Matt Haughey: I'm Matt Haughey and this is "Hobby Horse." This week we're talking to Erica Baker about ancestry and genealogy. Matt Haughey: I know on the surface that may seem like, I don't know, silly and lightweight, but as you'll come to listen and find out, that really comes from a place of privilege to think of ancestry as a silly game for Western Europeans because there's plenty of history there and they can figure out everything they need to know. But for other people, the picture isn't so simple and it's a question of humanity in the end. Matt Haughey: With that, let's go. Matt Haughey: With us today is Erica Baker. You are currently Director of Engineering-ish? Erica Baker: No. Senior Engineering Manager at Patreon. That's Pay, P-A-Y, treon, not Pat-treon. Matt Haughey: What? Really? Erica Baker: Yep, yep. Matt Haughey: I always said "Pat-tree-on." Erica Baker: Nope. Matt Haughey: Well, like a patron. Pat-tree-on. Erica Baker: Like a patron. No, it's a pay-tron. You call it- Matt Haughey: Pay-tree-on. Erica Baker: Yeah, because you're a pay-tron. Pay-tree-on. Matt Haughey: Yeah, I guess I did say Pat. No, it feels weird. Pay-treon? Pat-tree-on? Erica Baker: Pay-tree-on. Matt Haughey: Pay-tree-on? I always said Pat-tree-on. Pay-tree-on, Patreon's right. Erica Baker: It's Pay-tree-on, yup. Matt Haughey: Okay, I'm good now. Erica Baker: Cool. Glad we got that sorted. Matt Haughey: Senior Engineering Manager? Erica Baker: Correct, of the Infrastructure Engineering Team at Patreon. Matt Haughey: How many people are at Patreon these days? Erica Baker: We are right around 140 to 150, I don't know exactly. Matt Haughey: Oh, sweet. Erica Baker: Yeah. We are at Dunbar's number, so stuff's going to get interesting soon. Matt Haughey: You won't remember. It's okay to forget people's names soon. Erica Baker: But is it? Matt Haughey: No, not really. And before you were at Slack as a Build Engineer, right? Erica Baker: Yep. Matt Haughey: Before that, you were at Google as a whole bunch of stuff. Right? Erica Baker: Whole bunch of things. Nine years at Google, you can do a lot of stuff, so I did a lot of stuff. Matt Haughey: But we're not here to talk about that. Erica Baker: No, thank goodness. I'm so excited! Matt Haughey: We're here to talk about ancestry and genealogy. I remember specifically when you joined Slack and you did an intro. It was pretty normal. It was pretty pedestrian like everyone else. It was like, "I like to cook, I like to eat, I like dogs." All this stuff. And then it was like, "I'm way into ancestry and genealogy." Erica Baker: Yes. Matt Haughey: For a moment, I was like, "To me, that's a weird thing." I have an aunt who's into it, an uncle on the other side of the family. They're always trying to connect a family member to, I don't know, the Daughters of the Revolution or the Civil War or something. Erica Baker: The Mayflower or something. Matt Haughey: Yeah, yeah, right. That's the dream. It's like, "Oh, my four grandparents were all first-generation born in America, so you're just making stuff ... " It feels like a game with my family members who are into it. Matt Haughey: The other thing I thought was it's the only other thing that comes to mind is Mormons are into it. I was like, "So wow, why is Erica into it?" I've come to realize it means a lot more to you. Erica Baker: It sure does. Matt Haughey: And it's important to talk about. Tell us why you got into it, I guess. Erica Baker: Okay. So how I got into it was in 2004, my grandfather passed away. I went to his funeral in Richmond, Virginia. While I was there, I saw all these people I did not know. I'm like, "Who are all these people? I know my aunts and uncles, I don't know who any of these other people are." It made me really curious about my family because I realized that there are people I was related to pretty closely in this world who I don't [inaudible 00:03:52]. Erica Baker: So I started putting together my family tree on my mom's side first and started looking into my dad's side. It was just really interesting for me just to figure out who my people were, who my ancestors were, who my cousins and everything were. I did that just for me for a while. And then I started branching out. Matt Haughey: So the first round of ancestry stuff you're doing, was that mostly family tree just asking around? Erica Baker: It was a lot of asking my mom and my dad and my aunts and uncles, "Tell me stories. Tell me about who, what, where, when." At first, they're just like, "Oh, I don't know anything about my family." Then eventually, after prodding where I'd cajole them into talking about, "What was it like growing up where you grew up?" They would start talking about people who came around. They're like, "Oh yeah, that was uncle so-and-so." It's like, "Ah-ha!" Erica Baker: Yeah. I started building out my tree that way and with doing a little research on Ancestry.com. I just really got into researching my family. Erica Baker: My mom's side of the family, again, is from a small town or a small county in Virginia called Southampton County. As I was doing research in Southampton, I was realizing how connected every family in that county was. The Walden's were connected to the Blount's who were connected to the Ford's and everybody was like ... It seemed all inter-mingled, inter-married. I was just like, "I want to know the story." Matt Haughey: How many generations does it take to go back to that? Erica Baker: To that? To get to there? Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: Oh, like two. Matt Haughey: Oh, wow! Erica Baker: Yeah. That's where my grandmother was from, my biological grandmother. Yeah, it's all very interconnected. So seeing how interwoven those families were, I was like, "We are – black people – are all very related." Matt Haughey: Is there jargon for genealogy stuff? Like whenever you get social stories from your family versus stuff you look up somewhere, are there buckets you put that kind of information into or something? Erica Baker: I don't think there's jargon. I've never heard it if there is. I just call it, "Getting stories," talking to people. I don't know. Matt Haughey: What's on Ancestry? What kind of ... I've never loaded it in my life. Erica Baker: Oh my gosh. Matt Haughey: Should I do right now? Erica Baker: Yeah, do it. Matt Haughey: In another window. Does it family trees that captures from people or does it have birth records or what? Erica Baker: Ancestry has a lot of everything. It's