Episode 328 - Focus on Photography: Photo Detective Maureen Taylor on Photographing Your Pandemic History / as Important as the Picture: Metadata and a New Push to Standardize

Host Scott Fisher opens the show with David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org. The guys open the show with news that the National Genealogical Society conference for 2020 is going virtual. Hear when it is and how you can be a part of it. Then, a "social distancing happy hour" has resulted in a couple of families getting to know each other and learning that they're related… and not that far back… in Norway! Next, it's amazing how close America came to losing baseball great Babe Ruth in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Hear the story of how close he came, and how close America came to never having seen the later "Sultan of Swat." Another cold case has been solved and it never gets old. Find out about the latest crime breakthrough using DNA.

Next, Photo Detective Maureen Taylor talks about creating a "pandemic archive" or "coronavirus photo album." We're each having our own experiences in this mess. Maureen has some great thoughts on what to photograph and how to put it all together for the benefit of future generations.

Then, Chris Desmond from Memory Web and Robert Friedman from Permanent continue the photo theme. Visiting with Fisher, they explain the new group they are a part of that will hopefully result in the creation of standards so that metadata… all the information about a photo such as who, where, when, what, etc…. stays with the picture as it is shared from platform to platform. Without the metadata you lose all context about a picture. It's an important project that we can all play a role in.

Next, David Allen Lambert returns to join Fisher for Ask Us Anything. The guys tackle a question on an odd DNA result as well as another on pension records from the Spanish American War.

That's all this week on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show!