The Science of Ancestors Calling with Judy Nimer Muhn
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Judy Nimer Muhn has been researching her family history since she was 12 years old. After more than three decades, she runs Lineage Journeys, offering professional research and presentations specializing in French-Canadian, Acadian, Native American, and Scottish research. She’s also the current Awards Committee chair for the National Genealogical Society.
We recorded the interview portion of this conversation back in November 2025 (the rest of the episode was recorded in June 2026), and it took us longer than we’d like to admit to get it out to you. All apologies to Judy (and all blame to Elizabeth).
The wait doesn’t take anything away from the conversation, though. Judy is as fabulous as always!
You may also notice some brief flashing in Tami’s video during this episode. We apologize for the glitch and appreciate your patience!
Twelve Years Old and Already Hooked
A school immigration project sent Judy to her Aunt Catherine, who directed her to the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library. What started as a weekend assignment turned into a lifelong pursuit that eventually traced her family to the founding of Quebec City and a settlement in Nova Scotia. She became a professional genealogist in 1993 while living in Germany with her Air Force husband, using some of the earliest FamilySearch centers to research her French roots from overseas.
Same Struggles, Different Records
Judy’s specialties span French-Canadian, Acadian, Scottish, and Native American research, and while the record sets differ by region, she’s found the underlying stories to be similar. Farmers everywhere dealt with drought and insects. Her Scottish ancestors lived through their own potato famine, a history that rarely gets the attention Ireland’s does. War, famine, and poverty show up in nearly every line she’s traced, and she credits that pattern with giving her an inherited resilience.
Ancestors Calling: When Intuition Meets the Genealogical Proof Standard
This is where the conversation gets genuinely unusual. Judy started her career as a medical technologist with a hard science background, and in the 1980s she discovered Hank Jones’s book Psychic Roots. A strange encounter at the Burton Library (a stranger who correctly named three of her royal French ancestral lines, then turned out to have no traceable name, address, or library sign-in) pushed her to take seriously the sensations and synchronicities genealogists often experience but rarely talk about.
She’s since built a full workshop and methodology around it, and she’s careful to ground it in real science rather than mysticism: cognitive psychology, pattern recognition in the brain, and epigenetics research from the National Institutes of Health showing that inherited trauma can be passed down biologically. Her argument is that the Genealogical Proof Standard leans almost entirely on paper trails and DNA, while ignoring a third tool genealogists already use without naming it.
Chairing the NGS Awards Committee
Judy is the Awards Committee chair for the National Genealogical Society, overseeing everything from the Rubincam Youth Writing Competition for middle and high schoolers to the Award of Merit and NGS Fellow designations. Submissions come in from all over the world, and nomination deadlines fall on December 15th every year.
Judy’s Advice for Researchers
“Keep listening. Stop talking. Keep listening.” Find the experts, read the books, and tune up your radar for what the records (and the people around you) are trying to tell you.
What We’re Loving
Tami’s been using the Copilot AI built into Microsoft 365 to transcribe a stack of handwritten letters inherited from her father. She feels that it outperforms Gemini and Adobe’s AI, accurately handling 90–95% of the cursive handwriting. Her prompt: Transcribe the letter and build a table of every name mentioned along with their likely relationship.
Elizabeth’s current obsession is Artifacts, a podcast about the emotional history of early internet technology, hosted by Danny Brown. The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) episode reportedly brought her to tears.
Teatime: DNA and Medical History + Aliens
Tami shared some practical DNA testing advice: recent illness or antibiotics can introduce cellular debris that degrades a cheek swab sample, and most testing companies recommend waiting at least six months after chemotherapy before testing, since treatment can affect blood cell quality even though it doesn’t change your inherited DNA.
Then Elizabeth tackled a viral story claiming the CIA has been screening 23andMe and AncestryDNA data for “alien DNA,” a claim that traces back to a single secondhand account involving a real Cold War-era remote viewing program, which was then wrapped around an unsupported claim of alien DNA.
The genuinely useful takeaway buried beneath the noise: be mindful of your DNA privacy. California just sued 23andMe over the 2023 breach that affected roughly 7 million people, though both 23andMe and Ancestry maintain that law-enforcement access requires a legal process. Casual browsing by intelligence agencies is not permitted.
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Do you have a question or an idea for a future episode? Send us a message or leave a comment—we’d love to hear from you!
RESOURCES & LINKS
- Lineage Journeys (Judy’s website)
- Ancestors Calling: Science, Synchronicity and Sources (Judy’s blog post on the methodology)
- NGS Awards and Competitions
- Artifacts: Stories from the Emotional History of the Internet
- Vivid Pix Memory Station software
- California AG lawsuit against 23andMe (HIPAA Journal)
- New York Post: CIA alien DNA claim
This episode is sponsored by Vivid-Pix. All product opinions are our own.
On episode S2 E3 you talked about medical conditions that affect DNA testing. If people have had stem cell therapy or bone marrow transplant, they should not test because their saliva may contain the tester’s DNA and the DNA of the donor. https://www.ancestry.com/c/dna-learning-hub/dna-test-bone-marrow-stem-cell-transplant
Thank you for sharing this insight, Michael. Additional details like this are definitely valuable to note for folks considering testing, and we’ll be sure to mention this in a future episode. We appreciate you taking the time to comment!