got family trees. You build out your family tree on there, and you can choose whether or not it's shared. If you share it, then other people can find your relatives. They're searching for your relatives and then they'll see your whole tree. They can build off of it if they choose to, which is good and bad because there are some folks on Ancestry who have trees that are not quite correct. They just accept, "Oh, this person has the same name as my ancestor and they're born within the same 10 years, so totally, that's definitely my ancestor," except for one is white and the other is black, and they're married to entirely different people, and they have entirely different families. So trees get a little bit messed up like that. So I am not one to use the trees that have been built on the site because I don't trust the data. Matt Haughey: But you've built your own on the site, right? Erica Baker: I have built my own on the site. It goes back several generations. One, two, two or three lines – just counting in my head – two or three lines go back to slavery. Matt Haughey: Wow. Erica Baker: I know who owned one part of my family. Again, that's that Southampton stuff I was talking about. Whereas, "Oh, you know what? I can figure out how all these people are related because the data is there." There's this family called the Brantley family. They have, I don't know how much money, but apparently a lot. They have an association for doing their family genealogy called The Brantley Association. The Brantley Association in Southampton County, went to the courthouse and said, "We're going to digitize all your records." So they went in and they did the archival whole process with the gloves and whatever, and they took pictures of ever old county courthouse book and all the old birth records and marriage records and all that jazz. Then they took those pictures and had people capture the names of whoever was on each page. Erica Baker: The result is that for Southampton, there's this very significant trove of data for both white people and black people. The part for black people is important because we're going to go back to the Mormons for a second. Until the mid-70s, the Mormons didn't really get down with black people. When they were doing all their research about family trees because they wanted to get their ancestors into heaven and the only way your ancestor can get to heaven is if they're a Mormon, they would want to baptize all their ancestors posthumously. Matt Haughey: Right, that's what they do. Erica Baker: Right. But none of their ancestors were black, so they never had to do the research for black people. So the source data for black people is thin. It's not as rich as it could be, I'll say that. Some has been captures because it got captured along with the source data for white people, but the stuff like I was saying in the county courthouses and stuff, that stuff isn't there. That is where a lot of the information about black families, especially when you get back into the 1860s and 1850s, 1840s, that's where you find that data captured where one person might own a person for slavery. Erica Baker: In those courthouse books or records, I saw my fourth great-grandmother and fifth great-grandmother both owned by the same man because he reported when they had children because that was his property and he had report when his property had changed, I guess. There are two lines it's like, "Emma Wahler and Eliza Wahler." No, it didn't say last names. It's like, "Emma and Eliza, owner Levi Wahler." Matt Haughey: How many years did that go back to when they digitized all those records? Erica Baker: I don't know exactly. I want to say to the mid-1700s. Matt Haughey: Wow! Erica Baker: Yeah, I can check for sure. Matt Haughey: How big was ... So all those families in southern Virginia are probably from similar plantations or something? Or is it just- Erica Baker: The black families? Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: Plantations weren't that- Matt Haughey: It wasn't a thing in Virginia, I guess? Erica Baker: No, they were. They were definitely a thing. Virginia had a lot of cotton and tobacco. Plantations were big there, but I don't know that they all go back to the same plantations. There are ... Let's see. How do I say this? There are plantations and those have a lot slaves, but then there are families who just had one or two slaves. Matt Haughey: So like maid, I guess, or a person, or a groundskeeper, or something. Erica Baker: Something, whatever, yeah. Matt Haughey: Huh. So does fifth grandma take you back to like 1820 or something or farther? Erica Baker: Does my third great-grandma or fourth- Matt Haughey: No, you're ... What? Fifth. Erica Baker: Oh, fifth great-grandma. Matt Haughey: The farthest you can go back. Erica Baker: Let me look and see. I will tell you exactly. I'm looking actually right now. Matt Haughey: Oh, you have birth dates and stuff? Erica Baker: Oh, I have all of it. Matt Haughey: Sweet. Erica Baker: All of it. Matt Haughey: Well, what does Ancestry do to help you? I would just have to ask aunts and grand-aunts and grandmas and stuff to fill in our tree, but does Ancestry try to match up obituaries and birth announcements? Erica Baker: Yeah, yeah. They do a thing where if you have a person in your tree, they'll say, "Oh, these records look like they might be that person." They call them hints and there's a little leaf that shows up in your profile. The hints will sometimes be accurate and sometimes not. If it's accurate, then you can just easily add it to the records that you have for this person, which is really, eh, sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's not. It's really useful when there's something in that record that you didn't previously know, like if they've listed their parents or their brother or sister and that data helps you get another generation back. Erica Baker: Recently, I want to say last year or the year before last, the US government started releasing not just Social Security Death Index information, but actual applications. On people's Social Security applications, you can see who they listed as mother father. Matt Haughey: Oh, nice. Erica Baker: Yeah. That helped me get so much more information for my tree. Ancestry helps in that way. Erica Baker: However, they don't really do a great job in helping you triangulate data from other trees. With the Ancestry DNA portion of it, you get this list of relatives that you're related