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We're Doing This Together (with Steve Cowan) | Episode 12 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:01
  Steve Cowan: He was the hardest working man I've ever met and I could not keep up with him.
• 0:05
  Steve Cowan: I mean, I thought I was in great shape playing football and I could not keep up with him, but what I was able to do, he had constantly told me stories about different things.
• 0:16
  Steve Cowan: That really helped me understand who he was.
• 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.
• 0:30
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:34
  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: You can change everything.
• 0:50
  Crista Cowan: By now.
• 0:50
  Crista Cowan: You know me as a storyteller, but I have not yet introduced you to my storyteller, the person in my life, or one of the people in my life, who filled my life with stories so much that it was inevitable that I would become a storyteller, and that's my dad.
• 1:04
  Crista Cowan: My dad and I have always been close, but never closer than we have over the last handful of years, as he has come into retirement and has dived headfirst back into family history.
• 1:22
  Crista Cowan: We've had the opportunity to really connect over that, so much so that he is no longer just my father.
• 1:28
  Crista Cowan: He's also become one of my best friends, and yet I still feel a little bit like a little girl every time I get to sit with him and hear him tell stories.
• 1:39
  Crista Cowan: Now you're going to hear him tell some stories, and there's going to be a whole host of characters and I don't expect you to be able to keep track of some stories.
• 1:43
  Crista Cowan: And there's going to be a whole host of characters and I don't expect you to be able to keep track of all of them.
• 1:48
  Crista Cowan: Here's what I do need you to know in order to enjoy my dad and his storytelling, which is that he loves his family.
• 2:00
  Crista Cowan: This man has not only instilled in me a love of story, but a love of family that is so powerful, and I think, just spending a few minutes with him, you're going to feel that and you're going to start to understand that in a way that, for you, might be a little bit new.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: So, as you listen to my dad tell his stories, as you listen to our conversation, what I hope that you'll take from this is that you should be talking to your children.
• 2:32
  Crista Cowan: You should be telling your family stories as much as you can.
• 2:37
  Crista Cowan: You should be reminding them about who their parents were and who their grandparents were and who their great grandparents were.
• 2:45
  Crista Cowan: I want you to be telling those stories and, much like you may struggle to keep track of who everyone is as you listen to us today, your children will too in the beginning, but very quickly they'll come to know those people as individual characters in their story, people as individual characters in their story, and so, whether they've ever met great grandma Mary or not, they will come to know her because you knew her and loved her, and that is what my dad has to offer as a storyteller.
• 3:19
  Crista Cowan: Dad, I'm so glad you're here.
• 3:21
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for being here.
• 3:22
  Steve Cowan: Thank you, I like being here.
• 3:23
  Crista Cowan: So I want to hear your version of how you got into family history.
• 3:30
  Steve Cowan: It started really when I was very, very little.
• 3:33
  Steve Cowan: My parents took all of us to family reunions on a regular basis.
• 3:38
  Steve Cowan: My mom's side of the family I'm sorry.
• 3:41
  Steve Cowan: My dad's side of the family had a family reunion from the time I can remember.
• 3:44
  Steve Cowan: I'm sorry.
• 3:45
  Steve Cowan: My dad's side of the family had a family reunion from the time I can remember and we'd go every summer and I would see all these cousins of my mom and their children and their grandchildren and so on and so forth.
• 3:56
  Steve Cowan: And I can remember when I was five years old sitting at the feet of my great grandmother, amanda, and listening to stories from her about her ancestors and what I started doing, as then, a young child is trying to figure out who all these people were.
• 4:12
  Steve Cowan: You know, how do these all fit together?
• 4:14
  Steve Cowan: I'm a very logical math person, that's who I am, and so I have these, my grandmother with her, her grandfather with her 12, his 12 siblings, and I had to.
• 4:29
  Steve Cowan: I met, I think, almost every one of them at these reunions and I was trying to figure out all these cousins of my mom because she has on her dad's side something like 90 or 60-some cousins and I'm trying to figure out who they all are and who they go to which.
• 4:40
  Steve Cowan: And that was interesting from outside.
• 4:42
  Steve Cowan: Something like 60-some cousins and I'm trying to figure out who they all are and who they go to which, and that was interesting to me.
• 4:50
  Steve Cowan: And then I'd hear all their different stories of things they'd done or not done, and that interested me.
• 4:56
  Steve Cowan: And then later in life, when I turned about I think it was like 14, I was playing football in high school and I was trying to stay in shape one summer, and so my mom suggested that I work with my grandfather for a summer doing and he was a gardener and I thought, okay, that's.
• 5:12
  Steve Cowan: My grandfather was like 60 years old at the time and here I am at 14 or 15.
• 5:18
  Steve Cowan: And I think, oh, this would be great.
• 5:19
  Steve Cowan: I can, you know, do the things he can't do.
• 5:22
  Steve Cowan: And that was wrong, as you know well yeah, you met Grandpa.
• 5:31
  Steve Cowan: I did know Grandpa.
• 5:31
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, he was the hardest working man I've ever met and I could not keep up with him.
• 5:35
  Steve Cowan: I mean I thought I was in great shape playing football and I could not keep up with him, but what I was able to do.
• 5:42
  Steve Cowan: He had constantly telling me stories about different things and that really helped me understand who he was, because he started out as a dairy farmer and had worked at a frozen food packing plant for several years and now he was a gardener taking care, and he did excellent work and he would tell me all these different stories and it just resonated with me that everybody has a story and I loved hearing those stories.
