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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. For a lot of folks, this is a big travel and/or family and friends weekend. I hope you have something planned that fills your cup and gives you time with the people you love. Later in the hour, we'll speak with legendary Pitmaster Ryan Mitchell. If barbecuing is on your agenda this summer, you won't want to miss that. He and his dad, plenty of recipes for those of us in urban settings. You don't have access to grills, watermelon, sweet tea, anybody.

If you're looking for some music for a long car ride, we've had some great guests performing in WNYC Studio 5. This week, Madison McFerrin joined us to perform from her latest album that was on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Jason Mraz and his guitar came in and performed a couple of thongs from his latest album, which has some disco-infused bangers that scream, roll down your windows, and sing along.

We also had a great conversation with S. A. Cosby about how to write a thriller that's also a commentary on race relations. His book, All the Sinners Bleed, is a page-turner. You can go back and listen to all of our conversations wherever you get your podcasts, or head to our show page @wnyc.org. Now let's get this hour started with a family mystery.

[music]

As we're headed into the 4th of July holiday weekend, many families gather and it could be an opportunity to ask Meemaw or Pops or any aunties about that piece of family history you've always wondered about, but never quite got the straight story. You might be surprised by the answers. Radiolab producer and editor, Alex Neason was. After attending her grandfather's funeral, she noticed that in the program, her great-grandfather had a different last name than his son.

Alex's mission to find out why is documented in a recent Radiolab episode called Family People. The story takes us through the mud, Louisiana cemeteries, New Orleans history, and the site of a former plantation where Alex's family ancestors were once enslaved. The episode is a reflection on what our names mean to our identity, particularly for Black Americans whose family history is harder to trace. Alex Neason joins me in studio to talk about the episode. Hi, Alex.

Alex Neason: Hi, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: We're also joined by her collaborator on the projects whose voice you can also hear throughout the episode. Professional genealogist, Nicka Sewell-Smith. Hi, Nicka.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Hey, there. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. What does your name mean to you? What does your last name mean for you? Where does it come from? What's an interesting piece of family history that you've learned about yourself or a relative or maybe a distant ancestor, something you thought was true, maybe turned out wasn't, or maybe something you found out was really interesting? Give us a call or text us 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. You can also text us at that number. You can call and get on the radio as well, or you can reach out on our social media @allofitwnyc.

If you're enthusiastic about family history and finding out more, we want to know why, and maybe you have some advice for other listeners in researching their family tree. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. As you begin the podcast by reflecting on your name and what your last name means to you and your family, what is it about your family and your childhood that makes your last name and ownership of it really important to you?

Alex Neason: Yes. A lot of this started with my dad and with a real strong sense of pride that he taught me and my sister to have in our name. Another big part of that was because of the environment that we grew up in. My dad was in the military, and your last name in the Army specifically is how everyone is addressed. I was very used to hearing people address, not by their first names, by their last name. In a professional context, I only heard my dad referred to by his last name. So much so that as I grew up in my own social circles sometimes, I have whole groups of friends where I'm just known as Neason.

I think for my dad there, he had a real strong desire for us to consider our name as something valuable, as something that it was important for us to take care of and to treat with a kind of tenderness and to be really proud of and to be thinking about our name as one of the ways that our family legacy would be reflected in the world. I just grew up with my name as a huge character in my life, really. I have a ring on my hand that has my last name, not my first name. I always have it, it was on the outside of our house growing up. It was just very prominent in my childhood.

Alison Stewart: You're at your grandfather's funeral, and I'll let you tell the rest of the story. I don't want to tell your family's story, but these two names didn't match in the program.

Alex Neason: Yes, and it was actually my parents went to the funeral. This was like peak COVID before I was vaccinated, before I was eligible to be. My parents went to the funeral and brought me a program back. I actually ignored the program for a while. It was many weeks later that I sat down with it to go through it.

