Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
A "brick-wall" DIY genealogy podcast that features your questions and Kathleen Brandt's answers. She wants your stories, questions, and “brick walls”. But be ready to add to your "to-do" list. As Kathleen always says, this is a Do it yourself (DIY) genealogy podcast. “I'll show you where the shovel is, but I'm not digging up your family.”
Maybe, you have no idea where to start searching for an ancestor. Or, perhaps you want to know more about your family folklore. Host Kathleen has 20 years in the industry and is the founder of a3genealogy. She's able to dispense genealogy research advice and encouragement in understandable terms that won't get you lost in genealogy jargon. Along with her husband and co-host, John, she helps you accomplish "do-it-yourself" research goals, learn some history, and have a bit of fun along the way. Light-hearted and full of detailed info, Hittin' the Bricks is your solution for your brick-wall research problems.
Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
Unmarked Graves to Living History: Salus Populi
Discover the hidden stories of African American history in Missouri with our passionate guests, Michelle Cook and Riley Sutherland from the Salus Populi Project.
Michelle and Riley are on a mission to bring to light the overlooked narratives of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and unmarked African American burials in Missouri. With Michelle's storytelling prowess and Riley's academic insights from Harvard, they reveal the power of pension records in reconstructing entire communities and personal histories, all while bridging significant gaps in historical knowledge.
Join us as we explore the untapped potential of pension records and their role in uncovering rich historical narratives. By sharing these stories, we empower descendant researchers and shine a light on individual contributions during pivotal events like the Civil War. Michelle and Riley's work underscores the transformative impact of making these hidden documents available to the public, fostering a deeper understanding of the past.
Groups like Salus Populi and the Eternal Valor Network are making history an interactive experience, connecting past with present through genealogy and archival research. If you wish to participate in the Salus Populi Project contact Michelle or Riley: Salus Populi Project. Oh..and follow them on social media!
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.
Thanks to MyHeritage for their generous support to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen! Follow us on social media and subscribe to HTB with Kathleen in order to enter your name in our monthly MyHeritage Complete Package giveaway starting Jan 2024!
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of the Salus Populi State, the Kansas City that has a team everyone loves to hate. Welcome to another episode of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast that features your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, and today we'll be talking to members of the Salus Populi Project, michelle Cook and Riley Sutherland. So let's start Hittin' the Bricks, kathleen. Today we have two members of the Salas Poplarly Project, michelle Cook and Riley Sutherland.
Kathleen Brandt:And John, I will Go ahead and John, I will put their information in our show notes or in the A3 Genealogy blog at A3Genealogy. Are you done? No, I think I'm done. This is him teasing me because I always plug my blog.
John Brandt:Yeah, really, what's the problem? Okay, yeah, that's okay. This is the problem with doing these on Friday.
Kathleen Brandt:Or Monday or Tuesday. Or Monday or Tuesday, wednesday or Thursday.
John Brandt:Okay. So, kathleen, do us a favor real quick and tell me how you heard of Michelle and Riley's work.
Kathleen Brandt:Okay, Okay, john, from the top, you got it. What have we done?
John Brandt:Done three times. We know who they are. Everybody's met multiple times. I feel like we should all just be going out for lunch at this point, because I'm not. I mean, I want to know how, how you found out about the, the project and how you met up with Michelle and Riley.
Kathleen Brandt:I have been seeing it on on social media. I did not know what the project actually entailed, but it had something to do with USCT and something in Missouri.
John Brandt:And the.
Riley Sutherland:USCT is the.
Kathleen Brandt:United States Colored Troops.
John Brandt:Okay.
Kathleen Brandt:So that's why I went to the presentation. I was like what are they actually doing? And I was pleasantly surprised by both the diversity of the audience and their presentation was excellent.
John Brandt:Well, okay, so Riley and Michelle.
Riley Sutherland:Michelle, you really got engaged first, so I'll let you go ahead and start.
Michelle Cook:That sounds great. Thanks, riley. So I have been for about the last 10 years deep in African American records here in Clay County, riley and I Riley, of course, is at Harvard getting her PhD right now and I am still here in Liberty and we met many years ago. But prior to our meeting I was researching projects, specifically African American projects, here in Liberty, which is in Clay County, missouri, and I had a lot of questions and no one could answer those questions and so, like any good historian, I just kept digging deeper and deeper and deeper, trying to get into that.
