:50
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
9:50
Crista Cowan: So as you were going through this experience, is there one story from her life that you just became enamored with in the process?
9:59
Emily Pulham: I have so many stories.
10:01
Emily Pulham: Pick a favorite child, pick a favorite.
10:03
Emily Pulham: It is very hard.
10:04
Emily Pulham: Well, because she grew up in Denmark during World War II, some of the most dramatic were they involved Nazis actually.
10:14
Emily Pulham: So I'll tell this story.
10:15
Emily Pulham: Her mom's family.
10:16
Emily Pulham: She had a lot of aunts and uncles and this one aunt of hers never had any children, her Aunt Carla.
10:24
Emily Pulham: And her Aunt Carla actually really wanted to marry her dad.
10:26
Emily Pulham: Anyway, it's funny, her mom and her aunt both really liked my great grandpa at the same time.
10:30
Emily Pulham: But anyway, my great grandma won out so but Aunt Carla, she becomes a really respected podiatrist.
10:37
Emily Pulham: She never has any children, but there's one scene in the book where she tells her story.
10:42
Emily Pulham: So she was married to a man named Julius Wellendorf, and hopefully he has no descendants listening to this right now?
10:50
Emily Pulham: Probably not.
10:50
Emily Pulham: He was, he's.
10:52
Emily Pulham: He's Danish but he's of German descent, so he's living in Denmark.
10:56
Emily Pulham: He asked her Aunt Carla to take his coat to the dry cleaners.
11:02
Emily Pulham: She looks through the pockets, she opens the pocket and looks at this list.
11:06
Emily Pulham: It is a list of 500 Jewish families in Copenhagen.
11:12
Emily Pulham: She looks at that list and she was very disturbed to find that list.
11:19
Emily Pulham: She knew he was involved with the Nazis and their movement in Denmark.
11:23
Emily Pulham: She burns the list and she takes his coat to the cleaners.
11:27
Emily Pulham: Then later he says what happened to the?
11:29
Emily Pulham: Did you, did you, what did you do with the things in my pocket?
11:32
Emily Pulham: And he got really upset with her and she denied you know doing anything.
11:37
Emily Pulham: So she ended up not like she divorced him and went away, but like those those little, those little brushes with um.
11:47
Emily Pulham: The vitriol that was going on at the time was kind of scary and my grandma's her memory of it was um Julius had a son from a previous marriage and he was in the Hitler youth but he was a very arrogant kind of a boy and she really avoided him at family events and stuff.
12:05
Emily Pulham: And so my grandma, I feel like she holds some anxiety inside of her from those growing up years where things were really tense and really close to home.
12:15
Emily Pulham: But she kind of breathed a sigh of relief when they were divorced so she didn't have to see that you know cousin of hers anymore.
12:23
Emily Pulham: But that's just an example of one of the stories, and there's another one too, I guess.
12:29
Emily Pulham: Do you have time for a second one?
12:30
Emily Pulham: Of course we have time for a second.
12:31
Emily Pulham: Well, so my grandma was fairly young at the time and so she just remembers being left home alone and not knowing where her mom and dad were.
12:39
Emily Pulham: But it turns out my great grandma got taken by the Nazis and questioned for 10 hours.
12:45
Emily Pulham: She got caught in the crossfire of they were collaborating with the Danish resistance at my grandpa's work and she just has really strong memories of the anxiety she felt not knowing where her parents were.
13:00
Emily Pulham: And so then later in the book I have a moment where they tell the story of this moment where the Danish resistance come and take the bicycles from the factory that the Nazis had ordered and the resistance takes their order so that they can't have these bicycles and but my great grandma she was the only one in the factory at the time.
13:20
Emily Pulham: All the other workers, they had tried to get them out of the factory and make it be as empty of a scene as possible.
13:26
Emily Pulham: She just came to bring my great grandpa lunch and she just gets caught and gets caught and she does.
13:32
Emily Pulham: She knows nothing but she anyway just absolutely terrifying, and so that's not a savory story.
13:40
Emily Pulham: I don't relish it.
13:42
Emily Pulham: That's not a savory story, I don't relish it.
