It means it's meant to be right this moment. Today on The Criste Cast, I'm joined by a distant family member and a friend. My fourth cousin, twice removed, that's right, Don Ludwig, originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Don lives near Frankfurt, Germany and is constantly traveling the world. Since we've connected, I've come to appreciate his incredible passion for genealogy, family, and history. He spent years exploring and documenting family trees, uncovering long-lost stories, and helping others understand. Where'd they come from? Don also has a keen eye for historic banknotes, collecting them as both artifacts and teaching tools. He publishes his research and thoughts online, blending his love of writing, history, and education. And while I know this only scratches the surface of what he's involved in, today's episode is a chance to dive into what I've seen so far and uncover more about what interests him. Don, thanks for joining us. Glad to be here. All right, all right. So we're going to jump right into it. How did you get interested in genealogy. Well, it actually started back when I was in eighth grade, and we had a teacher, a science teacher, who was Mormon. And he gave us the assignment of doing a family tree. So he actually passed out some charts for us, and it was a simple chart where you had your name, names of your parents, names of your four grandparents, and names of your eight great-grandparents. And we were supposed to fill it out. So I went home, I talked to my mother, I talked to my grandmother, and we got it all filled out. Okay, and then I took it in. And then on our next trip back home, home being where my grandparents were from, and that's Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the groundhog is from. And I'm not related to the groundhog, by the way. So anyways, so we went back. We visited the cemetery where my grandfather's buried. He died when I was 10. And grandma started explaining to me who some of the people were. She was saying, it's like, okay, here's grandpa, of course. These are my parents. These are my grandparents. And then my great-grandparents, they're buried over there. And then I saw the names. And the name of my great-grandparents was Grube, G-R-U-B-E. And I looked around, and all of a sudden, I see all these gravestones that have the name Grube on them. And that kind of made me curious. And I was like, well, grandma, who are they? Who's that person? How is he related? Well, this woman over here, who's she? How's she related? And it just fascinated me. It was like this huge jigsaw puzzle, and I wanted to start connecting the dots. And, uh, and that's how it actually started with, again, with the group family. And then we did the same thing over the cemetery where my grandpa's parents were married. And that was the Gourley family. And along with the Gourley family, then we go back another generation or two and we get to the Sprankle family and that's how we're related. Exactly. And we're going to jump into that a little bit here in a moment. Cause yeah, we, we just kind of went over the family tree a moment ago and had plenty of interesting things to look at. It's just truly fascinating when you start to find out not only where people come from, but the kinds of things that they've done. And as we also mentioned, the similarities between families over time. So I'm, I'm super interested in that. Uh, and actually I'll share with you later. One of my future documentary ideas that has to do with family and keeping together. Uh, was there a specific moment though, as you were growing up that you realized that this wasn't just like maybe an ordinary hobby, something that was interesting, you know, to you more on a passionate level that you were going to follow for your entire life. When did you know, or did you meet a specific person? Like, how was that. Well, genealogy is one of these hobbies where it's a win-win situation. It's not that you're doing something for yourself and you're annoying other people. And when you talk to relatives, they're interested as well. You're asking them about themselves, their lives, their parents, their grandparences, and you can get beyond the names and the dates and then learn about them as people. What did they do? Where did they live? What did they accomplish? And again, when I established contact with your mom about 25 years ago, it was the same thing. I was able to learn more about her family and I was able to tell her about her own ancestors. So again, when you have those positive experiences, it motivates you to continue and to do more. Right. I mean, we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't because of that outreach and this interest that you have in this subject and getting to spark this conversation, which then goes out there, hopefully, to other people who are interested in these types of things. How do you verify the accuracy of what you're looking at? Is it something where you just have to have conversations with people to make sure that you are finding the right names? Or is it something where the Internet's helping out a lot with that. Well, when I started this, like I said, I was in eighth grade. So that means it was about 1973 when I started. And back in the 70s and 1980s, there was no Internet. And so things weren't online. So what you had to do is you had to talk to people. And of course, people's memories were not always the best. They might remember their grandparents, but would they remember exactly when their grandparents were born, when they got married, where they got married, things like that. So it's important to talk to people at the beginning to kind of get your family tree scanned. And then you need to kind of back that up with documentation. Well, what's documentation? Here in the United States, usually when someone dies, there's an obituary that's published in the paper, more so in smaller towns. And the obituaries usually say when and where they were born, when and where they died, usually or sometimes when and where they got married, who the family members were, parents, children. The obituaries were good sources of information and also actually doing some research in courthouses. Again, our family comes originally from Pennsylvania, so you can go into the courthouse and look up old marriage licenses, old tax records, old land records, wills, estate records, and that helps you kind of put the family together. And one other important tool in this is actually the old census records. In the United States, federal censuses are conducted every 10 years, and the first census was done in 1790. Beginning in 1850, they actually started listing all the family members. Okay. So 60 years later after they started, they said, hey, why not get the names in there, huh. Exactly. At the beginning, they only listed the head of the household, and then they only had a count, how many males under 16, how many females under 16, and things like that. So starting in 1850, then they started listing all the family members, and that's also been a tremendous help trying to piece the families together. that's very interesting and to you what do you think is the most interesting part of that history is it's just putting the pieces together is it finding the names uncovering the past like. is it just the whole aspect of playing the puzzle that's part of it the puzzle okay but again um, what's interesting uh the research aspect i think is interesting because you're actually not just going someplace uh and just think okay i'll just copy it down and i have it finished in a day right okay genealogy is not something that's done in a day it can take a lifetime to do and you're still not finished okay so it's very challenging and one of the, again one of the uh the great benefits is then of course meeting the people okay and. putting the names to the or putting faces and biographies then to the names and the dates, And, yeah, so, again, it's very, very rewarding. Talk about rewarding. I know that just even reaching out and meeting the people that you've been able to meet is fulfilling. What about, you know, connecting people with long-lost relatives or connecting people with family? Obviously, that's part of what you do. Has there been stories that you can tell that, you know, people come together where they say, oh, my gosh, now we're hanging out where we weren't before. Well, there was actually a case also in the Sprankle family about a woman in the state of Ohio. And she was married and divorced, and she had two very small children, and she was poor. She didn't really have that much money. And someone reported her to social services, and they gave her a tip-off. And so before social services came, she tried to run away with her two kids, her two daughters. And the one daughter was old enough that she could run along, and her baby really couldn't. So she actually left the baby at home, and she ran off into the woods with her older daughter, okay? Social services took her. And she never found out what happened to her baby again. And then 60 years later, I was able to reconnect the baby with her mother, who is still living. Wow. That's a wonderful story. And it's rewarding. Right. And I mean, just to push on that one a little bit, did you actually, I imagine you got to communicate with each of them and then brought them together. Did you get to see them talk to each other or that was just more of a you got to hear back. No, unfortunately not. And the baby, who was then adopted by a family, she ended up in the state of Oklahoma. And the mother ended up in the state of Arkansas. And then the woman in Oklahoma, well, a friend of hers knew the story, a good friend of hers. So she started making some inquiries. So actually, the interest in finding her birth family came from her. OK. So she put out enough information that we were allowed to or we were able to actually then connect with her. And she didn't expect her mother to be living. And surprisingly, her mother was still living. And she ended up then moving from Oklahoma to Arkansas. And she helped take care of her mother for 10 years until she died. Yeah. Again, that's just, to me, it's a miracle. You know, when you have those abilities to bring people together. And right there, that's not just a story of. you know, communicating and having something fun to, you know, as a hobby, that's like. actually changing people's lives. Exactly. Truly. It's emotional when you talk about things like that. And I've been involved in a few other cases where I've actually helped people find their birth parents or, or cousins or relatives, even siblings that they hadn't seen and lost touch. with. Absolutely. And I, I can just imagine when people are typing in genealogy, people that might find this cast are going to be people who are looking for old relatives. People are looking for family, people who are literally interested in doing what you're doing on a investigative basis because they're trying to connect with people that they want to. Exactly. Because. most families are not straightforward. Okay. You don't usually have mother and father have 2.4 children. And as you have the Ozzie and Harriet family, okay, that doesn't really exist. And and again, it's it's fascinating even the way we connect to it took me a while to locate your mom when I tried to track her down 25 years ago, since her mother passed relatively young. So but I found her. Yeah, well, let's talk about that real quick. As you said, you found my mom, I