to genetically. So me, I have this cluster right now of white people who are all related to each other and to me. Somewhere back three or four maybe five generations ago, we shared an ancestor. If I could compare all their trees to each other, I could see, "Okay, they have this ancestor in common. It is most likely that I also have that ancestor in common." I've been able to do that a little bit manually, but Ancestry doesn't make that easy to do algorithmically and they should. Erica Baker: But that kind of would ... I don't think Ancestry is in the business of helping you finish your family tree. That's not what they want. They want you to keep paying your subscription fee and come back. Matt Haughey: You'd think they'd want to, yeah. Hm. Erica Baker: No, like if everybody knew their family tree, if family trees were a solved problem, if everybody knew their family trees, and they'd all been put together, and we all knew how everybody in the world was related, they would have no business model anymore and they would go out of business. Matt Haughey: Oh man. Erica Baker: Yeah, so I don't super think they're in the business of getting your family tree finished. They just want you to- Matt Haughey: Keep going. Erica Baker: Keep going, yeah. Keep researching. Matt Haughey: I guess keep it a little bit mysterious in the farther reaches. Erica Baker: Yeah. Right now, especially with the genetic genealogy stuff, there's ... And genetic genealogy is the DNA stuff. Matt Haughey: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. How does the Ancestry DNA figure into the Ancestry family tree stuff? Erica Baker: I'm happy you asked Matt. The Ancestry DNA stuff, like I said, gives you this list of people you're related to. If I look at that list, and I do look at that list regularly, and I see a person who is a third or fourth cousin and they've got their tree connected, I can look through their tree and see who we have as relatives in common. Then I can take the data they have from their tree and connect it to mine, so that helps me build my tree out, go down my tree to see my distant-ish relatives. Erica Baker: But also, having that data helps me get more information that can help me build up my tree. If I have a third cousin who knows who our great-great-great-grandmother's brother was and I didn't know who what was, I now have that information to add to my tree, which is really helpful and interesting. Yeah, it's all very fun. Erica Baker: I'm going to tell you what my life goal is. I'm talking a lot so you can tell me to shut up whenever. Matt Haughey: Well, I have a lot of questions. I'm just letting them stack up. Erica Baker: Oh, okay. Go ahead and I'll tell you my life goal. Matt Haughey: No, what's the ultimate goal here? Erica Baker: The ultimate goal for me, my life goal is to reassemble the family trees that slavery tore apart. Not just mine, every black person's or every African-American person's. I don't want to say black people because not every black person is descended from slavery, but every African-American person, I want to put together our family trees, put back together those families that people broke up because they were selling off kids and splitting up husbands and wives and that sort of thing. I want to put those trees back together. Erica Baker: And then ultimately, I want to be able to take ... There are very few people or very records of connections to Africa. Some slave owners kept that, some counties kept that. I want to take those few records that we have and connect more people to that one connection, you know what I mean? Matt Haughey: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Erica Baker: If there's a, I don't know, I'm going to pick a name out of there, John, John Brown. Although he probably didn't have a surname because slaves didn't get surnames. Erica Baker: But John, in 1721 or whatever, came to the United States on a slave ship. If I can find all the people who are descendant from John and connect them all up, they all now know the part of Africa that they're from so we get black people away from being from trauma because right now, black people in the United States, we are from trauma. When you ask a white person, usually – I'm not going to say always but usually – where they're from, they're like, "Oh, my family is from Poland and Germany," or, "My family is from Ireland and Great Britain, Sweden and somewhere else." They're able to say where their family is from and they don't super care really because it's like, "Whatever, this is just what we know about our family." Erica Baker: But black people can't say that or African-American people can't say that. We can't say, "We are from this part of Africa" because we are from trauma. Our history stops at slavery. I want that to not be true anymore, so I want to change it. Matt Haughey: Yeah. I learned this from my coworker. Trina is way into this well and she has a wild story of tracking down the slave rolls and trying to get actual documents that are over 100-years-old and having to pay old white historian collectors for the documents that contain her humanity. It's so messed up. Erica Baker: Oh yeah. Isn't it? Matt Haughey: Yeah. I came to understand really quick that for me, with my weird aunt or uncle that are into it, it's just a fun diversion, but I have plenty of history if I want to dig into it. Everything is well-documented whereas for her, she's like, "Yeah, I can only go back to about 1880 and then it gets fuzzy. I kind of know the state I came from and eventually, through five years of research, got to the plantation my family came from, but then I don't even know what part of Western Africa I came from." Erica Baker: Exactly. Matt Haughey: And then we've got the 23andMe stuff where you can kind of get some of that picture. Yeah, I realized what was a silly game on my side and stories from grandparents is your absolute humanity. Erica Baker: Right. Matt Haughey: This is maybe a callous way to look at it, but it's like I have adopted friends who just don't know their health risks for anything at all. They also glom onto this stuff because they just want to know, "Did my dad or grandfather die of a heart attack or not? Or cancer? What should I be looking for?" Erica Baker: Or they just want to know their family, right? I'm doing that right now for a friend of mine who was adopted. She did an Ancestry DNA test and the relative she had have a certain name in common. Right now we're trying