• 6:11
  Steve Cowan: I didn't do much about it until I got home from my mission, when I had a little more time and was married, and we started sitting down and filling out the old family group sheets and the pedigree charts and starting to figure out all this.
• 6:24
  Steve Cowan: But the thing that I guess interests me the most is when I'd find out.
• 6:29
  Steve Cowan: I'd get information that others had given and find out hey, wait a minute, that's not quite right, and then I had to figure out how to change that and present it.
• 6:38
  Steve Cowan: So my journey in family history has been from the time I was about four or five years old well, until today.
• 6:44
  Steve Cowan: I mean, I still am very involved in it, but I had a break period where I was a career in raising kids and just didn't do as much as I would have liked to have done.
• 6:53
  Steve Cowan: And now that I'm retired I try and do it as often as I can.
• 6:58
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 6:59
  Crista Cowan: I love that you tell stories and have done that my whole life about these people that you knew, and you took us to the family reunions when we were little.
• 7:07
  Crista Cowan: And of course by then you know it was another generation of people, which is partially what got me interested in family history as well.
• 7:14
  Crista Cowan: The same as you, I'm not a math brain, but I have a logic brain and I want to piece all the puzzle pieces together and figure out.
• 7:22
  Crista Cowan: You know who you are and who you go with and how I'm related to you and and that was always fascinating to me From those reunions, as a kid did you have a favorite relative?
• 7:34
  Steve Cowan: I still had a favorite, and I think he was probably everybody's favorite, and that was Uncle Louie.
• 7:40
  Crista Cowan: He was my favorite when I was a kid.
• 7:43
  Steve Cowan: He was everybody's favorite and he just, he was a lot of fun.
• 7:47
  Steve Cowan: And he's actually the one that asked me to be the secretary of the Heaps family organization.
• 7:54
  Steve Cowan: So it was fun getting to know him that way as well.
• 7:57
  Steve Cowan: And it was just, he was a lot of fun my Uncle, wally, my mom actually introduced and he's my great uncle, by the way, so he's my mom's uncle and he introduced him to his wife because my mom knew her.
• 8:11
  Steve Cowan: So Wally was close to my mom's age because Grandma Mary was the oldest of the 11 children and Wally was one of the younger ones.
• 8:22
  Steve Cowan: So family dynamics were different.
• 8:25
  Steve Cowan: My grandpa was in the middle of his family, my grandma was in the oldest of this family.
• 8:29
  Steve Cowan: So the dynamics were different in those two families, but each of them had people that I loved and learned a lot from over the years.
• 8:38
  Crista Cowan: Loved Uncle Louie, Loved Uncle Wally.
• 8:40
  Crista Cowan: I still remember when the 1930 census came out and one of the first people I went and looked for was your mom and her parents.
• 8:47
  Crista Cowan: And she was living.
• 8:48
  Crista Cowan: She was eight years old, living with them in Los Angeles with her younger sister, and uncle Wally was living with them.
• 8:54
  Crista Cowan: And I took it to ma and I said why is uncle Wally living with you guys?
• 9:00
  Crista Cowan: Cause it's her uncle.
• 9:01
  Crista Cowan: And she told me this story about how he got in a lot of trouble as a kid.
• 9:07
  Crista Cowan: He did.
• 9:08
  Crista Cowan: And at one point his parents told him that if he didn't shape up and go to school and you know behave that they were going to send him to live with his sister.
• 9:18
  Crista Cowan: The threat was not that they were going to send him to live with your grandma Mary.
• 9:21
  Crista Cowan: The threat was that they were going to send him to live with her husband, grandpa Victor, who could work you in circles at 14.
• 9:27
  Crista Cowan: And so you know, 30 years earlier, probably was exactly what Uncle Wally needed to keep him in line.
• 9:36
  Steve Cowan: It's interesting when you talk about Grandpa Victor and Grandma Mary, the dynamics of those two.
• 9:40
  Steve Cowan: It was really interesting because I worked with him one-on-one and so I got to know him and he was a hardworking man.
• 9:48
  Steve Cowan: But he never said much ever when I was growing up that he was always out working in a shop or doing something.
• 9:57
  Steve Cowan: He wouldn't eat hot food, for example.
• 10:00
  Steve Cowan: Everything had to be stone cold before he would eat it.
• 10:02
  Steve Cowan: Um, he loved spicy foods, just, he loved my wife's chili.
• 10:07
  Steve Cowan: Um, but he was just a very quiet man.
• 10:10
  Steve Cowan: But if you got out of line, no, you didn't get out of line with grandpa.
• 10:15
  Steve Cowan: You just didn't.
• 10:16
  Steve Cowan: Grandma would love you to death and grandpa would would discipline.
• 10:20
  Steve Cowan: I mean he just by a look, or just he'd put you to work if you didn't.
• 10:25
  Steve Cowan: So yeah, that was interesting.
• 10:27
  Steve Cowan: And Uncle Wally was not the first person that was sent to Grandma and Grandpa to take care of.
• 10:33
  Steve Cowan: There was always cousins or aunts and uncles living with them, because they were controlling them.
• 10:38
  Steve Cowan: They were the controllers of the family.
• 10:40
  Steve Cowan: They really were.
• 10:42
  Crista Cowan: So you grew up in this family right On your mom's side, with literally almost.
• 10:49
  Crista Cowan: I mean she has more than a hundred cousins, I think, total between the two sides of her family.
• 10:53
  Steve Cowan: First cousin I've never really counted it, but yeah, it's somewhere around a hundred, but your dad's family was very different.
