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When AI Puts a Face on Our Ancestors

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Did you see Mark Thompson’s recent Facebook post about genealogy and AI enhancement of photographs ? His post raises an important question about the potential for AI to change how we perceive our ancestors. Many of us have experimented with colorizing old photographs or using AI to sharpen, restore, or enhance them. Those tools can produce amazing results. But as I’ve begun using AI to help tell my ancestors’ stories, I’ve encountered another issue—one that has made me increasingly cautious about the images AI adds to those stories. What happens when AI creates an image that looks as if it belongs to our family history, but doesn’t? When Illustration Starts Looking Like Evidence Google NotebookLM does a fantastic job of creating videos from the source material it is given. I’ve experimented with giving it narrative reports, military records, and other genealogical material and asking it to create video overviews. The narration can be very effective. The visuals are another matter. Note...
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Feeding AI Back into AI

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What Happened When I Gave NotebookLM Its Own Audio My recent experiments with Google NotebookLM and the records of Rachel Christy Ricketts took an unexpected turn. I had already given NotebookLM my narrative report for Rachel and used it to create an Audio Overview . As I described in my previous post, listening to that discussion helped call my attention to a problem with Rachel's birthplace. My narrative report said Indiana, while several records pointed toward Ohio. After reviewing the original evidence, I corrected the birthplace in my genealogy database. But then I became curious about something else. What would happen if I took the Audio Overview created by NotebookLM and fed it back into NotebookLM as a new source? I Just Wanted an Outline My original goal was actually quite simple: I wanted an outline of the Audio Overview . After experimenting with file formats, I uploaded the audio into a new NotebookLM notebook. NotebookLM processed the recording, but instead of produci...
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Monday's Diggings

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What Grandma Knew About Her Family Did you ever have to create a family tree as a child? Or perhaps you have inherited a family tree or family information written down by a parent or grandparent. Today’s digging is a little different from the courthouse records, newspaper clippings, census records, and other documents that usually fill my genealogy files. It is a simple handwritten family sheet created by my grandmother, Pauline E. Mentzer Briles . At the top of the page, Pauline recorded her own name, birth date and marriage date. Below that are spaces for information about her parents and grandparents. What makes this piece of paper particularly interesting to me is its appearance. It clearly wasn't completed all at once. Some information is written in blue ink, while other entries appear to have been added in pencil. Even the blue ink isn't all the same. There are also corrections, additions, and plenty of blank spaces. In other words, this doesn't look like someone sitt...
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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

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Two Places That Matter to Me This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings asks: What geographic and community places matter to you? When I first read this question, my immediate thought was Dodge City, Kansas . Even though I've lived in Seneca, Kansas, for most of my life, I still often consider Dodge City my hometown. However, as I thought about the question, I realized there was another place that deserved consideration: Nemaha Valley High School . After all, I spent 40 years of my life working in that building! Thus, instead of choosing just one place, I'm going to share two places that have played important roles in my life. Dodge City, Kansas — My Hometown Why do I consider Dodge City my hometown when I've spent most of my adult life in northeastern Kansas? Part of the answer lies in my childhood memories. However, an even larger part comes from the generations of my family who called Dodge City home. My family's connec...
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When an AI Audio Overview Found an Error in My Family Tree

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Sometimes the most valuable result from using AI isn't a beautifully written story. Sometimes it is discovering that something in my genealogy database is wrong. That happened while I was working on an ABC Biography for Rachel Christy Ricketts . As part of my process, I had gathered information about Rachel from my RootsMagic database and the records I had collected for her. I then used that material with Google NotebookLM to explore different ways of turning genealogical research into a story. One of those experiments was an Audio Overview . Listening to Rachel's Story NotebookLM's Audio Overview takes the sources in a notebook and creates a podcast-like discussion of the material. Instead of simply reading my genealogy report back to me, the generated discussion attempted to interpret the records and explain Rachel's life. As I listened, something caught my attention. There was a problem with Rachel's birthplace . The birthplace recorded in my genealogy database d...
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Friday Find

