My Trails into the Past

I have completed two hundred and sixteen (216) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. This week I was not in semi-lockdown. I spent three days at a model railroad convention, where I attended classes, visited home layouts, and judged models. I hope I didn’t catch anything! Genealogy Genealogy Meetings:   Again this week, Jacqueline and I continued discussing plans for our upcoming research trip to Texas, which we leave next Tuesday. I was too busy to meet with the Amigos and the RootsMagic SIG. Genealogy Writing/Research: I went to the FamilySearch center in Oakland to do some deed lookups in Erath County and fortunately, I was able to see the films on my computer. All my docs were downloaded and I got the citations all written. All I need to do now is the transcriptions. I did not have time to redo the Rockwall deeds I had failed to download to the thumb drive last week. I also found some tax records for Lancaster, Coor, and Welch families in Erath County. I will be looking at

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)  What newspaper article is the "best" one you've found to help you with your family history?  Tell us about it - where you found it, and what you learned from it . Here's mine: I have so many wonderful newspaper articles that have advanced my genealogy and could be called favorites. Newspapers are some of my favorite resources and I have written about many of these wonderful finds already. However, I can think of two newspaper articles that if used together, help sort out a family during those twenty years when the 1890 census is not available to us. The first is the obituary for my husband’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Davey, who immigrated to the US with his family in the 1850s from England. He was born in County Cornwall but lived in London before his emigration. He died on 6 Februar

I have completed two hundred and fifteen (215) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. This week besides the History Center, I attended a History Fair at DVC, researched at the Oakland FamilySearch Center, and worked a booth at the John Muir NP Earth Day Birthday event. Genealogy Genealogy Meetings:   The only meeting this week was our Monday meeting and Jacqueline and I worked on looking for her Griffin family without much luck. Genealogy Writing/Research: This week, I worked on several projects. One project was researching and writing about May Mansfield Sayre, the stepson of Amos Gorrell. Another was doing some more research in Ida Hork Colmann, my grandfather’s sister. Finally, I worked on creating a timeline of Nathan H.O. Polly’s life. I downloaded many deed documents from Rockwall County, Texas, from the FS website, however, I somehow did not make sure they were downloaded to the thumb drive. So if they were downloaded to the computer, they were wiped clean that evening.

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  Again -  Time For Some More  Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has our assignment today:  1)  What was your best genealogy research achievement this past month?  Tell us about it - what you achieved, and how does it affect your 2024 goals? Here’s mine : Well, to start with, it’s Sunday, instead of Saturday night. Yesterday, I could not get any Microsoft programs to open on my computer. Adobe Acrobat wouldn’t open either. And the sound wouldn’t play. However, all the other programs would open. It was so weird. I restarted the computer several times and I Googled the problem and tried those tips. NOTHING worked! Feeling defeated, I figured I’d write this directly on the blog in the morning. Hello Morning! Everything works now without any input from me. So here goes with the post, first written in Word. I don’t have a great achievement this past month. I have been working on the families who settled in T

In the 1880 Lamine, Cooper County, Missouri, household of Amos and Catherine Gorrell is stepson, May M. Sayre, age 19. [1] He is one of three children Catherine Shotts bore with Lemuel Sayre in the late 1850s. Mary Adela, born about 1857, died in 1858 George, born about 1859, died in the same year. [2] Only May Mansfield Sayre, born on 19 November 1860, lived to adulthood, dying on 22 February 1927 in Marion County, Ohio. [3] Catherine married Lemuel on 14 January 1857 in Ross County, Ohio. [4] Private Lemuel J Sayre died on 9 May 1862 in Hamburg, Hardin County, Tennessee, while in Company B of Ohio 63 rd Infantry Regiment. He died from inflammation of the lungs. [5] May’s mother married Amos Gorrell on 6 February 1866 in Chillicothe, Ross County, Ohio. [6] It was not a marriage approved by his parents and he decided to leave for Missouri. However, before doing so, Amos took care of business with the probate court to become the guardian of May’s estate. On 28 February, he too

I have completed two hundred and fourteen (214) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. This week besides the History Center, I went on a bird/wildflower outing, a hike, and to the train club meeting. Genealogy Genealogy Meetings:   Jacqueline and I continued our discussion about our upcoming trip to do research in Texas. Amigos met and we discussed citations and Legos. The Roundtable meeting was full of discussion that the time just flew on by. At Kinseekers Military SIG, we talked about WWI classification records, pensions, and claim files, and collected a few good websites for Army sources. Finally, book club discussed the book Woman, Captain, Rebel by Margaret Willson. Genealogy Writing/Research: In the process of filing digital documents I had downloaded, I entered them into RootsMagic and decided to write a short bio about Michael J. Sullivan, my great-grandfather’s youngest brother. Of course, in that process, more research had to be done, and to update the source citatio

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night Again - Time For Some More Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has our assignment for tonight: 1)  Are you experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for genealogy and family history?  What have you learned so far?  What have you done to date?  What GPTs have you used?  What results have you had - good or bad? Here’s mine: I have a subscription to ChatGPT but I have not used it much. I took a class last fall from NGS taught by Steve Little and learned how to write prompts. We learned how to get it to summarize text we have fed it, such as a transcription of deed or probate records. We learned to review the results to check against hallucinations. One of the first things I tried was to have it create an outline for a genealogy talk I wanted to prepare. It has some good ideas, but I ended up using only a few of the suggestions. Then I forgot about AI until this week when I took another workshop on AI, thi