My Trails into the Past

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)  March 21 is National Memory Day.  How can we celebrate, and participate, in the day?  I asked AI tool ChatGPT how, and it suggested "Capture a Memory Before Its Gone;" "Rescue and Identify Old Photos;" "Record an Oral History;" "Organize One Small Thing;" "Share a Story with Family;" and/or "Visit or Virtually Honor Ancestors." 2)  For SNGF this week, do one or more of those tasks or some other related tasks of your choosing. [Thank you to Genea-blogger Janice Sellers for telling Randy about the National Memory Day and suggesting this topic.] Here's mine: Surprisingly, this is a tough challenge. I did capture a memory this week in the 52 Ancestors challenge, writing about my childhood home. Check out “ 130Paulson Lane: A Family Home that the Fr...

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)  How was your genealogy day?  Tell us about it - what genealogy-related activities did you do today, yesterday, or another day this past week? Researching, summarizing, transcribing, analyzing, writing, etc. Here's mine: I shall also select Friday, March 13, 2026. My day started at 8 a.m. with a writing accountability group where we get together to write for an hour on whatever genealogy topic we are working on. I set up the meeting but no one came. I started a new article about full-text searching for George Wilson Lancaster at FamilySearch. A 10 a.m., I joined the first session of the Writing for Discovery course I’m taking where we had 90 minutes of writing time. We first explained what we’re working on, then we wrote leaving our cameras on, and then checked in at the...

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)  RootsTech 2026 just finished today.  Did you watch any classes online?   2)  Which online class was your favorite, perhaps the most informative, most helpful, or most entertaining, for you?    Here's mine: I viewed 6+ sessions at #NotAtRootsTech2026, watching the online presentations live. I attended the conference in person last year, but arrived home from vacation only a day before the conference started. I wasn’t ready to hop on a plane yet. Angela McGhie hit a homerun with her presentation “The GPS in Practice: Examples of Reasonably Exhaustive Research,” held first thing on Thursday morning. Her handout has two checklists: one showing what constitutes reasonably exhaustive research, and the other a list of records to consider when doing reason...

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)  Do you know what activities one of your ancestors/relatives engaged in?  How much detail do you know about those activities? 2)  Use the FREE artificial intelligence tool  Google Gemini 3  to describe what your ancestor or relative experienced in his/her activities (e.g., military service, a ship they migrated on, an occupation, an office they held, etc.).  Here's mine: I started out stating the following to Google Gemini 3: “My father-in-law was landing gear specialist during WWII in the Army Air Forces in England, stationed at Burtonwood. What would his job have been like?” The AI answer is this: That is a fascinating bit of family history. Being a landing gear specialist at RAF Burtonwood during WWII meant your father-in-law was at the absolu...

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 are your major genealogy challenges - the family mysteries that you haven't been able to crack to date?  2)  Tell us about five of your real genealogy challenges with a short paragraph, and link to blog posts if you have written about them. Here's mine: 1. I would like to know the origins of Samuel Johnston and his wife Elizabeth McCormack , both of South Carolina. I have them firmly in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, and many of their children were born in the 1840s somewhere in Alabama. The issues are I have no idea where in South Carolina they came from, Johnston is a common name, and South Carolina didn’t require marriage registrations until the 20th Century. I have written about them here and here . 2. I would like to know the origins and parents o...

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)  It's Valentine's Day - a day for lovers! We all have hundreds of love stories in our ancestry. 2)  What was the great love story of the ancestors in your family Tree?  What wedding had a great story in it?  Choose one ancestral couple. Share how they met (if known), when and where they married. Note how long they were married. Highlight something that suggests affection or partnership. Here's mine: I have written about my parents a few times before. My paternal grandparents split up after 15 years or so. My maternal grandparents had issues but stayed married until my grandfather died. My grandmother lived another 40 years. I shall write instead of my husband’s parents: George Joseph Gorrell and Thelma Marie Nilsen. They married on 6 October ...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings:  1)  Have you researched the ancestors of your spouse (or significant other)?  Please list the names and vital records data for your spouse/SO's grandparents and great-grandparents like in an Ahnentafel Report. 2)  Have you written genealogical sketches and/or biographies for each of them?  Here's mine: I am on the California Zephyr traveling across Nevada, logging in when we get to a big city where there is cell service. Let’s start with part 2 first. Yes, I have written about my husband’s family. I wrote a three-generation book about his Nilsen family who immigrated from Sweden, and a three-generation Kinship Determination Project (KDP) about his Lundquist family for my initial BCG certification. I also write posts about them regularly on my blog. Here is the ahnenta...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings :  1)  What genealogy fun have you had this past month?  What is your genealogy research highlight of the past month?  It could be attending or watching a webinar or local genealogy society meeting,  it could be finding a new ancestor, or it could be reading a new genealogy book, or anything else that you have enjoyed. Here's mine: This past month, I have been working on a month-long project concerning my 2x-great-grandparents, Peter H. Hutson and his wife, Sarah H. Selman, who married in 1879. Their families lived in Texas in Cherokee, Leon, and Comanche Counties. I have been collecting whatever documents I can find using traditional searches in records and through the catalog, and also using full-text search. Some of Leon and Cherokee Counties’ records are availa...

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...