• 11:01
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, my dad came from a family where he had an older sister and a younger sister, and that was it.
• 11:06
  Steve Cowan: Grandma Cowan was one of four girls.
• 11:13
  Steve Cowan: They had brothers, but they all died fairly young.
• 11:16
  Steve Cowan: And then Grandpa Cowan was who I never knew.
• 11:20
  Steve Cowan: I never met my grandfather.
• 11:21
  Steve Cowan: He died.
• 11:22
  Steve Cowan: Actually, he died right after my parents got married, and he came from a family with one brother, that's it.
• 11:29
  Steve Cowan: And so that brother of Grandpa Cowan had four daughters that we didn't even know about for years.
• 11:40
  Steve Cowan: In fact, I think you've talked in some of your other podcasts about the family reunions we go to.
• 11:46
  Steve Cowan: We went to one this last week and that's where we met the families of those four daughters.
• 11:53
  Steve Cowan: We'd met them before, but that was a good reunion to them.
• 11:56
  Steve Cowan: So we didn't know them.
• 11:58
  Steve Cowan: So all we had was my Aunt Dorothy and my Aunt Madeline.
• 12:03
  Steve Cowan: My Aunt Madeline never married and my Aunt Dorothy had two children.
• 12:06
  Steve Cowan: So I have two cousins on my dad's side of the family, or I have 21 on my mom's side.
• 12:14
  Steve Cowan: So yeah, totally different dynamics.
• 12:17
  Steve Cowan: Grandma Cowan was the matriarch and ruler of the roost.
• 12:22
  Steve Cowan: In fact she called my dad Sonny, which is a different story altogether, and my grandmother Mary was kind of the loving, nurturing type of, and my grandpa Victor was just, he was there and when he would get, when he'd come into the house to rest, he'd sit down and he'd tell stories or fall asleep one of the two.
• 12:44
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes both at the same time.
• 12:45
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, He'd be telling a story and fall asleep in the middle of the story.
• 12:48
  Steve Cowan: Wake up and start and go right where he was before.
• 12:52
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 12:53
  Steve Cowan: Grandpa Victor was.
• 12:54
  Steve Cowan: I loved him dearly.
• 12:55
  Steve Cowan: He was a witness at our or I mean, yeah, a witness at our wedding.
• 12:59
  Crista Cowan: So yeah, it's also interesting because you can kind of tell just by the way you talk about them.
• 13:04
  Crista Cowan: It was Grandpa Victor and Grandma Mary on your mom's side and Grandpa Cowan and Grandma Cowan on your mom's side.
• 13:11
  Steve Cowan: Grandma Cowan required us to be very formal, very proper.
• 13:16
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, everyone was aunt and uncle, grandma and grandpa, and yes, it was very formal On my mom's side, even our aunts and uncles, we called them Herman and Winnie, we call them Phyllis and Bob and we didn't call them aunt and uncle where I it's always aunt Madeline and aunt Dorothy and it just, yeah, very formal, differential there.
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: And so your parents, having come from these two different environments, right, they come together to form a family and I mean I loved my grandparents and my.
• 13:47
  Crista Cowan: What I know about your dad is that he fully embraced your mother's family and loved being a part of that vibrancy and chaos and all the people, all the time, and all the stories.
• 14:02
  Steve Cowan: My dad was very gregarious, extremely gregarious.
• 14:07
  Steve Cowan: He loved people.
• 14:09
  Steve Cowan: He loved meeting people.
• 14:10
  Steve Cowan: His job he worked for the city of Los Angeles for like 30 years and he designed streets in Los Angeles but his job was to meet with people that come to the counter.
• 14:25
  Steve Cowan: So he was meeting people public all day long and then he'd go out and inspect jobs and meet with people outside and he was just loved people and love being around people.
• 14:34
  Steve Cowan: And so, yeah, when he'd go to the family reunion, mom would sit in the corner talking to different people.
• 14:40
  Steve Cowan: Dad would be out playing horseshoes, going swimming, just talking to anybody and everybody that was there.
• 14:46
  Steve Cowan: And so, yeah, they were totally different people, but he embraced mom's side of the family wholeheartedly and everybody loved my dad.
• 14:58
  Crista Cowan: Your mom, however, was not embraced by your dad's family in quite the same way embraced by your dad's family in quite the same way.
• 15:04
  Steve Cowan: If my grandma Cowan had had her wish partly because her husband died when she was so young, but if she had had her wish all three of her children would have stayed at home.
• 15:16
  Steve Cowan: None of them would have gotten married.
• 15:17
  Steve Cowan: My dad was the first one to get married and there were several problems with that.
• 15:29
  Steve Cowan: Number one was she didn't want him to get married, and there were several problems with that.
• 15:31
  Steve Cowan: Number one was she didn't want him to get married.
• 15:32
  Steve Cowan: Number two is my mom was a different religion.
• 15:34
  Steve Cowan: My grandma Cowan was a Lutheran, as my Aunt Madeline said in her will when she died.
• 15:39
  Steve Cowan: I was born a Lutheran, I lived a Lutheran, I'm going to die a Lutheran.
• 15:42
  Steve Cowan: My grandma married her grandma had this similar attitude and here my dad marries a Mormon.
• 15:47
  Steve Cowan: And it just it threw her for a loop.
• 15:50
  Crista Cowan: Married Mormon and she was a redhead and she was a redhead.
• 15:53
  Steve Cowan: That was yeah.
• 15:54
  Steve Cowan: That's why I say there were several things.