know, we talked about it a little bit yesterday, we had the, you know, we had the opportunity yesterday to go to lunch, and we got to go to a nice little Mexican spot here in here in Florida. And while we were chitchatting, you mentioned how many years ago you sent a letter to my mom. And yeah, tell me a little bit about that process and how you found her. Okay. Well, this is a live podcast, everyone. We have the dog bark, everyone. So yeah, as you said, you found her and then you reached out and you were hoping that she would even be there. So I. want to know about that. Yes. Well, what happened was, well, the internet was available back then, but there wasn't really the social media context. So I couldn't just search for her name at Facebook. So I actually knew her name from some other relatives and then I knew where she was living and what city. Yeah. So what I did was I just started searching on the internet and she owned a house. So I was actually able to go in and find like tax records and such. So I was actually able to find the house and find that she was the owner. Okay. Well, you never know how up-to-date all of that information is, so I was hoping that she was still the owner. But I had her name. I had her address. I couldn't locate a telephone number for her, so I actually wrote her a letter, and I explained who I was. I put my email address in. We got in touch back then, and then she responded, and that's actually how I found her and how we got in touch. And when she responded, she responded by email, I assume? Yes. Was she pretty excited about it, or was she skeptical, wondering who is this guy. No, she was very excited. People who are skeptical usually don't write back. Right, right. They think it's some kind of a fraud or something. Again, nowadays it's a little bit more common that people do stuff like that, but back then it was more rare that somebody would reach out to you and say, hi, I'm a long-lost family member, right, trying to connect with you. And, again, as far as that letter, was that just you trying to say, hey, I just want to know some information about you, or what was kind of the thought process that you were going through at that time. Well, it's been about 25 years, and I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but essentially that. Then I explained who I was. I explained who she was, how we were related, and the fact that I wanted to get in. touch so and today unfortunately we have to be a little bit more careful about people just contacting us out of the blue so uh so it's important to verify i mean it's it's important and very good to be uh interested but you also have to be a little cautious as well do not just. give anybody your information contacts you unless they can prove it with family tree well there's. things that people want to know if they're actually researching the family history and there's people who and there's other things people want to know if they're trying to defraud you so like if someone asks for your social security number that's obviously they're trying to you know potentially steal your identity you don't give away your security number yeah you don't need that to do their genealogy of course not that's not of interest okay but you know who are your relatives and i've called people uh out of the blue or should i say cold i called i've called people cold on the phone who are very hesitant at the first so then i just start. talking about who their relatives are, and how we're related and what i know about the people and, they warm up, okay? And then once I've established that level of trust, then I start talking about a little bit more and what I'm interested in. And I make sure that everyone gets a benefit from it as well. So I actually do send some reports. I mean, now you can do it digitally. And again, so like what we just talked about a little bit ago, I mean, I just sketched out your ancestry for you, showed exactly how we're related, and we go back to a Civil War soldier. I'm not sorry, sorry, it's not Civil War. but Revolutionary War soldier. Revolutionary War soldier. And also Civil Wars as well. And that was your great, great grandfather. And yeah, I think it's somewhat difficult for somebody in America not to have some kind of a family member that's related to some... War of some sort, you know, but it's at the same time, it's still interesting to know exactly where they place themselves in history. And even things you mentioned to me yesterday were already sitting in my mind today, like, never heard some of those things. And, you know, as we just talked about, when you first contacted my mom, you know, she didn't know much about her family history. And we even asked her yesterday, and she said, it wasn't until you came along that she even could put some of those pieces together. So yeah, very thankful for you for coming along and doing that for us as a family. And anybody else out there who has a guy or somebody in their family who's helping with that, you know, obviously, great. If not, you probably need to be that person, right? And so yeah, keeping track of your history not only connects you with the past, but also tells you a little bit about who you are and helps you know what your future is going to be, right? In some way. I'm interested as well. What's probably the most surprising discovery that you have had personally for yourself that you've been like, wow, that really affected me in my life and made me see myself differently. Well, In school, we learn about history. We learn what happened during World War II. We learn about what happened during World War I and before. And usually we don't have a connection to any of that, a personal connection. And, uh, so it's just events and facts that we're learning, but when you start researching your own family and you see, it's like, well, during world war one, where were my grandparents or where were my great grandparents? Okay. Uh, I'll, I'll use your family as a person. Perfect example. As I said, your great, great grandfather, his name was Fred Sprankle. And he was start to go into the genealogy. Now we'll start, we can show some pictures. So yeah, feel free to. Okay. And he was a soldier in the civil war. Well, he was also in Ford's theater when Lincoln was shot. He was sitting underneath the balcony. And when he heard the shot, he first thought it was a part of the play. Okay. As I assume most people probably there did at the time, right? Exactly. And then as he got older, again, he moved to Kansas and lived there that he actually, in all his spare time, when he was older, he actually went down to the newspaper office and he told lots of stories. And a lot of these stories then were then published in the local newspaper. So that's actually how we know about a lot of his experiences because of the stories that he told. The first podcaster, right? Right. And, uh, but to answer. question, did anything really affect me? It's given me an appreciation, I think, of the things that are important to me because, again, I'm a byproduct or I'm actually a part of my parents and they're a part of their parents. And when we're growing up, usually our grandparents are just old people to us. But they were young at one time too. What motivated them? My grandparents, for example, on my dad's side, they were immigrants from Germany. And on my mom's side, I have revolutionary patriots, war patriots. And so it's just the combination of all of those. different things, learning about the past, learning about the people, learning about how they were a part of the history or how they observed it. And how different things that happened in history affected their lives. For example, the economic problems in Germany and the reason then my grandparents then came to America. Yeah, because the fact that they came over so long ago, you know, shows that there was just, as we see in life, almost situations that are kind of always happening. And as you said, the economic problems then were much different even 100 years later, you know, that were happening all over again in different ways. So and we see families again moving from certain places all over the world. So we see these little moments. Well, what was happening? Well, why? Well, again, this gets this whole opening of you get to learn about stuff you never were going to was going to learn about before. I want to talk a little bit about our families. I want to go into the family genealogy a little bit. I know everyone out there has their own history, but I think our family history is pretty interesting, as you've already shown me. If we go back to the beginning, the Revolutionary War, that's when we start with Frederick, is that right. Well, actually, Frederick's father, George Sprankle. And he was the son of an immigrant. His father's name was Michael Sprankle, but the original German was Sprankle, Michael Sprankle. So he actually emigrated then from Germany, and he settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the early 1700s. Interesting. And then his son, George, was born there, I think in 1741, if I remember correctly. And then they moved over into York County, which was on the other side of the Susquehanna River. And that's how they got their family started. And then the families, our families, they started migrating west. Mm-hmm. Okay. So the family went from then Lancaster County, west to York County, and then they moved up into Huntington County, and then up into Jefferson County. And Jefferson County is where Punxsutawney is, and that's well known now for where the groundhog comes from. So our family then was in Punxsutawney. And so I talked about George Sprankle, who was the Revolutionary War soldier, and then his son Frederick, and then his son John, who was the oldest child in the family. And John died relatively young. He was 38 when he died, and he had four children. And I descend. from his oldest child, Margaret, and you descend from his youngest child, Fred. There were two boys in the family, Fred and Diltz was his name, and Diltz was actually his mother's maiden name. And Uncle Diltz and Uncle Fred both went off to the war and served in the Civil War. And after they finished their service in the Civil War, they were actually granted land in the state of Missouri, and they moved out there and worked that land for about 10 years, and then they continued on further west, and Fred settled in Kansas, and Uncle Diltz went all the way out to Colorado to live. Right. And my family stayed in Pennsylvania. And your family stayed in Pennsylvania. That's the sisters, right? We've got Margaret and Sarah that are staying there together. And of course, that makes sense. They got each other. Well, but then they got married, and they were the older ones as well. Right. I assume that they kept in touch for most of their life. I guess. But again, my great-great-grandmother, Margaret, she died when she was 40. Right. Okay, so we don't really know too much about her. We have a picture of her gravestone. Right, right. And we'll show that, too, because we have some of these photos, but we don't have photos of, as you were mentioning before, we have to get on these things early, because some people, back at the time, we didn't have all the technology in the world, but even then, short periods of time, we don't have photos of everyone. Yeah. And unfortunately, as we passed down, a lot of people don't know who the old people, who knows, sorry, the people don't know who the photos are of anymore, unless they were labeled. And since I got interested in this at a very early age, when I was still a teenager, and I visited the relatives, I made sure we wrote on the back who all the people were. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, you can tell a little bit with faces. But you know, when one family member disappears, or you know, is gone, how do you recognize certain people again, and that's just super hard or even know exactly which ones they are. Even I was sharing with you a story of how I grew up seeing a photo of a family member not knowing who it was, because I didn't have that, you know, person to tell me until later on. Exactly. Unfortunately, she died relatively young. So you never met her. Exactly. And I've, You can briefly go into that too, because that sets a whole thing. Whether you meet people or know about them or not, yeah, it can create a hole and gap in your family. I am interested on your side. Before we jump into kind of going down my family side, I want to go into your family side, with Margaret and George Gourley, right? Gourley. Right. Yeah. So Margaret died. relatively young. George Gourley remarried. So he actually had two families. And in the first family, there were a number of children, and my great-grandfather was the youngest. And his name was Daniel Fair Gourley, and he was named after his mother's stepfather. So that's how the name Fair got into the blend. And in his brothers and sisters, there was actually a brother whose name was Cameron. And Cameron went west also, and he went out to the state of Missouri, sorry, Montana, and he worked as an ore weigher. So he actually worked with the mines out there when. they, and he was responsible for actually weighing the gold that was found. And he died in 1929, the same year that my mother was born. He and his wife never had any children, but they actually have a very nice grave out in a cemetery right outside of Helena, Montana, and I visited their grave. And what's unusual is they actually have a bench beside their gravestones with the name Gourley inscribed on the bench. And I've sat on that bench, I've looked out at the mountains, and I've, you know, thought about Uncle Cameron. They cared about taking time to reflect. Yeah, yeah. Actually. It's really neat. Yeah, I mean, as you've mentioned, the similarities in family, I get almost chills thinking about the fact that you're interested the way that you are in things, and there's a bench for somebody who was coming around looking for their family. I mean, it's serendipitous. And then you develop a connection. So Uncle Cameron, to me, he's more than just a name and a date of birth and a date of death. So I have a picture of him, and I visited his grave. So I visited the city where he lived, and it really… establishes an attachment to this person then even though it was so long ago right and even. when you find out the things that they went through in their lives so it's almost like you carried it a little bit you know like i feel that maybe i'm connected to that now i definitely have that experience from time to time when i see people you know from my family's past and and so. yeah continue yeah so continuing my family then well that was uncle cameron and the youngest in the family was daniel fair gorley who's my great-grandfather he also had a number of children and three died young and only a few of the boys lived and my grandfather was in the middle and his name was james elliot gorley, And Grandpa was born in 1898 and died in 1969 on Independence Day, July 4th. So, yeah, so Grandpa was a teacher, and he left Punxsutawney and went to Indiana, Pennsylvania, and studied there first. Back then it was a teacher school. It was called Indiana Normal School, and later it became Indiana State College and then Indiana University. So he studied there for a while, went to Penn State. That's where he got his bachelor's degree. And then he got a teaching job in Winber, Pennsylvania, which is outside of Johnstown. And from there, then they moved to Pittsburgh. And they actually moved to Pittsburgh just, I think, two or three months before the Johnstown flood hit in 1936. Timing. So my mother grew up in Pittsburgh. And her name was Betty Gourley. And then when she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, she and a girlfriend of hers, they wanted an adventure. So they decided to go to New Jersey to teach. So they went to Margate, New Jersey, which is a city south of Atlantic City. And they taught there for several years. And then there was a dispute over salaries. Because I'm curious, what did they teach. Elementary school. My mother was a first grade teacher and a reading specialist. So anyway, so they end up leaving the school there and they went up into northern New Jersey, outside of New York City. And they taught in Teaneck, New Jersey. And my father, who was a son of immigrants, that family just kind of stayed in the New York City area. And that's where my parents met. And then they kind of moved back and forth a little bit. They married in Pittsburgh, where my mother was from, back to Jersey, back to Pennsylvania, back to Jersey. And then when I was 15 months old, then they picked a city in the middle between the two grandparents. And that's how we got to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I was raised. Ah, okay. I know. That's such a great story, because as you mentioned, your mom, not only was she moving around to get to where she was, but then she left, went to New York to meet your dad, right? New Jersey. New Jersey to meet your dad. But yeah, at that time period, goodness, not a lot of people were doing that. I can imagine it wasn't something that was super easy to do. Well, what surprises me sometimes is how mobile some of the families were back in the 1800s. And we'll get back to your family. Again, your great, great grandfather, Fred Sprankle. Again, he was from the Punxsutawney area. He served in the war, Civil War. So he was in different battles in Virginia and other of the states. Then he was granted the land. He went to Missouri, okay, from Missouri. Then he went to Kansas, and he spent the rest of his life in Kansas. His brother, Uncle Diltz, went to Colorado and. came back. And this is back in the 1860s, 70s, 80s. And it's amazing how mobile the people were even back then. Right, right. They didn't have the roads. What were they? Wagons, wagons. Yeah, and eventually trains. Eventually, yeah. Luckily here in America, we had those going pretty strong early on, yes. And so, yeah, let's jump back, I guess, going back up your side of the family tree, jumping over to my side then. As you mentioned, we had Fred, and then it went down to Clara and Elmore, right. Correct. Because your great, great grandfather, Fred, so he had three girls. One girl died young. Her name was Zella, and then there were Clara and Elizabeth. And the name is Zella. Zella is kind of not that common of a name, but Zella didn't live. She died as a baby, and Elizabeth lived, and Clara lived. And Clara married Elmore McHugh, and as you can see, they had. Dilt-Sprankle, right? Dilt-Sprankle McHugh. Right. And when we go back to that previous generation, Fred, your great, great grandfather, he had that brother. whose name was Diltz Sprankle, actually Peter Diltz Sprankle, but he was called Diltz. Right. He went by Diltz all the time. So everybody called him Diltz. He was Diltz. Exactly. He was Uncle Diltz. Okay. So there we had Diltz Sprankle. And then we had two, well, one nephew and one niece of Diltz Sprankle who named their children after him. Okay. So on my side, my grandpa's brother was Diltz Sprankle Gwarley. And on your side, Clarice named her son. Diltz Sprankle McHugh. Exactly. Which is awesome. I think that's actually hilarious because we have this moment of almost like repeating history in the same genealogy section. Because the names. certainly aren't common. Who names their children Diltz or Sprankle? Right. So any other Diltz. Sprankles out there, contact us. Definitely. For sure. No. And so we went to that Diltz Sprankle McHugh. And then at that point in time, he met Edith. Editha. Right. Editha. Editha. They. married. And then they had two boys. Okay. Fred and Don. Okay. And Don is your... great grandfather and uh he as well as my fourth cousin twice removed right no so that's me yeah yeah exactly i'm saying don okay there's two dons yeah yeah exactly okay got it so and your great grandfather his name was don mckew donald oh actually don not donald don dilts mckew so his name actually he got the dilts and he served in world war ii and he was actually in one of the reconnaissance planes uh behind the anolda gay when the when the atomic bomb was uh dropped on. hiroshima and because of the uh radiation that uh you know was emitted uh from the atomic bomb being dropped that actually then developed into leukemia for him and he died relatively young. Which is fascinating to hear that because I've... Well, it's sad. Yeah, it's absolutely sad. The entire event is sad as far as just the history of the world. Nobody looks back and goes, yeah, that's... Well, this is one of the things that we talked about before. It's like, what's interesting about family history? Well, we learn about World War II, we learn about World War I. Well, we actually do learn about the atomic bomb. But then when you realize that your own great-grandfather was in one of the planes, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, there's that attachment there. Right, right. And then suddenly you have a different feeling about the whole event. Right, and as you said, it's like, it's another step for me because just being an American, looking at that, you go, I feel some attachment and almost some responsibility to this event that I had nothing to do with at the time. But at the same time, you hear that. And yeah, not only did it affect you, but it affected you negatively. You know, it developed something that wasn't great. And so... Yeah. I find that to be something that's very interesting. And yeah, I wish I could even ask, you know, I wish I could ask him some questions, you know, that'd be amazing to hear his stories, right? People like that. And that's one of the reasons I'm doing what we're doing right now is. because I just, I really think that there's some value to just listening to people and hearing what they care about, the stories that they have, the things that pop up into their minds when they're just speaking freely and openly. And if we could just go back in time and tap on some of the shoulders of those people and say, hey, let's just chat for a little bit. Well, we can't do that. unfortunately, but what we can and should do is we should talk to our parents and we should talk to our grandparents as long as they're still living and ask them about the past, ask them about the stories that are important to them, the things in their lives that happened when they were growing up that really influenced them. Some people don't talk about the past, especially a lot of the men who served in the war. They'd rather forget a lot of that. But those experiences have, blend it into their lives and their way of being and that also affects how they raise their. children as well. No for sure and I think that as you just mentioned there there's there's a lot of things that whether it's war or whether it's tragedy that happens in a family or whether it's just and successes as well success there's all kinds of things and even just having