Michelle Cook:And so when Riley and I met, through a project, we were cleaning headstones in the cemetery, in the local cemetery, and we started talking and I started chatting with her about what was going on, and she had actually heard me, I think. Correct me if I am wrong, riley, but I think you had. I had done a presentation for the Clay County Museum and Riley was heavily involved with the museum at that time and that was kind of the beginning of all of this goodness. And she began to talk with me about pension records because she was interested in pension records and that was kind of the start of it.
Kathleen Brandt:How did you get involved with this?
John Brandt:Well, hang on, I was going to actually ask a different question, because did you both go to the cemetery together to clean headstones or did you just bump into each other at the cemetery?
Michelle Cook:When the City of Liberty had a cemetery committee. They have since disbanded that cemetery committee, but I was the volunteer coordinator and I was trying to move the city towards preservation, because the cemetery here was an historic cemetery and so we were trying to do all of the good things that preservationists do, all of the recording and the cleaning and all of those good things. And so Riley came as a volunteer to clean headstones, got it. That's that piece. So your question, kathleen, is what do I do for a living? Well, I kind of do this for a living, but you know, as as most of us do, I think we have, we wear lots of hats and my pay gig is I'm a professional musician and educator, and so I did not realize or understand the level of my love for history until I began doing African American history.
Michelle Cook:I did not understand how much I loved it, and it has definitely become a passion of mine, and I don't think it's one I will likely give up, even after we complete this project. I am in, as they say, to my neck and I think there is too much work to do, and I want to be about the work, so Michelle, when the connection, the reason you got involved in African American history was because of the cemetery project.
Kathleen Brandt:Is that correct? You were actually involved there.
Michelle Cook:I had been researching our local cemeteries to discover the unmarked and unknown African-American burials in our city cemeteries and when I began that work the city had only 233 known burials not many marked but known and I am still working on that project. I am up to almost a thousand at this point on that project. I am up to almost 1000. At this point, in the process of doing that, I discovered the first USCT soldier and went what is this?
Michelle Cook:There's a bigger story here and that of course led to the Solus project and once I understood the magnificence of what the records held, the magnificence of what the records held and I understood the void between what we did not know nor could we find. That void was expansive and I knew that doing this work could fill that gap for a great many people, regardless of what angle they were coming at. I always say this, and Riley's heard me say this a million times there's an entry point to this project, whether you're a descendant, a community historian, an educator, you know a serious historian who makes your living, you know writing books, there's an entry point for everyone.
Kathleen Brandt:And what about you, Riley? How did you come along and get involved? What drew you to this project? Pick it up from there.
Riley Sutherland:Yes, I, prior to being in that cemetery, had started my undergraduate work as a history student at the University of South Carolina and I was studying Revolutionary War pensions. I had a high school teacher, kelly Locke McMillan, who encouraged me to look at these Revolutionary War pension records because the way they can help us see how people tell their stories. So in pension records we'll have folks who couldn't read, they couldn't write, but they would appear before a judge and share their stories. And so I was so drawn to these stories and wanted to figure out how to learn more about history through them, and this was on my mind when I was visiting my family over spring break. They lived in Liberty.
Riley Sutherland:I grew up in Liberty when the COVID lockdown happened and I couldn't return to school, so I found myself taking classes in Liberty from my parents' guest bedroom, and that's when my mom signed us up to go to a cemetery cleaning.
Riley Sutherland:To get out of the house during lockdown is where I bumped into Michelle, and Michelle mentioned pension records when explaining to me who people in the cemetery were, and I was so excited because I'd never met another woman who wanted to read pension records with the exception of a high school teacher, so this was very inspiring to me, as well as the way Michelle tells history.
Riley Sutherland:So so she took me into the cemetery to learn how to clean headstones, but she just started pointing to pieces of ground that weren't marked and she'd say do you see that ground right there? That's where this man is buried. His daughter is over there and relates to this family. And all of a sudden I saw Michelle, through hand gestures and stories, reconstructing an entire town and families and people who were legally opposed to each other rivalries, business partners, comrades all in this cemetery. And it was a way of telling stories I found sorely missing from my college classes and something I wanted to learn more from and explore more. So I asked Michelle, can I join you to share these pension records with people? And we got to work together and I rejoiced greatly.
