Episode 90 - Family Forensic Files Part 2

If you watch Law and Order than perhaps you saw the episode earlier this month called The Rubber Room where they are dealing with a blog and they call in a forensic linguist to see if the text matched up with a student or a teacher in a school. Gus Marsh wrote in to tell me that when he saw it he thought of Genealogy Gems.  That’s because my guest on the last episode #89 was Forensic Linguist Dr. Robert Leonard.

I’m disappointed I missed that episode of Law and Order, but on the newest episode of The Genealogy Gems Podcast I am very pleased to feature more of my conversation with Dr. Robert Leonard, PhD, & Forensic Linguist. He was fascinating to talk to, and was totally game for looking at how forensic linguistics could be applied to genealogy.

"You carry traces of every place you’ve ever lived in your speech – they might not surface all the time, but then at the oddest times they will." Dr. Robert Leonard.

In this episode Dr. Leonard gives us some clues on how to revisit those documents that we thought we had already gleaned everything from and he explains how we need to look at them in new ways!

"Being educated people we are trained to ignore that which doesn’t make sense, where as now we find that which doesn’t make sense could be the keys that we are looking for."  Dr. Robert Leonard

I just think it’s fascinating to see how scientific principles can be yet another tool in our genealogical toolbelt!

"The interesting thing always in science is not the single item, but it is the series of items, a wave of items, a pattern. So, that’s why it is good to write these things down. Because one or two or ten by themselves may not tell the story, but then you put that 11th together and then it’s like a little jig saw puzzle." Dr. Robert Leonard

You're also going to learn some unexpected things about this PhD that will surprise you!
Listen to Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 90.