Jana Churchwell Scott is a Genealogist, Military Records Specialist, International Researcher, and WWI & WWII Family Locator, dedicated to assisting in researching and memorializing any hero. In this interview, she reminisces what brought her to this field in the first place, and the insights that she’s gained over the years.
Please describe your background to starting the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
My background in genealogy and military research began with inspiration from my parents, who have been researching our family history for decades now, documenting as much information as they could collect and gathering a plethora of family photographs and stories.
My military interest began with my uncle, who was killed in a B-24 crash during WWII. My father always told the story of how my Granny tried desperately for months to find information about why his plane had crashed, but she was never successful at finding any details.
Years later, our family discovered the military aviation accident report and learned everything there was to know about what happened to him and his crew. We found that four airmen had survived to tell about it. I began researching everything I could find about these men and the families who lost them.
A month later, my family was on a plane to the exact site where the plane crashed; I was holding parts and pieces of melted aluminum from my uncle’s aircraft. I helped assemble biographies and photographs of the brave aircrew who lost their lives along with my uncle and learned every one of their family stories.
At this point, I was so moved that my life, and eventually my career, had changed paths and I knew I had found my true calling and passion. I began volunteering and locating family members so that no family ever had to experience the desperation of not knowing what had happened. Later, I began my consulting business to assist others in finding information about their hero soldiers and airmen, focusing on both WWI and WWII, and locating family members of those who were still missing.
Typically, my clients are family members seeking military records and information to know more about the lives and experiences of their lost loved ones. The majority of my work involves identifying family members of unaccounted soldiers upon request for legal next-of-kin, mitochondrial-DNA matches, y-DNA match, and autosomal-DNA matches. Occasionally I have worked with unknown parentage cases, particularly involving military personnel.
If I wanted to do a genealogy study on my family, what would be the first steps that I should take?
The first thing I recommend is interviewing family members and documenting family stories and memories through writing or recording. This is information you will not be able to gather simply by looking at a typical genealogy record. Several popular genealogy websites have compiled sample questions that one can use to document family stories that can only be told by living family members before they pass on.
The second thing I recommend is periodically backing up your collections and documentation in a secondary location, in the unfortunate case that a fire, flood, earthquake, computer failure, or other disasters should occur.
While platforms like Ancestry and MyHeritage have made genealogy research easier, critics claim they aren’t reliable and that they impose privacy risks. What are your thoughts on this?
Personally, I feel fairly confident that the popular and reputable genealogy sites have taken the necessary steps to protect the privacy of their users, and that these companies have placed users’ privacy as a top priority. As with any commercial venture that holds consumers’ private information, it is impossible to eliminate all possibility of a privacy breach. It is in these companies’ best interest to do everything they can to responsibly protect their customers’ private information, and generally, I feel they have done a good job so far.
How has DNA testing affected your field of work?
The majority of my work is done for the United States Army with military repatriation of unaccounted-for soldiers from WWII. To account for all US military, DNA testing is the key to solving many cases that could never have been solved in the past. Without the work being done by the Defense Prisoner of War-Missing In Action Accounting Agency (DPAA) in utilizing mitochondrial-DNA, y-DNA, and autosomal-DNA matching between living family members and older remains, their current goals could never be accomplished. The genealogist is the first point of contact with particular family members of the soldier and is done on a case-by-case basis.
We confirm contact with the correct relatives; next, the service branch casualty offices work directly with those family members who are willing to voluntarily assist DPAA with their goal of accounting by submitting a DNA sample.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days?
I find the technology that DPAA is utilizing these days incredibly fascinating in matching living family members with soldier’s remains from our nation’s past conflicts.
In previous wars, soldier’s remains were treated with chemicals such as formaldehyde; today, DPAA’s scientists and anthropologists have developed ways to circumvent the difficulties involved with identifications of these types of remains and have overcome these challenges.
Further, in the years during and post-WWII, and even into Korea and Vietnam, there was no such thing as DNA or family DNA matching. The military mortuary personnel and graves registration officials only had meager tools to work with. Up until 2012, there were thousands of soldiers who had to be buried as Unknowns in our overseas military cemeteries. Today, we would never hear or conceive of such a thing as leaving a US soldier behind as unidentifiable.
How do you envision the future of Genealogy?
I envision the future of genealogy playing an ever-more increasing and important role in the lives of families all over the world, especially with DNA testing that can now answer so many questions with science when paper records don’t exist, or when family stories get lost throughout the generations. We genealogists work hard to preserve and encourage both!
What are some interesting insights you’ve gained from your research?
With a military person, one can find much more information as opposed to a family member who didn’t serve, simply as a function of the government’s pattern to document. It is a way to trace a person’s steps and rebuild stories by finding out the names, dates, places, and context.
The insights gained from the stories learned in military records of the heroism of generations past are difficult to describe sufficiently in words. It’s an experience so personal, that it can only be felt by the one who dives into it.
Doing this work is unlike any other reward in life. It is as if the lives of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who made the ultimate sacrifice left it behind for us to study, feel, and be inspired by. By doing so, one can know that their sacrifices were not in vain.
The reward is exponential in the heart and soul of the researcher who makes the intriguing and amazing discoveries found in military records, and hero soldiers repatriated to the gold star families who lost them.
