Barbara Tien | The Stories Within Photographs

Barbara Tien | The Stories Within Photographs

Barbara Tien: Before we get started, tell me a little bit about where, what got you into all this. I mean, I've read a little bit of your posts. and, uh, so often I'm talking to people who have, you know, specifically gone after a path of telling their own story, it strikes me that this is much more academic.

Am I right about that? Tell me a little bit more about you and where you're going with this overall project.

Heather Murphy: Well, I have an academic background in genealogy. I have a bachelor's degree in family history and genealogy. So I started off that way and I'm just very analytical. but then also. I've kind of been pairing that with the last couple years with like, why do I do family history? And yeah, it's fun. It's a nice puzzle, but what are the benefits of that?

And so that's when I started kind of studying on my own the psychological benefits and like I studied resilience this last year and so many aspects of resilience. You can get from learning about your family, not just the connections, but being able to set a goal and work towards it. That's part of being resilient, but that's part of family history as well. and so I've just been searching for people to share their stories about like the difference that it makes. Yeah. It's fun for people to research their family history, but when it comes down to it, why does it actually matter?

Barbara Tien: Right. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, we're, we're, we're fascinated by that. I mean, there's, it's got layers sure. Of genealogy, but there's a lot of layers of sociology and psychology and other kind of academic fields that really get to the why and the, how this is going and where. Going, um, you know, we're four co-founders of a startup.

We've been in technology, our careers. We come at this from bits and bytes and packets and, you know, storage and all that kind of stuff. All of us are also parents. And daughters and sons and grandchildren and great grand aunt and all that kind of stuff. Right. And, generally I look back at myself when I was a young adult and wasn't yet married didn't yet have children.

And my worldview was different. in my own case, I alluded to some of this in in the interview that you, you had. In my own case, I grew up largely overseas. I was born in the United States, but moved it. I was still in diapers and I came back to the United States and then very quickly moved to Hawaii.

 And then even from there travel a lot. I didn't really get a chance to get to know any extended family at all until pretty much I was in high school. Uh, no. Well that's when a cousin came to visit and then came to the mainland to go to school and then living here in some ways I was freed of all that baggage of jealousies and complex relationships that people often have for.

Time, they were shunned at a family reunion or didn't like their boyfriend or all that kind of stuff gone. Didn't matter to me. It didn't exist. And in fact, all of other people's baggage didn't exist. I could just be curious about it. Um, so in that sense it was easier. but I also, I was touched, I never got a chance to know my grandparents, both had passed away before I was a young adult.

And I was just so. Loved and cared for by a great grand aunt, my grandmother's sister. it was a lovely relationship. She was the youngest by a lot of her generation and I was the youngest of, of my siblings. And it was just so lovely to have that opportunity. And get to know her and then get to know her extended family with whom again, I had no baggage whatsoever except a shared lineage and a shared great-grandfather.

So, uh, it was really a wonderful way to get into that fast forward to my sort of technology thing. I'm a, I'm a up now.

Age doesn't matter. I have the real privilege of living parents and we have two grown daughters. Um, and of course I'm the youngest, as I mentioned. So I have lots of nephews and nieces and now great grand nephews and nieces. And you know, I'm living in that middle state and that middle state is such a privilege because I have that those decades of. Behind me that I remember what that experience was like. but I also can look ahead to what my parents' experiences with also a new form of empathy, because I better understand as an adult, what they went through, what the traumas were, what the awkwardness was, what the forbidden things were, you know, um, things like divorce were just not spoken.

Uh, in even the sixties, the fifties, the sixties, it's like a family crime and nevermind all kinds of other things from gender differences to adoption and things like that. It's just, it don't talk about it. And today attitudes are so much more open. That we can look back and see these stories and understand them for who these people were and where they come from.

Uh, earlier I alluded to the distortions and sort of understand where they came from. I can sympathize. In a way that I never expected to, it was my secret trauma growing up, but to understand that my parents divorced when I was young. Okay.

It happens a lot. And then how they treated that I know a better understanding I've left much more to do with their parents and their parents felt that way because of their.