John Brandt:Well, it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like a lot of kindred spirits. And yeah, because pension records. You know I my reading tends to go in a different direction. But of course I've heard Kathleen talk about them and how important they are and she absolutely flogs that in her presentations and just how full of information they are.
Michelle Cook:When you go in to research somebody and you can find no information. When you find, do and you go into the research and you find the record and you find the pension, and you start reading the pension and it is just like all of these layers unfold and are unpeeled and you find things that you never would have found. Entire communities are reconstructed, entire families are reconstructed, entire families are reconstructed. Stories, pre-war stories, a battlefields account, the latest headstone that we had installed. This gentleman, his name is Woodford Pickett, and Woodford Pickett was in the battle, the siege of Fort Blakely, alabama, fort Blakely, alabama, which is a significant piece of history. And yet he came back. He was from Liberty, went away, came back. We can follow his entire trajectory up until the time he died and was here and I could find no information about him other than census information until I got this pension.
John Brandt:Wow.
Michelle Cook:So that's pretty significant stuff and I get excited about it. I'm probably one of 15 people in the whole universe that gets this excited about it. But I get excited. Count me in.
John Brandt:Well, we have at least three of the other 12 are lonely right now because the three of them are here at least. I'm not including myself in that, but I do appreciate how much those records and adding to the database of knowledge is so important really. That is really what history is about is understanding the individual contributions beyond the wider movements of politics and geography and all of that.
Michelle Cook:I think so frequently about how. You know, one of our main thrusts with this project and I know Riley can tell you much about this as well is we want them to be accessible and we want people to understand what they're looking at, why they're looking at it, how they were constructed, because they just have remained so hidden and so many people don't even know how to find them. And so we're really determined to help people have an understanding of that so that they can and I know you all believe in this, you know, then they can do the work. We can do a lot of the work. We can bring people to the work. You know, kathleen, you're a teacher. You understand this. This is how you educate people. You bring them and then they figure out how to do it. When you're out there swimming by yourself and I think we've all done that we're trying to figure things out and there's no one to help us figure those. We feel like there's nobody to help us figure those things out.
Kathleen Brandt:Which brings me to two different points. John One, I want to talk about the project, but I also want to talk about what Tracing Ancestors is doing, and we are organizing our first event now just to bring people in and helping them with those resources. But I'm going to get back to that in a minute. First of all, on Michelle and Riley's website, on the project website, the project that Michelle has referred to hasn't been explained yet.
Michelle Cook:Do you want to take a whack at that?
Riley Sutherland:I can go ahead and get started and then jump in and add anything. So the goal of the project is to first of all digitize as many of these pension records as we can. I don't know that either of us have actually explained what a pension record is yet, so we can do that a little bit more. These pension files are in the National Archives, most of them in Washington DC, some of them in St Louis, and are notes from when these USCT veterans applied for pensions, or if their widows, their children or sometimes even their parents applied for pensions in exchange for their service after the Civil War, and they'd appear before courts and clerks would write down what they were saying to prove that they'd really served, what their experiences were like in the war, and in order to prove they really served and deserve pensions, they brought alongside them family members, comrades. Michelle has even found documents in which the people who formerly enslaved these men would write in yes, I really enslaved this person. All to substantiate these men's stories. They would also submit additional documents they have so like. Sometimes widows would submit photographs of their husbands who served in the war, and all of these are now in files in the National Archives. So these are very rich sources, especially for descendant researchers who can reconstruct family trees and print networks and all of these things from these files. But none of them are digitized, and so Michelle and I wanted to find out how to help folks access these documents without paying upwards of $200 fees to get them scanned, which is what it costs to scan just a single pension file.
Riley Sutherland:So we are currently in the process of digitizing these records. I think we've finished scanning about 15% of them, so we're making progress, and our goal is to then make a digital archive so folks can access both images of the documents but also transcriptions, so that way they can keyword search for terms that might be relevant to them. So folks are able to see what the places and people and events these men are talking about were, and from there, michelle, you can talk a little bit more about this too. We're hoping to use this project as a springboard for additional remembrance projects in the community.
Riley Sutherland:Michelle mentioned headstones, so we're going to work on continuing to tell these men's story through headstones. We have been planning some preliminary arts projects. Michelle's a music teacher. I actually heard of her in the community before meeting her in the cemetery because I played the violin and it was in orchestras with her students. So Michelle ended up finding a USCT songbook of music. The fifers and drummers would have played in camp and we've been working with local music groups to record those songs and think about what these mean to men.