• 15:55
  Steve Cowan: It all kind of fit together.
• 15:57
  Steve Cowan: And so it was interesting when my parents and they went and visited grandma all the time.
• 16:02
  Steve Cowan: I mean, my dad was very close to his mother and she was a widow and so he felt it was a responsibility to take care of her.
• 16:08
  Steve Cowan: So they went there all the time and my grandma would come up to my dad sitting right next to my mom, and said, would you please ask your wife what she'd like to drink for dinner, and would never talk to my mother For years.
• 16:18
  Steve Cowan: This went on and my mom endured it.
• 16:21
  Steve Cowan: Grandma got to the point where she would talk to her.
• 16:24
  Steve Cowan: I think it's when Sandy was born, my oldest sister, grandma Cowan kind of loosened up.
• 16:31
  Crista Cowan: Grandchildren made the difference.
• 16:32
  Steve Cowan: Grandchildren make a difference.
• 16:33
  Steve Cowan: And then the real difference.
• 16:41
  Steve Cowan: Another story Grandma Cowan was born to German immigrants and they didn't speak English, and so Grandma spoke fluent German.
• 16:50
  Steve Cowan: But when she got married she after World War II actually is when it occurred she decided I can't, I don't want to speak German because there's a stigma in the United States with Germans at that point in time, and so she would not speak German at all.
• 17:04
  Steve Cowan: So when I knew her she would not.
• 17:05
  Steve Cowan: The only German I ever heard her speak is when she'd say thank you.
• 17:13
  Steve Cowan: She would say Dankeschön.
• 17:14
  Steve Cowan: That's the only German I ever heard from my grandma until you were born.
• 17:16
  Steve Cowan: And then all of a sudden, sue would take you over to her house at least once a week and she would sit and sing German lullabies to you and she spoke German to you, and it was that you made a whole change in her.
• 17:31
  Steve Cowan: I'm sorry she didn't live longer to see the rest of the kids, but you got to see that.
• 17:37
  Crista Cowan: I have vague, vague.
• 17:38
  Crista Cowan: It's actually probably one of my earliest memories because she had a sweater that she would wear.
• 17:44
  Crista Cowan: I think it was pink and it was scratchy because she would hold sweater that she would wear.
• 17:45
  Crista Cowan: I think it was pink and it was scratchy because she would hold me when she would sing those German lullabies and the sweater would scratch my face.
• 17:51
  Crista Cowan: It's one of my earliest memories in life.
• 17:53
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, grandma was a unique individual.
• 17:56
  Steve Cowan: She loved us.
• 17:57
  Steve Cowan: We knew she loved us, but she didn't show it.
• 18:00
  Crista Cowan: She wasn't warm.
• 18:01
  Steve Cowan: No, she wasn't warm and fuzzy, like Grandma Mary at all.
• 18:09
  Crista Cowan: Well, growing up in this environment of family reunions and family stories, and even though your two sets of grandparents were very different, they both lived close to you in Los Angeles and so they were around a lot, most of your life, all of your life.
• 18:21
  Crista Cowan: That then translated into how you raised your children and how you taught us and how we interacted with family history.
• 18:30
  Crista Cowan: Growing up.
• 18:30
  Crista Cowan: Even before that, you and mom, when you were at school, took family history classes together.
• 18:36
  Crista Cowan: The story, the way that I tell the story, is my dad was an accounting major.
• 18:41
  Crista Cowan: My mom was an English major.
• 18:42
  Crista Cowan: They were fairly newlyweds with me as a new baby, and decided to take one class together a semester.
• 18:49
  Crista Cowan: So you had some time together.
• 18:51
  Crista Cowan: Is that an accurate retelling?
• 18:53
  Steve Cowan: Close Mom was not an English major until she went back to school after everyone was born and raised.
• 19:00
  Steve Cowan: She was a family, I think of the exact term Child development Child development, family relations is what her major was.
• 19:09
  Steve Cowan: We decided we'd take one class together every year.
• 19:12
  Steve Cowan: It happened to be most of the time those classes.
• 19:16
  Steve Cowan: We talked to the professor before time.
• 19:18
  Steve Cowan: He, especially in one class, he encouraged us to bring you with us.
• 19:23
  Steve Cowan: So we took you to the classes there at BYU.
• 19:26
  Steve Cowan: Otherwise we would pass you off between classes because we were both going after you were born and then we had a good friend that we would.
• 19:35
  Steve Cowan: If, when we went to the class together where they wouldn't let us bring you in, then yes, we would have somebody that would take care of you on campus because we lived actually about two, about three miles from campus.
• 19:49
  Steve Cowan: But what we did was we scheduled our classes.
• 19:51
  Steve Cowan: So we took the bulk of our classes on Monday through Thursday and then I think I had two, one or two Friday morning classes that I had to take and then Friday afternoon we'd get out of school that I had to take and then Friday afternoon we'd get out of school, grab a group bite to eat and head up to Salt Lake City and go to the well at the time it was called the Genealogical Library there in Salt Lake City and spend the afternoon and into the evening doing research on microfilm and microfiche and the reels and just dug into a lot of that.
• 20:24
  Crista Cowan: And again the way I tell the story is, and it's true my parents would take me to the family history library and shove my baby carrier under a microfilm reader, and so somehow I became a genealogist by osmosis.
• 20:35
  Steve Cowan: You did.
• 20:36
  Steve Cowan: I claim the same thing.
• 20:37
  Steve Cowan: You got a lot of this by osmosis from me.
