Marked by Birth

We head to upstate New York, where the village of Linden once had a store, a post office, and a train station, until a killer and a string of unsolved murders drove its families away. From the first unidentified victim in 1917 to the triple murder of 1924, we follow the trail to a suspect who was never charged. We also cover a story that began in 1888, a coal company built a town in Erath County, Texas, and fenced it in with barbed wire and armed guards. This episode follows how a fight over the United States Mail helped bring that fence down, and how a coal miner named John Gaines, one of fourteen men who signed the 1903 strike demands, leads us to a cemetery full of unmarked graves and a town erased from the map.

In this episode, we’re traveling back to the late 19th century to meet two women whose stories left behind questions that still haven’t been answered. Florence Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic—but was she really a murderess, or did a scandalous marriage, an affair, and a web of suspicious circumstances condemn her?And then there’s Jesse Booth, a mother accused of something even more unthinkable: killing her own baby. But did she really commit the crime, or was she another woman caught in a story where suspicion proved easier than certainty? Listen in as we draw parallels to the current Lindsay Clancy case. Two women. Two shocking accusations. And two cases where the truth may be far more complicated than the headlines made it seem.

Season 4 is coming!. Starting back up again October 2026, we will dive even deeper into forgotten family histories. We’re uncovering forgotten stories of unsung heroes, industrial disasters, imposters, complicated love triangles, and remarkable survivors. New mysteries, new voices, and more stories waiting to be unearthed from the past.

History remembers the names of men first. It carves them into buildings, headlines, and verdicts, while the women caught between them become footnotes. They were called muses, temptresses, excuses. In tonight’s episode, we follow two love triangles separated by circumstance but bound by pattern: one played out beneath the electric lights of Gilded Age New York, the other behind closed doors where jealousy and control went unnoticed until it was too late. At the center of both is not romance, but power masqueraded as love, and violence justified as passion. The real story lived in the silence history left behind.

In this episode, we shine light on two stories involving arsenic poisoning. First is the true story of the Watkins family of Manchester, Michigan, whose children were slowly poisoned by arsenic-laced wallpaper in their Victorian home. As well as the infamous tale of Belle Gunness, who had a habit of collecting insurance payouts from fires and the deaths of her husbands.

In this episode of Shadows from the Tree, we discuss the 19th century fear of being buried alive, taphophobia. This wasn't an abstract of irrational fear for people of the era, but a response to genuine medical uncertainty. Listen in to hear more about the tales of Essie Williams Dunbar, a South Carolina woman with 2 funerals. As well as the interesting lengths the Pursel family of Pennsylvania, went to avoid such a fate.

In our next episode of Shadows from the Tree, we take a turn and uncover tales of heroic endeavors of men who thought nothing of risking their own lives to save a child in need. Ralph A Cook, a motorman saved a woman and child in Sundersvillle, MA- 1908 from imminent death. We also cover the story of Iowa man, Edward Maloy a traveling salesman who jumped into a well to save 18 month old Donald Venema in 1927.

In this episode of Shadow from the Tree we uncovered two intriguing tales of women lost at sea. Marie Empress (Mary Taylor) a silent movie actress who never made it to port in NY off the RMS Orduña on October 27,1919. As well as Southern elite Rebecaa Lamar's tale of the harrowing explosion of the Pulaski Steamer in June 1838.

Listen in to this episode of Shadows From the Tree, where we delve into the darker side of genealogy with the tales of the Monongah Mine Disaster in WV, and the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 in Boston, MA. Both harrowing tales of industrial accidents that shaped the necessity for increased work place safety regulations.

In 1927, Carrie Buck was sterilized under Virginia’s eugenics law—labeled “feebleminded” and unfit to reproduce. Decades earlier, Amanda Dickson, the mixed-race daughter of a Georgia plantation owner and an enslaved woman, inherited her father’s fortune but not society’s acceptance. Both woman’s lives reveal how law and lineage were used to police purity and power in America. Some marks aren’t chosen—they’re marked by birth.