to figure out how those folks are connected so she can figure out who her actual mom and dad are. That's a big deal for people. Erica Baker: You and I had a coworker who is no longer at slack. Matt Haughey: Yeah. I was going to ask if you knew that story. I won't say his name, but- Erica Baker: I won't say his name either but yeah. Matt Haughey: I did not know that was possible! Erica Baker: It is totally possible. Matt Haughey: To go into that system, get your DNA test so it tells you, "Oh my god, there is a first generation ... " Erica Baker: "You have a brother." Matt Haughey: Yeah, immediate family. Erica Baker: And since we're not saying names, we can say he had a brother. He was adopted. He now has a brother that's in that system and via that brother, he now knows who his parents are. That's huge! Matt Haughey: The thing that struck me with that story that it was amazing, I did not know they could do that, but how do you even ... Do you just get an email one day? Is that in the terms of service that you can get- Erica Baker: It kind of is. Matt Haughey: That you can get a gut punch someday that, "Oh my god, you have a sister. You have a mother." Erica Baker: Yeah. So 23AndMe specifically, I'm not sure, I don't remember what the onboarding is like for Ancestry DNA, but I've used 23andMe for a long time. I'm going to do a full disclosure here: I was on 23andMe's Roots Into the Future Advisory Board in 2008 or 2010. Matt Haughey: Oh, sweet. Erica Baker: So full disclosure. Anyway, 23andMe, they had this thing when you accepted relative finder matches. Relative finder is their thing like Ancestry's DNA thing where you can see who you're related to genetically. They have a thing that's like, "Do you want to see close relatives?" Because you can opt-out of seeing those matches because if you see one that is a cousin, or a half-brother, or an uncle, or grandparent that you weren't expecting, you have just uncovered some serious stuff going on in your family. Right? Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: There are some family secrets being revealed right here. And 23andMe was smart enough to say, "Hey, we know this can be hard for people, so we're just going to give them the option of opt-out of knowing." There are some people on 23andMe who maybe ... I'm sure there are some people who have checked that box to say, "No, I don't want to see my close relatives." Matt Haughey: Man, I don't remember that part of signing up. I just did my 23andMe like a month ago. I don't remember that part of it. It was just like boiler plate, boiler plate. I was probably clicking through, did not care. Erica Baker: Oh, got it, got it. Yeah. Matt Haughey: So when you're going back in the history, I know the slave logs, the accounting isn't tight, right? Like you said, there's no last names. There's first names. Did they have to pay taxes on people so they fudged it to get out of it? I've heard some terrible stuff, but if you see a ... I guess do their birth dates line up, if you know that? Erica Baker: Yeah. There are some birth dates. You have to look at things like wills. Here's how, if I'm looking at a relative who was born in the time of slavery, I am looking at ... First, I am figuring out what their last name was when slavery ended, if they were alive then. Then that points me to who might have been their owner because many slaves took on the last names of their owners. I will look at the people in the town that they're living in who have that same last name and also were farmers and owned slaves, or not farmers, anybody who owned a slave. Then I would look at the wills for those people and see if I see the name of my ancestor in the wills. Erica Baker: Similarly, I will look at either Genealogy Bank or Newspapers.com, usually Genealogy Bank, and search for the name of that person, my ancestor, with the last name of the slave owner somewhere in the immediate vicinity so that I can find slave sale advertisements or runaway advertisements, that sort of thing. Or, "This person has died" notices and, "Here are all the property that they are selling." Some insurance policies because slaves were property and so they were insured, like horses. Some insurance policies exist. Birth records, chancery records, lots of legal records. If someone is suing someone else for property or saying, "This slave belonged to me and not that person." Erica Baker: There are a lot of ... You have to look at people as property. The same kind of things that I would do to see how a plot of land had been passed around through families and throughout different people within a county, that's how I'd look to see how slaves were passed around. Matt Haughey: And it is digitized, this kind of information or do you get to paper really quick? Erica Baker: So the Southampton County one is digitized. That is a rare shining example of what could be. That's sort of my get-out-of-tech plan is to go and do what happened in Southampton County, what the Brantley Association did in Southampton County, to a bunch of counties. This is my goal and prepare to laugh: I want to take a giant 18-wheeler trailer, completely kit it out to turn it into a mobile scanning station, and have someone drive it around the southeastern United States through the black belt where all the slaves were, and me being in my RV- Matt Haughey: Digitize it all. Erica Baker: And we drive from county to county and we go to the county courthouse and we say, "Hey, we will digitize your stuff for free. We'll give you a copy of it, just let us also have a copy." And I want to get all that stuff digitized and then put it up into some sort of cloud situation, and then have it sliced so that we can ... I want to be able to distribute the digitization process. Erica Baker: Now I'm going to give away the secret and someone can do it before me if they want to, if they listen to this and are like, "I'm going to do that first." But I want to basically have the little chunk of data. If you think of ... Thinking specifically of census records because turns out, there is no publicly available census database that people can query. You can see all the pictures, but there is no querieable dataset of all the census records. That's my first one because if you can do really good queries on the census, you can come up with a lot of information. Erica Baker: So my first thing I want to do is get the census digitized. Since it's tabular, you can take those images, process them in some sort of