13:48
Emily Pulham: But knowing those stories does bring to your mind the importance of loving all people and brings to your mind the importance to know your past, I guess, and not to vilify people, but just to just to be familiar enough with it that you can say, not to vilify people, but just to be familiar enough with it that you can say, okay, this is my grandma's connection to World War II and I hold those stories and I get to share those stories and say this was a real event and these people really did have big struggles.
14:15
Emily Pulham: There's stories of that that abound in here, but my grandma was very young so she was not the main character of them but because it's the environment that she grew up in, I make sure to include those in a big way.
14:27
Crista Cowan: And they're her memories that led to the stories.
14:30
Crista Cowan: And so you think, like, as a child, those experiences are so impressionable that she has enough memories of them to craft the story from them.
14:39
Crista Cowan: They had to have had an effect on her and who she is, and so the telling of them isn't just about the connection to history, it's also about understanding her better and who she was raised to become because of her environment, right.
14:54
Emily Pulham: Yeah, she is like one of the most loving and like outreaching people, like she loves to talk to homeless people, she does all kinds of things.
15:02
Emily Pulham: There's another story in the book where she gets stuck on an airplane that absolutely has some of the worst turbulence of all time and she, to this day, has a fear of flying, and so it's actually very helpful for those of us, her descendants, to realize why is grandma afraid of flying?
15:16
Emily Pulham: Why won't she go anywhere unless she's driving?
15:18
Emily Pulham: It's because of that experience, and so you can kind of have empathy for those personality characteristics for sure.
15:26
Crista Cowan: Yeah, I love that.
15:27
Crista Cowan: It's interesting to me that you know, sometimes on this podcast I'll just tell a story.
15:34
Crista Cowan: That's just, you know, front to back, a meaty story.
15:38
Crista Cowan: But the little vignettes of life and the way that those stories start to weave together and form a pattern becomes really evident when you do something in this format.
15:49
Emily Pulham: Yeah, it does, I guess.
15:51
Emily Pulham: I don't know if people can see, but here's the proof copy of it.
15:54
Emily Pulham: You can see.
15:54
Emily Pulham: It is not a short book and it is scenes.
16:29
Emily Pulham: It is scenes from her life.
16:29
Emily Pulham: I try not to bore people with you know years of just kind of where keep moving forward.
16:34
Emily Pulham: Anyway, I could talk forever about this, which is why I wrote a book
16:37
Crista Cowan: Like why a book?
16:38
Crista Cowan: Right, not just.
16:38
Crista Cowan: You could have just talked forever.
16:40
Crista Cowan: You could have recorded those stories.
16:41
Crista Cowan: You could have just become a storyteller and inherited her stories and passed them on to your children and grandchildren.
16:48
Crista Cowan: Why this format?
16:51
Emily Pulham: First of all, the photos needed to be digitized.
16:55
Emily Pulham: Like and maybe that's a separate discussion, but they needed to be digitized.
16:59
Emily Pulham: I wanted to find the best copies available to put in here because there's been copies made of copies for years, so I wanted the originals and I wanted them preserved in a good way in here.
17:09
Emily Pulham: My grandma's also very traditional, you know.
17:11
Emily Pulham: I think she always envisioned she actually had the title of her book picked out for years prior the Red Hills of Home Stories of a Modern Day Pioneer.
17:19
Emily Pulham: I tried to talk her into something different that would maybe like give hints that, like you're from Denmark or whatever.
17:24
Emily Pulham: No, they immigrated to Southern Utah and so the Red Hills of Home it has been.
17:29
Emily Pulham: And I try to just, you know, say this is a format that is very accessible for my grandma, who is still with us, and I can take a PDF of this and I can share it as widely as I, as I choose to, with family friends, you know, when she passes, upload it to.
17:45
Emily Pulham: You know, say, family search tree or ancestry it's.
17:48
Emily Pulham: It can be as portable as I need it to be and those people it's a print on demand product.
17:53
Emily Pulham: I'm not.
17:53
Emily Pulham: I don't have cases and cases of books in my house, so, as needed, can print more for descendants or friends and family, and so it feels like this was the right way to go to honor my grandma, who's still with us and then, but also use technology to share it in wider ways if I need to.
18:09
Crista Cowan: I love that you mentioned that this is a proof copy.
18:12
Crista Cowan: Has she seen it yet?
18:13
Emily Pulham: Yes, so she has seen several copies of it.
