Heartland Genealogy

How often do the paths of our ancestors come close to crossing without their ever knowing it? As I have researched my Civil War ancestors, I have discovered men serving in units from Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Kansas. Recently, I started wondering whether any of those men—or their siblings—were involved in the Battle of Mine Creek , fought in eastern Kansas on October 25, 1864. It turns out that my family had several connections to the events surrounding that battle. The Battle of Mine Creek The Battle of Mine Creek was part of Confederate Major General Sterling Price's 1864 campaign through Missouri and into Kansas. By late October, Price's army was retreating south following its defeat at Westport. On October 25, Union cavalry caught part of Price's army near Mine Creek in Linn County, Kansas. The Confederate troops were hindered as they attempted to cross the creek with their wagons. Union cavalry under Colonel John F. Philips and Lieutenant Co...

  Ethel Lighter Beggs — A Handwritten Obituary Have you ever looked through your genealogy files and found handwritten notes from research you did years ago? Before newspapers became available online, finding an obituary often meant visiting a library or archives, locating the appropriate roll of microfilm, and scrolling through pages of a newspaper. During my early genealogy research, I made trips to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas, where I used their microfilm collection to research Dodge City newspapers. Rather than paying for copies of every article, I often transcribed the information by hand. Sometimes I copied an article almost word for word, while other times I simply recorded the information I considered important. Today's Friday Find is one of those handwritten transcriptions. Ethel A. Lighter Beggs Ethel A. Lighter Beggs is my first cousin twice removed . Our common ancestors are Washington Marion Crawford and his wife, Mary Foster . Ethel was the d...

  Two James Crawfords?  One of the challenges of researching my CRAWFORD family is keeping track of the various men named James Crawford who lived in Kentucky during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I've spent considerable time trying to distinguish these men, particularly those who lived in Garrard, Lincoln, and Barren counties. For some time, I've had a deed documenting the sale of 200 acres of land on the waters of Marrowbone Creek in Barren County, Kentucky. The seller was James Crawford of Preble County, Ohio, whose wife was Martha. Recently, while searching through Kentucky's South of Green River land records , I found a land grant for 190 acres issued to a James Crawford in 1810. Was this the same James Crawford? Because the acreage was different, my initial assumption was that these records involved two different men. However, I had never compared the actual land descriptions. That seemed like a good opportunity to see whether artificial intellige...

Have You Tried It? Have you experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) in your genealogy research? Have you wondered how AI might work with the information you've already entered into your genealogy software? With the release of RootsMagic 12, users have an improved feature to explore: the AI Prompt Builder . Since upgrading to RootsMagic 12, I've been experimenting with this feature. Rather than writing a separate blog post about each experiment, I decided to share some of my experiences and encourage other RootsMagic users to try it with their own family history data. After all, what works well with one genealogy database might produce very different results with another. What Is the AI Prompt Builder? RootsMagic 12 includes an AI Prompt Builder that helps users prepare information from their genealogy database for use with artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. Instead of starting with a blank screen and trying to decide what to ask AI, RootsMagic creates a promp...

What Did We Inherit from Mom? In my previous post, [AncestryDNA Origins: Four Tests, Four Maps], I shared the Origins maps for my mother, my two brothers, and myself. Since all four of us have tested with AncestryDNA, I thought it would be interesting to compare our estimated geographic origins. After all, my brothers and I inherited our DNA from the same two parents. Wouldn't our Origins results be fairly similar? As I examined the percentages, I discovered something that surprised me. My mother has several geographic regions in her AncestryDNA Origins that don't appear in my results—or even in those of either brother! How could that happen? Comparing Four DNA Tests I created a spreadsheet comparing the Origins percentages for my mother and her three children. To keep the results straight, I identified the tests as Mom, MC (me), DC, and TC. I also included Ancestry's estimates of which regions each sibling inherited from our mother and which came from our father. The sprea...

Grandma’s 1913 Diploma Sometimes several seemingly ordinary family keepsakes come together to tell a much larger story. Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared several items connected to my grandmother Pauline Mentzer’s school years in Coffey County, Kansas . One was a school souvenir listing Pauline and other Mentzer children among the pupils. Another was Pauline’s 1912–1913 grade card , which provided a glimpse of the subjects she studied and how she performed in school. Today’s digging adds another piece to that story— her eighth-grade diploma . The diploma is a wonderful old document, complete with elaborate scrollwork, flowers, and the large words “Public Schools Diploma.” It records that Pauline Mentzer had completed the prescribed Common School Course of Study in Coffey County and was awarded the diploma on May 31, 1913 . In Kansas at the time, completing the common-school course had real significance. State law provided that pupils who completed the prescribed course of study for...

Weekends at Milford Lake What do you think of when you hear the words family history ? Do you think of census records, courthouse documents, old photographs, or family trees? While those are certainly important parts of genealogy, family history is also about the memories we create with our families today. This weekend, I won't be spending much time researching my ancestors or writing blog posts. Instead, I'll be spending time with my brothers, their children, and their grandchildren at Milford Lake in Kansas. And that is a family history story worth sharing! A Tradition That Began in 2013 In 2013, our family began a tradition of gathering for a fall weekend at Milford Lake. What started as a family get-together has become an annual opportunity to reconnect, relax, and enjoy one another's company. Over the years, we've taken lots of pictures. I have photographs from each of our gatherings between 2014 and 2025. Looking through those pictures provides a wonderful reminde...

  An Experiment in Renaming Genealogy Files with ChatGPT Have you ever looked at your genealogy files and wished they were better organized? Have you ever considered renaming hundreds—or even thousands—of files so that you could tell what they contained without opening them? I have! Recently, a post in the Facebook group Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence caught my attention. The writer described using ChatGPT and Claude to process genealogy documents. Their AI agents could extract information from documents, rename the files, place them in appropriate folders, and create structured data files containing the extracted information. That sounded intriguing! Could I use AI to improve the organization of my genealogy files? I decided to experiment. My Original Filing System When I began researching my family history, genealogy was largely a paper-based activity. I traveled to libraries, archives, and courthouses, made photocopies, and organized those papers in folders. For organizi...

A Wedding Announcement from My Handwritten Research Notes Before newspapers became available online, genealogy research often meant spending hours in libraries and archives scrolling through rolls of microfilm. For me, that frequently involved trips to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, Kansas. One of my research interests was the CRAWFORD family of Dodge City, Kansas. Since several members of this family lived in Dodge City, I spent time reading microfilmed copies of the local newspapers, looking for obituaries, wedding announcements, and other articles that might provide information about the family. Unlike today, when I can often download an image of a newspaper page and save it to my genealogy files, my research usually involved taking handwritten notes. Sometimes I copied an article word for word. Other times, I simply recorded the information that seemed important at the time. Today's Friday Find is one of those handwritten documents. It contains information from ...