My Trails into the Past

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)  Do you have Research Notes for some of your ancestors in a number of sources and papers, or perhaps in a Person Note or Research Note in your desktop family tree program, and dread trying to put them into a coherent genealogical sketch or research note?   2)  This week, take all of the Research Notes you have for one person in your tree and put them all in one word processor document. Organize them if you want - you don't have to.  Make a PDF file of your new word processor document and name it.   3)  Go to your favorite LLM (you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or any other LLM), load the document, and ask the LLM to "Please organize the research notes in the attached document for [your ancestor's name, birth and death year] and c...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!   Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has our first assignment for the new year. 1)  What are your genealogy goals for 2026?  Consider genealogy research, education, organizing, service, writing, and whatever else you care to share . Here’s mine: I delayed working on this because I just bet this would be the theme for today’s assignment. I have reviewed last year’s goals here: Revisiting my 2025 Genealogy Goals . This is always a good start, as we often have left over goals we did not finish. This year, I am going to break up my goals into different categories: Education, Organizing, Research, and Writing. Education Under Education, I have signed up many of the upcoming Legacy Family Tree Webinars . I do not always watch them live, except the BCG-sponsored ones, because I am usually busy when they first air. I started a Wednesday Webinar meme this past year, where I tak...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings : Join in, accept the mission, and execute it with precision. Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him about your Christmases past. Rev up the old thinking cap and cue up the Mission Impossible music - your mission, should you decide to accept it - keeping with the Christmas theme - is: 1)   Today's challenge is to share memories of December holiday gatherings and celebrations with your families (as a child, a young adult, a parent, a grandparent, a great-grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a nibling, a cousin, an in-law)!   2)  Pick two or three questions from the list in my blog post:   Ask AI Gemini:  "What questions can I write about concerning family gatherings and celebrations during the December holidays?"   This is a new list of q...

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)  Larry Smith invented six-word memoirs (see  https://www.sixwordmemoirs.com/ ).   2)  How do you want to be remembered?  What is most important to you?  What six-word memoirs would you write?   3)  Write at least one on any subject, and the sky is no limit. Here's mine: A part of me didn’t want to do this. It sounded too much like writing poetry, and I don’t like poetry. But then I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a try. Baseball, tennis, soccer: sports I love. Train watching, train riding, utter joy. Bird watching, binoculars in hand. Lookout! Wildflowers on hikes, pictures to make. Researching is fun, writing is hard. Teaching genealogy brings knowledge to all. I guess those aren’t too bad. I couldn’t figure out how to ...

Calling All Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings ’ assignment tonight is to: 1)  Who is Number 100 in your Ahnentafel list? Tell us about him.  {If you don't have a #100, use another number]. 2)  How do you descend from #100? Here's mine: My tree is unusual, as I have my daughter in the number one spot.  So, #100 is Christoph Siewert , my paternal 3rd-great-grandfather (her maternal 4th-great-grandfather). I don’t know much about him. He was born about 1766 in Posen, Prussia. He married Anna Mariana Ewald on 14 January 1811. He died on 3 February 1841. I know this information because a cousin hired a researcher in Poland. However, he doesn’t remember the researcher’s name, nor have any information about where this information came from. So, I can’t write specific citations to the church, only to the research notes given to me by my cousin. The lineage:  #100 – Christoph S...

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 )  Review the last three or four "Best of the Genea-Blogs" posts (see    https://www.geneamusings.com/search/label/BestofGeneaBlogs ).  2)  Pick one of the articles listed that either helped you with your research or your writing, and/or that touched your emotions, and/or that you are really impressed by. 3)  Tell us which article you picked (and link to it), and why you chose that article, and how it helped, touched, or impressed you. Here’s mine: James Tanner’s post from Genealogy’s Star titled “Why are you stressing over an end-of-line?” touched me. It’s true that at some point in our research, records will not be available for many reasons, and we will not be able to go any further back. Saying it lets us let it go. He told us to “start researching other p...

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)  You were born and given a forename (first name and middle name(?)) and a surname on your birth certificate. What were they? 2)  How many persons are on the  FamilySearch Family Tree  (with an exact search for a birth name) with your first and, separately, your surname? Are there any other persons with your complete first-middle-surname? 3)  How many matches do you have when you search the  FamilySearch Historical Records   (with an exact search for a name)  with your first name, and separately, with your surname?  Are there any other persons with your complete  first-middle -surname? 4)  How many people are in the  Public Ancestry Member Tree collection   (with an exact search for a name) with your first ...

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) Think about your most memorable Hallowe'en - was it when you were a child (candy, games, carnivals), a teenager (tricks and treats), or an adult (perhaps a party)? Here's mine: Two memories came up on Facebook where I had posted photos. The first one pertained to one of the Hallowe’en parties my parents would host sometime before the actual day. This shot is my favorite as it looks like a ghost popped into the photo. The second photo is of my daughters wearing the costumes I made that year. We attended a Hallowe’en party and won the best costumes award. Copyright © 2011-2025 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.

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)  Select an ancestor, and a genealogical sketch (or research notes, or a timeline, or Ancestry Member Tree profile, etc.) for that ancestor, and create a PDF of the sketch/notes/timeline/AMT Facts page/etc.   2)  Go to one of the FREE AI Large Language Models (LLM) like  ChatGPT ,  Claude ,  Gemini ,  Grok , etc., and write a prompt (create your own, or modify mine below) for the LLM to create a biography of that ancestor in, say 500 words.  If you want something longer, ask for more words. Here’s mine: Off the bat, I prefer to write my own ancestor biographical sketch, but I will give it a try with ChatGPT and Claude and compare the two. I will use the same prompts as Randy. ChatGPT "You are an expert genealogist. Please create a draft biography w...

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)  Sometimes we don't know the full names of both the parents of an ancestor.  In our family tree, those ancestors with unknown parent names are the end of the line, at least as far as we know. [Some researchers call them "brick walls."] 2)  Tell us about several of your ancestors who have no known-name parents,  3)  When was the last time you looked for these unknown parents? Here's mine: My RootsMagic is set up with my daughter as no. 1, so I have both my genealogy and my husband’s genealogy in the same file. For his line, the first unknown parents are the parents of his 2x-great-grandparents, Anders Petersson and Anna Larsdotter. I know through patronymics that Anders’s father’s first name would be Peter, and Anna’s father’s first name would be Lars. I bet my...

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)  Sometimes an ancestor or relative has no name at all - not even a given name (for males, we usually can surmise a surname, but ...) -- we all have millions of them.   2)  Tell us about one (or more) of your ancestors that have no given name and no birth surname, who has perhaps married an ancestor with a given name and surname from whom you are descended.  (Don't worry, we'll do unknown parents sometime soon). 3)  When was the last time you looked for this no-name ancestor? Here's mine: When I look at a list of the people in my RootsMagic database, I have many people, mostly women, who have no surname. It’s something like a half a dozen Elizabeths, Anns, and Marys each. If I work from the number one person and only focus on ancestors, then I came up with Eliz...

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)  Sometimes an ancestor or relative just disappears from the records, and we cannot find another record after a certain date.  2)  Tell us about one or more of your relatives or ancestors who have disappeared and have not been found since a certain date.  Do you have any idea of what might have happened to them? Here's mine: First, I can share a blog post I wrote for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks two weeks ago about an ancestor who disappeared: WhatBecame of Robert Hutson of Cherokee County, Georgia? I wondered how I could locate all the people in my database who have no death fact. I have RootsMagic 10 now and used the search feature, focusing on an event that has a blank death date. I got 4839 matches out of 7462 people. That is not a great statistic! Many of the hits are pe...