tragedy happen with somebody's you know I guess uh keepsakes or moments there's fires you know where entire you know things get taken away and so there's just some benefit to oral stories and of course digital format moving here into the future which everything's temporary at the end. of the day. I mean you talked about fires I mean of course I've had uh different families that I've researched where there have been fires and children have been killed in the fires which is very sad. And also documents and family pictures have also gone up in flames. And even in my own family, when I was growing up, we didn't have a lot of pictures on the Gourley side, because Uncle Diltz, my great-uncle Diltz, he actually got a lot of the family pictures from the farm and he kept them in the basement. Well, one time there was a flood and they got damaged and most everything got thrown out. So I'm very, very fortunate to have some Gourley family pictures, but they didn't come from my own family. They came from, well, Daniel Fair Gourley, who I mentioned before. Before, his wife, Alice, her aunt was George Gourley's second wife. Kind of complicated. But to make a long story short, on that side of the family, the McLaughlin side, is I visited Alice's nieces and I asked if they had any old family pictures. This was back in the late 1970s. I was visiting them with my grandmother. Oh, yes, we have those boxes up in the attic. Well, they're kind of in the back. I said, well, if you don't have any of those boxes, can you show me where they are? Can we get them? out oh we haven't had those out since mother died and she died in 1946 oh boy so uh so they let me go up in the attic and get the pictures the boxes so i pulled them down we went through them and what do i find i found pictures of my great-grandfather daniel fair gorely and his wife alice who would be an aunt to these two nieces wow and my grandmother was there and a tear came to her eye she lived her entire life and had never seen a picture of her mother-in-law because alice died when my grandpa was only 14 so she only heard stories her whole life exactly and then. she finally and she said oh if jim were still here and then my grandfather and he never really had a picture of his mother his entire life and then there i was sitting with my grandmother and. we found the pictures yeah again another moment that's just it's really cool to hear that and talk about pictures from the past we've got a whole bunch of family photos that we've been trying to carry around and keep mold free and water free and flame free you know it's just not not an easy thing to do and i know that's something that's you, I don't know, interesting to most people, but if you have a photo, right, if you have a photo album, you got to make sure to digitize it as soon as possible. Exactly. Scan them in and also. label the pictures. So people, so the next generation knows who the people are. Right. And before I get sidetracked, cause I almost want to go into a whole tangent with photos and things. Let's continue back. Cause we didn't quite finish the family tree on the side. We got to, don't sprinkle me, McHugh went to Don and then of course, Don met Vanita and that's got Don Vanita. You mentioned that. I think it's kind of funny cause we have a lot of these mixing of names in today's world where people, you know, combine names, combine names. So we look in the past and we had Don and Vanita and we got Danita, which is your grandmother and my grandmother. Yes, absolutely. So, and we've got a picture of her that we'll show, which is, well, we've got several pictures that we have been showing and are going to continue to show, but we've got Danita's picture as well, which then she met Gary. That's how we got the Phillips name in the family. And originally when I was first born, cause you know, we had a couple of days there where I was Caleb Phillips. And then they crossed it out. And they put Caleb Eubanks. Yeah, I feel part of the Phillips family. I've got a little bit of that. But yeah, so. From this situation, obviously, is this when you were doing your research, you found this part of the family, and then you started researching, oh, what kids did she have? And she had my uncle and then my mom, right? And so I'm interested, did you reach out to each of them, or what was your process. Yes, yeah, yeah. But I think the initial contact was your mom. I found her, and then through her, then I got to your uncle. And again, but your mom was very helpful at the beginning as well, because some things we weren't really sure about. So, like, I ordered some vital records from the state of Kansas, so I ordered, actually, the birth certificate for Vanita, your great-grandmother. But that could only be released to a family member. So I had your mom then, you know, apply for that. I think I paid for it. But anyway, so we got that. And your mom was actually very helpful providing the information she knew, and I was able to verify a lot of things then with official records, and we were able to get the family documented very, very well. Absolutely. And since then, we've been able to then uncover a few. We've got a few pictures here and there that I never got to see growing up that you've shared with us, which is really, really. interesting, you know, and. Having said that, you know, today's world, we have obviously AI, which is popping up. People are talking about it quite a bit. When I first was talking to you about some of the photos, I was trying to touch them up using Photoshop. Nowadays, I've noticed that you can just take an old photo of somebody and you can drop it into a program and say, please touch this up and add color to it. And it'll sit there and just do that. You know, it's amazing what can be done. Right, right. And so do you find those tools pretty interesting as far as I mean, obviously, I know that you appreciate the original things and the reality, but being able to see something in almost a different form, does that help you visualize it maybe a little better. Yes, but it's a strange feeling. I mean, you actually did this with an old picture of me and my sister when we were like extremely young. And it's kind of strange kind of seeing yourself move, you know, and in my own family, we're actually kind of lucky on my dad's side of the family that we do actually have a lot of home videos. My grandfather, my father's father was a professional photographer. So he actually made family movies in the 1930s. Yeah. And we have this. That's very rare. Not a lot of people can say they have. We have those. And if I can go on. tangent is one of my grandfather's brothers was actually killed in 1939 and uh and then his wife. widow was kind of ostracized by uh from the family and their son at the time i think he was uh five or six so she took the son and we never found him again into the family we never heard from that family side of the family again well the mother eventually passed and when i was trying to track people down back in the 1980s i actually was able to track down this son fred uh ludwig and i found him he was living on long island wrote a letter and uh and he was a little hesitant at first and. but his son motivated him oh of course and uh and i actually met him and uh when i drove up to long island to meet him i took along this family movie okay and he was actually able to see himself playing with his father after all those years and he had never seen those, And he'd never even seen a picture of his father, because after the father had been killed, the mother kind of destroyed all these pictures. She didn't, you know, she didn't want anything to have, she didn't want to have anything to do with the Ludwig family anymore. And what was interesting, he showed me his baptismal certificate, and my grandmother was his godmother. So that was kind of an interesting connection. Right. And his mother had actually saved a picture, but she actually cut out her head of the picture because she liked her, the way her hair was, apparently. And I actually had the original picture, the entire thing I was able to show, and then all of my family was in there as well. But she only kept the little part of her head. So you were able to, yeah, show, hey, this belongs to another piece of the puzzle right there. Yeah. So the son, Fred, he was a little quiet about a lot of it, you know, but he had to take a lot in, you know, because can you imagine actually seeing a video of yourself playing with your father after like 60 years. I mean, I can imagine it for sure in the sense that I just think it would be just wonderful. I think it would just be just a magical, touching moment that would just be like nothing else. And as we kind of were originally mentioning or talking about, I said, did you connect people? And you gave me a good story of that. But this is just another moment, even though they didn't maybe physically get to meet, still being able to connect somebody with a visual from the past, I would find that to be healing. Well, one of the nice things is, too, Fred was actually able to meet two of his Ludwig cousins. OK. And one of them was a cousin that he was actually very close to as a boy. And they were actually able to reconnect. I mean, I put them into touch. Right. Right. And then I also put them into touch with my uncle who was still living and they got to meet as well. Right. That's one of the gifts that you bring to people through this process is being able to just show people that they're not alone. Family members are there. Yeah. But the interest has to be there on the side of the other people as well. They have to kind of want to know their family and what these connections are. And some people don't. Some people have kind of. I've drawn a line, and that's in the past, and I'm not interested in it anymore. I'm curious, because I know you play with the subject a lot. What do you think is maybe the reasons people might be that way? Obviously, we can all have some ideas. Some people are afraid, I think. They're afraid to confront themselves with things from the past, and sometimes the memories are not always good. Sometimes there's pain associated with the memories, and you don't really want to relive that pain. And sometimes your expectation is that if you do try to reestablish that connection, that the pain might come back. But we're all human beings, and basically people are good. And even if there was pain associated with certain situations, there was good as well. And sometimes it is good to connect to find out what that good was. Yeah. I agree. I having felt like, you know, I've had an experience of, of happiness, like, like everyone in their life and their family and feeling like I have pain. When I look back in the, in the history of life, I feel like knowledge and communicating about it is helpful. It's healing and learning about it. Seeing photos are helpful. It's healing, you know? And, and so I can understand how it can be difficult maybe at the moment or at the time, or for people may be directly connected, but for families in general, I think it's really nice to be able to have that place where people can at least uncover facts, history, and visuals, which is, you know, truly. cool. I guess, is there one specific time period overall that you are more drawn to than others? Like, you know, when it comes to the past, are you really drawn to the 1800s, the, the night. are you, you know, your family specifically like it? Well, the older you go back, the further you go