Growing up, Joe Greer had “way more questions than answers” about his family.
Greer, a photographer who lives in Portland, never knew his father, and his mother died in a car accident when he was 4. He was raised by an aunt and uncle.
“I had dead ends searching,” Greer said of his attempts to find relatives beyond those he knew.
Greer and his wife, Madison, are one of the four teams on the second season of BYUtv’s “Relative Race,” which premieres March 5 at 6 p.m.
This season, they start in Miami and race their way to Boston. Along the way, they will have to complete challenges related to their family history and stay with relatives they haven’t previously met that they matched with using AncestryDNA.
Each team leaves their smartphone and any GPS device, gets a flip phone, paper maps and a vehicle during the race, according to information from the show. They have an allotted time for travel and challenges, and the slowest team gets a strike. After three strikes, they are out of the race and the running for the $50,000 prize.
The other teams are Kyla and Duley Williams of Smyrna, Tennessee, Justin and Brittany Stuart of Colorado Springs and Leo and Rolexis Schinsing of New Orleans.
“I was blown away,” Joe Greer said during an interview at the recent RootsTech family history and technology conference. He said they had kept their expectations low going into the show because of how little he knew about his family tree, but there were many emotional moments.
The Williamses were on the first season of the show as relatives. Kyla Williams is a relative of Anthony Brown, who was racing with his wife, Brooke, and Duley Williams insisted they sleep in a tent during their overnight stay. Kyla Williams still keeps in touch with them.
“We’re too much alike,” she said of Anthony Brown, who is her fourth cousin. “It was so natural.”
Duley Williams, who is a graphic designer, said as a native New Yorker, he’s skeptical of bringing people he hasn’t met into his home with his two young children, and he was at work when they arrived and didn’t see his wife’s text vouching for the Browns.
And a tent was one of the options listed in the contract, he said.
“I’m a warm-hearted individual,” the father of two said during an interview at RootsTech as he and his wife held their two children, Titus, 5, and Neriya, 2.
His family had a tradition of Native American heritage, and when his dad sent in his DNA, it came back without any Native American DNA.
Duley Williams said when they got the information about being a relative for the first season, he initially thought it was spam.
Kyla Williams had been interested in family history, but hadn’t had too much success and it was frustrating.
She went into the “Relative Race” hoping to meet at least one of her relatives.
Dan Debenham, the show’s host and the co-owner of LenzWorks Productions, which produces the show, said that for the first season, they had 100 applicants and for the second season, they had more than 1,000.
When they go through the applications, they look for a couple that they “believe will do well on TV” and hope to find enough family members through DNA testing and that they are willing to be on the show, he said.
And this season, there were many “moments that are so amazing and so real and so wonderful,” he said.
Debenham said that instead of 10 one-hour episodes, they could have had three times that this season.
“From the first generation to the fifth generation, there are connections that are made,” Debenham said.
Greer and the Williamses are both looking forward to seeing how the other couples handled the race.
“I know 25 percent of what happened,” he said. “I want to see everyone else’s journey.”
A third season is in the works as the application deadline ended Feb. 28. The show recently tied with NBC Sports Group for the best new reality competition series category from the Cynopsis Media TV Awards.
Season two of “Relative Race” premieres March 5 at 6 p.m. Mountain Time on BYUtv. See relativerace.com for information.
Duley and Kyla Williams on 'The Relative Race'
Joe and Madison Greer, Team Black
'Relative Race,' season two