So, you know, we carry these forward and now we look around across multicultural environments in all this talk, for example, about women in Afghanistan and the traumatic experience, just the physical experiences of what they've gone through, but, uh, how. That translates into generational change as families have grown up here since before that war began.

So, you know, from that perspective, looking at it, I talked a little bit about how talking about stories of our own families. Have us thinking about our place in history. You know we, we peg ourselves back into history to remember where people were. I said, I didn't live on the mainland us and yet yeah.

I'm an American and yeah, I speak like one look like one, but I, this, this cowboy thing you talk about, what does that mean? What is this? Two-step I don't know. Um, there's a lot of really embarrassing, bad job, just an idiot, but a lot of embarrassing pop culture, things that I don't know and can't really deal with, but.

Being able to look and see, wow, my great-grandfather was born in Kansas in 1864. And he watched as the cowboy trains came through the Chisholm trail and up through Texas and across the Prairie's on the rail to the markets in the east. And so he started writing stories about the old cowboy times. By the, he lived a long life until 1955. So he was telling these stories to an, to an audience that was moving into track homes, near freeways and going out to drive ins, you know, it was just such a different world. Um, and to see that that's my own history is, uh, kind of amazing. And then of course, looking at my kids and my husband's experience, very, very different.

So yeah, these are, these are stories that are kind of, I have been eyeopening.

Heather Murphy: I really liked what you said about that you understand your parents because you look at their parents and then you kind of see how people get to be who they are because of who they were parented by. And that's, I, that's one of the big things that I try to teach people is you don't know who you are until you understand your parents and you don't know who they are until you understand their parents.

Barbara Tien: I can't say that. I understand. I can say that I have empathy for and empathy and appreciation in a way that I never did when I was younger. I've you know, to just look at each stage of life and you look back and say, I knew nothing, then am I. Favorite books growing up was, was all the AML and stories, the Winnie, the Pooh stories.

But the poem, when I was one I had just, begun. Forgive me. I just have to say the whole thing.

When I was one I had just, begun when I was two, I was nearly new when I was three. It was barely me when I was four. Not much more when I was five, I was just alive. And now that I am six, I am as clever as ever. And I think I'll be six forever and ever,

and it's just such a simple concept of this moment in time is the best is the, you know, it's Pollyanna-ish of course, but, and it's not, except that only at this point of time, do you fully have the history behind you . Because there's no question about that. You may not understand it. There's lots of things that you might even have whole memory gaps for, but there's no question that it is behind you and there, what is ahead of you, you know, anyway,

Heather Murphy: yeah.

Barbara Tien: it takes each of those things. And, and, you know, as I look at again, coming into a world of technology as we do today, um, Suddenly all of this personal worldview and personal family history becomes a core to my business. Because we are in the business of telling family stories, not somebody else's stories, not our stories, but rather creating a way that people can tell our own stories in the artifacts and photographs that they have, and that they want to keep private and keeping the family and encouraging them to do that kind of storytelling.

So, you know, software is only partly about bits and bytes and a large part of it is figuring out how people communicate, what are they trying to do? What motivates them to do that and how do they get that kind of connection and drive it forward? So we are paying a lot of attention to those kinds of, um, subtle subtleties of psychology, sociology, genealogy, that, that motivate people.

That motivation is really, really important to us.

Heather Murphy: And that's something that I never think about when I see these photo sites online, you know, I just think, oh, it's just a place to put your photos. So it's really interesting to hear that you're not.

Oh, let's put, have someplace to put photos, but let's see how we can help pull those stories out of people and to make this more than just photo storage.

Barbara Tien: Exactly. I mean, there's a lot of places to store your photos. There has been, since flicker said, wait a minute, why not store it in the cloud? And, um, it's like, you know, the web itself as having a way to be able to reach out at any point anywhere and bring that kind of content in or go out and visit that site.

And we started to really look at how you're able to do that and realize that photograph. Images of any kind can be a jumping off point for more and with what we're doing with Ponga, it turns out we do all this fancy stuff of machine learning, computer vision, AI, blah, blah, blah, to go in and study faces and organize all your photos for you by the people in the pictures, tech nuts stuff.

