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Unlocking County Histories with Modern Tools

Have you used county histories in your genealogical research? These invaluable resources often hold detailed information about families, local events, and community development. If you’re like me, you might have photocopies or digital images of pages from these histories tucked away in your files. For years, I manually typed the text from those pages to incorporate them into my genealogy documentation. But now, with the help of ChatGPT, transcribing these images has become a quick and seamless process.

Recently, while researching my BLAND cousins in Platte County, Missouri, I remembered using Annals of Platte County during the early days of my genealogy journey. At the time, I only captured a portion of the BLAND family information from the book. Luckily, I discovered that Annals of Platte County is available on Internet Archive, allowing me to revisit it and locate all references to the BLAND family. I saved these pages as images for further use.

Knowing that Adobe Acrobat includes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities, I decided to try converting the images into text. Unfortunately, the OCR struggled to accurately recognize the text, leaving me with a less-than-usable result.

That’s when I turned to ChatGPT. I uploaded one of the images and asked it to transcribe the content. Not only did it transcribe the text flawlessly, but it also preserved the format of the family information, saving me valuable time. Now, I have both the original image and a clean, accurate transcription that I can incorporate into my genealogy documentation.

Thanks to tools like ChatGPT, it’s easier than ever to breathe new life into these historical resources and ensure the stories they contain are preserved for future generations.