Stories That Live In Us

Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist
  • 5.0 (214)
  • Personal Journals
  • Updated Weekly

What if the most powerful way to strengthen your family’s future is to look to the past? I’m Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.  I created this podcast to inspire you to form deeper connections with your family - past, present, and future.  All families are messy and life is constantly changing but we don’t have to allow that to disconnect us.  I’ve spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.Tune in weekly to receive inspiration and guidance that will help you use family stories to craft a powerful family narrative, contributing to your family’s identity and creating a legacy of resilience, healing, and connection.__________________________Want to climb your family tree and uncover your own family stories?  Visit my website - CristaCowan.com - and sign up for my free newsletter.

  1. 4d ago

    Connecticut: The Windsor Witch | Episode 114

    〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    22 min

  2. May 28

    Massachusetts: From Rags to Riches to Ashes to Starting Again (with Laura Tasse) | Episode 113

    〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    33 min

  3. May 21

    Maryland: A New Kind of Identity | Episode 112

    Four months pregnant, two babies already buried in German soil, Anna Maria Niccum boarded a wooden ship in 1749 and crossed an ocean she'd never seen. Not for a revolution but for a foothold. My six-times great-grandmother made an extraordinary journey from the exhausted Rhineland Palatinate to the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland's Toms Creek, where she would hold the line for nearly two decades so her children could inherit something no tyrant had ever offered her family: a new kind of American identity. Her story is one that history almost forgot, but your family tree may be hiding one just like it. Somewhere in your ancestry, a woman who signed nothing and appears in almost no official records made your existence possible. It’s time to find her. 〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    20 min

  4. May 14

    South Carolina: Ancestors Leading the Charge in Battle and in Life (w/ Anne Mitchell) | Episode 111

    A wounded soldier refuses to dismount. His boot overflowing with blood, his hat riddled with three bullet holes, he rallies his troops up a South Carolina hill in Pennsylvania Dutch. History turns on a single moment. Anne Mitchell, a South Carolina native whose roots run deep in the Palmetto state, joins me to share the story of her sixth great-grandfather, Frederick Hambright, a German immigrant who helped win one of the most decisive (and least talked about) battles of the Revolutionary War. As we count down to America's 250th birthday, Anne shares how a family tree hint on Ancestry led her to the Battle of King's Mountain. There, Hambright's courage helped force Cornwallis to change his entire strategy. This is a story about what it means to stand up when history calls your name and why the most powerful family stories are often the ones nobody told you growing up. 〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    31 min

  5. May 7

    New Hampshire: Chosen Family, Jewish Roots (with Nancy Kotz and Lynne Snierson) | Episode 110

    Chosen family and Jewish roots run so deep in New Hampshire's Lakes Region that two families spent generations wondering where one ended and the other began. In this episode, Jewish genealogy researcher Nancy Kotz and award-winning journalist Lynne Snierson share the stories of their families, woven together across generations. From a Lithuanian rabbi who may have missed his train stop in 1902 to lakeside lobster bakes and a synagogue that still carries the nameplates of the original founding families, their story is a testament to what community can build when people choose to show up for one another. If you've ever wondered whether the family you were born into is the only family that shapes you, this episode will give you a beautiful, definitive answer.  〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    46 min

  6. Apr 30

    Virginia: One DNA Match and a Woman Who Didn’t Want to Be Found (with Nicole Palsa) | Episode 109

    What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back? After Nicole Palsa heard her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking story, she spent the next twenty years searching for answers. Nicole’s great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney, disappeared from Virginia around 1914, leaving behind a little girl, a grieving family, and a silence that lasted generations. When a single DNA match arrived the Friday before Mother's Day 2018, everything changed. And what Nicole uncovered was far more complicated, tragic, and surprisingly triumphant than anyone expected. From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Floyd County, Virginia to a small Illinois village where people still remembered Dessie's name, this is a story about the secrets women kept to survive, the daughters left behind, and what it means to finally find someone your family spent a century trying — and failing — to forget. 〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    36 min

  7. Apr 23

    New York: A Melting Pot of Resilience (with Scott Pratt) | Episode 108

    What would you do if a single letter revealed that everything you thought you knew about your family was only half the story? Scott Pratt walked into a historic Brooklyn church as part of Ancestry's powerful documentary Railroad Ties expecting to find some connection to his Scottish colonial roots. Instead he discovered that he's a descendant of enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In this deeply moving conversation, Scott and I trace the extraordinary arc of his family tree: from Sophia, the light-skinned Black woman who fled slavery through Brooklyn, to her grandson Frank, a silent film star who kept a journal about passing for white that now sits in the Harvard Library. Scott's story is about so much more than genealogical discovery. It’s about the grief of lost stories, the complexity of inherited identity, and the fierce resilience that echoes across generations when we finally let ourselves claim the whole truth of who we are. 〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    36 min

  8. Apr 16

    North Carolina: Buried Treasure, Buried Stories | Episode 107

    He buried a fortune in gold under a bent white oak. Then he died before anyone could find it. My 6x great-grandfather Abraham Kuykendall lived 93 extraordinary years. He survived colonial America, fought in the Revolution, crossed the frontier with 13 children, and built an empire of 2,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But when I found him on a Sunday night FaceTime research session with my dad, I discovered that history remembers him as a ghost story. There's still an iron wash pot full of coins buried somewhere near Pheasant Branch in Flat Rock, worth an estimated $8 million today, and treasure hunters are still looking for it. But in this episode, I want to tell you who Abraham actually was and why the gold isn't the real treasure that got lost. Your family has buried stories too. You still have time to unearth them. 〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️  🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most. 🖼️  Ready to get your family tree out of your computer and onto your wall? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations. ♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

    29 min
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Trailers

5
out of 5
214 Ratings

About

What if the most powerful way to strengthen your family’s future is to look to the past? I’m Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.  I created this podcast to inspire you to form deeper connections with your family - past, present, and future.  All families are messy and life is constantly changing but we don’t have to allow that to disconnect us.  I’ve spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.Tune in weekly to receive inspiration and guidance that will help you use family stories to craft a powerful family narrative, contributing to your family’s identity and creating a legacy of resilience, healing, and connection.__________________________Want to climb your family tree and uncover your own family stories?  Visit my website - CristaCowan.com - and sign up for my free newsletter.

Information

  • Creator
    Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Crista Cowan
  • Show Website
    Stories That Live In Us

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