Heartland Genealogy

My Oldest Confirmed Record This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun assignment asks: Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again — time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1) What is "Your Oldest Confirmed Record?" What is one of the oldest documents you've personally found for any ancestor? At first, I thought this would be an easy question to answer. My immediate reaction was that the record was probably associated with either my HAMMOND or WHITE ancestors. Both families extend well into the 1600s in my RootsMagic database. But how was I going to determine which record was actually the oldest? With thousands of people and many more facts and sources in my database, clicking backward through generations wasn't very appealing. So I decided to see whether ChatGPT could help me find the answer . Searching My GEDCOM with ChatGPT I exported my entire RootsMag...

  Have you ever started researching one question only to find yourself investigating something entirely different? Genealogy research often works that way. We find one record, which raises a question, which sends us looking for another record. Before long, we're following a research trail we hadn't anticipated. I've discovered that my conversations with ChatGPT can evolve in much the same way. A recent conversation about James Marshall Ricketts is a good example. I started with a fairly simple request: Create a timeline from the transcription of James Marshall Ricketts's Civil War pension file. I wasn't asking ChatGPT to solve a mystery. I simply wanted help organizing the information I already had. But that timeline led us somewhere I hadn't expected. Starting with a Pension File James Marshall Ricketts served in Company K of the 7th Indiana Cavalry during the Civil War. His pension file contains documents created over many years, making it difficult to see h...