Uncovering Your Roots with Tamara Adams

Full analysis

Host Elizabeth Miller and guest Tamara Adams — an occupational therapist who cared for her father through dementia — explore how family history research can deepen connection with someone living with dementia, preserve identity, and sustain the caregiver. The episode is warm and personal rather than clinical, with a handful of concrete starting-point suggestions for anyone who wants to try it.

What was covered

• Tamara Adams's caregiving arc. Her parents moved from Tallahassee to Alpharetta, Georgia in 2017, initially prompted by Tamara's own health scare. Her father's dementia became evident around 2019, he moved to memory care in December 2024, and he died approximately two months before the recording. Her mother, still living independently, remains Tamara's primary day-to-day responsibility.

• Role division in a geographically split family. Tamara handled the hands-on, day-to-day care; her brother in California contributed logistics — taxes, paperwork, post-death life-insurance filings. Weekly Sunday Zoom calls, held during her father's dinner hour at the memory care facility, kept the whole family visually connected even when he could no longer meaningfully participate.

• Using genealogy as a dementia care tool. Tamara brought photographs and documents to memory care visits. Specific, concrete prompts — "Do you remember your first car?" or showing a childhood photo — drew out memories more reliably than open-ended questions. Her father, who had lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II, could describe hearing planes overhead right up until his final months; long-term memory outlasted short-term recall.

• The grandmother's diaries and the book Last Ship to Freedom. During COVID, Tamara's mother spent seven to eight months translating five volumes (roughly 200 pages each) of handwritten Russian diaries kept by Tamara's grandmother, who fled the Crimea on a ship during the November 1920 Russian Civil War evacuation — roughly 150,000 refugees on 126 ships across five Crimean ports. The project gave both women purpose and a mental escape from caregiving stress. It ultimately led Tamara to publish the family story as a book.

• Ancestry.com as a starting point. Tamara recommends building a tree with what you already know, then expanding. She specifically named Crista Cowan (corporate genealogist at Ancestry, last name spelled C-O-W-A-N) as a source of free beginner and intermediate video tutorials on the platform.

• Caregiver boundaries and self-care. Tamara discussed the difficulty of saying no — to non-urgent parental requests, to social invitations when she was tapped out — and the value of batching or delaying non-emergency asks rather than responding immediately. Permitting herself unstructured downtime (30–45 minutes of doing nothing each morning) was a strategy she returned to repeatedly.

Notable claims & predictions

• Tamara Adams on genealogy and dementia connection: "Talk to the oldest person" in the family first; once dementia progresses, the window for collecting first-hand family history closes permanently. Audio or video recording those conversations is more reliable than note-taking.

• Adams on long-term memory in dementia: Her father could describe specific sensory details of his displaced-persons-camp childhood — the sound of planes, the view of a river — almost until the end, even after short-term memory had largely failed. This matches widely observed patterns in dementia and points to a real, usable caregiving strategy.

• Adams on the therapeutic value of a parallel project: "I could sit at my computer and just step into another world and it would just kind of rejuvenate me so that when I did have to deal with my parents' issues I felt like more refreshed." The genealogy project served as a structured respite — not escape, but restoration.

• Adams on memory care guilt: Several spouses of memory care residents she observed remained married while their partner lived in the facility. She offers this as a direct counter to the social pressure that placing a spouse in memory care is a form of abandonment.

• Adams on concrete versus open-ended questions: Asking "What was your childhood like?" is too broad for someone with dementia. Anchoring a question to a specific object, photograph, or sensory detail ("Do you remember your first car?") is more likely to unlock a response.

Fact check

The Crimea evacuation of November 1920. Tamara Adams describes roughly 150,000 refugees departing on approximately 126 ships across five Crimean ports beginning November 14, 1920, during the Russian Civil War. This is consistent with well-documented historical accounts of the White Army and civilian evacuation of Crimea. The date, scale, and context are accurate. No issue here.

Long-term memory outlasting short-term memory in dementia. Adams presents this as observed family experience, not a clinical claim, and it aligns with well-established patterns in Alzheimer's and related dementias. No issue.

No claims that fail scrutiny.

Why this matters for you

• If you are caring for someone with dementia, the photograph-and-document technique Tamara Adams describes is low-cost and immediately usable: bring one specific image or object to the next visit and ask a single anchored question rather than an open one. Record the answer on your phone. The window for capturing those memories narrows as the disease progresses.

• If you have aging parents who are still sharp, the prompt to interview them now — before any cognitive decline — is the episode's most time-sensitive takeaway. Tamara Adams notes that her father's brother, who held much of the family history, died suddenly, closing off information she can never recover. A voice memo or video on your phone costs nothing.

• For families spread across the country, the weekly Sunday Zoom during her father's dinner hour is a simple logistical model worth borrowing: it shared the emotional weight more evenly and gave the distant sibling real visibility rather than secondhand reports.

• For caregivers feeling depleted, Adams's framing of a personal project — genealogy, translation, writing, anything absorbing — as structured respite (not selfishness) is a useful reframe. The practical point: identify something that fully occupies your attention and can be picked up and set down on your schedule, not the care recipient's.