back, the less records are available. Okay. So there's records from the early 1700s about the Sprankle family where we connect is there really isn't much. And the only things that really, exist still are like land records. Like if someone died and someone else or the land was inherited by the children, and then there was some type of document, either a deed or a will that actually listed who the children are. The people back then, they went to churches and. churches did keep records, but a lot of those church records just don't exist anymore. So it's very difficult sometimes to piece that together. And a lot of information actually comes from gravestones, if the gravestones still exist, because it would normally list the dates of when people were born and when they died. And that's also a valuable tool. Right. And that's, you've given a lot of useful information on people that might be interested in this, but I would say if there's somebody who's looking to get involved in this, to kind of research these things, what's kind of step one, where do you start when you're starting to look. for somebody or, you know? Okay. First to answer your other question, is there any particular era that I find most fascinating? Not really because every era has its, uh, interests. And I think sometimes it's easier for us to relate to the eras of our parents and our grandparents and great-grandparents because there's people that we can talk to and we can get to know the people more than just the name on a gravestone, for example. Okay. What was your next question then. What's the step number one, if you're, if you're looking, okay, I want to look somebody up. Do I. go to a website? You know? Yeah. How do you start? Okay. Uh, step number one is talk to your parents, talk to your grandparents, start young if you can. Okay. When you actually have parents and grandparents living, if any of your grandparents are deceased, then see if they have any brothers and sisters who are still living, visit the people, spend some time with them and just get as much information. As you can. And, uh, when I started, there was no such thing as the internet and no records were online. So I actually had to do all the hard work. I mean, I can't tell you how many days I've spent in the basements of courthouses, looking through old dusty ledgers and books, trying to dig out. information. That was one of my questions. If you, I could literally imagine you going through doing. that kind of stuff. So, and that's all been digitalized now. And it's amazing because not everything would line up with, uh, the information that the family members gave you. I mean, it was very common back then that women. Like if you had a case where a woman was pregnant before she got married, well, you know, 50, 60 years later, when she gave you her, uh, when she got married, she would usually give you the right month and the right day, but she might back date the year. Okay. It wasn't a 1949. It was actually 1948. She wouldn't say that she was in 1948. Okay. And then when you're in the courthouse trying to find a record of that, it's like, Hmm, 1949. Okay. Got it. So, so again, you start with the relatives that you have and, uh, and then you go from there. And usually in most families, there actually is someone who is somewhat interested and is willing to talk and especially older relatives because older relatives are often lonely. They don't get many visitors and they love to talk. They love to have activity, visit them, spend some time with them, call them on the phone if they live far away. So that's the best place to start. how do you make sure that the stories that you gather get to some place that's actually useful right i know that you go to a website right now it's findthegrave.com and you publish a lot of. things there exactly um one of the websites that actually is very popular these days it's actually ancestry.com and ancestry has actually accessed so many digital records and put so much online so that's actually a great place to research ancestry also allows you to to develop a family tree there and you can have access to that if the people keep them public but you have to remember if you find public family trees at ancestry the information is only as good as the researcher, so you should always view that as a starting point and not as oh this is fact this is my family tree. okay usually the information's uh accurate 90 of the time but it's important to verify now, i don't really want to put all of my family tree information out at ancestry because i don't want, I mean, I want relatives to benefit from it, but I don't want people to just kind of take it all and then they have everything that I've done over the past 40, 50 years, okay? I don't want that. But I also want my name to be known as a family researcher. And a lot of the people that I communicated back with. back in the late 1970s, 1980s, they're not living anymore. So that's how I got involved in this website called Find a Grave. And Find a Grave was actually started as a tool to help people find graves, tombstones of their relatives in places where they didn't live. So let's say you were researching your family who was from Pennsylvania, but you were now living in Kansas. Well, you probably couldn't easily just travel back to walk through the cemetery, okay? But if there was this tool called Find a Grave and you could actually go to it, pull up the cemetery and go through and look at all of the gravestone pictures, well, you could then find relatives there. And Find a Grave has actually expanded. They've added things to it over the years, including linking family members. So you can actually link people together, you know, parents, children. Which is very powerful, yeah. Exactly. So this is one thing I was able to do with you. I mean, obviously you're living, your mother's living, but we were able to pull up the Find a Grave entry for your grandmother and then click father, click father, and just kind of go back to your great, great grandfather, Fred Sprankle. And then the sibling is listed, his sister, Margaret. My great, great grandmother. And then we came down to my mother, also not living. And Find a Grave is set up to actually, essentially to keep track of gravestones, but it's developed into more. You can put biographies there. I already talked about the linking, but you don't find information on living people there, unless of course someone has actually included information on them, either from an obituary or they've added a little bit more. And I also noticed this feature, because I was looking at it just yesterday or this morning, and they have like a, you can even add flowers, which I thought was kind of a nice little feature that. on there, right? Yes. And then which is something which is interesting, but you can see maybe who's still interested in your family members or who also is looking and cares. And that I felt actually, you know, something was kind of nice about that little feature right there. Yeah, this concept of flowers, essentially it's a way of adding a comment. Yeah, saying, hey, I'm thinking about you. Well, yeah. And some people like, okay, so again, you have each person has his or her own memorial, so to speak, and you can add comments to that. You can also add pictures. You can add the picture of the gravestone. You can add a picture of the people. You can add pictures of documents as well, like obituaries or marriage licenses, things like that. You can even add images of death certificates, which I don't find that motivating. I don't really like it. If you really want to prove that somebody was there, if you have nothing else, I guess. Well, no, it's like death certificates can be a little personal, I think. Even if it is your great, great, great grandmother and it's like who even cares anymore. But there are cases where people were, you know, killed themselves or killed their loved ones. Killed in crime. car accidents, suicide, and that doesn't necessarily have to be out there for everybody to see. Okay, again, concentrating on the positive, not necessarily the negative. Right, right. Remembering people and the way that they... The way they should be remembered and not just how they died. For sure. Exactly. There's the facts of it, but there's the reality of who people are, which is not those. And this ability to add comments then to these memorials at Find a Grave, you can actually add a comment by then selecting a particular flower image. So that's kind of where that came from. Interesting. And yeah, I think that that's, you answered that one really, really well. Are there any particular regions that you find yourself drawn to in general? Like, obviously we came from Pennsylvania, but as far as family goes. Well, what I think is fascinating is actually when you get involved in other families from other countries. So I always thought my family was kind of boring because we were always from Pennsylvania. Okay. But not my dad's side of the family, because my grandparents were born and raised in Germany. So I've actually done research and church records in Germany. Well, my sister married a man who was half Slovenian, and I've actually done research in Slovenian records. Really? Yeah, there's been other cases where I've actually done some research in Bohemian records, which is now the Czech Republic. And, uh, and also in Italy, there's been some connections and it's kind of neat. I mean, not that I speak all of these languages, but you learn enough of the basic, uh, words to be able to actually read these documents. And you don't need to have a huge vocabulary in, in Italian to understand, you know, born, died, parents, things like that. And, uh, and that's what I find fascinating. Languages have always fascinated me. And then when you're actually, you combining that interest in languages with genealogy, the research, it's just, it's just fascinating. And so this is kind of going to segue a little bit here and we can jump right, right on back to genealogy. Cause I want to just jump all over the place. But when you talk about traveling, you talk about finding history, you talk about connecting with people all over. One thing you can't help but do is spend some money and have conversations. I know you're also interested in banknotes. Yes. What got you interested in banknotes other than the fact that you had to see them and use them as you were traveling. Well, I mean, I kind of grew up with a collecting mentality. My father started me with. Stamps and I had some coins at home. And then after I was finished with college and graduate school, I got a job, worked in the Washington, D.C. area for six years, and then transferred over to Germany in 91. So when I transferred over to Germany, one of my colleagues, work colleagues there, he was actually, he had a small collection of banknotes. So he tried to keep one or two banknotes from all the different countries he visited. And again, and also a cousin of my father's also had a collection of banknotes, and he motivated me as well. So when you look at a banknote, it's not just a piece of paper or a piece of plastic. There's things on it, other than just the denomination, like $100. Well, who's this person on it? What's this building on it? What's this landscape on it? Okay. Why did the country choose these images to put on their banknotes? So it actually gives you an opportunity to learn more about history and learn more about these countries and about... You know, what makes them tick, so