• 20:40
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 20:41
  Crista Cowan: So after you graduated from BYU and started your career and life happens right.
• 20:48
  Steve Cowan: Yes, it does.
• 20:49
  Crista Cowan: But you stayed involved in both family history and genealogy in different ways and encouraged your children to kind of do the same.
• 20:57
  Steve Cowan: Absolutely.
• 20:57
  Steve Cowan: We still went to family reunions on a regular basis.
• 21:00
  Steve Cowan: When I graduated, I went back to LA and I worked there for about a year and a half and my wife and I decided and we had you and she was pregnant with our twins, and so we talked about it and we decided we didn't want to raise you in Los Angeles.
• 21:17
  Steve Cowan: It just was not what we wanted to do in the 1970s.
• 21:21
  Steve Cowan: So I found a job up in the Bay Area and so we moved up to the Bay Area, but we would constantly.
• 21:30
  Steve Cowan: In fact, when Sue got because she was pregnant with twins, she was put to bed rest while I was working full time, and so and I broke my leg.
• 21:41
  Steve Cowan: And you were on a jungle gym and going down a pole and slapped your leg against the pole and broke your leg.
• 21:47
  Steve Cowan: So she couldn't take care of you, I couldn't take care of her.
• 21:50
  Steve Cowan: So I talked to my parents and they were more than happy to take her in.
• 21:54
  Steve Cowan: So one of the trips down to LA I left her there and I went back up to Gilroy, California, and worked during the week and go home, go back to LA every Friday evening, and so we yeah, we were close to family and her mother was down in Orange County by then and we'd go down there periodically.
• 22:17
  Steve Cowan: But even when we moved over to Central California and worked there, we'd still go home.
• 22:23
  Steve Cowan: I've always called Los Angeles home to me because I lived there first part of my life.
• 22:28
  Steve Cowan: But, yeah, we would visit family there and we always tried to go to any of the family reunions that we had.
• 22:35
  Steve Cowan: We were actually closer to Uncle Louie when we lived in Central California, so it was just, yeah, family was important to me, and so we tried to stay as close to them as possible.
• 22:47
  Steve Cowan: It's interesting, though during that whole time I kind of lost track of some of my cousins the 21 cousins that I've got.
• 22:53
  Steve Cowan: I lost track of them during that period of time because they went all different directions as we were moving further and further north.
• 22:59
  Steve Cowan: But we tried to stay as close as we could to at least the grandparents and siblings that I have.
• 23:07
  Crista Cowan: Some of my favorite memories growing up are the five-hour drives back and drives back and forth to LA, spending time with my grandparents.
• 23:15
  Crista Cowan: The two sets of grandparents.
• 23:18
  Crista Cowan: My two sets of grandparents lived about an hour apart and so we would go, stay with your parents and then we'd drive down to see mom's mom and and just that, just knowing that that was home for me too a lot because we moved around just enough that their homes were the constant in my whole growing up years, and not only that, but that every time I would go there they had stories and they would share those stories so freely.
• 23:44
  Crista Cowan: And one of my favorite memories growing up would be sitting at Nana's breakfast table and she would bring out a shoebox a literal shoebox of pictures and just go through the pictures.
• 23:56
  Crista Cowan: She liked quiet and order.
• 23:59
  Crista Cowan: Your parents' house was often chaos and love and fun and cookies from the freezer.
• 24:03
  Crista Cowan: Nana's house was clean and orderly and quiet, and if you're going to make noise, go outside, and so I think she often did that just to keep us quiet.
• 24:11
  Crista Cowan: But that was one of my favorite memories was sitting and going through her photos and hearing those stories from her.
• 24:18
  Crista Cowan: And so when I found the secret closet at your parents house that had all the pictures, because I had been kind of trained into that by Nana.
• 24:26
  Crista Cowan: Then I started asking mom and pop questions about the people in their family and they weren't as willing to sit and go through pictures, but they always were willing to share stories.
• 24:38
  Crista Cowan: Yes, they were.
• 24:39
  Steve Cowan: And you brought up a thought to me You're the one who named your grandparents.
• 24:43
  Steve Cowan: You were the first grandchild, at least on my parents' side, but Nana was always Nana, but you couldn't say Grandpa and Grandma, so they became pa and ma or ma and pa, and they put that on everything after that.
• 24:58
  Steve Cowan: So but yeah, they had.
• 25:00
  Steve Cowan: My mom or my dad loved to take pictures.
• 25:03
  Steve Cowan: I mean, he had so many pictures that he took because we did a lot of travel and vacations together as a family.
• 25:09
  Steve Cowan: My dad was very, very much family oriented in everything he did.
• 25:15
  Steve Cowan: And so, and he wanted to somehow keep a memory of those, and pictures are the best way to do it.
• 25:23
  Steve Cowan: And, yeah, he didn't like going through pictures.
• 25:26
  Steve Cowan: That was not my, neither of them.
• 25:28
  Steve Cowan: Well, mom did a little more, but dad didn't like that at all.
• 25:31
  Steve Cowan: He would put the slides in and watch a slideshow, but pictures was not his thing.
• 25:35
  Steve Cowan: But you bring a picture and say who is this, he'll tell you who it is, although my mom always said my dad slept through his childhood, so he didn't remember a lot of things when he was little, but he would know what a lot of people are.
• 25:49
  Steve Cowan: I can only remember one time going to Texas to meet his family that still lived there.
• 25:55
  Steve Cowan: So I didn't know any of those people at all, and so it was good hearing when you would ask questions.
