Just Like Nana

Jen Shaffer

• Amie Penny Sayler • Episode 8

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0:00 | 24:26

In this episode of Just Like Nana, host Amie (Elizabeth) Penny Sayler is joined by “The Formidable Genealogist,” Jen Shaffer, to discuss how uncovering the histories of our ancestors allows us to move forward with empathy and understanding. 

They discuss how professional genealogy can be a powerful tool for exploring ancestral trauma and finding a path toward healing, and how you can get started uncovering your own family tree.



About Jen Shaffer:

Born in Iowa and currently residing in Minnesota, Jen Shaffer has had a lifelong passion for history, which she has channeled into a career as a professional genealogist. Jen is an active member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, where she also serves as the Booth Coordinator for both in-person and virtual industry events. She possesses a remarkably broad knowledge base covering diverse time periods, geographic locations, and languages. A graduate of St. Olaf College with two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Russian Language and Russian Studies, Jen particularly enjoys working with Slavic and Scandinavian records. Her linguistic background includes the formal study of Russian, Spanish, German, Latin, and Norwegian. She has developed a specialized talent for "brick wall" research, expertly distinguishing between individuals with identical names to identify the correct ancestor with precision.


In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • Modern DNA testing can help break through long-standing “brick walls” to identify unknown ancestors and connect distant relatives.
  • Genealogy is more than names and dates; it’s about learning the historical circumstances that shaped your ancestors’ lives and decisions. 
  • Genealogy is a team sport and collaborative tools can help you build a shared history with others. 



Resources Mentioned


Connect with Jen Shaffer



Connect with the Show

Do you have stories about the "Elizabeths" or Nanas in your own family tree? We want to hear from you!

  • Website: justlikenana.com
  • Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.

Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Hey, welcome to Just Like Nana, so excited to have an expert genealogist with us today, nay, not even expert, a formidable genealogist with us today. Jen Shaffer, Jen is absolutely incredible and has a lot of good advice and tips for finding your own ancestors. Jen Shaffer is a full time professional genealogist and owner of The Formidable Genealogist in addition to client research, she's passionate about short form genealogy education. She posts daily social media videos across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky. She's been interviewed by many newspapers and TV stations regarding TikTok use for small businesses. She's published articles and periodicals and writes PDF research guides to help others level up their research. She recently researched for and appeared on Relative Secrets, which is a television show hosted by Jane Seymour. Jen has a very broad knowledge of various research subjects, while also specializing in Slavic Nordic, Irish, Mexican, Canadian and US research. Her formal education is in the linguistics field, with a BA in Russian language, a BA in Russian studies, and countless courses in Spanish, German, Norwegian and Latin. She also holds a certificate of Russian language immersion from Veliky Novgorod State University in Veliky Novgorod, Russia. Jen is the booth coordinator for the Association of Professional Genealogists, and she adores connecting with others at in person events like Rootstech, the National Genealogical Society Conference and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Conference. You can visit www.the formidablegenealogist.com to purchase genealogy research guides or inquire about a research project. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight. Jen, yeah, thanks for having me absolutely super excited, Just Like Nana is really about kind of exploring ancestral trauma and how to heal that. And when I say that, I mean that in the most respectful way to our ancestors. So it's not about hey, so and so did this, and that's a problem for me. And so now I'm mad at this person. It truly is just understanding that everyone's doing the best they can, but how can we, sort of, like, move forward from here? And so the first component to this, for many, many people, is learning about their families. So that's why we're just so excited to have you here, The Formidable Genealogist, which is just the most fantastic name ever.

Jen Shaffer:

Not terrifying. It's unfriendly and formidable.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Exactly, exactly nothing can stop you. So if you don't mind, I would love to start if you have a favorite or powerful memory or story of your grandma or Nana and what you called your grandma. Love to hear about it.

Jen Shaffer:

So we were kind of formal. Both of mine were just grandma and last name. So kind of see that a lot in the Midwest, especially. Yeah, they were in South Dakota, both of them. I don't have, like, profound things that come to mind first, it's just more the little things, like how my grandma Smith, every time I came to visit, she would have, like, a canister of planters, cheese balls. They're just sitting there on the counter ready for me, which I would immediately, like my teenage self would eat, like the whole canister until the roof of my mouth hurt. So it's just more little things like that, or just, like spontaneous trips for ice cream and just those little things are would have really stuck, stuck with me, you know, since they've all passed away 20 some years ago.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yeah, yeah, that's so special. I love that it is the little things that, in the end, sort of matter the most. I'd love to hear a little bit about what drew you to genealogy and what sort of a day in the life is like for you. I'm sure they're all different, but kind of you know what your days consist of.