18:16
Emily Pulham: This is our second proof copy round and she, you know, would make notes and text me, send me all the stuff We've got maps and charts and graphs and all kinds of fun things in here and she's she's been very, I think, maybe pleasantly surprised.
18:33
Emily Pulham: Maybe she didn't realize that I could do this.
18:35
Emily Pulham: It's been really fun to work with her on it Because, like I said, I didn't grow up around her.
18:40
Emily Pulham: And here's the other thing I am a lot like her but I didn't grow up near her and so I have benefited in a huge way of getting to know her deeply, because I wouldn't say I felt like an outsider in my family.
18:54
Emily Pulham: I would say that I sometimes felt like I was louder, more bubbly, more, you know, performer, like my grandma who's a singer, and it has helped me accept myself, actually this process in a big way.
19:09
Emily Pulham: I don't know if that even answers your question.
19:11
Emily Pulham: You asked me.
19:12
Emily Pulham: I'm sorry.
19:12
Crista Cowan: That was actually really beautiful and for me, is one of the one of the reasons that I am so enamored with storytelling and just feel like it's just so important is that I want people to have those stories preserved.
19:28
Crista Cowan: But the process of doing that, the process of telling those stories, the process of hearing those stories, does exactly what you just explained.
19:36
Crista Cowan: It helps us recognize in ourselves those who came before us and find our place in our family, because all families are messy I say that so much, but it's so true and families are different and and it just helps us find our place.
19:52
Crista Cowan: Storytelling has such power to do that.
19:54
Emily Pulham: I I 100% agree there.
19:56
Emily Pulham: There's no, there's no way that you can connect with someone solely from just dates and facts.
20:02
Emily Pulham: It doesn't quite do the trick.
20:05
Emily Pulham: You have to go a layer deeper and it does take that.
20:07
Emily Pulham: But it is worth all the time and energy I know.
20:09
Emily Pulham: You know that it's worth it.
20:11
Emily Pulham: So it's worth it for me personally.
20:13
Emily Pulham: But I think I hope, my hope is that my other, my grandma, has four sons.
20:18
Emily Pulham: She has no daughters, daughters, I don't know.
20:21
Emily Pulham: We carry stories.
20:23
Emily Pulham: We're kind of, for better or worse, most of the time women are the storytellers.
20:27
Emily Pulham: But my grandma has like 22 grandkids and most of us are girls.
20:33
Emily Pulham: So it's like I'm like, okay, I will take up this torch of the storytelling for my grandma so that it doesn't get lost.
20:38
Emily Pulham: So that it doesn't get lost because, for whatever reason you know, it's harder for my dad and uncles to maybe take up this mantle.
20:48
Emily Pulham: But it feels very worth it and I hope that it's worth it for my other cousins especially.
20:54
Crista Cowan: so all the time and energy and effort to digitize the photos and collect the stories and write the stories and craft it into this work of art?
21:03
Crista Cowan: Essentially, is this a one and done experience or are you motivated to do this for other members of your family?
21:13
Emily Pulham: I am.
21:13
Emily Pulham: I'm motivated to.
21:15
Emily Pulham: Let's see, I've learned that it is very hard actually to do it for a living relative because you have to go with what they want and you, unlike someone who's a distant past relative.
21:26
Emily Pulham: Um, I do have another project in the works.
21:29
Emily Pulham: Um, one of my other lines.
21:32
Emily Pulham: Um, my great-grandma from Scarborough in Yorkshire has a very interesting family story and I imagine myself writing a narrative nonfiction about her as well.
21:45
Emily Pulham: I can be more playful with it, possibly because I have some stories.
21:51
Emily Pulham: But I want to fill in those gaps with the historical context.
21:54
Emily Pulham: So that's my great-great-grandma, margaret Ness, and her daughter, emily, my great-grandma and they both immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s and I just think they have really compelling stories that would resonate with people today.
22:10
Emily Pulham: So that story would be easier to tell because I can kind of go on my own and do my thing without people saying, well, gee, whiz, why do you want to write it like that?
22:20
Emily Pulham: But I will say, all the friction in the world has been worth it to do this book, and I involved my dad in it too because he's the oldest, her oldest son, and so his memory kind of helped round things out.