to speak. And that fascinated me. So my first goal, I suppose, was I wanted to get like, oh, let me get one banknote from every country in the world. And then I found out that not only are there coin dealers and stamp dealers, but there's also banknote dealers. And I got involved in that as well. And as things developed, I eventually met a man from the country of Slovenia. And that connection actually was also through my brother-in-law because he was half Slovenian. And he was just getting involved in polymer plastic banknotes because that was a very nascent industry at the time. There weren't many countries who were using plastic banknotes at the time. I think maybe just Australia, New Zealand, maybe another one or two. So he was just getting involved in that, thinking that was like the technology of the future. And it's worked out to be that way. So many countries now use polymer banknotes. So because of my knowledge of banknotes, also because I'm a native speaker of English, he kind of pulled me into his business. And we've been working together for over 20 years now on banknotes. And even though I've reached the age now where I'm officially retired, I'm still working, but doing fun things, doing the things that are satisfying to me, including the family history work, the genealogy, and also with the banknotes. has also given me great opportunities to travel. So I've been to the South Pacific several times, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu. I've connected through Australia and New Zealand. I've been to Namibia several times for banknotes. I've been to the Maldives. And these travel opportunities are also so educational. Yeah, beautiful places to see. And obviously, you were telling me the shirt that you're wearing now, where did you get that one from. Yes, this shirt is actually from Samoa. Yeah, it's awesome. I really like the style because it's very hot and humid there. So it's a very light cotton and a very airy and very, very comfortable shirt. A lot of viewers I have are actually from all around the world. So they'll be like, oh, yeah, I recognize that style. I'm sure some of you guys, what's going on here? Cool style right here. Yeah, in Florida, it works. Again, as I was telling you, you walked in and said, is it a good shirt? It's perfect. It looks great. It's fly. Yeah, I like it. Absolutely. And when you travel to these places, obviously, you're getting to experience people. I know for a fact that you're getting smarter, more knowledgeable as time goes by, as every single time you meet somebody. Is there a specific region or banknote that you find to be kind of top tier, one that you like the most, one that you find yourself fancying more than others. Yes. I don't have an image of it right here, but a lot of the colonial banknotes are very beautiful. Like the French colonies in Africa, some of those are very, very beautiful. So one of my favorites is actually from Somalia. Actually, that was Italian though, Italian Somaliland from 1950. It has a leopard on it. Okay. It's a very beautiful banknote, also quite scarce these days, especially in good condition. And not only that, Italian Somaliland, but also a lot of the French colonies as well. Beautiful banknotes. designs. I agree with you there. As I mentioned, I'm fascinated with coins just because I don't have to worry about breaking them or destroying them as easily. With banknotes, it's a whole different game, a whole different process. And of course, we have the grading aspect of things. But, let's go ahead and jump into a little bit of why you're here right now. Because one interesting thing is you're here in America, here in Florida, where we're filming the podcast at the moment, and you're originally hanging out in Germany. So what brought you here on this trip. And tell us a little bit about that. Well, this word that you mentioned, grading, what that is, is it allows you to have an independent company evaluate the condition of something. And that something could be a coin, it could be a comic book, it could be a baseball card, or it could be a banknote. And they look at it and they evaluate what the condition is. Does it have any folds in it? What does the paper look like? Is it original paper? Is it dirty paper? How many folds? Does it have any tears? How good? Is the centering as well? And then. What they do is they encapsulate it in some plastic, and they give it a grade. And the scale that they use actually originated with coins where the absolutely best number you could get was a 70. So they've actually adapted that now and the best, absolutely best number you could get for a banknote is also 70. And why am I here is I actually brought a few banknotes along to be graded and then to pick them up and then just take them back. Absolutely. So it's just super exciting that you get to not only be interested in the things that you do, but when you get to go to places, you've got family in different places. Exactly, exactly. And the nice thing is, is before I came here, I got in touch with your mom. And again, we'd been in touch for almost 25 years now, but we'd never met. And I said, I was coming, would you be interested in meeting? And she said, yes. So I met her yesterday for the first time. I met you yesterday for the first time as well, even though we've been in touch then for many years now. Oh yeah, when it comes to my mother, she's somebody who loves meeting people all around the world of all sorts, especially if you're family. She's going to want to meet. Yeah, I mean, your mother is a great woman, you know. She's had her struggles in life, as all of us have, but she's turned out to be a wonderful lady who has raised four great children, and I'm very proud to be able to call her one of my cousins. That's right, that's right. And my mom just came in off camera a little bit. She's here in the background, but we'll go ahead and say my mom's gone through plenty of adversity, and here we are in Florida at this time period. We've gone from being on a boat, the van, the new house. Life's always fun. Yeah, but that adversity is. No, we have a great fun with everything. And that adversity has made her very strong. She's a very strong woman. Oh, and not just that, but then the kids, the people that get to see the things. Again, it's knowing things and actually getting to experience it, which is what makes you strong. And I talk a lot. Even just on the podcast about, you know, going through life and struggling, because that's actually part of the fun. You actually go through a cocoon stage to become the butterfly, so to speak, right? And without that. Well, it's important in life not to only have successes, because we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. Absolutely. And, and, again, that makes us strong. Okay. And we have to find ways to, to solve problems, especially if you have a family like raising children. Okay. And look where you are now. Look at the wonderful job that you're doing here. And, you know, obviously, you've done that yourself, but a lot of the credit then goes to your mom. A lot of the credit for her success also goes back to parents and their success. And then we're back into the family history. 1000%. I think that we all help each other. We live in a cooperative society. And anybody who thinks they're doing anything by themselves is delusioning themselves or disillusioning, illusioning themselves to some false reality. I'm actually happier and more comfortable the moment I realized that I've got people out there helping me. And when I see that I've got a family behind me, and there's more people involved in it, it makes me feel more confident in life. Yeah, you've got a lot more relatives than you know about. Absolutely. Yeah, it's more comforting overall, you know, and I think that that's something that many people can feel that. So what sparked your... Yeah, it's. overall desire to want to travel in the first place when you first started going to Germany. I didn't even go into that part because I wonder what got you there? What got you out of America to Germany? I'm interested. Well, where'd that start? Well, I think the interest in other. countries and such actually started also when I was a boy. My father was a dentist. Okay. And through his work, he also had contact with people in different countries and there'd be letters that would come in the mail. And then I would see these stamps from different countries. Okay. Well, where's that from? The stamp collecting. Right. And then not only was my father a doctor, but my mother was a teacher. And it's like, well, let's get out the encyclopedia and let's look up about that country. So everything was a learning, was my mother used as a tool for learning. So, and so I kind of learned at an early age that there was more than just the United States and there's a. lot of people everywhere else. My parents were also, my father was a... a director at a local camp, like a camp for children during the summer. And they would usually have a counselor come in from a different country every year. And since my father was one of the directors, that counselor would then stay with us for about two weeks before the actual camp began. So I got to meet all these people from Germany, from Denmark, from Switzerland. And that also gave me an opportunity to learn more about those countries and things like that. So I think the interest in languages and different countries and traveling started at a very early age through these experiences. And my first big trip actually happened when I was 23 years old. And I took my sister, who was three years younger, and we actually went to Germany. And this was after I would finish college and before I started graduate school. And we just went over for five months. I'm sorry, not five months, five weeks. We went over for five weeks. I was going to say, that's the first big trip. No, five weeks, sorry. Gotcha. So we went over for five weeks, and we traveled around and visited relatives. Because in my family, as I mentioned before, my grandparents were born and raised in Germany. Well, we know what happened during World War II. Germany lost. And Germany was devastated after World War II. And we had a lot of relatives still in Germany, brothers and sisters of my grandparents. So what the relatives did in the United States is we actually divided up the relatives in Germany. And for a period of about two years, we sent them care packages once a month of essentials. You know, coffee, canned food, clothes, things like that. Because those items just were not available in Germany, in post-World War II Germany. And when my sister and I then went back to visit back in the early 1980s is some of those people were still living, but their children were living and the memories were there and. we were treated like royalty. And, um, I was, we weren't expecting, you know, royal treatment by any means, but they. were just so appreciative. And that was a way that they saw of like paying our, our grandparents back for all of the, goodwill that was given to the family during world war two or after world war two. And, and again, you know, the goodness in genealogy, that's a lot of it. Okay. I got to meet these people who are very appreciative and I got to see so many pictures of my grandparents that they had that I didn't know. And, uh, so a lot of the family pictures I have, even from my own family, I've gotten from other relatives. Very well said. And I kind of wanted to wait to ask this question