Kalima Watson could feel the power of his ancestors flow through him.
There was Aunty Rose, who in the 1970s invented a cellophane hula skirt with her cousin and became a key figure in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance at a time when Hawaiian language and traditions were being suppressed.
There was his Māori ancestor, Pouaka Reihana Paki, who was a boy born in New Zealand when muskets first arrived in the 19th century. To save him from danger, his family hid him in a crate of raisins, earning him the name “Pouaka Reihana” — or “box of raisins.” Before sending him away, his mother tattooed his real name on his arm so he would never forget who he was or where he came from.
And there was his great-grandmother, Tori Waiata Ormsby, who descended from a Scandinavian Viking named Orm. As legend has it, Orm had his leg severed in a battle with the Scottish and then carried his limb to the shore so he could be the first to set foot on Scottish soil and claim it as his own.
Learning about the courageous feats of his ancestors was transformative for Watson, a Utah-based storyteller from Hawaii who turns ancestral stories into viral videos. He could think clearer; the goals he wanted to accomplish didn’t feel so insurmountable.
After years of struggling with his weight, he managed to lose 100 pounds in six months.
“I credit it completely to learning about my ancestry and feeling empowered by them,” said Watson.
Learning about his family history — from Scotland, England and New Zealand — also filled an emptiness that had lingered since he left Hawaii for Utah after college.
“It just feels like you’re losing something when you leave where you grew up,” said Watson, whose mother is from New Zealand. “I felt this need and strong desire to feel that connection more.”
Once he found that connection, he wanted to share it with others.
First he made videos about Aunty Rose, Pouaka Reihana Paki and others. He then asked his followers to volunteer their ancestry lines for his genealogical sleuthing. His quirky costume and action-packed storylines — packaged in a short, bingeable format — struck a chord with the online audience.
Within the past six months, his following jumped from 700 to almost 200,000 on Instagram. One of his first videos got over 8 million views.
“It just kind of snowballed from there,” he said.
He sees it as his life’s mission to help people connect with their ancestors and “draw power from knowing them.” His goal is to reimagine genealogy as something vibrant and relevant, he said — a “well of power” that anyone can tap into.
From boring to cool
Genealogy has long been seen as a pastime for history buffs and retirees, evoking images of dusty archives, microfilm and old records. But recent efforts have challenged this image.
DNA testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have turned genealogy into a kind of personal detective story. A company Lynx promises to make genealogy “fun, fast, and interactive.”
A TikTok trend from 2023 involved creators filming themselves having imaginary conversations with their ancestors, often dressed in costume, about shared experiences or common traits.
These efforts are part of a movement to transform genealogy from a niche hobby into a tech-infused exploration of identity and belonging in a world where people crave connection to their roots.
And that’s exactly where Watson fits in.
Watson is not a licensed genealogist, but he’s developed a language that speaks to Gen Z. His reels are short, visually dynamic and packed with cinematic tension that brings history alive.
“What were their cultural practices? What did they do day to day?” he asks. “I think when people learn about that, they feel less alone.”
A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Watson believes the growing fascination with ancestry is connected to what Latter-day Saints call the Spirit of Elijah, an innate pull to know and honor one’s forebears.
His audience is in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and all over Asia. “It’s very cool to see – it transcends countries. Everyone wants to know where they are from.”
“Genealogy is often seen as boring — something only old people do,” he said. “But for me, it changed everything.”
Untapped source of power
From his basement studio in Eagle Mountain, Utah, Watson gets situated in front of a computer wearing a chainmail coif and tiny round glasses. The costume started as a joke.
“I wanted to make my kids laugh,” he said.
But then he tried it out in a video and it stuck.
“Now it’s my brand — I have to wear it.”
He attributes the surge of his following partly to this eccentric look.
After graduating from Brigham Young University-Hawaii in 2017, Watson made the difficult decision to move. Hawaii was expensive and the girl he was dating was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and would be returning to Utah after. He took a job in human resources and the two got married when she came home.