Jen Shaffer:

And that's the most exciting part, honestly, that it is so different. But I come from a long line of people that have, like, one child every 40 years, so I was surrounded by adults, older adults, all the family gatherings. It was mostly just like my grandpa, who was born in 1904 by comparison, I was born in 78 so they had lived their whole lives, you know, very full lives. I even came along. So a lot of it that, you know, was the impetus for this interest in history and genealogy. Was just them talking about their lives. It seemed, you know, many generations before, you know, talking about basically homesteading in South Dakota, right? It was just like pioneer times when they were kids. So that's kind of what made me become interested in it, because that's the stories I grew up with. That's what I heard. So I had a lot of time to myself as a child, as an only child, so I read a lot of history books, like other kids would be getting teen or YM I would be getting archeology magazine. It's just kind of always stayed with me. And then it wasn't until my daughter was born in 2017 that I decided, Hey, I wonder if I could make my family history, passion, a career, and then I worked my my tail end off for about five years before it really became like a solid, sustainable business. Second part of your question, what a typical day looks like. It's exciting every single one because of it's wildly different. No two family cases are the same. Often they aren't even similar, and that's what really drives my passion and makes me so excited to do this for a living, because yesterday, I was tracing some Irish immigrants in Poughkeepsie and Brooklyn back into like 1820 and the day before that, I was trying to find somebody that immigrated from Bohemia or Slovakia coming from but like in 1925 so it's just wildly different Every day. Yeah, awesome.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Wow, that's amazing. So I'm curious. Your grandpa born in 1904 and you talked about the homesteading. Was it his parents who are homesteading? Or was it like his? Yeah, I was thinking that timing was about right.

Jen Shaffer:

Wow. Yeah. So it was like, I found, like, the homestead papers, land was still pretty available from the Homestead Act of 1862 right around 1900 in central South Dakota. So they were able to get that, that Homestead Act benefit that a lot of people couldn't have gotten at that point, like in Iowa, because all the land had already been claimed.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Interesting, very rugged. I'm curious, has your daughter? I mean, she's young yet, but has she kind of expressed interest in your family stories or your work, or is that sort of bug in her as well that you've noticed?

Jen Shaffer:

I'm working on it so slowly. With Shirley, she's very much into KPop Demon Hunters right now, less so in the genealogy, but my walls are lined with old papers and photos of these people from, you know, the 1800s all of her ancestors on both of our sides of the family here, yeah, and she does ask questions about them. This is kind of a cool thing that I discovered, that maybe some of your listeners would find interesting too, but I find that she's more willing to listen to stories about these people from times she can't even quite Fathom or print in context if we're doing an activity. I have taken some of these old photos from the 1800s uploaded them into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to make them into coloring pages in black and white. Wow. And then I print those off, and we can sit and we can color and talk about the people I'm trying to lay lay that groundwork. But obviously she's her own person, and she'll have her own interests, but I want her to at least be aware that this is a thing that exists. Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler:

What a beautiful way to honor her family and let her get to know people who aren't here anymore. You've worked with so many clients and helping them find their families and their family histories. What do you think that sort of gives us, as far as helping us understand ourselves, or specifically, like any trauma that's played out through generations,

Jen Shaffer:

I come across that a lot, really. Sometimes it is kind of the like, really big deal trauma, and sometimes it's more just the little things that kind of fit into place based on what I find, like I had a case recently where somebody knew that his grandfather was a grocer and owned a grocery store in St Paul, but then through my research, we were able to discover that he had to file for bankruptcy. So then relaying that. Information to my client, it starts to put it into perspective, and they start to understand what they couldn't grasp as a small child about the things they felt around them and the tensions and what was actually going on that was, you know, not just at surface value, like they remembered it, right?

Amie Penny Sayler:

Wow. That is really powerful, like recontextualization. Yes, exactly. One of the things I've enjoyed is so a lot of my family came from Bavaria before it had, like, joined with Germany, and so it's interesting just to read about the sort of history. And so Bavaria, when Martin Luther came around, the rest of you know what would ultimately become Germany. All became Lutheran, but Bavaria held fast with the Catholic Church. And so it's just really fascinating to read about the you know, that country and sort of its history and what was happening, and just kind of translate that into the values that, you know, my grandma would talk about that she learned from her grandma, whose mom came from Bavaria and all of that. So, yeah, it is, it is just really fun, you know. So you were hanging out with your ancestors when you're, you know, young teenager, and they're in their 70s 80s. As you started researching, did you feel like you understood them better?