Riley Sutherland:So we're hoping the project will help individuals connect with the history of their ancestors, but also with these mutual aid networks that the men constructed, the communities they constructed, and we're considering how studying that past can help us construct those communities and liberty today. Michelle, I'm going to hand it off to you to add whatever you like to that.
Michelle Cook:Well, no, you did a fantastic job. In a nutshell, brevity is not my strength. Riley is far, far better at that. I'm the story girl. I synthesize the information because I feel so strongly that people need to hear and understand the stories.
Michelle Cook:This project does not encompass all of Missouri. That would be incredibly voluminous and we are small and it's costly. And so we chose for our data set the seven counties in Missouri that were the heaviest enslaving counties, and when I say that I mean these seven of Missouri's 114 counties held a third of Missouri's enslaved Seven. I'll say that again because it's so important for people to understand. Seven counties held a third of all of Missouri's enslaved, and so we chose to focus on those particular counties.
Michelle Cook:We are in the second phase of our project. The first phase took about a year and a half, just slightly over that. We went through 5,000 records and whittled that down to 2,500. And we've created a pretty robust database with a lot of information, the military information that allows us to find the pensions, because matching the pensions and the people is a little challenging with African American research, specifically because of the names, and so I feel fortunate to have had, you know, we had a small team, a team of 15 people, but we got it done. We went through that many records in a year and a half and we are now.
Michelle Cook:We've been concurrently getting the pensions and we are starting the work of transcription at this point, so we're going to need a lot more help. I feel excited and hopeful about what I think this is going to bring to the communities who, frankly, are a lot of them still in the dark about this history.
Kathleen Brandt:She did mention the seven counties that they chose, which was Boone, Calloway County, Sheraton, Clay, Lafayette, Howard and Saline County. Those are seven of the 17 parts of Little Dixie, or what we called the Black Belt. Missouri is noted for having the most African Americans enslaved or enslaved persons outside of the South, and so because of that, this history is extremely rich. She was talking about Liberty, Missouri, where she was cleaning the graves. That was just one of counties, which is Clay County, right. So that's just one of those seven counties where it's Liberty. And of course, my family was there too and it was a Buffalo soldier from there.
Michelle Cook:Something we are also tracking with this project, by the way.
Kathleen Brandt:Wonderful, and Saline County of course covers my entire maternal side of enslaved people, so I was very excited about that, yeah.
John Brandt:I noticed on the map on the website, though that there are counties that run all the way down through the Cape Girardeau area.
Michelle Cook:Yeah, there were 54 enlistment stations throughout the state. It is surprising. I did a presentation a couple of weeks ago in Weston and had specifically talked about those enslaved. Weston's USCT, at their recruitment, had only two men listed from that particular station and every other man from Platt County went somewhere else to enlist, which of course is true for so many individuals but definitely for Platt County too, so all across the state for sure.
Kathleen Brandt:And they were able to get to where they needed to go, because we did not have an organized Confederacy here in Missouri. We had the looting and the crazies running around, but we didn't have the organized. All they needed to do is get somewhere, and these are enlistments in the Union Army, the GAR, absolutely the.
Michelle Cook:Union Army and they were considered volunteers, they were considered their own. And the recruitment here it's very interesting because we have some, have some soldiers, those USCT soldiers who actually started before. I think the earliest in Missouri's technically is 63. But we actually have some from these counties who enlisted before that. They went to other places and enlisted before that, you know, in First Kansas.
Kathleen Brandt:Yes, so that was one of my my questions. The actual project, it's a digitizing project. It is one more way that we can honor these people who served our country. They didn't serve them as traitors, they served them. As I believe in this constitution, we are fighting for our rights, we're fighting for our freedom, and I don't know if you're going to have to cut and paste this part, but I wanted to ask. I'm sorry. I wanted to ask them why the title.
Riley Sutherland:Michelle and I thought for a long time about what to title the project. We wanted to make sure it's something that would really, we hope, resonate with the men who were studying who were studying. We chose, after Michelle looked at USCT training books for so long, to name the project Salus Populi, because Salus Populi Ex Let Suprema. I do not know Latin, that might have been horrific, so apologies to listeners who know how to pronounce.