In New Orleans funeral programs are prolific and have tons of information, their genealogical documents in of themselves. I sat down with this program and was confused from the first paragraph. It had all this stuff you would expect my grandfather's name, his birthday, where he was from. Then it listed his parents and they had listed his mom's name, Edna Jackson, and then for his father's name-- This was the first time that I had seen this name, it said Wilson Howard. A lot of questions immediately came to mind. It was like, "Well, who's Wilson Howard? Also, why is he Wilson Howard? And why are we Neason and where does Neason come from?" I called my dad first and later started calling his siblings and started to ask questions.

Alex Neason: Nicka, when you first heard this story as a professional genealogist, what popped into your head first?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's normal. I think a lot of folks think that folks having different last names is somehow unique to their scenarios, but it actually isn't. Especially when you get back into the slavery era, considering that enslaved children, they took on the disposition of their mother and because they followed their mom, if their mother was free when they were born, then they were free, if their mother was enslaved and they were enslaved. You'll see men that have their mother's last name because that's who they lived with, as opposed to the patrilineal name that comes down. It ends up being very common.

We weren't around when all this stuff was happening. There's a lot of variables and really juicy family drama that the kids aren't really supposed to hear. Especially with us going into a holiday weekend, this is the time to soak up those conversations and really lean in and listen because they're giving us all the goods. The spades are being played, the Dominos are being slammed down on the table, but somebody is dropping something beyond the cards and the Dominos. If you're perceptive enough, you'll pick it up and you'll chase the lead just like Alex did with this.

Alison Stewart: Well, I thought it was interesting in your episode that when you start asking around your family members, some are rolling their eyes, some are like, "That's grown-folks business." I've heard that from Edna, my grandmother was Edna, by the way. They don't make names like that anymore. After you went through this whole process, did you understand that response better than when you first got it? Because imagine it was frustrating when you first heard it.

Alex Neason: Yes. I think, honestly, before we even got to the end of the story, I was starting to understand it was with each layer I understood my family's response a little bit more. The first big thing was that I came into this at step one of what for me was the beginning of a big mystery. Then I started calling my dad and my aunts and made the assumption that this must be step one for everyone and it definitely wasn't. These were questions that my dad and his siblings had sat-- they'd been sitting with these questions for a really long time. I found out through talking with them more and more that some of the same questions I was coming to them with, they had gone to their dad with and hadn't gotten answers and I had been asking and re-asking questions over the years and really not gotten any information.

I think when people listen to the story, they're always surprised, especially people who know my family surprised that people were not in the same space of frenetic curiosity that I was in. I think it's just because they had been in that space before. I was new to this big mystery, but it wasn't new to them. I think I came to understand that a lot of the questions I was asking had been asked and they hadn't gotten those answers.

When you look backwards and things are complicated when you consider like Black history in this country, it's really easy to look back and just see the mess and decide not to step into it. It was also like I was in a position where I had a lot of time to be making these phone calls and asking all of these questions and not everybody did. I came to understand that it wasn't really a lack of curiosity. It was more about like, this has been a question or similar questions have been floating around for a really long time and at some point people had to live their lives.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call from Wendy calling in from Springfield, New Jersey, who heard the episode. Hi, Wendy. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Wendy: Excellent program right up my alley. My grandfather was born in 1886 in Charleston, South Carolina, and the original spelling of his last name was E as in elephant, B as in boy, O as in ostrich, Ebo. I've seen that spelling for the people who live in Nigeria and Ghana so I wanted to know, was this common that people could keep their ethnic identity name as their last name?

Alison Stewart: Nicka, what do you say?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Absolutely. In fact, for enslaved people, you typically see it as an added thing onto their name. It would be like Ebo Alison or Ebo Alexandra or Ebo Nicka to distinguish between another Alison or another Alexandria that would be on the same plantation. I've seen Congo, I've seen a number of different names like that. Then the other thing is we have to remember that folks who emerged from enslavement were choosing their identities. They were choosing how they wanted to be referred to.

