Summary
AI Ruth
Bud opens by noting it took two years of persuading, including a restaurant conversation in Poland, to get Charleen on the show. It’s her first podcast ever. Charleen works as a professional genealogist. She traces the interest to her childhood, when she felt like the odd one out in her mother’s Jewish and Italian family and wanted to learn about her father’s side. He had been orphaned young and knew little beyond his parents’ names. Her father was one of the first computer science majors at the University of Houston and later ran a document-control business in the oil and gas industry. Her mother is an artist, and Charleen describes family dinners where everyone’s specialties overlapped. Her own lifelong specialty is databases, which she says fits naturally with genealogy.
The conversation covers her many crafts and interests. She has done embroidery for 43 years, ever since her grandmother gave her a kit to keep her from fidgeting during evening TV. She recently finished a leather purse as a way of reconnecting with her late father’s hobby. She learned to cook from her mother and grandmother and loves spicy food, especially breakfast tacos with Hatch chilies. Bud shares his own stories: his mother taught cooking classes in Hilton Head, his wife is knitting a blanket for their coming grandchild, and a childhood spent watching Mike Wallace’s “Biography” on CBS in the early 1960s began his love ofpersonal stories.
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Charleen explains her genealogy work in detail. The shelves behind her hold family binders and reference books organized by region. She has volunteered on forensic genetic genealogy projects. Her paid work includes locating mineral-rights owners in Texas for law firms, researching the history of old houses, and, most often, documenting clients’ eligibility for lineage societies such as the Sons of the American Revolution. For beginners, she recommends FamilySearch (free) and Ancestry (freemium), along with local genealogical societies, library meetups, and Legacy Family Tree webinars. She has just submitted presentation proposals to the National Genealogical Society, holds a 2011 bachelor’s degree in IT and software engineering and a 2018 genealogical research certificate, and plans to start a history degree. Before genealogy, she worked in informatics and systems analysis for hospital systems and the oil and gas industry. When Bud asks what genealogy databases are built on, it prompts the show’s signature “Seriously, Bud?” moment, and Charleen admits she doesn’t know.
The two also discuss family and the WordPress community. Charleen is nine years older than her brother Matt. She helped raise him and later got him into jazz clubs by bribing bouncers. She first attended WordCamps in San Francisco so he would see someone in the front row who loved him no matter what he said. Today she calls herself a “WordPress groupie” who keeps coming for the community. A post by Courtney Robertson recently inspired her to build an AI wiki for genealogy, although as an old sci-fi fan she worries about HAL and Skynet. Her travels include WordCamps in Paris, Turin, and Taipei, plus a solo 50th-birthday trip during which she fell in love with Vienna. There she saw an opera every night and ate dinner at the Hotel Sacher, where her great-great-grandmother once worked as a maid. Portugal, which she wants to visit for its Templar history, has eluded her three times, once due to COVID, and she still holds an unused flight credit.
The episode ends with lighter exchanges. They trade rumors about the next WordCamp US location; Bud dreads Miami Beach in August, and Charleen would have picked St. Augustine. She mentions that a branch of her family helped found Piscataway, New Jersey, and recounts driving an elderly woman’s decades-old houseplants from New Jersey to Texas. When Bud asks about local politics, she politely sidesteps. For future guests, she recommends Carolyn Shelby, who started an ISP at 17 and is the queen of a micronation, as well as Mo Carter and Megan Marcell. Bud closes by thanking her for her “first and probably last” podcast.