Heartland Genealogy

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 ...

Four Tests, Four Maps Have you looked at the Origins map for your AncestryDNA test? Have you compared your map with those of other family members? I've had my DNA tested with Ancestry, as have my mother and my two brothers. While I've spent considerable time working with our DNA matches, I haven't paid nearly as much attention to the Origins information. Why? Because most of my genealogy research is focused on ancestors who lived in the United States. Although I have identified a few immigrant ancestors, many of my family lines are still firmly rooted in American records, with their European origins unknown. Recently, I decided to take another look at our AncestryDNA Origins results. Four DNA Tests Having DNA results for my mother and all three of her children provides an interesting opportunity to compare our estimated geographic origins. AncestryDNA analyzes our DNA and compares it with reference populations to estimate the geographic regions associated with our ancestry....

Keeping Genealogy Software Current Do you keep your genealogy software up to date? Or are you still using an older version because it does everything you need? Yesterday, October 8, 2026, RootsMagic announced the release of RootsMagic 12 . Along with the announcement came a special upgrade price of $19.95, available through October 31. Since I was already using RootsMagic 11, I decided to take advantage of the offer and upgrade. My decision wasn't based entirely on the new features. In fact, I haven't had time to explore them yet. Instead, my decision reflects something I learned during my years as a high school technology coordinator: keeping software up to date is an important part of maintaining a healthy computer system. Lessons from a Technology Coordinator Before retiring in 2016, I spent many years as the librarian and technology coordinator at Nemaha Valley High School. My responsibilities included maintaining the school's computers, managing servers, and keeping th...

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...

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...

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...