Heartland Genealogy

NotebookLM Creates a Video What happens when you give an AI tool a genealogical narrative report and ask it to turn that information into a video? After creating my From Indiana to Kansas song and video about James Marshall Ricketts, I decided to try another experiment. This time, I uploaded James's narrative report to Google NotebookLM and asked its Studio to create a video. I actually created two versions. Explainer or Cinematic? For the first video, I selected the Explainer style. For the second, I tried Cinematic . I really liked the look and feel of the cinematic version. Unfortunately, it included an image of a nineteenth-century couple. Since those people were not James Ricketts and his wife, Rachel , I don't feel comfortable sharing that version as part of their family history. That's one of the challenges of using AI to tell our ancestors' stories. An image may look historically appropriate and make a beautiful video, but viewers could easily assume they are ...

  From Indiana Farm Boy to Kansas Pioneer James Marshall Ricketts lived through a remarkable period of American history. Born in Indiana in 1847, he grew up on the eve of the Civil War, enlisted in the Union cavalry while still a teenager, married shortly after returning home, and eventually moved his growing family west to Kansas. There he spent much of the remainder of his life farming in Woodson County. Over the course of his seventy-three years, James experienced the Civil War, westward migration, the development of rural Kansas, and enormous changes in transportation, agriculture, and everyday life. Yet the surviving records also tell a much more personal story—of family, land, military service, visits from relatives, and more than fifty years of marriage. Birth and Parents James Marshall Ricketts was born on 28 November 1847 in Clinton County, Indiana .[3–14] The census records place him in the household of John Ricketts during his childhood. In 1850, three-year-old James wa...

Do you remember sitting at a microfilm reader, turning the handle as you scrolled through page after page of an old newspaper looking for a marriage announcement? When you finally found what you were searching for, did you print a copy, transcribe the entire article, or simply jot down the information that seemed important at the time? I have to admit that I sometimes chose that last option. Printing an article from microfilm wasn’t always convenient. At the library where I was researching, I had to rewind the roll, move it to a separate reader/printer, relocate the article, and then spend a quarter to make a copy. Apparently, that was enough of an obstacle for me to decide that handwritten notes would do! One of those sets of notes concerned the marriage of my great-grandparents, Charles O. Mentzer and Nettie E. Wells . Their wedding announcement appeared in the 20 October 1893 issue of The Yates Center News . Fortunately, genealogy research has changed considerably since I made those...

  The Mentzer Family Bible Do you have family Bibles tucked away among your family treasures? If so, have you taken the time to photograph or scan the family register pages? I'm fortunate to have several family Bibles that were part of my grandmother's collection. One of those Bibles belonged to the family of my grandmother, Pauline Edith Mentzer Briles . Like many family Bibles, its handwritten pages preserve information about births and a marriage that might otherwise have been lost. For this week's Monday's Diggings , I'm sharing two pages from that Bible. Parents' Names The first page identifies Pauline's parents and records their birth dates and marriage date. Transcription Family Register — Parents' Names Husband: Charles E. Mentzer Born: 1869, July 1 Wife: Nettie F. Wells Born: 1873, Feb. 5 Married: 1893, Oct. 3 This page is particularly valuable because it connects the children recorded elsewhere in the Bible directly to Charles E. Mentzer a...