My family, our surname is Atlas at, A-T- L-A-S. That was a name that was deliberately chosen. Our slaveholder had the last name Short. No one went by that name but they made a deliberate choice that if you come across any other black Atlases that are from Louisiana and Mississippi, you're going to know that that's your family.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious, Nicka, when you work with clients, what are some things you talk to them about to prepare them for what they might learn? Because not all stories are happy stories.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Correct. I would say. I think it just makes me think the first time me and Alex met and she thought that was going to be the only time we talked and I laughed and I was like, "That's funny." Because it's not every--

[laughter]

Nicka Sewell-Smith: No, this is not how this works. It can be a very short process. It can be a very long process. It could be a very emotional one, especially when you're talking about African American family history and the fact that just our presence in this nation is political and it's emotional. When we show up looking at documents and looking at our history, we're already coming in the door with a lot of emotions that a lot of other groups may not have.

Then when you start going down the rabbit holes of validating family stories and maybe going to places and looking into scenarios that other people were not brave enough to do or that enough time had passed to where the wounds aren't as fresh. You as the grandchild or the great-grandchild are going and pursuing this information so people are much more willing to talk to you as opposed to the children or the spouses that were involved.

For me, there are so many rewards but I totally understand why people may be hesitant because, again, we're walking in the door with just emotions as a people, but then we also have the emotions we have in our families based off of certain circumstances. There are whole pockets of families that stop talking and no one knows. Then here you guys go and reconnect because you've got the two factions of the family doing family history research because you don't have that memory of the reason why the talking stopped. It can be a roller coaster, but to me, there's no better way to learn about American history than through the vantage point of your own ancestors.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about a recent Radiolab episode called Family People. Alex Neason is the Radiolab producer, editor, and star of the episode, as well as Nicka Sewell-Smith, she is a professional genealogist who is a part of the story as well. We want to hear your stories, listeners. What does your last name mean to you? Where does it come from? Do you have an interesting piece of family history that you've learned about yourself, digging through the family archives and history? Maybe about a relative, a distant ancestor, something you thought was true? Turned out it wasn't. Our phone lines are open to you. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You can tweet to us. I'm sorry, you can text to us as well. You can also tweet to us or reach out on Instagram it's @allofitwnyc.

The story begins with some of this drama around your real great-grandfather, who was married to your great-grandmother named Edna Jackson. By the way, we got a tweet from someone else who's got an Edna in her family waiting for a comeback, says Little Eddie. Good nickname, by the way.

Alex Neason: Team Edna.

Alison Stewart: Team Edna.

[laughter]

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Me too. I've got an Edna myself, but it doesn't [crosstalk].

Alison Stewart: All right, we're going to bring Edna back. Move over, Mabel. Edna's coming back. Sit down, Dottie, it's going to be all Ednas. Back to us, great-grandmother Edna. It was Wilson Howard the funeral program said. Then there was another man you found named Clarence Neason. I want to play this clip, and we could talk about it on the other side. First, we hear Nicka, and then we could talk about this clip from Family People.

[clip playing]

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Oh. Oh.

Alex Neason: Oh, no. Wilson Howard?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: What? What?

Alex Neason: On the marriage certificate, listed as one of the witnesses is Wilson Howard.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Well, okay. Wait a minute.

Alison Stewart: Wait, the other great-grandpa contender?

Alex Neason: Yes. He would've been 20 years old at the time.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: No. What? Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Alex Neason: Wilson Howard witnesses. Oh, no, they were friends? Oh, no.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Oh, my freaking gosh. Were they friends?

Alex Neason: We can't know for sure if they were friends or not, but on November 19, 1938, it was a Saturday, these two men stood in the same room in New Orleans, maybe it was a church, maybe it was at City Hall. Probably they were both dressed to the nines, and Wilson Howard watched Clarence Neason get married. This would have been just a year after my grandfather was born.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: I cannot, grandma Edna-- like girl. What is going on? I'm kind of paralyzed because I don't even know. Was it like a Wilson and Edna creeping on the low situation?

Alex Neason: Oh, my goodness.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Or--

Alex Neason: It could be the other way around, right?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: I don't know.

[end of clip]

Alison Stewart: That must have been a moment.

Alex Neason: It was. [laughs] That was a moment.