• 26:00
  Steve Cowan: It was good hearing those stories Because I just was, as a child, busy and didn't really ask those questions.
• 26:05
  Steve Cowan: You had that from the time you were little.
• 26:08
  Steve Cowan: You would always ask who's this and who's this, who's this, and that was good.
• 26:12
  Crista Cowan: I learned a lot too, and during those times yeah, another memory from my childhood is in Nana's house.
• 26:20
  Crista Cowan: She always had a portrait of Grandpa Woody.
• 26:23
  Crista Cowan: He died when mom was a teenager and I didn't know him but through her I got to know him.
• 26:28
  Crista Cowan: But she had a very prominent portrait of him in her home.
• 26:31
  Crista Cowan: But other than the shoebox, not a lot of pictures around her house.
• 26:35
  Crista Cowan: And then your parents I don't remember Like.
• 26:38
  Crista Cowan: I remember, I think, a little curio cabinet that had a couple of photos on it of of childhood, pictures of Ma and maybe a picture of their wedding picture, but other than that, not a lot of photos around their home.
• 26:53
  Crista Cowan: In the home I grew up in, you and mom both always had walls and bookshelves of family pictures.
• 27:00
  Crista Cowan: Was that a conscious thing?
• 27:02
  Steve Cowan: Yes, it was Because family was so important to both of us.
• 27:05
  Steve Cowan: And when we got married, she assimilated my family immediately and wanted that big family.
• 27:13
  Steve Cowan: And I've told the story many times that before we got married, we sat down and separately decided how many children we wanted, and we came up with the exact same number, which was 13.
• 27:24
  Steve Cowan: And so we wanted a big family.
• 27:26
  Steve Cowan: That's what we wanted.
• 27:28
  Steve Cowan: It worked out we only could have five, but the five best kids I've ever had.
• 27:33
  Steve Cowan: But we wanted you to know about your family.
• 27:38
  Steve Cowan: When I was little and we'd go visit Grandma Cowan, my parents would play with Grandma Cowan and Aunt Madeline cards after we and they'd put us to bed.
• 27:49
  Steve Cowan: Well, I would sleep in Grandma's bed cards after we and they put us to bed.
• 27:54
  Steve Cowan: Well, I would sleep in grandma's bed and above her bed with the pictures of of her, um her parents, uh, julius and Anna, and so I went to sleep.
• 28:03
  Steve Cowan: you know, thinking about those, cause I've I've watched them all the time.
• 28:07
  Steve Cowan: So, when grandma died, the one thing I asked for from well, it was two things.
• 28:11
  Steve Cowan: I asked for the chandelier that was in her dining room that I remember constantly, and those two pictures.
• 28:16
  Steve Cowan: And and so when dad said, absolutely, you can have those.
• 28:20
  Steve Cowan: They now sit above our piano and have for years, and we want you to know who they are.
• 28:26
  Steve Cowan: We wanted our children to to know who family is and how they're important to us.
• 28:31
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and that is what I remember is being surrounded by family, not just physically but also through those pictures and through that constant reminder of who they were.
• 28:45
  Crista Cowan: It also made me more curious about them as people.
• 28:48
  Crista Cowan: I think sometimes we see a name on a pedigree chart, whether it was a paper, one from the seventies, or, you know, now on a computer, on a, on a family tree online, and sometimes they're just names and dates and places.
• 29:00
  Crista Cowan: Having those pictures was super meaningful.
• 29:02
  Crista Cowan: Having the stories was even more meaningful and and it led me to to know those people, like I talk about my grandpa Woody as if I knew him, because I do, because so many stories were shared with him, because that portrait hung right inside Nana's front door, practically Like that was so important to me to be able to come to know those people in that way, and so thank you for raising me that way.
• 29:28
  Steve Cowan: We're glad the way you turned out.
• 29:29
  Steve Cowan: Believe me, we're happy with all of our children and and it's important Family is important.
• 29:35
  Crista Cowan: So one of my memories is when I was about 12 years old you got a computer and loaded the first DOS-based genealogy software program on it PAF yes.
• 29:45
  Crista Cowan: Personal Ancestral File.
• 29:47
  Steve Cowan: Yes.
• 29:48
  Crista Cowan: And you know, grabbed the box of family genealogy that you'd been carting around with us through moves throughout California and invited me to take that information and computerize it, do the data entry, and that's what I then spent any spare time I had as a teenager doing usually side by side at a desk with you so that I could ask questions.
• 30:12
  Crista Cowan: Usually side by side at a desk with you so that I could ask questions, and again like conscious choice to do that, or was that just?
• 30:18
  Crista Cowan: Oh, here's some free labor?
• 30:21
  Steve Cowan: Probably a little bit of both.
• 30:22
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, as an accountant, I am probably one of the faster people on a 10-key ad.
• 30:29
  Steve Cowan: I don't have to look at the keypad and I can just fly On a typewriter.
• 30:33
  Steve Cowan: I'm two fingers, one on each hand and I hunt and peck.
• 30:37
  Steve Cowan: And I'm not a fast typist.
• 30:40
  Steve Cowan: I tried to teach myself one time and it just didn't take.
• 30:42
  Steve Cowan: Sue is a very fast typist but she was raising kids and she had so many things going on in church and community she just didn't have time.
• 30:53
  Steve Cowan: So when you showed an interest in family history, which you had done most of your life, I thought, you know, give her a chance to learn these people, and the best way to learn them is to input them in so you know where they are in the family.