Riley Sutherland:That is Missouri's state motto. It means the will of the people is supreme law, and this is something that Michelle discovered. Some USCT soldiers actually had written on their flags that they carried into battle, and we were thinking about just the nuance and intricacy of what that means. The will of the people is supreme law, especially in a state like Missouri during the Civil War. So we found it just tremendously impactful that these men were fighting to be included in the people whose will was supreme law and wanted to name our project after that to honor the fact that these men transformed what the Missouri state motto means, as well as to honor the fact that we want those voices to be included in the narrative of how this became the Missouri State motto and its significance.
Kathleen Brandt:I really was touched by this. On your website, you have these three reasons why it was named that, what it meant. You put up the motto, the model, the regimental flag, and then at the very end, you said this project through its process to interrogate the changing historical meaning of the people, and when I saw that I thought that is fabulous. Wouldn't we like to have a more inclusive in the people? And, john, do you remember me talking about this earlier today?
Kathleen Brandt:yeah, well, um yeah, in other words in other words, I kept telling him start with. In other words, in other words, he goes what about the rest of it? Do you like that too?
John Brandt:so so, john, will you read that, just because it's so beautiful in other words, we believe the archive is not a place or a collection, but a cacophony of voices which have been buried by prejudice and underdeveloped archival infrastructure. It's time to listen and I think that active approach to experiencing history is often lacking. I don't find it lacking with genealogists and with the people I've met through Kathleen and through, really, the podcast. It's not lacking. History is a living thing. For especially the researchers, it's a living thing. It's often presented as very dry and very boring subject. You know it's talking about the past with no context. You know it's talking about the past with no context and I think with the genealogy and the research that's being done and the work being done with groups like Salas Popula, it becomes a living thing, which is wonderful and a great way to experience our past and our history.
Michelle Cook:We deeply appreciate you saying that and hearing that very clearly. That means we're doing our job right. That and hearing that very clearly, that means we're doing our job right. And I don't think anybody who spends any time in the archival record knows that the work is going to be never ending to tell stories, to help people understand, to educate people the disparity in what has not occurred and what has been covered up and is now, as you say, living.
Michelle Cook:The archives do speak to you and I know that sounds very woo-woo to some people, but I do believe that when you begin to do this work, you understand and we want to engage people at a level beyond just sheer military history, just sheer black history. You know, when I read the stories of these individuals and their wives, I am floored daily by the things that I read and I think often about how this is just so completely inaccessible and buried. And it drives I think it drives us to the work. And even though it is big work, someone said to me well, why aren't you doing all of Missouri? One day I said you know that's the goal. The ultimate goal is to do this project, do it well, help people understand what it can be and then teach other people how to do it. I mean, I'm an educator, riley's an educator. Kathleen, you're an educator, you know this is it's work, fergus.
John Brandt:Fergus, I'm sorry, can we sit back on that name for a second?
Michelle Cook:He's a West Highland Terrier, so he had to have a name, of course he is he had to have a name.
John Brandt:Of course he is, he had to have a name.
Riley Sutherland:Oh, michelle's getting up. I'll just note that something she frequently says to me, building on what she was just saying about connecting with educators, is, she says Riley, you know, if we're doing this project correctly, this will inspire people across the United States to undertake similar projects, and we want to connect with them and help make a model in which we're not just necessarily putting documents out there without any interpretation or without any work building community to listen to what the documents are saying, but instead figuring out how to work alongside each other to forge community through the documents, and I think about that frequently when working on this with Michelle. So part of education is helping people figure out the potential of these documents.
John Brandt:Yeah, beautifully put Again. An excellent idea going into the concept of this is community.
Michelle Cook:I love that you said that because you know, that's one of the things that I always think about. I was like I grew up here, riley grew up here, we grew up in a town called Liberty, for heaven's sake and and I I knew nothing of any of this history. It was not taught, it was not accessible to me. And now I know and I think I am very determined to help people. I know I taught my students ask me about it all the time. They ask me about the project all the time and we are even working. We were working with students. We're setting out those, you know, putting out those feelers and drawing people in to help with transcription work.
Michelle Cook:And they're very interested, they want to know, they want people to talk to them about it.