Jen Shaffer:

Yes, definitely, especially like the census questions, where it's like, what is the value of your real estate, or what are the values of your your personal goods? And you will find that on various US censuses, and that kind of helped to helped you to understand like, what went on during the Depression, what their lives were like, different obstacles that they encountered.

Amie Penny Sayler:

For sure, would your grandpa or your grandma ever tell you stories of living through the Depression, or did they just not want to talk about it?

Jen Shaffer:

They didn't really talk about it. Yeah, but you could see behaviors that had carried on, like you rinse the ziploc bag and you reuse it, things like that. That was very much a non wasteful approach to life, which I think can be directly, you know, attributed to the Depression. They were actually farming in Colorado at that point during the Depression, and they did talk about dust storms that came through. Okay? Was that was the extent of what they talked about really, right?

Amie Penny Sayler:

They talk about the weather, and this is very Midwestern, like, I'm not going to talk about my feelings, but I'll talk to you about the weather.

Jen Shaffer:

Yeah, exactly.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Do you find that you know for yourself or others who you've helped along the way? Did they find learning about their ancestors healing and in what ways?

Jen Shaffer:

Absolutely, whether it is, you know, figuring out the immigration story for people that did have immigrants in their line, or whether it is finally making a connection to a specific Native American tribe where that knowledge has been lost to the descendants of where they originally came from, yeah, or even just understanding maybe a second great grandmother who's who was widowed in the Civil War and was left alone with, you know, all of these children and had to adopt some out, and things like that. People find that it really resonates, you know, it humanizes them to see these things that these people went through, and then when I explain it with historical context, then they see a lot of patterns in their family. They see how people often treat problems the same way, react the same way, and they just gain a deeper understanding of their parents, grandparents and as far back as I'm able to find.

Amie Penny Sayler:

That's incredible. And you know, that really hits on part of what I think you offer that's different than just, you know, someone like me going online and trying to figure out who my ancestors are. So it's fun, obviously, to figure out where they're from, and you know, what year they were born and what year they died, and all of those types of things, but that's obviously just so surface level. And what is truly enjoyable is to start to try to think about who was this person and what did they experience in life? So can you talk a little bit to our listeners about, how can they start to kind of dig deeper into that? And I know you have a lot of resources available, so I'd love for you to kind of explain some of those.

Jen Shaffer:

The best thing you can do is learn about historical context for that time and place that you're researching, whether it's like you were talking about, you know, Bavaria around 1871 when they joined the German Federation, understanding what life was like at that point, what would have been a typical life for somebody in that profession that you found. And you know, you can just Google that, or you can use ChatGPT to help you summarize what life may have been like for that person, things they would have encountered, what the immigration experience would have been. There's just a lot more to the names and dates like you're talking about, because those do not have a lot of meaning, right? You have to read between the lines, understand if somebody owned land or not, if their profession was labor or if it was something more specific, like ship Carpenter, their life would have been drastically different. Newspapers are also a key thing that's going to help you fill in beyond those general facts and put more context, especially those small town newspapers where it's going to say Aunt Betty came up town after church for luncheon or something like that, right?

Amie Penny Sayler:

Especially, yeah, those are amazing to read. I know one resource that's helped me is so my family went Bavaria to Illinois and the County Historical Society. So it was the Metamora Historical Society. They've been so helpful and so kind in helping me kind of look at maps and telling me anything they know about my family. So that's been fun, too.

Jen Shaffer:

Yeah, absolutely. The best experts you will find are the people that have lived in a location for generations. I was in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland last August to see where my family lived from about I don't know, 1720 until about 1780 or so. Wow. And the people who were younger than me that lived there, but had been there for generation upon generation could tell me, Oh, over here, the road used to go closer to where your family came from, but now it's over here. They just have this knowledge they've absorbed simply by living there. It's amazing. Yeah, you should always go local in your research.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Were you able to visit, like, any land or graves or anything?

