Heartland Genealogy

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...

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 ...

 A Short Life Remembered: Oren Wesley Lighter Have you ever discovered additional information about an ancestor simply because a newspaper you previously searched became available online? Years ago, I spent hours scrolling through microfilm of Dodge City newspapers, looking for mentions of my Crawford family and their relatives. During that research, I discovered two newspaper articles about the birth and death of an infant in the Lighter family. Now that these newspapers have been digitized and made available on Newspapers.com, I can search for a surname instead of scrolling through page after page of microfilm. A recent search for the surname Lighter led me back to those original articles—and helped me discover a second death notice that I had missed! A Birth Announcement The January 25, 1900, issue of The Dodge City Globe included this brief announcement on page 5: BORN—To Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Lighter, yesterday, at noon, a boy. This announcement establishes that a son was born to...

  One of the challenges of researching the Crawford surname in the Dodge City area is determining whether every Crawford who appears in the records belongs to my family—or is simply another Crawford living in the same place at the same time. Samuel M. Crawford is one of those people. Samuel lived in the Dodge City area and worked for the railroad. In 1900, he married Carrie Tuttle, apparently a second marriage. His daughter Nellie Crawford, likely from an earlier marriage, died in Dodge City on March 6, 1901, at only 18 years of age. Just over a year later, tragedy struck the family again when Samuel himself was killed in a railroad accident in Mexico. While I don't yet know whether Samuel connects to my Crawford family, four newspaper accounts of his death provide an unusually detailed picture of his final days. From Dodge City to Mexico Samuel was an experienced railroad man. According to the Journal-Democrat , he had worked for the Santa Fe until the railroad strike of 1894, whe...

Do you ever feel as if DNA results are breaking family connections instead of verifying them? That has certainly been my experience with my Kentucky CRAWFORD research. For years, many researchers have identified William, James, and John Crawford , who lived in the early Garrard County, Kentucky, area, as brothers. That relationship appears in online family trees and has become part of the commonly accepted reconstruction of this Crawford family. But what happens when Y-DNA says otherwise? Testing a Descendant of William Crawford Some time ago, I asked a descendant of William Crawford of Madison County, Kentucky , whom I will identify as RC , to take a Y-DNA test. Since Y-DNA is passed from father to son along the direct paternal line, I hoped RC's results might help confirm William's connection to the other Crawford men living in the area. Instead, the results created another Crawford puzzle. RC's Y-DNA placed him in the R1b-05 group of the Crawford Y-DNA Project. More rec...

According to ChatGPT Have you ever wondered what artificial intelligence would say about you if you gave it permission to be completely unhinged? I recently read Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings post, The Completely Unhinged Life of Randy , and couldn't resist trying the same experiment. I opened ChatGPT and entered a very simple prompt: "Please write an 'unhinged narrative' about me." Since I've spent considerable time chatting with ChatGPT about my genealogy research, historical society projects, blogging, and adventures with technology, I was curious to see what it would come up with. The result? A rather entertaining account of my so-called retirement, my ongoing battles with the Crawford family, and my tendency to ask AI to create images with absolutely NO PEOPLE! Of course, ChatGPT didn't get everything right. It invented children and grandchildren for me, neither of which I have. That's a good reminder that even when AI appears to know us well,...

A Crandall Public School Souvenir Did your grandparents save mementos from their childhood? Perhaps an old report card, a class photograph, or a school program? My maternal grandmother, Pauline Mentzer, saved a small souvenir booklet from Crandall Public School in Coffey County, Kansas. Although the booklet is undated, it provides a glimpse into her childhood and the school she attended with her siblings. Dating the Souvenir Booklet Unfortunately, the booklet does not include a date. However, the teacher's name, the ages of the Mentzer children, and the family's movements suggest that it was likely created sometime between 1912 and 1915. In 1910, the Charles Mentzer family was living in Liberty Township, Coffey County, Kansas. According to the Burlington Independent of Burlington, Kansas, Charles Mentzer rented the H. Harreld farm near Crandall in January 1912. By 1915, the family was still living in the Crandall area, where the Kansas state census recorded them in Neosho Towns...