22:31
Emily Pulham: But, like I say, the more people you involve in a project, the more complicated it becomes.
22:35
Emily Pulham: So, yeah, it's whetted my appetite for more stories in the future and that's the one that I'm hoping to do next, but it may not be as long or as involved of a project, because I won't be inheriting a bunch of photos to digitize or any of that.
22:49
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
22:50
Crista Cowan: So if you could give one piece of advice to somebody wanting to undertake something like this, other than maybe wait till after they've passed, I don't know.
23:00
Emily Pulham: I would say don't wait until after they pass for good reasons, right, because there might be some gaps missing in the story.
23:07
Emily Pulham: I'm not trying to be self-promoting, but I would love to talk to you about it and help you know you are not alone in wanting to do this.
23:18
Emily Pulham: It is daunting to inherit boxes and boxes of disorganized stuff and then put it and organize it.
23:26
Emily Pulham: I would just love to let you know that you can do it.
23:31
Emily Pulham: I want to be your greatest cheerleader.
23:33
Emily Pulham: It is worth it.
23:34
Emily Pulham: I cannot think of very many things in my life other than my children that are going to outlast me.
23:38
Emily Pulham: This is going to outlast me.
23:40
Emily Pulham: My kids are going to want to read it.
23:42
Emily Pulham: Their kids are going to want to read it, even if they only skim through and look at the photos.
23:47
Emily Pulham: I mean, come on right, if they only just kind of get a glimpse at that.
23:52
Emily Pulham: I just can't think of many other things I've done with my life that are that important.
23:55
Emily Pulham: So it's hard, yes, but what's what?
24:01
Emily Pulham: What is really going to outlast you?
24:02
Emily Pulham: So I think it's worth it.
24:05
Crista Cowan: I love that.
24:05
Crista Cowan: So if people want to contact you to have you be a mentor or a cheerleader through the process for themselves, where can they do that?
24:13
Emily Pulham: Instagram is kind of my favorite place where I live and I shared I've shared a ton of my process on there, but you can also email me organizedwithemily at gmailcom and I'm not here.
24:25
Emily Pulham: I have helped people do books and they've paid me to help them, but honestly, I just want to help people.
24:32
Emily Pulham: I just want people to feel that they're not alone in this process.
24:35
Emily Pulham: I may not be taking very many paid clients in the future just because of my growing brood at home and my growing family tree on the other side, but I would absolutely love to connect with you on Instagram or you can email me.
24:48
Emily Pulham: Just would love to help anybody.
24:51
Crista Cowan: I love that Fantastic.
24:52
Crista Cowan: Well, before we wrap up, I ask everybody the same question Okay, you ready for this, as you think?
25:06
Crista Cowan: about the future of family history, of your family, like what is it that you hope for the future?
25:10
Emily Pulham: I hope that people, they recognize that they're part of something bigger.
25:13
Emily Pulham: Loneliness is so prevalent in these days and I think we're coming out of the pandemic.
25:18
Emily Pulham: Maybe it's a couple years in hindsight, but I don't know if anybody is listening who remembers some of that sheer sense of loneliness we had.
25:27
Emily Pulham: Your ancestors are closer to you than you think.
25:31
Emily Pulham: They can help fill the gap where sometimes there's not really a living person that can really touch your heart that way.
25:40
Emily Pulham: And I have had multiple experiences with that that are very, I hold very close to my heart and I, I know that.
25:47
Emily Pulham: I know that they care about you and I, I hope that everybody finds a way to connect with that, whether to reconcile hard things or to spring forward into something new and just feel that you are not alone and that there's more support, more love out there for you through them than you can ever imagine.
26:16
Emily Pulham: And you's not, it's.
26:18
Emily Pulham: You're not making it up, it's not in your head.
26:21
Emily Pulham: They, they really do, they care about you and they, they want, they're cheering you on and I, I hope, I hope everybody feels that and and gets a chance to connect with that in the future, and I think it's more accessible now than it ever used to be with DNA testing and other other forms of that.
26:37
Emily Pulham: But to dig deeper to find those connections will hopefully help everyone feel more connected.
26:42
Crista Cowan: Beautifully said.
26:43
Crista Cowan: Thank you so much.
26:44
Crista Cowan: Thank you.