• 31:08
  Steve Cowan: So, yeah, it was a conscious decision in the fact that I didn't want to do it.
• 31:14
  Steve Cowan: It's not that I didn't want to.
• 31:16
  Steve Cowan: I was not good at it and you know I tend to do things that I'm good at.
• 31:21
  Steve Cowan: We all do, I think, and you were.
• 31:23
  Steve Cowan: You had a knack for it and you loved it and you it for first few times and I thought, well, I, I didn't give you the whole book.
• 31:30
  Steve Cowan: I didn't give you everything, as they go after it.
• 31:32
  Steve Cowan: I said here, why don't you try this page, or do this page and see what you come up with?
• 31:36
  Crista Cowan: and you came back asking for more, and so I just kept feeding you and and plus I'm a really fast type yes, you are that became kind of this uh thing with you and I, where you know you would feed me information or sit at the desk next to me.
• 31:52
  Crista Cowan: As I did this for four years, five years of my life, and then I left for school and you got busy in your career and you kind of drifted away from family history.
• 32:03
  Crista Cowan: Uncle Louie died and the family reunions kind of petered out, and so what?
• 32:10
  Crista Cowan: At one point you decided you wanted to get back involved in family history.
• 32:15
  Steve Cowan: Yeah, I'm not sure exactly when that occurred.
• 32:18
  Steve Cowan: I you know, I think you took a couple of family history classes and then then our other daughter, angela, did the same thing and Cameron had done a family or a pedigree chart for school, for a project or something, and each of you had different interests and I thought, okay, I need to start doing that.
• 32:40
  Steve Cowan: So, yeah, I started dabbling a little bit in it and not doing a lot, but just getting started with it.
• 32:47
  Steve Cowan: And then, in 2012, dna came out.
• 32:51
  Crista Cowan: Dna came out.
• 32:52
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 32:52
  Steve Cowan: And that just lit a spark in me and you started showing me things that I could do with that and that was just.
• 32:58
  Steve Cowan: I got excited about family history.
• 33:02
  Crista Cowan: It's because it was math.
• 33:03
  Crista Cowan: That's exactly what it is precisely.
• 33:06
  Steve Cowan: I loved the math side of it, as Krista teases me all the time.
• 33:11
  Steve Cowan: I have a spreadsheet for almost everything, and I started spreadsheets of of what I could wanted to work on and what I needed to do and where I needed to go in the family history with the dna.
• 33:20
  Steve Cowan: And uh, all of a sudden, not only that, but I got a real interest in who these people were, not just where they fit in my family and how I'm related, but who are they?
• 33:31
  Steve Cowan: How did they get to where they?
• 33:33
  Steve Cowan: We went to a family reunion, as we've talked about last week, and the one question that both sides of the family, or both family reunions, asked is how did you get to?
• 33:45
  Steve Cowan: We were raised Lutheran, you're now Mormons how does that work?
• 33:48
  Steve Cowan: And so we had to trace that for them.
• 33:52
  Steve Cowan: And then, well, how did you get from Prussia to?
• 33:56
  Steve Cowan: California To Texas, to California Well we were all in Texas so I had to tell them a story about how we got to California and so and you got to know your family to tell those stories.
• 34:08
  Steve Cowan: So that really interested me and the further back I go, the further I want to know how did?
• 34:13
  Steve Cowan: they end up there.
• 34:14
  Steve Cowan: It started with my parents.
• 34:17
  Steve Cowan: My dad was born in San Francisco, my mom was born in Idaho Falls.
• 34:20
  Steve Cowan: How did they get together?
• 34:21
  Steve Cowan: And they'd tell me the story.
• 34:24
  Steve Cowan: And oh, they worked together at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles.
• 34:27
  Steve Cowan: That's how they got together.
• 34:28
  Steve Cowan: Story.
• 34:29
  Steve Cowan: And oh, they worked together at Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles.
• 34:30
  Steve Cowan: That's how they got together.
• 34:31
  Steve Cowan: So that interests me how that works.
• 34:34
  Steve Cowan: And then, when you and I started working together, all of a sudden we'd say, well, how did these people meet?
• 34:39
  Steve Cowan: They were here and back in 1860 or 1870.
• 34:44
  Steve Cowan: How did they get together when they weren't anywhere near each other?
• 34:47
  Steve Cowan: So we'd trace where they'd move.
• 34:49
  Steve Cowan: And that really is an interest to me as well, and so that was fun.
• 34:52
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so you mentioned us working together.
• 34:54
  Crista Cowan: What year did that start?
• 34:56
  Steve Cowan: 2016.
• 34:58
  Crista Cowan: So 2016,.
• 34:59
  Crista Cowan: You hadn't yet retired.
• 35:00
  Steve Cowan: Nope.
• 35:01
  Crista Cowan: So we both work full time, but we decided Sunday nights was a great time to do family history.
• 35:06
  Steve Cowan: Yes.
• 35:07
  Crista Cowan: You live in Oregon, I live in Utah.
• 35:09
  Crista Cowan: I travel quite a bit for work, at least I did back then.
• 35:12
  Crista Cowan: You traveled occasionally for work or for vacations.
• 35:17
  Crista Cowan: Every Sunday, though, we decided, no matter where we were in the world, we were going to get on FaceTime and work on family history, and we don't start it until 9.30 pm, utah time 8.30 Oregon time.
• 35:30
  Crista Cowan: And we usually spend well.
• 35:32
  Crista Cowan: It started with three hours, and then it went to four, and now I think we're up to about five hours every Sunday night, which is delightful.