Everything or Nothing? Randy Seaver's challenge for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: 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 started but unfinished projects do you have? Define one or more of them, and how far along are you in the project. My Answer: Everything. Or Nothing. How's that for an answer? I'm constantly working on various aspects of my genealogy research, but I don't mentally categorize any of that work as a "project." Since genealogy is never truly complete, I could argue that everything is unfinished. On the other hand, since I don't think of my research in terms of individual projects, I could just as easily argue that I don't have any unfinished projects. So, my answer to this week's challenge is both everything and nothing! And tomorrow? I'll simply conti...

Turning an Ancestor’s Story into Song Have you ever thought about turning an ancestor's life story into a song? I've been experimenting with using artificial intelligence to tell family stories in different ways. My latest experiment took the story of my relative, James Marshall Ricketts, from a collection of genealogical records to a song—and eventually to a YouTube video! It Started with a Biography My first step was to provide ChatGPT with a RootsMagic narrative report for James Marshall Ricketts and ask it to write a biography. James was born on November 28, 1847, in Clinton County, Indiana. As a teenager, he enlisted in Company K of the 7th Indiana Cavalry during the Civil War. After his discharge in 1865, he returned to Indiana and married Rachel Elmeda Christy on July 12, 1866. James and Rachel began raising their family in Indiana before moving to Woodson County, Kansas, where James purchased land in 1879. He spent much of the remainder of his life farming in Kansas. Ja...

Do you have old newspaper photocopies tucked away in your genealogy files? As I continue looking through my Crawford-Kansas files, I am finding newspaper clippings and photocopies collected years ago—records that deserve another look and, more importantly, a place in my digital research. Today's Friday Find is the obituary of Nelson Garfield Crawford , brother of my great-grandfather Judson Foster Crawford . Nelson was a son of Washington Marion Crawford and Mary Foster . Like Judson, he grew up in the Dodge City, Kansas, area after the Crawford family moved west. His obituary provides more than the basic facts of his death. It gives us a glimpse into a long career with the Dodge City post office, his involvement in the Methodist Church and Masonic organizations, and his place in the community. One detail that particularly caught my attention was his 47 years of service with the post office . According to the obituary, Nelson served as Dodge City postmaster from March 1928 until A...

Do you struggle with figuring out who’s who in records created before the 1850 census began naming everyone in a household? I certainly do—especially when researching the CRAWFORD surname in Kentucky. While using FamilySearch Full Text Search for records involving William Crawford in Madison County, Kentucky , I uncovered a 1792 court document that caught my attention. Among several men summoned to testify was: William Crawford, Junr. That little word “Junr” immediately raised a much bigger question. Which William Crawford Was He? Was this William Crawford Jr. the son of the William Crawford who later migrated to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri ? Or was he simply a younger William Crawford living in the same area who was unrelated—or perhaps only distantly related—to the older William? The designation Junior is an important clue, but it does not by itself establish a father-son relationship. Historically, Senior and Junior could be used simply to distinguish two men of the same name livi...

 Other genealogists have been asking ChatGPT what AI knows about them, so I asked. If you asked me, “What does AI know about me?” , based on our conversations, I could actually give a fairly detailed answer—not because I have searched the internet for you, but because of what you have shared while we have worked together. Here is how I would describe you: What I know about you You are Marcia Philbrick , a retired educator, librarian, and technology coordinator in northeast Kansas. Technology has been part of your professional life for decades, so your interest in AI is really a continuation of something you've been doing for a long time: figuring out how new technology can be put to practical use. Genealogy is one of your major interests. You maintain Heartland Genealogy , where you write about your research, discoveries, records, DNA evidence, research problems, and the process of doing genealogy. You don't just want names and dates—you are interested in reconstructing people...

  From Indiana Farm Boy to Kansas Pioneer James Marshall Ricketts lived through a remarkable period of American history. Born in Indiana in 1847, he grew up on the eve of the Civil War, enlisted in the Union cavalry while still a teenager, married shortly after returning home, and eventually moved his growing family west to Kansas. There he spent much of the remainder of his life farming in Woodson County. Over the course of his seventy-three years, James experienced the Civil War, westward migration, the development of rural Kansas, and enormous changes in transportation, agriculture, and everyday life. Yet the surviving records also tell a much more personal story—of family, land, military service, visits from relatives, and more than fifty years of marriage. Birth and Parents James Marshall Ricketts was born on 28 November 1847 in Clinton County, Indiana .[3–14] The census records place him in the household of John Ricketts during his childhood. In 1850, three-year-old James wa...