Riley Sutherland:Teachers as well. I'm lucky that I had some of the most encouraging, thoughtful history teachers. That's why I'm a history student now, and some of my former high school teachers middle school teachers have reached out to Michelle and I and said we want to hear more about this work. How can we share it with our students? How can we get our students involved? So Michelle and I have talked a lot and written some guides to help students get involved in the transcription process, so they can see not only these men's stories but also what the process of doing this work looks like.
Riley Sutherland:What does it look like to try to sit down and read cursive handwriting? What does it mean to sit down and really get into the work? Like Michelle and I, we sometimes just call each other and cry sobbing reading these pension records, because you can relate sometimes so deeply to the emotions. In this document Michelle found some of the most beautiful letters. A soldier wrote home to his wife asking about folks who were enslaved alongside him and asking to be sent a hymn book because he wanted to have that with him in camp. And reading these sometimes is just so overwhelmingly meaningful and we're really eager to engage students in that the descendants that we've had the privilege of talking with understand this so deeply, and we want to share that feeling with students so they can understand the importance of this work as well.
Kathleen Brandt:Going back to what they're both talking about, and that's that community, community involvement, community engagement and education. That is why Tracing Ancestors has a new project called the Eternal Valor Network, the EVN, and that network is to pull organizations like yours who are out to honor veterans, whether they're black or white, but union, because we have in our community several organizations I've identified, I think, seven so far that honor our military and our veterans. So the Eternal Valor Network will be a consortium where organizations like yours will be a part of, and we're hoping to have our first event this spring. Michelle has been already asked to be a speaker.
Michelle Cook:Yes, and I'm excited. I'm very excited about being a part of this. We knew immediately when we started this project that having a space on the permanent website for these gentlemen to be honored and for people to read about their stories and in fact, we are going to have like an end memoriam kind of a page. But we are going to put QR codes.
Riley Sutherland:This is the tired lady speak.
Michelle Cook:Thank you, riley, and I'll tell you how many times Riley has saved my keister on many, many, many, oh, saving the reverse On the actual. So if you're going through right, you're walking through a cemetery. I know that sounds weird, but people do it all the time. There are public parks here, people walk through the cemeteries and if there's a QR code and you can, John, what is your role in all of this?
John Brandt:I'm here for the pithy statement History is about all of us.
Michelle Cook:As a listener, I have to say I appreciate the pithy statements.
Kathleen Brandt:There you go. Do you have other things you want to add about your project? Except, I do have one question, and, john, I'm not sure if this is included or not, I don't know, but I do have one question. Michelle, what?
Michelle Cook:is the Slavery Memory and Justice Project.
Michelle Cook:I'm a William Jewell College graduate and the Slavery Memory and Justice Project was something I had a great opportunity to be a part of.
Michelle Cook:One of our board members, dr Chris Wilkins, was formerly at William Jewell, and Chris is a brilliant scholar and a brilliant educator, and he and his students began doing research many years ago on people enslaved by the founders of William Jewell, and I got involved with that project pretty early on as a research director and had a great time helping the students do.
Michelle Cook:Having such a strong conviction myself about understanding the contributions of enslaved to the college where I went to school was pretty important for me, and so we made a couple of documentaries about that. Those are on YouTube and it was a real pleasure to work with those students and be able to listen to them, ask questions and be able to say, either I don't know, we'll go figure it out, or this is where we might look for that, but Chris led them so brilliantly in discovering that and there's a website for that as well and, like I said, the video is on YouTube. So that was a side. That was another side project. When you begin to get into the history game, as you know, you get a lot of little side projects that are that become very important, and that was one of my side projects, that that became very important to me. So thank you for asking about that.
Riley Sutherland:I would just add for anybody listening if you have questions, if you want to get involved, if you would like to tell us what you'd like to see on the digital archive, what would benefit you, please feel free to reach out. We'll give Kathleen our email address. It's also on our website so all of you should be able to find it, and we are so eager to collaborate with folks, build community, like we've talked about throughout the podcast, so please feel free to email anything stories, questions ideas?
Michelle Cook:Absolutely, and it's just a little piece of information that helps you understand the need for obviously, small nonprofits need financial support. That is a given, but there are lots of ways that people could contribute, and one of the things that Riley was just talking about we're going to need I'll give you a very concrete example. So we have all of the Clay County pensions.