Alison Stewart: I don't want to give away too much. Well, it's interesting because we do find out about your great-grandfather and you do find out who your great-grandfather was. Did that give you any sense of peace? How did it change how you felt?

Alex Neason: Yes, I think it's interesting because I was so hyper-focused at the beginning of this whole pursuit with biology. When we started working on this, it felt really important to know what the answer to the question of who biologically was my grandfather's dad. I think I had come into this thinking that I would validate my attachment to my name by finding out that it was the "right one" and that you could figure out if it was the right one through biology that got blown up once, twice, probably three times through this whole process. How I was feeling about my name through all of this.

For sure there was some anxiety that, what if I find out that my name should have been Howard or should have been some other name entirely? Then what do I do with my ring? What do I do with this sense of self that has been cultivated around this particular name? But the deeper we got into this and a lot of this was from the conversations I was having with Nicka, I was moving further and further away from biology mattering, whatever the answer was. Whether it was Howard or Neason or some other name that we were going to find out that would be brand new.

I was coming around to the idea that I didn't need biology to justify my attachment to a name. That's the story for people who were enslaved in this country. That's everyone's story because of all the things I was learning about how people were carrying perhaps their mother's name and not their father's name, how post-emancipation people were chucking their names that had been imposed on them and choosing entirely new ones for a lot of different reasons. I was coming to understand that part of my legacy as a black person in this country is the freedom to do that. Is the freedom to say that we aren't going to follow these very rigid Western notions of a name and what belongs to you and why.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Alex Neason and Nicka Sewell-Smith. We are talking about the recent Radiolab episode Family People. We're also taking your calls. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Alex Neason and Nicka Sewell-Smith. We're talking about a recent Radiolab episode, Family People, where Alex went on an adventure, went on a journey to find out why certain people in her family didn't have the same last name. Nicka, I want to read a text we got. It says, "In my family history, my father told my brothers and sisters that he knew his great-grandmother who walked the slave trail of tears from Virginia to Louisiana in 1827. Her name was Martha Jane Garthright and she also remember the selling of her mother and sister. His great-grandmother died at the age of 108."

That's amazing because this person has that information. For a lot of people in this country, when you go back and you look on ancestry.com, sometimes it's hard to read the scribble, or maybe you don't know what to look for on the marriage certificate as a clue, or on the death certificate. As people are starting to be amateur sleuths, as a professional genealogist, what are some of the clues and places you should look on documents you find that don't seem obvious? We immediately go to the day of birth, but maybe there's some other little clues you can find from those documents.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: I think the clip you played is totally just connected to this because we could have just been looking for the marriage license and been totally fine with the name of the groom and the bride and the date and the location. When you went in and looked at the witnesses, we would have never known that Wilson Howard was a witness for the marriage of Clarence Neason, had we not read through the entire document.

I would say, number one, you need to read everything. Sometimes you have to go back and read the same things over and over again because as you go through your journey of family history research, what you read and how it came off today is not the same way it would come off years later where you have much more information, you've talked to people, you may have DNA tested. You just have this gamble of different things.

So go back read everything, handwriting. I know it sucks, I know not everybody had the best handmanship, but sometimes that's when you engage other people who can read handwriting to say, "Is that an A or is that an E?" Folks ask me all the time, how do you learn to read handwriting? I say, "Keep reading handwriting, [laughs] that's the only way that you can do it."

Alison Stewart: It's true.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: You just don't leave any crumbs on the table especially when you're talking about enslaved people. That text that you got was an incredible one, because here it is, it's describing the downward movement of enslaved people from the upper south to the lower south. We know that more than 300,000 enslaved people were taken from places like Maryland and Virginia and brought down to what's considered the deep south states like Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana. The fact that he has her name, he knows who sold her, that means that you can go local, go to those conveyance records, go to deed records, and pull out the names of the slaveholders because those transactions will be in those books. Now, that's pending whether or not there was records destruction like a fire or something like that.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that, oh, enslaved people weren't documented, no, we were literally money walking around on two legs. The very breath out of our lungs was monetized through mortgages and loans against our livelihood. Us being able to birth children to provide future workforce was another form of economic empowerment that the enslavers got. Then our physical labor was also monetized. You can't tell me if I've been monetized three different ways if there's not paper documenting it.

