My Trails into the Past

I have been working with tax records in Beaver County for my husband’s Gorrell family. The tax records for the family range from 1804 through 1840 across two or three different townships. Some years there are one or two entries, other years three or four. I recorded the entries by year and included the census entries from 1800 to 1840. These are census records with only the head of household and tick marks for the other members by age and sex. I also included some of my own comments and source citations. I ended up with 9 pages. The work I’m doing is to find the family of Amos Gorrell (1804-1890). Here is an example of what I created: 1800 South Beaver Township census . The only townships at this time were First Moon, Hanover, North Beaver, Second Moon, Sewickley, and South Beaver. The Gorrells were enumerated in South Beaver Township. Two men were enumerated next to each other. One James is older than the other, also indicated by the senior and junior appendages to their name. It ...

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...