Michelle Cook:Those pensions are somewhere between eight and 10,000 pages, wow. And the affiant statements, which I think are the real. Everything that's in there is important, but the affiant statements are very, very important because they give us so much really rich contextualization that we would not get anywhere else. Those have to be transcribed, most of them. There are a few from the 30s that are typewritten, which we get very excited when we see those. But you know we need all kinds of help and there will be offshoot projects like the music project, the transcription projects, the headstone project, and we have. You know, we're forming a descendants council. We believe that Black voices have to be a key piece of this project. The voices of descendants are critical as well.
Kathleen Brandt:So, John, I want to make sure that everyone does understand they do have a 501c3. We will have all of that information where people can donate financial or ink, as well as financial, to help Riley and Michelle. I really want to thank you for joining us. I'm looking forward to working with you all in the future, especially in the spring. Riley, I mentioned that Michelle is the speaker, but I've also seen what you can do. Don't think you're out of it. I just haven't asked you yet.
Riley Sutherland:I look forward to attending in any capacity and really look forward to talking with you more.
Michelle Cook:I talk to Riley, all the time I say thank goodness I met you. Thank goodness you're leading the way for somebody who's a couple decades older than you. I could not do this project without her.
Kathleen Brandt:Michelle's telling us how great you are, riley, so I'm writing it already down what I need you to do Go ahead.
Michelle Cook:She's brilliant, but Riley has put in the work and is an incredible scholar. This project would not be what it is or where it is without her and without the team of people that we have. So it's great to be supported, to have the support of people, so we're incredibly grateful that you asked us to come and talk. We could talk for hours about these guys. This is one of my favorite things to do is to tell the stories of these men. I, you know, we want to make it so that they can tell their own stories through these records online, and they tell their stories well.
Michelle Cook:Um, I just you know, we're just being a conduit right now so that they can tell their stories.
Kathleen Brandt:Thanks both of you for joining us. John, Did you have? Any closing words.
John Brandt:No, not at all. Um, I absolutely love this. It was such a pleasure to meet both of you and hopefully we will talk again soon. I absolutely love this. It was such a pleasure to meet both of you, and hopefully we will talk again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you, kathleen. We have a winner, do we not? For what month is this? Are we in?
Kathleen Brandt:This was for.
John Brandt:October For October, for the month of October, for the MyHeritage. Complete Package which is a $300 value, and thank you so much to MyHeritage. And who do we have as a winner this month?
Kathleen Brandt:This month, john is Stacy.
John Brandt:Stacy Schimpf.
Kathleen Brandt:Yes, so it's Stacy Schimpf.
John Brandt:She subscribed to the Linktree.
Kathleen Brandt:That is correct. In order to get a chance to win, you have to be a subscriber of linktree. Slash hitting the bricks.
John Brandt:And you have the chance of winning the MyHeritage Complete.
Kathleen Brandt:Package. So we're going to be giving away quite a few Ancestry DNA kits as well as my heritage packages, but I am going to make it as the board has suggested, only for our subscribers. So if you are looking for people to subscribe, we have about 10 other packages extra between next week.
John Brandt:Of the Ancestry DNA.
Kathleen Brandt:Ancestry DNA.
John Brandt:Oh, okay, we have.
Kathleen Brandt:Ancestry, dna, myheritage Complete Package, a Legacy Tree software also.
John Brandt:Now the MyHeritage Complete Package.
Kathleen Brandt:those are monthly, so you're going to get picked monthly on that?
John Brandt:Now the DNA. It sounds like you can be a little bit more liberal with those. That is correct, because you're dumping those that. Now the DNA. It sounds like you can be a little bit more liberal with those.
Kathleen Brandt:That is correct.
John Brandt:Because you're dumping those before what? The end of holiday, before the end of the year.
Kathleen Brandt:Before New Year's Day December 31st is the last day for those December 31st we're going to get.
John Brandt:We're clearing out the basement of all of our DNA kits. Is that what it is?
Kathleen Brandt:That is correct. Well, congratulations.
John Brandt:Well, congratulations, you've made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to MyHeritage and Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Thanks to Michelle and Riley for spending time with us. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brandt, our part-time brain worm and full-time whale, dismembering nutbag, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hidden Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fisknuckle and the Swifties. Watch for the next appearance. Wherever your favorite vaccines are sold. You can find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? No-transcript.