Python library. There's one that exists that I can't remember the name of, but have it sliced along the lines. Then each little chunk, I want to take and I want to treat it like recaptcha does. You know when you- Matt Haughey: Right, yeah. Erica Baker: But instead of doing it to log into stuff or whatever, I want it to be part of a game you play on your phone. So you're playing some game, like Candy Crush or whatever blast- Matt Haughey: And you could get game clues if you solve enough "puzzles." Erica Baker: Not even game clues. You know, like when you run out of lives on Candy Crush? Matt Haughey: Oh, right. Erica Baker: Instead of having to pay money- Matt Haughey: Power-ups. Erica Baker: Yeah, you do the little, "Oh, I'm going to transcribe this thing." Matt Haughey: I feel like the Internet Archive has a scanning ... They have the bookmobile which can print books and they did mobile scanning. I feel like- Erica Baker: The Internet Archive, yes, they do that and are super into it. But I tried to reach out to the person who is the lead of that project and they ignored me. Matt Haughey: Oh my god! I know people there and I am going to talk to them because- Erica Baker: Well, I support that because I tried to reach out. I talked to a friend about this and he's like, "Oh my god. You should talk to Internet Archive," and I was like, "All right, I'm doing it." And radio silence. Matt Haughey: Aw, yeah. There's a few people at Slack who were formerly at the Archive. There are ways. They might, on first glance, they might think, "Oh, that's a little bit too specific of information," but on the other hand, they're all world's knowledge is what they're trying to digitize. This is pretty great if they could scan an OCR. They have 20 years of scanning and OCR experience. Erica Baker: Well, so here's the challenge Matt: they think about genealogy the way you do. Matt Haughey: Yeah, that it's like a silly game or something. Erica Baker: Right. And it's not, because lack of diversity. For them, they don't have to think about, "Oh, I'm trying to figure out who my family and my people actually are." I'm trying to actually learn my history. It's not like a silly, "Oh, I'm connecting myself to the Mayflower and I want to be a part of the DAR." It's like, "I am trying to actually figure out who my family is, who we are." I don't get a chance to tell that to them because they think, "Oh, genealogy. Silly game. Not responding to this email." Matt Haughey: Yeah. So you figured out, was that your mom's side of the family you said? Erica Baker: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt Haughey: So what have you found on the dad side? Erica Baker: Oh, my dad's side of the family gets really interesting. This is an interesting story because I am very good at finding people online. I'm going to tell a funny story. Erica Baker: At Google, I was working with this guy, I'm not going to say his name because I don't want to put him out there like that, but I was like, "Yeah, I'm pretty good at finding people online. I can find almost anybody online." He didn't believe me. I went about finding this really obscure handle of his on a message board that he had no idea was connected to him. It was easy to do in my head. It's not typically easy for other people. He's like, "Okay, stop now." He's like, "I'm afraid, stop now." I was like, "I told you." Erica Baker: Anyway, that was just a, "This is how I work, operate, sort of thing." So I applied that to my dad because my dad did not know his biological father his entire childhood, all of his life, mostly. He had a father figure like my grandfather, who I call my grandfather and knew as my grandfather my entire life up until I found out he wasn't, was my dad's dad. That was fine. He didn't not have a dad for people who are like, "Ah ha ha, black family, no father." You know how people like to say that online. Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: Anyway, so as my grandmother was dying, she had a short amount of time to live because she had cancer. She knew it was her time. She told my dad the name of his biological father. I was like, "Okay, I have a name." That was in 2007, pre-a lot of stuff on the internet. Was it 2007? '97? Matt Haughey: Oh wow. Erica Baker: One of the '07, some '07. I forget which '07. It was pre-a lot of stuff online. I was like, "Okay, I have categorized this information for future use." I want to say in 2009, it was 2009, I get back it back in my head to try to find my dad's dad. Because when I first found his name or I first got my dad's dad name, I couldn't find anything about him. Erica Baker: And so in 2009, Facebook was really big and my dad's dad had a last name that was very uncommon. There were very few records in Ancestry. I was like, "Okay, it's going to be kind of easy for me to find this person or at least find someone related to him" because I thought he'd passed away. I'm on Facebook and I look for the last name and I look at all ... The people who come up, I look at the pictures to see if they're black. One came up that had the same name as my dad's dad and I reached out to him. I'm like, "Hey, this is random. I know this is a long shot, but do you know this person David Last Name?" And he's like, "Yeah, that's my dad." Matt Haughey: Whoa! Erica Baker: And I was like, "No." I was like, "This is not ... Did he live with so-and-so and blah blah blah?" He's like, "Yeah, that's my dad." I was like, "What? Uh ... What?" Erica Baker: He puts me on the phone. I get on a three-way call with him, or maybe it was four-way. There was a lot of people on the phone call. It was that guy, his dad, my dad, and me. I get them all on the phone and I drop off the call. They're having a conversation and my dad is saying, "Do you know my grandma?" His mom, but my grandma. He's like, "Yeah, I remember her." And then proceeded to tell the story of how they met, where they met, everything that was exactly my dad's mom's story and he met his dad. Matt Haughey: Wow! Erica Baker: Yeah. In 2009, well, I remember giving him a call. I was like, "Dad." He's like, "What's up?" I was like, "You need to sit down," before he had the phone call. He's like, "Okay." I was like, "I think I found your dad." He was quiet for a while. He's like, "Really?" I was like, "Yeah." That got him into the point where he was doing that phone call I had mentioned. Erica Baker: But shortly after that, he went up there because the guy, his father, lived in Georgia. He