just because it's kind of a general question. Um, but just to hear some of these stories from yourself and what does history mean? To you. in general? What does history mean to me? History is something we should learn from to make sure that the good things happen again in the future and the bad things don't. So that's just basically my opinion. Oh, you said that very well. I think there's many things. I kind of alluded to in my thoughts that were describing exactly that meaning right there, because you don't want to continue the bad things, right? We want to have people learn from it. Again, that's part of my process of even doing this, which is hopefully I can have a life that moves forward and progresses. And in order to do that, I don't want to repeat the same. mistakes over and over again. No. Okay. But mistakes are not always mistakes. No, not the first time. Well, when we make decisions in our lives, we usually make the decisions based on the best information we have at that point in time. Maybe later we can view that as a mistake, but we really shouldn't, okay? Because it was just a decision we made, and we were thinking we were making the best decision at that time. And then we kind of learned from that, and we really never know, well, should I have taken path A or path B? Well, I've taken path A, so I really never know what B would have brought. So I can't regret not having taken that path. I have to accept the fact that I took path A, and I've built a future for myself based. on that, and the knowledge that I've gained and the experiences, and that's made me into the person that I am, which I will then pass on to my children and grandchildren, and you as well, children and grandchildren. Absolutely. everything you spoke i definitely agree with i like your perspective on that and i'm wondering, is that something that you feel was instilled upon you with your parents or do you feel like that's something that you kind of learned throughout life uh or maybe a combination. of the two what combination i think as we get older we don't necessarily see everything as black and white we also see the gray areas more and we're able to evaluate things in a different way based on our experiences and uh i mean my parents divorced when i was uh 16. Seven, actually 17. My father left when I was 16, divorced when I was 17. And so I think one of the reasons I reached out to the relatives because that gave me a certain amount of stability. and because, you know, mother struggled for a while and she went back to work and we didn't have that much for a while. And my sister and I both worked to get ourselves through college and I continued on to graduate school. My sister didn't, but mother got paid back later. I mean, not necessarily financially, but paid back with trips and different things that we've done for. So, and I feel that those struggles, also financial struggles, has also made me very aware of what I need, what I have, what I don't need. Okay. Because we don't need everything. Definitely don't need everything, and we don't have the ability to even understand those things unless we have, I would say, the roller coaster, the adversity, and the things that come in there. I've learned to not look at my life as something that was hard, but look at it as something that's been lucky. Well, the thing is you can't really tell them. People have to make their own experiences. Absolutely. You can give them advice. You can relate your own experiences, but usually a bad experience, you learn more from the bad experiences if you actually did them yourself. I know you do a lot of writing. I know you don't just sit there and enjoy collecting, and I know you also have put things out there on the Internet talking about these experiences. What got you into publishing these things, or what got you into writing in general. uh probably a lot of my job because um after i graduated from purdue university in indiana, i got a consulting job in the washington dc area and part of it was program and part of it was documentation so i actually did a lot of writing okay or if you're trying to get work with different governmental agencies most of our contracts were with the government is you have to write proposals you have to explain things you have to document things not only do you have to code things after you have the project but you actually actually have to write documentation users manuals things like that so i did a lot of writing there and photography has also been. of great interest to me because my father's father was a professional photographer, so that actually also came down to me a little bit maybe through the genes or at least the interest, And, uh, as far as writing is concerned, I still do a lot of writing. I've, uh, been editor of various newsletters and, uh, along with the banknotes, I mentioned my friend in Slovenia that I work with, we've actually published a catalog on polymer banknotes and we've published now four editions. The last one is called polymer 2021 still available. So, and we're hopefully we'll have a new edition out next year. And one other thing that I do too is, uh, there's a German site. So I live in Germany is I got involved with them actually writing different articles on new issues of banknotes, usually new issues, sometimes on historic issues. And, uh, and usually I write them in English and then I use a translation program. I can speak German. So, but it's easier just to use a translation program to give you that base. And then I read through it and I make a little, the few corrections that I need to. And, uh, and I've been doing that for a number of years and currently I have about 380 published. articles. So on banknotes. Yeah, that's a good little repertoire of writings, I would say. I've actually looked at some of your Facebook writings recently, and I've noticed that you're publishing quite a bit even lately. Yes, and some of those Facebook posts, I've actually included links to that German site. And now what's nice is you can actually pull up some of these German articles, and then you just right-click, translate to English, and you've got it. Perfect. So, yeah, we're kind of translating back and forth, but, no, it makes sense. It's easy to do that. And where can people find these contributions of yours? If they wanted to follow, if they wanted to read some of these things, do they have to go online and search specific things, or how might they find them. Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's like the name of the website in Germany. It's actually a German name. It's the word banknotes in Germany is Geldscheine. So G-E-L-D-S-C-H-E-I-N-E, Geldscheine, minus online, and then dot, it's not D-E, I think it's com. Gotcha. Well, we'll go ahead and put just links in the description. So if anybody wants to check out that. You know, and there's like a blog there as well. And I'm not the only one who publishes there. Other people also write articles, but I'm in charge of like current events, so to speak. I would assume that this gives you an outlet, not just to speak to people, but then for people to come back to you and then respond to you and give you information. I don't consider myself an expert about everything, of course. But when you write articles on things, banknotes, family history, whatever, you have to do a little bit of research. So you have to get your facts down before you can present something. So I have learned a lot and I am, and if I may say so, it's like I am kind of, I'm a little bit of an expert. You can humble yourself all you want. You're absolutely an expert when it comes to this stuff. When it comes to top of mind, if somebody were to ask me, who do you know who's the best in this area? It's this guy right here. And it's not just because of passion. It's because of the time you spend in it. And it's also because of the fact that you're able to continue learning all the time. And the passion is part of it. Okay. Because you're able to write good articles if you're actually interested yourself. Okay. Because you do put some of your heart in it, into the articles. Right. And that's definitely important. You can tell when somebody's not putting their passion to something. That's why I like to cook food. I like to actually put love and care into the food. And you like to do podcasts as well. And I can see that passion now as well. Podcasts are fun for a few different reasons. But more than anything, when I watch myself later, I'm always kind of judging myself. And part of that process is, okay, well, I want to be a guy who actually is. kind and nice and smart and asks questions, but I don't want to be annoying and all these other things that I can see myself as, as I watch. And so slowly, but carefully over time, I can maybe become the person that I'd like to be, right. That I see myself in style and, uh, the types of. questions that you want to ask. Okay. And I think part of it as well, it's like, you have to be able to go with the flow. For example, you have to be able to not only have your list of questions you want to ask, but you also have to then listen to what the person is saying, because questions will actually then come up based on what your interviewee then says. Exactly. There's times. when I've been hearing somebody say something and they go to say, and I'm watching the podcast later and I'm editing and I'll say, Oh, there's a perfect question. I'd love to ask that guy. And then I hear myself go right onto another question. I'm like, Oh no, no. And as you just said, yeah, well, these are, these are the learning opportunities in these moments in life that I think are pretty fun and enjoyable. Is this the first time you've had the opportunity to sit down and do a live in-person podcast? Yeah. I've never done this before. Again, as I was speaking before, you have a natural voice when it comes to speaking to people. And I think just overall. If you were just to sit online and talk to people in like a live show or something like that, you would get a lot of people that would be interested in that kind of a thing. So because you've traveled the world and you know quite a bit, I'm going to ask you a few kind of not crazy questions, but off the cuff questions. And we have a lot of people right now talking about government control. You know, there's a lot of conspiracy theories talking about UFOs in the sky. Do you get to hear about these things and does it come on your radar much being involved in things that you are? And what do you think about that stuff. Yes. When you're in the United States, there's so many other countries and we usually don't hear about all those other countries. But the United States is such a large country and its influence on other countries is so large that when you're in other countries, you really hear a lot about the states. And also the world is kind of developed or should I say divided up into different spheres of influence. And Western Europe, well actually most of Europe I would say now, is more or less in the American sphere of interest. So we hear... So we're very influenced by a lot of things that come out of the United States. even on the radio in germany there's they're still playing like the songs from the 1980s which are good songs of course but you still hear a lot of english songs and now if you're in traveling like in azerbaijan where i've been to kazakhstan uzbekistan that's still like the russian sphere of influence where you really don't hear so much about the u.s but