Jen Shaffer:

Yeah, there were a few graves, like my fourth great grandfather's brother, but not any direct ancestors, because they would not have been able to be buried in a Presbyterian Churchyard at that point. Okay? And they were not Catholic, so there aren't any graves that remain for them. But I was able to visit the original farm and even meet a he was like my grandpa's fifth cousin, or something, oh, 90, and he was born in that farmhouse from the 1740s Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Oh my goodness, did he just loved sharing his stories.

Jen Shaffer:

He did. He showed me all these little photos, and it was amazing because he had, like gossip about the 1700s and information had been sent from my family in Pennsylvania back to his like he just had this knowledge, this ancestral knowledge, it was incredible, right?

Amie Penny Sayler:

Wow. That is amazing. I have not yet met, like a live person that I've been able to sort of talk to about my family, which sounds absolutely incredible. I know I've gone and visited places and just even being on the land that my family was on. It just it feels so timeless. You just feel so connected.

Jen Shaffer:

Yeah, when I went there, I just sobbed. It was crazy.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Can you talk a little bit more about, like, the tools and resources that you offer? Because I know you have a lot of you can kind of take online courses, or you work directly with people, just to give our listeners. I'm sure a lot of them are I want Jen to help me. Yeah. So how can you help people? Right?

Jen Shaffer:

So I do take client projects, but my wait list is 237 people at this point, so I am booked out about two years. Oh my goodness. So yeah, but I don't charge anything to hold your place in line. So if you're interested in learning more about that, contact me, and I'll send you the packet. So I do that in any amount of hours. Everything starts with just two hours of research, and then we go from there. It's kind of a collaboration where it's like I found this. Now, what do you want me to do? Rather than I spent 20 hours and here is an eight page report right to update people along the way. But what I found I really enjoy doing is writing research guides. So I have seven or eight research guides, and one of them's free, too, if you want to just get a sample, it's called discovering the free side of ancestry.com but I have research guides on family, search ancestry newspapers.com Find A Grave, reading Russian records and ChatGPT for genealogy and how to find records offline. So those are all on my website, very reasonably priced at 19. Each and then I do have a few online classes left. I am going to retire from offering those at the end of 2025 so you can check out the on demand ones after 2025 they are on my website, pre recorded.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Okay, wonderful. Do you have kind of a last best tip for someone who is interested in their ancestry and just feels overwhelmed about where to even start.

Jen Shaffer:

I like to recommend that people just start with a piece of paper and emailing cousins or calling Great Aunt Betty, asking what she knows, because there's so much that isn't in a record that's just only knowledge that is like firsthand knowledge or an anecdote told to you, and get those older members of your family as quickly as you can see what they remember, even if it's not absolute fact, there's Probably a kernel of truth in it. If it's like I heard that so and so died in the Civil War, you might actually start researching what she said and find that they just fought in the Civil War, not necessarily died. So just take everything with a grain of salt, but you will get a lot of leads from family members that you can't find anywhere else. So get those while they still exist.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Through your work, have you ever had, you know, because sometimes there's estrangement in families and you don't know one side of the family or someone leaves in a marriage and you don't know that family. Have you ever had a client who's been able to sort of bridge that gap and connect even though they don't have, you know, maybe they're connecting with an older generation, and they don't have that bridge generation in between. And what's that been like for your clients?

Jen Shaffer:

Yeah, I've had a few like that. I used to offer DNA research for unknown parentage. I no longer offer that, but back when I was doing that, sometimes I would be able to connect somebody with, like, the correct grandparents, but there would be no way to know which brother in the family was the correct father. Okay, so we've been able to, you know, jump past that, through DNA, and then put them in touch with cousins, even though they don't know who their exact father might be, but that's been one of the most amazing things you can do with DNA, especially with Ancestry DNA right now.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yeah, it is pretty incredible. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important that you want to get out there as part of your message?

Jen Shaffer:

Remember that it can be a team sport. It doesn't have to be the solitary thing that you're doing in your basement at two in the morning. You can have people that collaborate with you. You can have cousins, and everybody works on the same tree you can use, like wiki tree, which is a free tree that you can use, and it's a collaborative tree. So everyone uses the same tree. You can use the Family Search world tree, which is also collaborative. It's becoming a more collaborative thing. Family history is not as solitary as it once was. So if you're looking for community, this can be a great hobby to start doing, because you will find other people that are really passionate and also maybe, like the nerdier things in life, and you might find a lot of really great connections.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yeah, that's amazing. I love that. And just feel more closely connected to your family, exactly. I'm so appreciative for your time, yeah, no problem and for what you do. Thank you.

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Jen Shaffer

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