Alison Stewart: I want to go back to what you were talking about, Alex, about how this whole process helped you have an expanded sense of what family means. You got a little bit of a lesson in that from Aurelia Amelia Jackson. Tell folks who she is. We'll play a clip from her in a minute.

Alex Neason: Aurelia, or as I was introduced to her, Rhea, and as she's known in my family. Rhea is the niece of Edna Jackson, my great-grandmother, so I think that makes her my grandfather's cousin. I had not met her before but I'd heard her name. When I started working on this and started asking questions, the first piece of advice actually that Nicka had me do was actually not to look in documents at all, it was to do family interviews. These were different kinds of interviews that I was used to doing as a reporter, and they were much closer to oral history, what oral historians do.

Nicka really emphasized that there's this jump, we skip the order of operations when people sit down and say, "Okay, I'm going to do family history research," and we all go and log into ancestry.com and start to search for our names and the names of people that we know. Nicka was like, "Your first and biggest resource are people, the people in your family." I started to do that, and more than one person I would call and we'd do these interviews and Rhea's name kept coming up as the only living person that I knew of, that anyone knew of who had actually known Edna.

It became clear pretty quickly that if Edna were here, I could just ask her like, "Who was his father? Explain to me why you gave him this particular name." She wasn't here, so we were looking for somebody who had known her and could offer some insight about who Edna was, that might help us understand why she made the decisions that she made around our name. I got her phone number and started calling her, and for many months called her and could not get a hold of her until the literal last day that we were in New Orleans when Nicka and I, and also NMQ1 who produced the piece went down and spent a week in New Orleans and was still calling her twice a day. Finally, tracked her down on the last night and drove out to Saint Bernard Parish right outside the city where she lives, and got to actually talk to her, and learned more about Edna than any of the documents could have told us.

Alison Stewart: She had a different thought process about the whole situation than you did, she was sure that Wilson Howard was the father. Let's listen to a clip from the episode and we can talk about it on the other side.

[clip playing]

Alex Neason: She started saying things about Howard being the real father, that his job took him away to see a lot, so some other man stepped in to help raise my grandfather.

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: That had to be someone in the family, so I think that'd be family people because that's a lot of kids too, so that's family people.

Alex Neason: I guess what I'm trying to understand is why she wouldn't have given him the last name Howard.

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: She probably was in the relationship with somebody and he just named the son after him.

Alex Neason: It's possible then that Edna might have been dating someone whose name was Neason.

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: Now that you think about it, no, I don't think so.

Alex Neason: Talking to Rhea, I started to realize that we were both speaking English but we weren't really speaking the same language when it came to family.

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: For instance, [unintelligible 00:26:42] right now and I come and I pick you up and bring you by my house, I didn't put you there because I hate you, I put you there because I love you.

Alex Neason: She would use terms like family people. I think her idea of what a relationship is, was more expansive than mine.

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: But you going to remember what I did when I picked you up. That's the way it was with Clarence Neason.

Alex Neason: Do you know that there was somebody named Neason who did all those things?

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: It had to be.

Alex Neason: Or else why would she give him the name?

Aurelia Amelia Jackson: Thank him out. Nobody going to just give you a name just like that, it got to be somebody that's really know you and care for you. We take care of each other in the family, I'm going to put it that way to you because we family that take care of each other. That's all I know, sweetheart.

[end of clip]

Alison Stewart: That's from family people. Nicka, I thought that was just such an interesting-- I love that tone of phrase, Alex, that we were speaking English but not the same language. Which is really interesting. Nicka, this weekend if you're around family, what are the kind of questions that you can ask that will get you information, or at least get you started?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: I think it's very similar to how we operate in journalism. You want to ask leading questions that folks can expound upon and don't just say yes or no because that's not going to help with color with your story. Instead of you saying things like, "Do you like pizza?" You'll say, "What do you like on your pizza?" Those are two different responses, one is yes or no, the other one is, "I like mushrooms. I like anchovies."

