A dapper playboy, a broken plantation safe, an embezzlement scheme, and a grandfather who completely vanished. What happened to William H. Wheeler? 🕵️‍♂️🔍

When an 83-year-old client named Jane came to Julie Merrill, an accredited genealogist with Ancestry ProGenealogists, looking for clues about her missing grandfather, she had no idea the search would lead away from Washington state, straight past California, and deep into a high-society scandal in 1890s Georgia. Armed with DNA clusters and old newspaper archives, Julie chased down this 100-year-old family history mystery and uncovered a jaw-dropping double life.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Four months pregnant, two babies already buried in German soil, Anna Maria Niccum boarded a wooden ship in 1749 and crossed an ocean she'd never seen. Not for a revolution but for a foothold. My six-times great-grandmother made an extraordinary journey from the exhausted Rhineland Palatinate to the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland's Toms Creek, where she would hold the line for nearly two decades so her children could inherit something no tyrant had ever offered her family: a new kind of American identity. Her story is one that history almost forgot, but your family tree may be hiding one just like it. Somewhere in your ancestry, a woman who signed nothing and appears in almost no official records made your existence possible. It’s time to find her.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

A wounded soldier refuses to dismount. His boot overflowing with blood, his hat riddled with three bullet holes, he rallies his troops up a South Carolina hill in Pennsylvania Dutch. History turns on a single moment. Anne Mitchell, a South Carolina native whose roots run deep in the Palmetto state, joins me to share the story of her sixth great-grandfather, Frederick Hambright, a German immigrant who helped win one of the most decisive (and least talked about) battles of the Revolutionary War. As we count down to America's 250th birthday, Anne shares how a family tree hint on Ancestry led her to the Battle of King's Mountain. There, Hambright's courage helped force Cornwallis to change his entire strategy. This is a story about what it means to stand up when history calls your name and why the most powerful family stories are often the ones nobody told you growing up.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Chosen family and Jewish roots run so deep in New Hampshire's Lakes Region that two families spent generations wondering where one ended and the other began. In this episode, Jewish genealogy researcher Nancy Kotz and award-winning journalist Lynne Snierson share the stories of their families, woven together across generations. From a Lithuanian rabbi who may have missed his train stop in 1902 to lakeside lobster bakes and a synagogue that still carries the nameplates of the original founding families, their story is a testament to what community can build when people choose to show up for one another. If you've ever wondered whether the family you were born into is the only family that shapes you, this episode will give you a beautiful, definitive answer. 

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back? After Nicole Palsa heard her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking story, she spent the next twenty years searching for answers. Nicole’s great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney, disappeared from Virginia around 1914, leaving behind a little girl, a grieving family, and a silence that lasted generations. When a single DNA match arrived the Friday before Mother's Day 2018, everything changed. And what Nicole uncovered was far more complicated, tragic, and surprisingly triumphant than anyone expected. From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Floyd County, Virginia to a small Illinois village where people still remembered Dessie's name, this is a story about the secrets women kept to survive, the daughters left behind, and what it means to finally find someone your family spent a century trying — and failing — to forget.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

What would you do if a single letter revealed that everything you thought you knew about your family was only half the story? Scott Pratt walked into a historic Brooklyn church as part of Ancestry's powerful documentary Railroad Ties expecting to find some connection to his Scottish colonial roots. Instead he discovered that he's a descendant of enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In this deeply moving conversation, Scott and I trace the extraordinary arc of his family tree: from Sophia, the light-skinned Black woman who fled slavery through Brooklyn, to her grandson Frank, a silent film star who kept a journal about passing for white that now sits in the Harvard Library. Scott's story is about so much more than genealogical discovery. It’s about the grief of lost stories, the complexity of inherited identity, and the fierce resilience that echoes across generations when we finally let ourselves claim the whole truth of who we are.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

He buried a fortune in gold under a bent white oak. Then he died before anyone could find it.

My 6x great-grandfather Abraham Kuykendall lived 93 extraordinary years. He survived colonial America, fought in the Revolution, crossed the frontier with 13 children, and built an empire of 2,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But when I found him on a Sunday night FaceTime research session with my dad, I discovered that history remembers him as a ghost story. There's still an iron wash pot full of coins buried somewhere near Pheasant Branch in Flat Rock, worth an estimated $8 million today, and treasure hunters are still looking for it. But in this episode, I want to tell you who Abraham actually was and why the gold isn't the real treasure that got lost. Your family has buried stories too. You still have time to unearth them.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

What can a single vintage photograph tell you about your ancestors? Maureen Taylor, know as The Photo Detective®, has spent decades proving that old family photos can solve family history mysteries in pretty fascinating ways. Born and bred in Rhode Island and currently serving as president of the Rhode Island Genealogical Society, Maureen takes us on a tour of the 13th state’s unique history. She recounts stories of her great-grandfather’s paper hanging business in Pawtucket and her grandmother who crossed the border from Quebec to work in the textile mills. Along the way, she shares how a tiny state with fierce independence and a rich industrial heritage shaped generations of families, including her own. If you’ve ever wondered what the place your ancestors called home might reveal about who you are today, this conversation will inspire you to start looking.

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

 🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!