went up there and met his dad for the first time. He just passed away last year, so he got a good ... What year is this? 2017 was last year? He got a good seven years with his dad. Matt Haughey: That's amazing! That's remarkable. Erica Baker: Yeah. I'm really excited about it. My dad was really moved. My dad doesn't do emotion, right? He's very stoic and I got married in 2010. He got up at my wedding and I thought he was going to do the normal dad speech. He got up there and he was like, "I could never thank her enough for helping me find my dad." He got all close to tears. I was like, "Whoa. I am unprepared." Matt Haughey: Wow! Did he know ... How long was his dad in the picture? He doesn't remember him as a child or anything? Erica Baker: So this was in the early '50s. My grandmother was down, far away from her home because black people in the '50s, they had to go find work where they could find work, especially in Florida where the work you got in Florida as a black person usually involved – especially if you were poor and you were not light-skinned – it usually involved you going somewhere to pick something. I think she was down in Tampa doing something. There were a bunch of black people who had gone to Tampa to do something, some sort of work thing because that's where they could get work. That is where they met. Erica Baker: So after that, she left Tampa, went back up to where my dad's family is from. She didn't see him or talk to him again. It was the '50s. She didn't have his phone number, couldn't find him on Facebook, couldn't shoot him an email. Matt Haughey: Wow. Has the DNA testing stuff filled out more of the picture for you? Does it just give you a general range of where ... Erica Baker: It has filled out some of the picture for my distant family members. I now know who several third cousins are. Oh, here's one. I have a second cousin who is a lawyer in Oakland. Matt Haughey: Oh, wow! Erica Baker: Had no idea, yep. Matt Haughey: That's wild. Erica Baker: Yeah, right? It does that. It makes those connections. That's the sort of connection I want for every black person to have. I want for them to be like, "Oh, that person who works around the corner and I see the commercials on TV for their law office is my second cousin." I don't know. The hippie happy joy-joy part of me is like, "Maybe if we know how we're all connected, we'll be kinder to each other." I know that's like pie in the sky, like, "Yeah, utopian ideals Erica," but I don't know. I also want us to not be from trauma. Matt Haughey: Yeah. And just knowing more of the story, that gives you your humanity, that gives you- Erica Baker: Totally. Matt Haughey: Yeah, if we had better record keeping you could figure out ... Erica Baker: I'm also really big into puzzles and solving puzzles. This is like a puzzle to me. Erica Baker: Right now, if we had the right application of data, like the source data that was digitized and the right genetic genealogy data, and some of the right family tree data that we could query over with the right algorithms and put things together, I feel like we could really, algorithmically, build out some pretty significant trees. There will still have to be some manual work, but I think if we have the right source data, we can build out trees at a pretty fast rate that will help us make these discoveries that connect us all to each other and connect us back up to where we came from. Matt Haughey: Totally, yeah. I don't see why the Internet Archive or someone like that wouldn't want to be a part of that. It's like giving a gift to humanity. Erica Baker: I hope that they want to be a part of it. Maybe when you talk to whoever you know, they'll be like, "Oh yeah, that's interesting. Sorry we ignored her email. That's actually kind of cool." Matt Haughey: That's what I hope the resolution is as well. Erica Baker: Yeah. And if it's not, I'm going to do it anyway. It would be cool if they could help, but this is going to happen one way or the other. I have my plan. I know how much money it's going to cost to make this happen on my own and I have ways to go about doing this. Matt Haughey: Have you gone back east to rummage through county records? Erica Baker: Oh my gosh, yes. I love doing that. I have to plan another trip to Virginia to do that again. Erica Baker: One of my relatives, my second, third great-grandmother, I only found her information by sitting in the Library of Virginia and going through microfilm and microfiche about marriage information. It's like, "Okay, I gotta look through all these things." That's fun for me sitting in the Library of Virginia. While I'm there, I also, every time I get an image, I also store it to USB and then I can put it online somewhere for other people. Erica Baker: Let's see, last ... No, year before last, the summer of 2016, yes. I was in Southampton, Virginia and I literally spent a whole day walking through a cemetery taking pictures of gravestones. Matt Haughey: Man, this is stuff that AI and machine learning should be able to help with, right? Like photos? Erica Baker: Totally. Matt Haughey: There could be automated microfiche scanners and then you're using AI or OCR at least to start to get- Erica Baker: Yeah. The scanner's exist but they cost money and this data is in public libraries that don't have a lot of money. They have to spend money to do other stuff like stay alive. I would love to be able to have some foundation that would just gift these scanners and some training on how to use it to libraries that have all this data. It could really change the face of genealogy. Matt Haughey: Totally. Erica Baker: But again, people who have the money think of genealogy as a game. It's silly. Matt Haughey: Wow. Man, the thing that kills me also when I was reading "Just Mercy," Bryan Stevenson's book, that we have one private slavery museum on a plantation that a rich guy has bankrolled. And now we've got ... Isn't there a lynching museum that's coming together? Erica Baker: Yeah. That was his. That's Bryan Stevenson's. Matt Haughey: Oh, wow! Oh, so it's going to be in Alabama then. Erica Baker: Yeah. It is, it exists. Matt Haughey: I really want to go. I've seen some just stunning photos from the Louisiana, from the slavery museum. I cannot believe there isn't a national museum or a museum in every state trying to tell, as horrible of a story as it is, so we don't repeat it, so we can learn from these mistakes, so we can better inform people about what's gone on. Erica Baker: We're going to get into some really tricky stuff here. Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: Are we ready for it? Erica Baker: A lot of, not a lot, but there are some white people – I can't say how many because I've never run a survey. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll do that on Google Surveys. They are afraid that if they acknowledge who their family owned, that the descendants of those people will come after them for reparations. They will try to take their money. So they don't want to have that connection. That's why for a while, 23andMe had it so that you had to ask to connect to people. I remember one of my closest white connections on 23andMe just rejected my request. Matt Haughey: Oh my god! Oh my god. Erica Baker: Yep. Yeah, there's people who don't want ... They either don't want to know because they don't want to have it associated. They don't want people coming after them for reparations. Or they have these really nice family history stories about great-great-great-grandfather Jack who had the farmhouse with the beautiful house that they passed down to everybody, and so much land, and so many acres, and oh, also he had 40 slaves. They don't want that to be part of his story. Erica Baker: It's very interesting if you look on Ancestry.com and you look at family trees for people who definitely have slaver owners in their trees, the records of those people owning slaves are there. They do not connect those records to their family. They will not connect them. They will not say, "This is great-great-grandfather Jack's slave ownership record." They just will not do it. Matt Haughey: And they're just trying to say, "We're blood relatives only" or something? Erica Baker: I think that either it doesn't register to them that it's important or they want to actively ignore, avoid that piece of information about their family. If you tell somebody who is white, "You are descended from someone who owned slaves," the look that comes across their face is just like you've just told them that you killed their cat. Matt Haughey: I know someone who's learned this and he feels really bad about it. Erica Baker: Right. Matt Haughey: But I mean, this was 150 years ago. Erica Baker: Exactly. Matt Haughey: I always thought a reparations thing would be a government-based thing, but it's so selfish to block all this knowledge just because people are worried about ... Ugh. Erica Baker: Worried about reparations, not wanting to besmirch the family history, not wanting to feel that feeling really bad about your ancestor 150 years ago or 400 years ago owning another human being. But the thing is, that happened then. The people who are alive now, while they are the beneficiaries of it, did not commit those atrocities. So they have the opportunity now to make that right and try to help people figure out where they came from and get over that whole, "Oh god, I feel bad because my ancestor was horrible." Erica Baker: They have an opportunity to make it right, and get over that, and improve the lives of the people who their ancestor made life horrible for. They can right that wrong. But they can't get past the feelings of, "Oh no, I feel bad" to get to that place where they can right the wrong. Matt Haughey: And hiding all that information, to deny everyone their humanity, is just so wild. Erica Baker: You know what? It's really selfish. Matt Haughey: Yes. Erica Baker: But humans are selfish and you have to figure out how to get them to not be selfish. You have to figure out how to get them to not think just of themselves. Erica Baker: I was talking with someone the other day about their ... They're doing an Ancestry DNA or a 23andMe test. They're like, "Oh yeah, I know who all my relatives are. I don't need to know." I was like, "But what if four generations ago or even one of your aunts or uncles or your great-aunts or uncles had a kid that they gave up for adoption and now the descendants of that kid are trying to figure out who their family is? The way they do it is because you take an Ancestry DNA test and they find you and they can try to put together their tree." Erica Baker: They're like, "Oh, oh yeah. I guess. Huh." It's like, "Yes, it is not just about you." Matt Haughey: Oh, I just found out my family's stories don't match up with reality. Erica Baker: Yeah? Matt Haughey: I did 23andMe. I've always been told on my mom's side, the grandparents came, they were the first kids born from Italy. Both families were Italian immigrants. They have very Italian names. So that would make them 100% Italian because they'd only lived in Italy. My mom must be 50, I must be 25%. Matt Haughey: And my dad's side, it was like Irish and some other stuff, mixed Western Europe. I always thought that was weird because I remember being a kid and going ... The first funeral I went to is my great-grandmother who was obviously a Russian Jew who fled Russia because of anti-Semitism. I was like, "Hey, dad. Aren't we a little bit Jewish too or something because Great-Grandma Fienne really seemed kind of ... That was a thing." He was like, "Oh, I don't know if that's a religion or an ethnicity. I don't know. It's probably not." Matt Haughey: So I do the 23andMe last month. I just got the results a week or two ago. I am 31% Italian, so that's less than 50 but pretty high. My next highest is Ashkenazi Jewish at 18%. It's like there's some anti-Semitism in my own family, like they don't want to admit. And then everything else is just a mix of Western Europe. I was really bummed there was 0 Africa. I'm apparently from Malaysia like in my- Erica Baker: Wait, okay. I have questions. Okay. Well, no, one statement and one question. Matt Haughey: Sure, shoot. Erica Baker: One statement first. It is maybe not that your family is not anti-Semitic. It may be that they just don't know because when a lot of Jewish families were fleeing to escape persecution, they completely wiped that history of themselves away, like completely. They did not tell anybody. Wherever they went, they're like, "Nah, I'm not. I'm whatever. Something else." They would not recognize that Jewish part of them because it wasn't safe. Matt Haughey: That's right, that's true. Erica Baker: So I would hesitate to call them anti-Semitic and maybe it's just nobody really knew, right? Matt Haughey: You just don't tell grandchildren and then they forget and yeah. I could see that. And you want to not be persecuted in your new homeland, so