Still, he missed Hawaii every day. To reconnect, he decided to get a traditional Hawaiian tattoo, which is applied with ink tapped into the skin by a professional kahuna, which means “expert” in Hawaiian.
In preparation, he was asked to learn about his ancestors so elements of their stories could be woven into the design. The tattoo, which runs along his leg in a strip of crescent moons and worm-like symbols tied to a Hawaiian creation story, represents his Big Island ancestry and serves as a reminder to stay humble.
He attributes his massive weight loss to the power and discipline he drew from his ancestors.
But not everyone was convinced. Some of Watson’s friends, who were white, lamented that they wished they too had a “culture” and “cool ancestry story.”
“In my head, I was thinking — you do have stories, and they’re just as cool as Hawaiian stories and those traditions and lessons are all there,” he said.
Almost out of spite, Watson set out to prove that their heritage was worth celebrating.
From FamilySearch to ChatGPT
From a more practical point of view, Watson also saw an opening in the market. In a social media landscape oversaturated with content, almost no one was making videos about genealogy, especially catering to Gen Z.
“People were waiting for something like that and the proof is in the following,” he said.
He’s had celebrities reach out to look into their family trees — a producer, rappers, NFL players. For his celebrity reel series, he made a video about Taylor Swift’s ancestry, whose roots go all the way to a Mayflower passenger and whose grandmother, Marjorie, was a famous opera singer.
After putting out a call to his followers, the response was so overwhelming that he couldn’t keep up. He’s gotten 50,000 messages with requests to look into peoples’ ancestral stories. So he made a Google form for people to fill out — he’s got about 1,000 of those.
“I pretty much have content for the rest of my life to make or research at least,” he said.
Recently, Watson was researching a man named Thomas Monk from Dudley, England — an ancestor of one of his followers, John Monk, who had submitted the name. Watson keeps a running spreadsheet of his followers and the ancestor stories they share.
He started his search on FamilySearch, where he found Monk’s portrait. From there, he moved to Ancestry.com, which revealed that Monk had been a boat builder. Then, using WikiTree, another research platform, Watson uncovered even more: Monk was known for designing the first canal boat with a cabin at the end — a model that became known as a “monkey boat.” That was when Watson knew he had the makings of a great reel.
To add depth, Watson often turns to ChatGPT to help fill in historical context, which he then fact-checks carefully before using. Each short video is typically 45 to 90 seconds and can take four to six hours to complete, from speaking with the follower to researching, writing the script and editing.
‘Talk to your elders’
Understanding the historical backdrop, Watson said, often brings the stories to life. Once, a young woman told him about her Yiddish ancestors who emigrated from Ukraine to Pennsylvania in 1906.
“It was easy to paint the picture,” Watson said, “because it was already painted in ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’”
Sometimes stories take darker turns, like the account of his fourth great grandfather Jules Dudoit, who was the first French consul in the Kingdom of Hawaii and traveled around the world on a schooner named Clementine to bring goods to Hawaii. He was later stabbed by his chef after a disagreement.
“I think his courage lives in me, because I’m part him,” Watson said in a video.
But not every search leads to a revelation.
“Hitting a dead end is kind of the nature of genealogy,” Watson said. “There’s an enormous amount of information in the world, but only a fraction of it is written down, an even smaller portion is online, and only some of that has been indexed.”
Most available records, he added, come from Western countries, which makes research from other regions far more difficult.
“I get a lot of comments from people like, ‘Why do you only do European people or white people?’” Watson said. “And that’s a fair observation.”
He explains that in some countries, like Germany and Russia, strict privacy laws limit access to genealogical data. In Japan, many records are held privately by families. And in war-torn countries, archives have often been destroyed.
Because of these limitations, Watson urges people to take a proactive approach with relatives who are still alive.
“If we had 200,000 people asking their grandparents questions and visiting local libraries or churches to find documentation, that would be ideal,” he said. “It’s a well of power that’s not being utilized.”
And for anyone stuck in their own research, Watson’s advice is simple: “Look at the people who are still alive,” he said. “People don’t think of their parents or grandparents as genealogy. Talk to your elders. Ask questions. Write it down.”