But at the end of the day, what we're doing is giving you a way to have organized your photos. And now on any one photo, look at it, know who was there? I didn't know. They knew each other. Cool. And you can now see, and then you start looking at where it was when it was, why it was okay. You get through all that stuff.

And what is it? That's not in the picture. Where's who took the picture? Why were they. What is that thing in the background? Why are they doing that? And you find in these little micro moments and these micro moments that were caught on film, a larger story. And sometimes it's just a draw, just a jumping off point for more.

I have had the opportunity to share some of the pictures when I share pictures on social media. I'm always very, very careful about privacy because Frank, quite frankly, many, many of these are from my personal collection. I got to find him somewhere and I don't want to use stock photography because they're not personal.

They're not authentic. And that's sort of the point. So, I try to be very careful on drawing from my own. Most of them I do are black and white because I'm pulling from photos of people who are no longer with us. They won't cause problems for people who are living. and then. You know, generally I muddled names so that it's a little less identifiable, that kind of thing.

But, you get into these pictures and you study them in depth and suddenly they just inspire these larger stories. I had a wonderful moment to connect with my great aunt. Great. My great-granddad her daughter. So she's my mother's cousin. and she, uh, lives very near my own daughter and has become like a grandmother to my own daughter, which is lovely.

and I was sharing with her, these collections of pictures. I just want to make sure my own cousins are okay with all of this because, you know, And it turns out she's very lovely. All of my cousins have been incredibly supportive. and I was doing this over zoom. So I share the pictures with her in zoom and move around in Ponga, in zoom and capture her storytelling as a video, which I can then add right back into Ponga technique, I'm going to be posting about, um, and doing as part of a, uh, roots tech course, but, uh, each of these kinds of things, starting to realize how we can use these tools that are just part of our everyday stuff now and bring them in to our storytelling, because that's kind of how we tell stories now, you know, oh, I there's this thing. And then there's this thing. Um, you know, it's like pointing to a book on a, on a shelf.

Heather Murphy: So, what are some of those stories that you've been able to pull out of a picture that you've found and did what you've talked about, about asking all those questions about a photo.

Barbara Tien: Well, the one that always comes to mind and I sort of alluded to it earlier is who was taking this picture. So there a picture, that I, use in a lot of our, a lot of the blog posts perhaps too often. And I often share and that picture is I call it the Harder Family Picnic, Harder is this great-grandfather. And it's, I know, taken in Abilene, Kansas, which as I said, was at the end of the Chisholm trail. And, um, I stared at it for 10,000 minutes.

You know, who, who are the w well, I, I figured out pretty much who everybody is. There's one person who was Mr. Bachelor. Was that a last name or something else? I don't know. and everybody else, I pretty, there's one mystery baby. Who took the picture, what was the occasion? And I feel so proud of myself to figure it out pretty solidly who took the picture?

It was my Greg was my grandfather because he was definitely a amateur photographer and a really good amateur photographer. And he had had a wet lab at home. He was doing color photography in the early 1930s before Kodachrome was introduced. , and. , my grandmother is staring right at him and she's a young mother there with her parents back at her house.

They lived in Chicago. So they've traveled to Abilene enter in some kind of maybe Easter, or it seems to be spring. and it seems to be 1918. I don't know why they're not wearing that. Right. It's 1918. so the pandemic was in full bloom. They knew, but anyway, I don't know the answer to that question, but there's still a lot of other mysteries that are in there.

It, and a lot of those are the things that I've been able to on earth, mostly by, uh, facial recognition, quite frankly, figuring out who people are. My grandmother also was an inspiration because she wrote a wonderful self-published book that the sort of my generation of cousins still has copies of. And generally there's only one per my generation to pass to our children.

Uh, but it's a self published book and. So it helped me figure out who people were by birth dates. Cause that's not always, you know, passed on with, uh, you had this cousin F Ethel, really how old, So you know, those kinds of things, it's been a lot of fun.

Heather Murphy: So how has using photographs and getting into your family history through that way, connected you more with your family?