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Following Samuel M. Crawford’s Ford County Homestead Sometimes a Friday Find isn't a newly discovered record. Sometimes one record leads to another—and then another—until a much fuller picture begins to emerge. That is what happened as I continued investigating Samuel M. Crawford , a man who lived in the Dodge City area and who may—or may not—connect to my Crawford family. My earlier research into Samuel centered largely on newspaper articles. Those records told me about the death of his daughter Nellie in 1901, Samuel's work as a railroad engineer, and his own tragic death in Torreon, Mexico, in 1902. More recently, a cemetery record led me to theorize about Samuel's family. Now land records are adding another layer to his story. A Ford County Homestead The Bureau of Land Management records contain a federal land patent issued to Samuel M. Crawford on June 10, 1891. The patent describes his property as: Lots 1 and 2 and the East half of the Northwest quarter of Section 18...
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Why Moses Dooley Belongs in My Crawford FAN Club

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When researching a difficult ancestor, sometimes the people surrounding that ancestor become almost as important as the ancestor himself. That's certainly true in my continuing effort to untangle the various Crawford families of early Kentucky. One of those people is Moses Dooley . Moses isn't a Crawford, and I currently have no evidence that he was related to my Crawford family by blood or marriage. Yet the more I learn about him, the more convinced I am that he belongs in my Crawford FAN club. Why? Because Moses Dooley keeps showing up in the same places as the Crawfords I'm trying to understand. From Virginia to Sugar Creek Moses Dooley was born about 1748 in Virginia. By 1780, he was involved in Kentucky land acquisition. A survey for 500 acres on Sugar Creek was completed for him on May 26, 1780. He later filed land entry papers and received a grant for those 500 acres. Moses was also an early Baptist preacher associated with the Old Sugar Creek Meeting House in what...
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Genealogy without a Subscription

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Genealogy can be an expensive hobby—or at least it can seem that way. When someone tells me they are interested in researching their family but don't have enough time to justify paying for a subscription to Ancestry or another genealogy site, I don't want them to think they can't do genealogy. They can. In fact, there are an amazing number of genealogy resources available online for free . The challenge for a beginning researcher isn't necessarily finding records. Sometimes the challenge is knowing where to look. So, if I were helping someone get started without purchasing a subscription, where would I send them? Start Here: A Beginner's Genealogy Toolkit Rather than overwhelm a new researcher with dozens of websites, I would begin with a handful of sites that can either provide records or point toward other resources. FamilySearch FamilySearch would be my first stop. FamilySearch is much more than a website where you type an ancestor's name into a search box. ...
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From Indiana to Kansas

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 Rachel’s Story in Song After writing about the life of my ancestor Rachel Elmeda Christy Ricketts (1845–1927) , I decided to tell her story in a different way—through music. Using information from Rachel’s biography, I worked with AI to create lyrics tracing her journey from her Christy family in Ohio and Indiana to her life with James Marshall Ricketts and their family in Woodson County, Kansas. I then gave the lyrics to Suno , asking it to create a ballad appropriate to the period from the 1860s through the 1920s. The resulting song, “From Indiana to Kansas,” became the soundtrack for a video that I created and shared on YouTube. It’s another experiment in turning genealogical records—names, dates, census entries, and family relationships—into a story that can be experienced in a different way. I hope you enjoy Rachel’s story in song.
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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

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What Was I Doing in 2001? It’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun time! This week’s challenge asks: Do you recall what you were doing in 2001? Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc.? At first, I wasn’t sure how much I could remember about 2001. After all, that was 25 years ago! But once I started thinking about where I was working, what technology I was using, and what I was doing with genealogy, pieces of that year began falling into place. And, appropriately enough, I used today’s technology to help me reconstruct my life with the technology of 2001. Work and School In 2001, I was the librarian and technology coordinator at Nemaha Valley High School in Seneca, Kansas. By then, technology was a major part of my job. I managed the computers throughout the high school along with a network of Novell servers. One of those servers handled our email. Think about that for a moment. Today we take cloud-based email, Google services, wireless networks and Internet acces...
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Monday Diggings

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Pauline Mentzer and the Class of 1913 Sometimes the most interesting genealogy finds aren't vital records, census records, or deeds. Sometimes they are the little pieces of everyday life that help us picture an ancestor at a particular moment in time. This week's digging takes me back to the school days of my grandmother, Pauline Mentzer . Among the family materials I have is a program for the Coffey County Rural School Commencement , held in Burlington, Kansas, on May 31, 1913, at 2 p.m. The program lists the members of the county's Class of 1913 , organized by rural school district. And there, among the graduates, is my grandmother: District No. 9 Hattie Carroll Glenn James Pauline Mentzer Teacher: Bertha Werts A County-Wide Commencement The program is interesting because it wasn't simply a graduation program for one school. It brought together graduates from rural school districts scattered across Coffey County. The long list of students and teachers gives us a gl...
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