you're not going to call attention to yourself. Erica Baker: Right, exactly. It's a secret you take to the grave with you. Matt Haughey: That makes sense. Erica Baker: So she took it the grave and you saw her at the funeral and you're like, "Hm, I don't know." Erica Baker: Okay, and now the question. Why were you bummed that you didn't have any African? Matt Haughey: Well because you know, I think that is the source of all humankind. I knew there was some probably southern Europe stuff. I think of northern Africa and southern Europe as being fluid, like Morocco and stuff. I was surprised my, whatever, my farthest reaches are from Malaysia. Some sort of neanderthal population. They give you some weird 0.0%. Matt Haughey: I would hope we could trace all humanity back to Africa. It seems like the source. All biological records seem to point there. Erica Baker: Yeah, genetically, the mother of all men is from Africa. It's just interesting to me. I hear that a lot from white people about, "Oh, I'm just plain whatever. I'm 100% European. I'm boring." I'm just like, "What were you hoping for and why?" Matt Haughey: I think you want more interesting stories. I heard, maybe three years ago, that my dad almost married a different woman before my mom which never- Erica Baker: Wow! Matt Haughey: Why would you tell someone when you're 75 that small nugget? He was engaged to get married. Me and my brother like, "What?" Erica Baker: Does your mom know? Matt Haughey: I don't know because she died a few years before he told us that. I would hope she knows, but ... Erica Baker: I bet that has been something that was weighing on him that was inside part of him or maybe he is telling you that because maybe he has a child out there that you don't know about. Matt Haughey: Yeah. Erica Baker: That was like him warming you up for that information. It is possible. Matt Haughey: It is totally possible. Erica Baker: So maybe one day someone's going to pop up on 23andMe like, "Hey Matt!" Matt Haughey: Half-brother I guess. Erica Baker: "So we're half-brothers. What's up?" Matt Haughey: Yeah, I really hope every IPO in the world happens and you're flush with cash so you can actually help finish this project. It sounds like a really cool ambitious thing that god, so many people should be helping you with this, especially the Internet Archive. I'm so going to yell at people there. Erica Baker: Good. I support it. Please do. Let them know how to get in touch with me. You have my email address so you can give that to them, but I would really love to have their support or the support of anybody who is interested in making this a reality because it's honestly so important. Every time I tell the story to people, they're like, "Oh my god. How do we get you funding?" I'm like, "I don't know, but if someone"- Matt Haughey: Make it happen. Erica Baker: Yeah. If someone knows a way to make this happen, I would gladly go lead this project somewhere. That is, again, my life goal. It's what I want to do. Matt Haughey: And there's no endgame in sight for you because you want to fill out the rest of your story, but then it's fill out every other family's story. Erica Baker: Yeah. Matt Haughey: Go sideways with your family tree. Erica Baker: Yeah. Step one is getting the data. The data is the big thing. Erica Baker: You know what? It freaks me out that this data isn't digitized because every time there's a hurricane, I'm like, "Oh god, that's a big record set that gets swiped away." Or a fire or whatever. It is so fragile, this data, and we only have a limited time to get it digitized. That people are just like, "Do do do, no big deal. We're not going to digitize it." It's just like, "We're going to scan a library." There are a bazillion copies of that book you're scanning. That is not the thing that's important to scan. Scan the data where there's only one copy and it is fragile and will go away if the wrong disaster happens. That's what you want to focus on and not scanning random textbook that there are 60,000 copies of. Matt Haughey: Right. Erica Baker: Sorry. Matt Haughey: I can't believe Google doesn't do this as a test project, like a non-profity kind of thing to do to just test stuff out. Erica Baker: Matt, I tried so hard. Matt Haughey: Oh man. Erica Baker: I tried so hard when I worked at Google to get the Book Scanning Project to do this, and they are just not interested. Matt Haughey: Plus you could teach college CS classes on big data sets by just using census rolls going back 200 years. Let students work with ... This is public data, you know? This would be a massive data set, just requires some scanning, some OCR, some sorting, some cleanup. Erica Baker: Less OCR unless there's a good OCR library. Matt Haughey: For handwriting. Erica Baker: Yeah because the handwriting is tricky especially when you get back into the part where F's looked like S's. Matt Haughey: Right. But yeah, that's what AI could be doing. Erica Baker: Totally. But instead, AI is doing things like whatever, like making fake porn and whatever. Matt Haughey: Okay. Let's wrap it up. Erica Baker: Okay, all right. Let's do. Matt Haughey: You said your peace. I hope this happens someday. I will do whatever I can to help move this along. Erica Baker: I appreciate it. Matt Haughey: Thanks for talking to me for the last hour. Erica Baker: Thanks for letting me talk for an hour about genealogy. Literally when you asked me to do this, I was like, "Oh my god. I don't ever get to talk about genealogy! I'm always talking about diversity or whatever. I get to talk about genealogy? Oh, I'm so excited!" Matt Haughey: I've been wanting to ask you a million questions since I heard you say it when you joined Slack and we just never got around to it. Erica Baker: It's a good thing you never asked because I would have talked to you for hours on-end Matt. Yeah. But thank you for talking to me about it. This was a great experience. Matt Haughey: Yeah, you should write about this anyway, no matter what happens with this. Erica Baker: Oh, we didn't even get into the whole thing about what's going on with the Golden Gate or East Bay Killer dude. Matt Haughey: Oh, right! Erica Baker: Yeah. We can talk about that later. Matt Haughey: Okay, all right. Awesome. Thanks a lot Erica. Erica Baker: Thanks Matt. Matt Haughey: Thanks again to Fireside.fm, the podcast host for this show. Just a great, simple-to-use app for podcasting if you're into it. Check it out at Fireside.fm. Thanks.