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Piecing Together a Family

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Digging Through the Paper Trail Do you remember the days of “paper genealogy,” when every record, note, and photocopy had to be filed somewhere? That is how my genealogy journey began. Like many researchers, I accumulated file drawers full of paper. At some point, I learned about the Dollarhide Method for organizing genealogical research. William Dollarhide is probably better known today for his maps, but he also proposed a system for numbering and filing research materials. My version followed this pattern: Surname.State Abbreviation.### By adding that number to a citation, I could trace the source back to the appropriate paper note, photocopy, or document in my files. Then scanners changed everything. Instead of relying on paper files, I could scan documents and attach the resulting image directly to the citation in my genealogy software. In theory, that eliminated the need for all of those old filing numbers. There was just one problem. I had to actually scan everything, identify i...
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Geocities Restoration Pitch: Trap or Treasure

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Nostalgia as a Hook: Why You Should Think Twice Before "Restoring" an Old GeoCities Site If you spent any time on the web in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you probably remember GeoCities . Long before social media feeds, many of us staked our digital claim in "neighborhoods" like Heartland , carefully hand-coding HTML tables, uploading tiny animated GIFs, and publishing family lineages or local history research. Recently, an interesting message arrived in my inbox from a service offering to build a "free preview" restoring my old GeoCities website. At first glance, it sounds wonderfully nostalgic: your old, lost corner of the web brought back to life with a single click. But behind the appeal of a blast from the past lies a modern digital marketing tactic that requires a healthy dose of caution. How Did They Find a 25-Year-Old Website? When GeoCities shut down its US operations in 2009, its content didn’t vanish completely. Digital archivists, including ...
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Monday's Diggings

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Pauline Mentzer's 1912–1913 Grade Card Do you have any of your ancestors' old report cards? What can those records tell us about their education and childhood? Among the items my grandmother, Pauline Mentzer, saved was her grade card from the 1912–1913 school year. This little piece of family history provides a glimpse into her education more than a century ago. A Look at Pauline's Grade Card The card identifies the pupil as Pauline Mentzer, attending District No. 1 during the 1912–1913 school year. Her grade is listed as 8–9, suggesting she was studying material associated with both the eighth and ninth grades. The report includes columns for eight months of school, although grades were entered for only the first six months. Looking at the subjects listed on the card, I was struck by both the similarities and differences between Pauline's education and the subjects taught today. Her report card included: Orthography Reading Writing Arithmetic Language Grammar Geography...
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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

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My Oldest Confirmed Record This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun assignment asks: Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again — time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1) What is "Your Oldest Confirmed Record?" What is one of the oldest documents you've personally found for any ancestor? At first, I thought this would be an easy question to answer. My immediate reaction was that the record was probably associated with either my HAMMOND or WHITE ancestors. Both families extend well into the 1600s in my RootsMagic database. But how was I going to determine which record was actually the oldest? With thousands of people and many more facts and sources in my database, clicking backward through generations wasn't very appealing. So I decided to see whether ChatGPT could help me find the answer . Searching My GEDCOM with ChatGPT I exported my entire RootsMag...
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Another Way to Tell James Ricketts' Story

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NotebookLM Creates a Video What happens when you give an AI tool a genealogical narrative report and ask it to turn that information into a video? After creating my From Indiana to Kansas song and video about James Marshall Ricketts, I decided to try another experiment. This time, I uploaded James's narrative report to Google NotebookLM and asked its Studio to create a video. I actually created two versions. Explainer or Cinematic? For the first video, I selected the Explainer style. For the second, I tried Cinematic . I really liked the look and feel of the cinematic version. Unfortunately, it included an image of a nineteenth-century couple. Since those people were not James Ricketts and his wife, Rachel , I don't feel comfortable sharing that version as part of their family history. That's one of the challenges of using AI to tell our ancestors' stories. An image may look historically appropriate and make a beautiful video, but viewers could easily assume they are ...
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