My Trails into the Past

My outside activities this week included two trips in one day to the dentist for a crown, phenology at the meadow where I saw a gopher snake in the grass, and the train club where I operated trains for a show.    Genealogy Genealogy Volunteer/Work: Because of the dentist on my History Center day, I only spent a couple of hours there. John and I met to discuss what to do with the small books and textbook collection. I got a request to do a presentation in November and took care of filling out their contract. Genealogy Meetings:    I attended the Renewal Accountability Group this week, and we discussed some of the research I had done on my vacation. The Monday Morning group met and I shared about my research trip to Indiana and Kentucky. Amigos didn’t meet due to other commitments, but I attended the RootsMagic SIG and spent time adding headshot photos to my program. Genealogy Writing/Research : This week, I have worked on processing the research I conducted in...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1 )  FamilySearch has a page for "Famous Relatives" at   https://www.familysearch.org/en/discovery/famousrelatives .  It works if you are connected to the FamilySearch Family Tree. 2)  Check out the website.  Which connection surprises you?  Do you believe that the connection is correct? Here's mine: None of the relatives listed on this website are closely related to me. Once we get past 5th cousins, we are in the part of the tree where I have not done the research and don’t have the sources to prove the connections. All of the matches are on my mother’s side, as my father’s side is more recent immigrants from Germany and Ireland. George Washington is my first cousin eight times removed, through Amanda Deborah Oldham. I don’t know her parents, but the FamilySearch Family Tree shows Mary Ann ...

I can't believe I have been blogging on My Trails into the Past for fourteen years. I still manage to write at least three posts a week. I even managed the posts while I was on vacation.  So on average, I do 52 posts on the following themes: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks . I sometimes write the post at my other blog, Mam-ma's Southern Family. Genea-pourri. These posts document my genealogy week. Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. We write a post using a theme thought up by Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings. I sometimes write those on my other blog. Occasionally, I'll write a fourth post when I have something interesting to write about. This past year, these were those extra posts: Progress on the Polly Line: Keeping the Timeline Up to Date Analysis of the new AI Summary at FamilySearch Goals for 2025 RootsTech 2025, Day One RootsTech 2025, Day Two Artificial Intelligence Helped Consolidate Multiple Blog Posts into a Coherent Story Statistics for the blog: It's cool that there are m...

Whenever I come across a new website where I can do some searching, I use a couple of surnames to test out the site. I try my unusual surnames first, like Coor, Hork, Gleeson, or Hutson. Of course, it depends on the database’s subject. I certainly would not search in a northern state for a family with southern roots. Sometimes, I get nothing from a database. It’s frustrating, but before I give up, I test out the database with more common names such as Smith, Johnson, or Jones. If I cannot get any returns with those names, it means I need to dig deeper to see what the database does cover. My husband’s friend has me conduct research, and one of his family names is Hulaniski. Now, that name is pretty rare, and I can almost use it globally in a database search without using place filters. It is one of the first names I used when FamilySearch released its full-text search capability. What names do you test a database with?   #52Ancestors-Week 26: Favorite Name This is my eight...

My outside activities included presenting in person to the Davis Genealogy Club, visiting the History Center to attend the board meeting, and taking a trip to Fresno with APG NorCal members.     Genealogy Genealogy Volunteer/Work: I took minutes at the Contra Costa County Historical Society’s board meeting and filed some items at the History Center before the meeting.  I presented to the Davis Genealogy Club in Davis on land records and using the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office website. I drove up and back and had no traffic. The group was very welcoming and seemed to enjoy the presentation, asking lots of questions. Genealogy Meetings:    I attended the Certification Peer Group this week and got caught up with Annette and Josh, after having missed several past months. Genealogy Writing/Research : I attended the Artificial Intelligence course at the Texas Institute of Genealogical Research (TIGR) and learned how AI can help me with rese...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1)  According to Wikipedia, today is World Music Day!  How should we celebrate? 2)  How has music affected your life?  What is your favorite music type?  What are your favorite songs? [Thank you to Janice Sellers for suggesting this challenge to me] Here's mine: I’m getting a late start on this because I spent the day visiting the Fresno Public Library’s Heritage Center with the Northern California Chapter of APG (Association of Professional Genealogists). I'm going to focus on listening to music and not on any music I perform. Growing up, there was always music in our house, mostly from the radio. When my mother was young, she played the current hits. Later in life, she played country music on the radio. I was surprised when some of my pop songs were also being played on the country station...

This past week I have attended the Texas Institute of Genealogy Research (TIGR), held virtually via Zoom. I'm taking the AI course coordinated by Nicole Dyer and her co-instructors Angela McGhie, Diana Elder, Mark Thompson, Steve Little, Jan Joyce, Alice Childs, Mark Humphries,   and Katherine Schober. It has been an action-packed class, with lots of hands-on practice using many pre-written prompts, as well as our own, in several different AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Studio, and Gemini. I have practiced many different uses. I want to share one of those in this post. In the past, I wrote nine blog posts about my husband's father, George Joseph Gorrell, who was an Army Air Corps mechanic during WWII in England. In one exercise where we were to learn about our writing style and create a writing style guide, I used a project in ChatGPT, uploading the nine Word documents. The AI analyzed the writing and said:  "The style is ideal for a family history blog: war...