One of the leading questions I usually start with family is like, "What's your earliest memory? What's the first thing you remember as a child? Maybe is dancing around the living room to like Got to Give It Up by Marvin Gaye. Is it a funeral, or who's the oldest person you remember meeting in the family?"

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's a good one.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Stuff like that because oftentimes-- and here's the thing, we also have to realize you usually don't do family history interviews only once. You usually have to go back to the folks. We're living this out daily, we've got like a cash of cookies, life cookies. If you think of yourself like a computer, we have a cash of life cookies, and sometimes you have to go back into your search history of your own life and remember what happened on a particular day.

Today you may not remember it, but just having somebody prompt you and ask you questions, two weeks now you can come back and say, "You know what, Alex, I forgot. Oh, my gosh, I was vacuuming the other day and I remembered when the first time I saw Clifford the Big Red Dog. Things that come out like that, me personally, I like to get little steno pads or like note pads for my elders that are just for me. I have them sit them by their phone or in an area that they can get to so if they have a memory that comes up, they can just write it down and then the next time I make my call, my monthly call, they say, "Oh, let me go to your notebook and pull something out that I didn't want to forget to tell you."

Alison Stewart: This is a great text, "My last name is O'Rasa, and my grandfather added the apostrophe to his Italian name in order, in his mind, to have better economic advantage in an Irish-dominated economy of Illinois. Now the name is being changed again back to original spelling Orasa, no apostrophe because online signs won't accommodate the apostrophe." Very strange. Let's talk to Margaret from Rochester. Hi, Margaret. Thanks for calling in.

Margaret: Hi, thank you. I'm actually from New York City. I'm just here because my son and daughter-in-law live here, but my name is Margaret Blackstone and it has been all my life. My father is the one with the interesting story. He was a genius in the 1930s. He was born in Idaho and he graduated valedictorian from a now-defunct high school called Broadway High School. His name was Henry Urich, U-R-I-C-H. Now you have to remember, this is just before World War II. He gets a full scholarship to MIT. This was in the age of the actual American Dream.

He changed his name before he went East to Blackstone, inspired by a mentor named Tom Blackstone with an I, but he just picked the Blackstone. Everything's gone wrong for me financially in my life, but I still have the moniker, Margaret Blackstone. At the time, I didn't get told until my stepmother was about to marry my father, and an aunt told me in Sun Valley, Idaho. It was such a big family secret. The reason that he changed it was that it was highly susceptible as a German name and they were Ukrainian diaspora-type Russians who also had German blood and it was not a good time.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Margaret, thank you for sharing your family story. We appreciate it. This one is my last, somebody texted in. "My last name is Marsala. I always tell folks like the chicken, but I always think of it as a place in Sicily that was named by French Conquerors. By the way, my name is Agnes, or Agne, one of the two." How do you think about names differently now, Alex?

Alex Neason: I came out of this experience having my feelings about my own name strengthened and fortified, not because we eventually found a birth certificate that this Clarence Neason guy, a third Clarence Neason because that's my dad's name and my grandfather's name who I had not previously, none of us had any idea existed. Not just because that's the name that was written on a birth certificate but because I don't know, it was sort of like going through this process and asking the question, is this my name and what will it mean if I find out that it was supposed to be something else and giving myself permission to claim the agency to say, "This is the name that I've had. This is the name that my dad had and the name that my grandfather had." Whether or not it's the quote-unquote "right one" is irrelevant because it's how we've been moving through the world for three generations now.

I came out of this, just feeling confident in that. Also feeling curious about other people's name stories as well. Learning about just how much fluctuation there was pre and post-emancipation with people's surnames and how they changed the spellings and how people tried on one name and then later tried on another one. It just makes me really curious about everyone else's name story like maybe there's a similar story. I don't think that my family story is an anomaly at all.

Alison Stewart: You should listen to the entire episode, Family People from Radiolab. My guests have been Nicka Sewell-Smith and Alex Neason. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your reporting and your information.

Alex Neason: Thank you for having me.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: Thanks.

 

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