Heartland Genealogy

Three Years in Uniform What can a military service record tell us about an ancestor's experiences during the Civil War? Sometimes, the answer is quite a bit more than simply when he enlisted and when he was discharged. I've been working my way through the 28-page compiled military service record of George Mentzer , who served in Company C of the 24th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. At first glance, many of these pages appear repetitive. Most are company muster rolls recording whether George was present or absent during a two-month period. However, when examined together, these records provide a timeline of his military service from September 1861 through September 1864. They also document a furlough, a lost set of company records, an outstanding bounty payment, and some conflicting information about his discharge. By combining these records with the history of the 24th Massachusetts Infantry, I can begin to understand the military experiences that formed ...

A Wedding Announcement from My Microfilm Research Do you remember researching newspapers before they were digitized and searchable online? Have you spent hours scrolling through microfilm, hoping to find a mention of an ancestor or relative? Before online newspaper collections became widely available, I made research trips to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas. There, I spent time reading newspapers on microfilm, particularly those from Dodge City, Kansas, where several branches of my family lived. Instead of printing or copying every article I found, I frequently made handwritten notes. Sometimes these notes were fairly complete transcriptions. Other times, I simply recorded the information I considered important. Today's Friday Find comes from one of those handwritten notes. Eileen Jones Weds Russel Horton On Wednesday, April 17, 1941, the Dodge City Daily Globe published a wedding announcement for Eileen Jones and Russel Horton. I found the article on page 5,...

The Beck-Bookman Library Have you been following Randy Seaver's experiments with artificial intelligence on his Genea-Musings blog? If so, you're probably familiar with his ABC Biography process, which uses AI to turn genealogical research into stories. Recently, I had the opportunity to demonstrate AI storytelling to an AI interest group in Holton, Kansas. Since I wanted the presentation to have a local connection, I chose a historical scrapbook about Holton's Beck-Bookman Library as my source material. The scrapbook contained newspaper articles, letters, and other documents chronicling the library's history. It provided a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how several AI tools could work together to transform historical records into different forms of storytelling. I started with ChatGPT , using it to transcribe the scrapbook's articles and letters. Those transcriptions were compiled into a PDF that became the source material for the next steps. Using that inf...

Discovering a Useful RootsMagic Report Are you a RootsMagic user? If so, have you explored the variety of reports available in the program? With the release of RootsMagic 12, I decided to spend some time exploring the reports available in the software. While I was interested in the new reports, I also wanted to revisit some of the reports introduced in earlier versions that I had never used. That's when I discovered a report that could become a valuable tool in my genealogy research: the "Who Was There List." This report isn't new, but it was new to me! What Is the "Who Was There List"? The "Who Was There List" allows users to identify individuals in their RootsMagic database who have events associated with a particular location during a specified time period. Instead of looking at one person or family at a time, the report provides a broader view of the people connected to a particular place. For someone like me, who frequently researches family, ...

Making Them Work for Me Do you use RootsMagic's source templates when creating citations? Or do you prefer the free-form method? While it would be easy to use the free-form option, I've always preferred using source templates. In fact, I frequently take that process one step further by copying a built-in template and modifying it to meet my needs. With the release of RootsMagic 12, the number of built-in source templates was significantly reduced. That change has encouraged me to take another look at the templates that are available and how I can customize them. Citing an Ancestry Family Tree Recently, I needed to cite an Ancestry family tree as the source for a death date in my RootsMagic database. Looking through the available templates, I selected Family Trees, Documented . As I started entering the information, however, I encountered two fields that caused me to stop and think: Database Title Tree Title What was the difference between these two fields? Wasn't the title ...

The Charles O. Mentzer Family Bible Do you have a family Bible that has been passed down through the generations? Does it contain handwritten records of births, marriages, and deaths? Family Bibles can be wonderful sources of genealogical information. However, like any family record, the information they contain needs to be evaluated. Were the entries made at the time of the event, or were they recorded years later? Who recorded the information? And how accurate was that person's memory? Today's Monday's Diggings features a typed transcription of the family Bible belonging to my great-grandfather, Charles Oliver Mentzer . The Charles O. Mentzer Bible According to the transcription, the Bible was a King James Version published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland. The name Charles Mentzer was engraved on the front. The transcription also describes a Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, with a self-pronouncing edition that divided and accented proper names to...

  The War Didn't End When He Came Home It's Saturday Night again — time for some more Genealogy Fun! This week's challenge from Randy Seaver asks us to identify an ancestor who lived through a major historical event and explain what the records reveal about how that event affected the ancestor. For this challenge, I've selected my second great-grandfather, Washington Marion Crawford (1838–1889) , who served during the American Civil War. I've written about Washington Marion Crawford's military service several times. In fact, some of my earliest posts on Heartland Genealogy contain transcriptions of documents from his pension file. Those records help tell the story of a man who survived the Civil War but apparently never fully recovered from his experiences. A Soldier in the 2nd New York Cavalry Washington Marion Crawford was born in Warren County, Indiana, in 1838. On August 3, 1861, he enlisted in Company H of the 2nd New York Cavalry. His military discharge id...

How often do the paths of our ancestors come close to crossing without their ever knowing it? As I have researched my Civil War ancestors, I have discovered men serving in units from Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Kansas. Recently, I started wondering whether any of those men—or their siblings—were involved in the Battle of Mine Creek , fought in eastern Kansas on October 25, 1864. It turns out that my family had several connections to the events surrounding that battle. The Battle of Mine Creek The Battle of Mine Creek was part of Confederate Major General Sterling Price's 1864 campaign through Missouri and into Kansas. By late October, Price's army was retreating south following its defeat at Westport. On October 25, Union cavalry caught part of Price's army near Mine Creek in Linn County, Kansas. The Confederate troops were hindered as they attempted to cross the creek with their wagons. Union cavalry under Colonel John F. Philips and Lieutenant Co...

  Ethel Lighter Beggs — A Handwritten Obituary Have you ever looked through your genealogy files and found handwritten notes from research you did years ago? Before newspapers became available online, finding an obituary often meant visiting a library or archives, locating the appropriate roll of microfilm, and scrolling through pages of a newspaper. During my early genealogy research, I made trips to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas, where I used their microfilm collection to research Dodge City newspapers. Rather than paying for copies of every article, I often transcribed the information by hand. Sometimes I copied an article almost word for word, while other times I simply recorded the information I considered important. Today's Friday Find is one of those handwritten transcriptions. Ethel A. Lighter Beggs Ethel A. Lighter Beggs is my first cousin twice removed . Our common ancestors are Washington Marion Crawford and his wife, Mary Foster . Ethel was the d...

  Two James Crawfords?  One of the challenges of researching my CRAWFORD family is keeping track of the various men named James Crawford who lived in Kentucky during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I've spent considerable time trying to distinguish these men, particularly those who lived in Garrard, Lincoln, and Barren counties. For some time, I've had a deed documenting the sale of 200 acres of land on the waters of Marrowbone Creek in Barren County, Kentucky. The seller was James Crawford of Preble County, Ohio, whose wife was Martha. Recently, while searching through Kentucky's South of Green River land records , I found a land grant for 190 acres issued to a James Crawford in 1810. Was this the same James Crawford? Because the acreage was different, my initial assumption was that these records involved two different men. However, I had never compared the actual land descriptions. That seemed like a good opportunity to see whether artificial intellige...