• 35:39
  Crista Cowan: Still means I have to get up for work on Monday mornings, though.
• 35:42
  Steve Cowan: So did I for the first few years.
• 35:46
  Crista Cowan: But worth it right oh absolutely.
• 35:48
  Crista Cowan: And mainly, we focus on figuring out who our DNA matches are.
• 35:52
  Crista Cowan: Tell me about what that means to you that we do that.
• 35:57
  Steve Cowan: The first thing it means to me is I get to at least once a week.
• 36:00
  Steve Cowan: I get to talk to you.
• 36:01
  Steve Cowan: I mean that I know is going to happen.
• 36:03
  Steve Cowan: Number two is when we first talk Sue's on the phone with us usually and we talk about what we've done or what's going on in our lives or what's important, what's bothering you.
• 36:14
  Steve Cowan: We have anywhere from.
• 36:16
  Steve Cowan: Usually it's about a half hour to an hour that we talk about life and what's going on.
• 36:23
  Steve Cowan: And that to me, is if I could give anybody advice.
• 36:29
  Steve Cowan: The best advice I give them is when your children leave and go away, stay connected to them, because it's important.
• 36:35
  Steve Cowan: That's again, family is so important.
• 36:37
  Steve Cowan: And then we get into the family history and I've gone because now, when I'm retired, I can spend during the week figuring out who is it that I'm interested in or how do we want to go, and so that's my job is to kind of figure out where we're going to head when we get together.
• 36:53
  Steve Cowan: But then we can collaborate, we can talk about you know different things, and I can be looking at one area, you can be looking at another area, and we can then come together and say you know, and we're talking through this the whole time and we can see each other's expressions and sometimes we don't say a word for several minutes because we're both researching something.
• 37:12
  Steve Cowan: But it's that connection together that's so important to me, that we're doing this together.
• 37:19
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and that's something that a lot of people I think as they get into family history.
• 37:23
  Crista Cowan: It can be very isolating when you're doing genealogy research.
• 37:26
  Crista Cowan: It's you on a computer at 2 am, bleary-eyed, and there isn't anybody around to ask those questions to how this couple in the 1870s got together and following migration paths and figuring out which angle to come at solving a family history problem from having somebody to bounce those ideas off of, I think helps us make discoveries faster and not just one plus one equals two faster, but like one plus one equals five faster to be able to figure these pieces of this puzzle out that make up our family story.
• 38:12
  Steve Cowan: That's what family history really is as you get further and further.
• 38:15
  Steve Cowan: Back is mystery solving mysteries.
• 38:17
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's a little bit like a murder board.
• 38:20
  Crista Cowan: That sounds so gruesome.
• 38:23
  Steve Cowan: It is gruesome, but I think of the same thing.
• 38:25
  Steve Cowan: You're putting all these different names.
• 38:27
  Steve Cowan: I think last Sunday we had one where we were trying to figure out who the biological father was and we had it down to one of three sons.
• 38:36
  Steve Cowan: So we would put those three sons up on our virtual murder board and say, okay, could it be this one?
• 38:43
  Steve Cowan: And yeah it's solving a mystery, a murder mystery, sometimes.
• 38:48
  Crista Cowan: I love it.
• 38:49
  Crista Cowan: I love the mystery of it all, the puzzle of it all.
• 38:52
  Crista Cowan: I love the stories that come out.
• 38:54
  Crista Cowan: I love the time I get to spend with you.
• 38:57
  Crista Cowan: What's next when you think about family history and what it means to your family now and what it means to your family in the future?
• 39:06
  Crista Cowan: What's your hope for the future, your family now and what it?
• 39:09
  Steve Cowan: means to your family in the future.
• 39:12
  Steve Cowan: What's your hope for the future?
• 39:13
  Steve Cowan: You know I track how many new matches we get every week, basically, and then I look at the number of matches we solve every week and the matches that we're getting far exceed what we're solving by multiples and I think, okay, in the future is this going to slow down or are we going to have ways to find things faster?
• 39:32
  Steve Cowan: And you know, I think the my idea is the more people who who test, the more solutions we'll have.
• 39:42
  Steve Cowan: So I know you guys are up to what 25 million.
• 39:46
  Steve Cowan: Ancestry DNA tests um you know, if you think of the world, it's a drop in the bucket.
• 39:52
  Steve Cowan: So if we could get that up to you know, like 250 million, we can solve things a lot faster.
• 39:58
  Steve Cowan: Um, but I think, more importantly, I, I hope that um, you know I'm not going to live forever, so I you know, I know you'll carry this on, but what happens then, you know I would hope that more and more people want to get interested in this and figuring out so I know you'll carry this on, but what happens then?
• 40:12
  Steve Cowan: I would hope that more and more people want to get interested in this and figuring out who's who and how we're all related.
• 40:16
  Steve Cowan: We need to be more connected with the people that we meet with and who are actually our relations.
• 40:22
  Crista Cowan: You mentioned losing contact with your 21 first cousins through life and we've made some intentional connections with them, but now they have children and grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren, are starting to come, so that's exciting to me as a member of this family, to not just recognize that we are connected as a human family, but to actually figure out the connection to people that are part of the same story that we are a part of.
• 40:51
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, thank you for being here, thank you for raising me the way that you raised me and for being still deeply involved in this family history journey with me.
• 41:02
  Steve Cowan: Well, thank you, I'm glad who you turned out to be and I appreciate you a lot and I love you.
• 41:09
  Crista Cowan: Love you.