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Stories That Live In Us: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist
What if the most powerful way to strengthen your family’s future is to look to the past? I’m Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I created this podcast to inspire you to form deeper connections with your family - past, present, and future. All families are messy and life is constantly changing but we don’t have to allow that to disconnect us. 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. Tune in to receive inspiration and guidance that will help you use family stories to craft a powerful family narrative, contributing to your family’s identity and creating a legacy of resilience, healing, and connection.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 2 days ago48 min
When Family Secrets Surface: Escaped Camps, Hidden Children, and DNA (with Erika Hanchar) | Episode 136
How many times have you hesitated to dig into an old family mystery because you were terrified of what you might find? In this episode, I sit down with writer and photographer Erika Hanchar (host of the Granddaughter of Immigrants podcast), who inherited a cryptic bedside stack of untranslated Ukrainian records at nineteen and spent twenty years unraveling the silence her grandparents took to their graves. From escaping a WWII forced labor camp in a stolen supply truck to a surprising Ancestr...
- 1 weeks ago22 min
A Person Dies Twice: How Family Stories Keep Us Alive | Episode 135
What will your family remember about you when you're gone? And how do we keep the stories of the people we love alive for generations? When I pulled over on an empty desert road near Utah Lake and handed my 18-year-old nephew the keys to my convertible, I felt my late Aunt Rhonda sitting right there with us. She was a larger-than-life woman who never had children of her own but left an unforgettable legacy of love. From a wild ride down Sunset Boulevard in the 1990s to a quiet moment beside U...
- 2 weeks ago50 min
All the Beautiful Things: What Really Brings People Back to Faith (with Shelley Graham) | Episode 134
How many times have you sat across the table from a child or sibling who sees faith completely differently than you do, and felt an aching gulf between you? In those moments, our first instinct is usually to defend what we believe, but my guest today is here to help us flip the script. Playwright and BYU theatre professor Shelley Graham joins me to share the incredible stories behind her verbatim stage production, All the Beautiful Things, revealing what actually brings people back to faith a...
- 3 weeks ago37 min
The Countess of Cons: Uncovering Scandalous Ancestors (with Deborah Holman) | Episode 133
"When I noticed a yellowed piece of paper physically taped over a portrait in an old family book, I knew there was a secret waiting to be found." My guest today, author Deborah Holman, set out to uncover that hidden identity and ended up spending two years untangling the unbelievable life of her husband’s great-grandmother. We’re talking about a 19th-century woman living under dozens of aliases, pulling off high-stakes cons, breaking into 50 homes in a single weekend at age 60, and keeping h...
- Oct 8, 202643 min
Black-Market Adoptions to Broadway Stars (with Lisa Elzey) | Episode 132
What if the secret to breaking through your own genealogy brick walls is stepping away from your family tree entirely? In this episode, my dear friend, colleague, and podcast producer Lisa Elzey joins me to explore how researching strangers' family trees—from solving the dark mysteries around the 1950s Georgia "Hicks babies" black-market adoptions to uncovering the immigrant roots of the cast of the Broadway show Anastasia—completely transformed the way we do family history and genetic geneal...
- Oct 1, 202624 min
Why You Probably Have Cousins Everywhere (And How to Find Them) | Episode 131
What if the person sitting next to you right now (at work, in church, or at a wedding) isn't a stranger at all? When I started doing descendancy research and checking my DNA matches, I realized we are constantly crossing paths with living cousins in the most unexpected places. From college roommates to the groomsmen out on the dance floor, our ancestral threads weave us together in ways that completely change how we see the world. Join me for the start of National Family History Month as we e...
- Sep 24, 202636 min
Breaking a 150-Year German Brick Wall (with Jenny Ashcraft) | Episode 130
When a 150-year-old German brick wall kept my friend Jenny Ashcraft stuck for nearly two decades, she decided to stop pushing straight backward and try a completely different research strategy. By fanning out to document all ten of her ancestor's children, the floodgates opened—leading to an unbelievable library encounter with the author of the exact emigration index she needed, a mysterious phone call revealing an unmarked grave, and a renewed connection with living cousins. If you've been s...
- Sep 17, 202634 min
The Heirloom Portrait & The Danish Flood: Verifying Family Lore (with Rhonda Budge) | Episode 129
Growing up, my guest Rhonda Budge spent hours sitting beside her grandmother, staring at a massive framed portrait of her great-great-grandfather, Johann Christian Hansen. Family lore claimed he heroically rescued neighbors from their rooftops during an 1872 Danish flood, lost his ship, and gave away his reward money. It’s a story that sounded almost too extraordinary to be completely true. But when Rhonda set a clear research goal and wrote to an archive in Denmark, a 1908 newspaper obituary...
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About Stories That Live In Us
What if the most powerful way to strengthen your family’s future is to look to the past? I’m Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I created this podcast to inspire you to form deeper connections with your family - past, present, and future. All families are messy and life is constantly changing but we don’t have to allow that to disconnect us. 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. Tune in to receive inspiration and guidance that will help you use family stories to craft a powerful family narrative, contributing to your family’s identity and creating a legacy of resilience, healing, and connection.
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