My Trails into the Past

Outside activities included phenology, board meeting, Archives crawl, and lunch with siblings & nieces and nephews. Genealogy Genealogy Volunteer/Work: This week, I volunteered at the History Center once and attended also the board meeting. I spent most of the day dealing with the queries that came in email. I hosted the writing group on Thursday and after discussing Jacqueline’s work, we played with Claude and ChatGPT asking them editing ideas. Genealogy Meetings:  I met with my renewal accountability group on Monday. The Military SIG also met on Monday and I presented about the information I found on the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) that one of my husband’s distant cousin was involved in at Middlebury College in Vermont. Jacqueline and I did not meet this week. Genealogy Writing/Research : This week I worked on the children of Jerry Sullivan and his wife Mary Sheehan. I will post this work in the coming week. Blog Posts Published: A Moment of Courage: Mak...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings , is to: 1)  MyHeritage introduced the Scribe AI tool to analyze, transcribe, translate, and provide historical context to a record or photographic image in the past year.  Have you used it? 2)  Pick one record image or photograph image from your collection and ask Scribe AI to do its task list for you. How did it do? NOTE: If you cannot access Scribe AI, please access another AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Transkribus) that can transcribe, translate or analyze a record or photograph image. Here's mine: Well, I don’t have a MyHeritage subscription but thought it might do one or two of these as a trial, but no go. I got the screen giving me upgrade subscription choices. Next, I tried Claude.ai. My prompt was: “I will up load an image from a German church record. Transcribe, translate,...

For the 52 Ancestors theme for week 42, we are to compare our life to an ancestor’s. I have worked all my life, first as a babysitter to neighborhood children, then in the library at Cal State University, Hayward (now East Bay), a year at Alameda Sporting Goods as a clerk/computer operator, and then at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District first as a train operator and then as a train operator instructor (official title was Employee Development Specialist). I retired in 2010 after 32 years. My mother did not work outside the home. She raised six children while my dad worked in various grocery stores as a produce clerk. However, both my grandmothers worked outside the home. My paternal grandmother, Nana, worked because she had to. She left her husband and raised her four children alone. She worked in restaurants, and then in education, first in Napa at a one-room schoolhouse, and later in Concord, California, at Williams School. Because her credential was earned in Montana from a norm...

The last post was about John H. Sullivan (1854-1932). His parents were Jerry and Mary Sullivan. I wrote about the proof for my BCG certification portfolio. His death certificate named his father as John Sullivan. However, through researching his brother, Michael J. Sullivan, I found documentation that helped prove Jerry was John’s father. H ere is what I know about Jerry. His birth date is a bit fuzzy, not uncommon for illiterate Irish immigrants. His tombstone gives the date of death of 6 November 1888, with his age of 77 years, which subtracts to 1811. [1] However, his age ranged all over the place in records he created or were created for him during his life in the United States. I’ll create a table showing the birth years at the end of this piece. 1870 Census in Michigan The first record of Jerry found was the 1870 census, where the family was living in Franklin Township in Houghton County, Michigan, along with his proposed wife and four children. He was a miner with personal prop...