Barbara Tien: Well, certainly, uh, in, in my case, I am not a genealogist. I, you know, I, appreciate the rigor . Of it as a field and the precision and care of a professional of going through those things I do, as I said, have, have learned enough through all of this to appreciate that and to appreciate what my grandmother was doing when. Be going through this book, several of the chapters, not consistently several of the chapters and with, you know, little passages, that list, such things as you know, thus and such where the birth dates of the children and the F the first middle and last names when they were born and when they died and that kind of thing.

Which is very useful today because in 1948, she didn't know about this internet thing. Um, and, uh, the fact that we can now Google those people or look them up on FamilySearch and be able to pull all the details together. Um, but yeah, there've been a lot of things. For me, the photo thing has inspired a appreciation of who they were and where they were and how my people were connected in to history.

 Another thought with respect to distortions was growing up. I remember my mom telling me and showing me this book and telling me that we were related to Betsy Ross. Really, that's pretty cool that, you know, I'm, I'm seven years old, I'm reading about these things in history. Right. and then, you know, later it was, you know, sort of.

And what does that mean? Sort of, and then she showed us this book and it's kind of dry. I mean, you can be honest, they all live wonderful productive lives. and, uh, dig in there a little bit and because of the, because of that history and that name, there's a whole lot of Elizabeths and Betsy's and Lizzie's and so on throughout the family?

And Ross's for that matter. Well, it turns out. Her brother Ross was the explanation of how we were related to Betsy Ross. Her brother's first name was Ross. I thought that odd, well, it turns out that in fact, yes, that was coincidence, but again, that was a tribute name and it was a through marriage thing. So it was the anyway it's a long detailed, but it was the, uh, we have. Distant relative, who was the older brother to Betsy Ross's husband. So we aren't really related to her by blood, but Hey, that's pretty close. We're related to her children.

Heather Murphy: yeah, and that's an example. of how family history can make the world smaller, because even though you don't have a direct line to her, you have a connection. And I think that can be with so many other people you find out. Okay. Different connections that you had, that you didn't realize, whether that's with a different ethnic group or a different social class, you can, it has the opportunity to make the world a smaller and more inclusive place. When you recognize how connected we really are.

Barbara Tien: Yeah. In fact, we're really thinking a lot about that lately. Um, in part, looking ahead to family history month, but also beyond that into November and remembrances of wars, you know, I mentioned Afghanistan earlier, my, uncle, my mother's brother, fought it. He will Jima. And, I grew up, as I said in Hawaii where the Pearl Harbor. Right there. and as we've been pursuing this effort with Ponga, we've discovered a consistent pattern of people, highly motivated to be telling these stories as they relate to experiences at war and especially for the United States, with these experiences at war that we're in. On our own land that we're taking people into other worlds, other countries, and very often that experience in other worlds and other countries gives them connections to a place they might never have touched.

 And a perspective of, you know, religions and, cultures that are far, far away. so again, I traveled a lot as a child. We lived in Hawaii, very cross-cultural place. So these kinds of experiences were very. Common in my own, in my own background growing up. But I have really seen how that experience and war in one form or another has really affected people.

And then as effected that bond between others that they shared in that experience. So talking about it, the generation who actually experienced world war two is passing. You know, we're losing them every day. Uh, one of our members has been really, since his, retirement spending his time, very closely with his dad, helping his dad, we retell the stories from world war II.

He was one of them. Relatively small number of Chinese Americans from California who fought in the war for the United States in, both in Europe and then also in Asia where their language skills were part of it. Hawaii had the famous four 42nd. that was so key in the European theater, even as their own families were interned here in California.

Here, we have stories of the internment in California and elsewhere around the country, actually. And then the generation today are the. The well, the young there's, my generation are going to be the children of that generation. And it's, you know, each of these absolutely is connecting people with real history just as we have this pandemic. His history in the making. And we're trying to encourage people to think about how they are capturing themselves in these moments, whether it's hugs with loved ones, especially the elderly, and you know, the experience of wearing masks, the experiences of things that are different and they're upsetting, sure. Capture it. So we remember what it's like and why.

Heather Murphy: I like how you say that it's upsetting, but capture it anyway.