you hear more about russia and then uh if you're in the southeast asia then you hear more about china because that's more or less the chinese sphere of influence and uh so okay i'm sorry what else. no you're good when it comes to the world right now in america they are talking a lot about uh future technologies with ai and of course energy and then the third one is they're talking about aircrafts right when future technologies when it comes to space travel uh are any of those things something that you find interesting you. Uh, space travel, not so much AI. And what was the other one? Uh, AI energy. energy, energy, energy are connected to quite a bit, but they're still separate. I would say. energy, not so much, uh, space travel, not so much, but AI, I think it's interesting because it's still just, uh, a baby, so to speak in many ways. And I find it interesting, but I also find it scary because, uh, now even on my phone, when I ask a question, uh, the first thing comes up is like an AI summary. Okay. And that summary is only as good as the information that it's drawing on. Okay. So what I'm afraid of is, is what happens when AI starts drawing on AI, uh, opinions of. things or summaries of things that were also drawn on AI. Okay. And maybe the original source wasn't even correct. So, um, I have a cousin in New York city and her husband writes, uh, different books. He's actually a tax, uh, professor. And, uh, and he's actually made a few posts himself where he's asked, uh, uh, the AI generators about his book. So what's the theme of this book? What's about this. Okay. To see what they come up with. And they aren't even close to being accurate. Right. Okay. So that's what scares me. And, uh, and that also relates back to the family history research, always go back to the original sources and verify things yourself. Okay. The, some of these AI summaries or family trees at ancestry, they'll give you outlines of things, but take the time. Consult the original sources. That's the most important thing. That was a perfect piece of advice right there. I think that there's so many people out there that are just going to assume that AI is going to be correct all the time. And as you said, the base information is what it's drawing from. And a lot of base information, if it doesn't exist, now it's hallucinating or just coming up with stuff that's not real in the first place, uh, or at the very best, even giving you just wrong information about a book or a summary of some sort, right. Exactly. And in today's world, I mean, unfortunately, you know, we could have a set of facts and then you interpret. them in one way i interpret them in a different way and uh i mean the current politics political situation the united states actually does upset me that we it's diverged to the extent that it has, and i won't get into necessarily my opinions politics next time but i just find it sad okay that you actually have these two camps where the two camps don't really even talk to each other anymore and there has to be neutral uh. fact checker, so to speak. There has to be a way of just avoiding the conspiracy theories, just kind of sticking to the facts and getting ourself as a country back on track. I'll just. leave it at that. Absolutely. And as you just said that, that's actually one thing we bring up quite a bit when we talk about AI is this idea that a lot of people think, well, that's one of the things that it potentially can do is that it could be a mitigator and that it's going to have information be fed to it. And as long as we can agree that the information being fed to it is accurate, right? And we can test that and then we can say, hey, now let's talk. And as you said, fact checking and these kinds of things are absolutely being thought of here in the future with applications. So I find it to be exciting. I know that it can be a little bit scary, but. anytime I think of a problem, I think there can be a solution used with the same stuff, right? And it's always about intention and passion and desire, right? Exactly. Let's just say we're. both interested in something and we get an AI summary of it and it lists like, let's say, 20 points. Okay. Well, if you tend more towards interpretation, things in one way and win the other, then well, maybe I'll pick out like 12 points that kind of, more support the way I think. You pick out eight points or that support the way you think. And then all of a sudden we're starting to diverge again. Exactly. And there was actually in the 1960s, there was a law of fairness and reporting where news organizations were actually required to present both sides of issues. And unfortunately that law was repealed. And I think that's one. of the major problems in today's, or actually in the U.S. society now today, that we don't have. that fair reporting anymore. Right. If they get private funding now, they don't have to do it. Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily beneficial just to present one side of things. People can make their opinions based on what they believe, but they at least shouldn't be given enough information that they have enough information that they can form their own opinion. And not just be fed only opinions in a certain direction. Yeah, I agree with that. I know that's not what our whole point is here, but truly when people are looking up stuff on the internet in general and you're starting to go into genealogy and you're starting to go into history and you're starting to go into banknotes, you're going to find fraud. You're going to find aspects of things that are untrue and you have to be able to just have a mind that can... Exactly, because the current events of today will be history of tomorrow. Okay, so we'll all have to live with that also in 10, 20, 30 years and our children. Okay, and we want them to grow up with the same amount of accuracy that we grew up with. And I know that right now, at least with my children growing up, that they're going to have at least an accurate family history going, going at least definitely four or five generations back up until a certain point, you know, well, again, your great, great grandfather, Fred Sprankle, his father was John. So there we have another great, his father was Frederick, his father was George. So that means your great, great grandfather was a revolutionary war soldier, and his father emigrated from Germany. And your ability to actually keep this to memory is pretty great. The neuroplasticity in this guy. Yeah, you have to be able to make those connections and keep those solid. So it's well, I mean, as long as it doesn't go past 10 generations and then I run out of fingers. Right, right. And it's a little more difficult. All right. Well, one thing I like to do, because in this podcast, I want people to learn things. I want people to get interested in things to just find out about stuff that maybe they weren't even interested in before. But on top of all that, I want to be motivating. I want to be positive. I want people to, you know, maybe if you're having a bad day to feel like you're having a good day, because I've went through life up and down. And we talk about experiences happening in family. I grew up without much knowledge of a family and it did affect me. And I felt a lack of place in the world. And as I've gotten older, I feel more like I have a place, you know, because of. knowing where i come from and the people that were here before uh having said all that yeah i, life's not always been easy because of some of the things that go on uh in family history and and not to blame anything it's just reality if you feel certain way it is and so moving forward i want to just be motivating i want to help keep people positive because i just i genuinely feel that way nowadays i feel super excited when i wake up i feel like i made you know just by waking up and coming out of bed that's 20 million dollars in my mind i have this kind of idea that we have. a hidden bank account where you have just a bunch of money in it and you know just every single day you wake up it's it's not free right there's you know what i mean like it was it cost something to. be here and i'm lucky to be here so i think one of the things that we're all kind of interested is we all want to make a difference we all want to have some type of legacy that we leave especially as we get older i think we think about a little bit more and what's that legacy, going to be it can be children it can be grandchildren it can also be books that are written articles that are published, And, uh, and one of the, my motivations for continuing with the genealogy, like I said, I started when I was a teenager, that was over 50 years ago. And, um, and again, to be able to. pass that on to you, your children that gets passed on. I mean, that's something that's going. to benefit many generations after I'm dead and buried. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you've been able to do for people already shows us that, that it's been beneficial and it's already gone down a good path. And I think that we are not even able to see. the future of what you've helped out with people. And again, with even having this podcast right here, my hope is that there's other people out there that get interested, that go out and do some of these things and then reach out to people and that then compounds and snowballs, right? And get a lot of people out there, high five and others and calling up family members that they didn't know existed. That'd be great. You know, the world is cooperative and the more we hang out with each other, help each other, the better off we are, the faster we progress. And again, when you start doing your family tree, there might be a few skeletons in the closet. There might be a few horse thieves back in there, but you have to view these items as historical. You know, you don't really have a connection to your great, great, great uncle Fred, who was a horse thief, right? But just view it as historical, maintain the stories, you know, and it adds. Don't steal horses anymore, right. Well, it adds color to the family history. Right, exactly. No, well said. And so at the end of the podcast, I like to kind of do a thing where I don't have any preset thing to say other than I want to know a recipe for success that you might have. And that could be one word, it could be multiple words, it could be an idea, but something that you think that people can follow. that they do, that they should do to just have success in life. What is your recipe. Well, I would say you don't have to tell everything, but always be honest in how you approach things. Be respectful of other people. And I think probably the most important things to learn is that if something is different, it means it's different. It doesn't mean it's wrong. Absolutely. We can have the and instead of or. Ladies and gentlemen, Don Ludwig. No, I won't do that. All right. That's it. Great job. Talk about my mom being good. Well, he'll get them first and then we'll do the rest. Alright, we'll get over there. First serve. No, you're good. You're good. Ready? A little darker. It's fine. You look great. Make her smile. Hi-yoo! I'm coming! Yeah! Mmm! Throw it around. My most important thing is making sure that everybody's good. Do you want to go to the bathroom and you got your water? How long will you be speaking? You like to talk a lot, Don, so I feel like we could talk a while. You might want to grab your water. Water? Me? I like to talk at least an hour.