Barbara Tien: Yeah, we think about that a lot because, you know, we started out realizing that the stories that need to be told, usually don't need to be told over a microphone from the town square.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Barbara Tien: There's a big difference. And a lot of the stories may only need to be told at a little quiet writing desk with nobody else. you know, it's perfectly okay to tell those stories into the privacy of your own Ponga account that no one else ever sees, kind of like a journal. On the other hand, you can also select who you want to share it with and you share it with that small group of people and start opening up a conversation.

And that can be really important for those really hard conversations. So it might move from the writing desk to the living room. And, you know, and then go out to be shared with cousins onto the front porch. It's still not the town square, still not the microphone. And we think that that's the way to touch on these really difficult questions.

My, my co-founder tells a story about his son, getting to know a gentleman down the street that was just very kind to him. And he spent a lot of time and then he saw. , gentlemen had like some dog tags or something artifacts and he asked him about him and it turns out he was a Vietnam. And he just did not, he was, he could not talk about it.

He was at that stage and he could not talk about it, but he could share stories with his neighbors. So there wasn't that direct connection and that made it okay. That made him select the context. So to us context is just very important. What, and, and it's, you know, it's, it's nothing special about us, to be honest, this is just what we do as people.

And that's why I use the descriptions where we use physical metaphors, the metaphor of a, of a writing desk or a town square. you know, we really think about how as human beings of tens of thousands of years, we've learned how to do this. We just get this technology thing, photograph. Our technology, right?

That's new. It's only 200 years old. That's nothing. And we're still figuring it out. We're figuring out how to take pictures, but we're also figuring out what it means. And, you know, it's where we believe it's, it's creating new ways to tell stories. We've had, a member Kate reached out and asked about how do you tell a story in a picture if it doesn't have a beginning and a middle and an end, it's not a story. I love that because it's a great challenge. And in fact, people do tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends in a picture. They might just be a long paragraph, or it may be, it'd be lots of different comments in the same picture. Or it may be that one picture links to another links to another links to another.

We have one of our members has taken photo books that she did for a long time. She's been doing photo books. So she took one of her phone goat, photo books, and Ponga ported it. So that she's turned a stayed book that was sell sat on a shelf, into an interactive book that all of her cousins and family can get engaged in.

And we love that. So we started thinking why not family tree? Or, take a landscape of time, you know, a landscape that describes time and, and start talking about the things that happen and how you were connected to each of those. And then each of those could be a jumping off point to something else. I feel like I'm talking about web design, but it doesn't matter. You just bring in any old image and have at it, have a whole Canva worth it's. Okay. so that's some of the stuff that we do.

Heather Murphy: Well, it has been amazing to talk with you about this. Cause like I said before, I just was thinking Ponga just another place to put your photos and tag people in, but it is fascinating to see how much you think about. The people on the other end, like it's, it sounds to me like the people who put things on your site are not just customers, they're people that you care about and you want their stories to be shared with their families and to make an impact, not on the social media way, where you blast everything out and who knows who sees that, but you don't have any connection.

You want to connect with the people that matter most in a very intimate way.

Barbara Tien: That's exactly right. I couldn't have said it better. That is exactly why we do what we do. Thank you.

Heather Murphy: This has been not the typical kind of interview that I've done, but it has been a beautiful one and I have really, really

Barbara Tien: you.

Heather Murphy: it.

Barbara Tien: Thank you. this piece has been really touching for me too. You're right. It's we don't look at them just as customers. In fact, we don't even use the word customer. We call them member. And the people they share pictures with, aren't just their Sherry's or something. They're their guests. And we take that verbiage very seriously, that terminology, because from our perspective, when you invite someone into your home and you tell them a story, You're not going to charge them.

We're not going to step in there and say, oh, and pay by the way, would you like a canopy? And that'll be 20 bucks. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're your guests, you know, so our members pay us. We think it's reasonable. it maps to kind of our costs. It's like what it takes. Keep the, keep the walls up and then you have guests.

That's perfectly fine software it's okay. If they even laugh and make a lot of noise, we don't care come on in. We are learning every day about those social aspects. They are very important to us and we are really looking forward to continuing to grow this.

Heather Murphy: Well, it sounds like an amazing thing that you're doing and I hope it continues to grow well.

Barbara Tien: Thank you.