Blog – Page 8 – Family Locket

Levi Richards’ Journal Account of Joseph Smith’s First Vision

Levi Richards is the 4th-great-granduncle of my husband, and brother to the well-known secretary of Joseph Smith Jr., Willard Richards. Levi Richards was born on April 14, 1799, to parents Joseph Richards and Rhoda Howe in Hopkinton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.[1] Rhoda’s sister was the mother of Brigham Young, making Levi and Willard the first cousin of Brigham.[2] Levi Richards joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 31 December 1836 in Kirtland, Ohio.[3] […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 20, 2025 LDS Family History

Edward Raymond Kelsey – Horseman and Sheriff’s Posse Member

How do you choose a favorite photo out of a large collection? I came across this photo of my grandfather, Edward Raymond Kelsey, on his horse, Pal, and decided it would be a perfect time to write about Grandpa Kelsey and his love for horses. I also wanted to experiment with using AI to help analyze a photo and learned its a great way to start researching a photo from your collection. Ed and His […]

By Diana Elder January 19, 2025 Artificial Intelligence, Creating and Sharing Family History

Finding Thomas Delaney: Using Irish Naming Conventions and the Research Like a Pro Process

The first webinar in our Research Like a Pro webinar series was presented yesterday by Susan McKee, an expert in Irish genealogy, and a graduate of our Research Like a Pro study group in the fall of 2023. Born and raised in Dublin, Susan brings a unique perspective to Irish family research, combining her native understanding of Irish culture with professional genealogical expertise. Now residing in Seattle, she serves as a contributing writer for Irish […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 19, 2025 Research Tips

What Researchers Learn from the 14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge

I’m excited to choose my research objective for the upcoming 2025 14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge! It starts on January 21. As I look through my research questions and think about which one to tackle, I love seeing what I have learned from past challenges. I also asked in our Facebook group to hear what others’ learned. The structured daily approach has helped so many of us make breakthroughs in our family history research. […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 15, 2025 Research Like a Pro, Research Tips

RLP 340: Using AI to Analyze Tax Data

In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss using AI to analyze tax records. Tax research involves a lot of data, and once you’ve extracted the data, analyzing it can be a challenge. Diana explains how she exported data from Airtable into a CSV file, and Nicole explains how she used Claude AI to create a table from the data. Diana provides an example of how she used the AI analysis […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 13, 2025 Podcast

Joseph Lee Robinson and the Book of Covenants

This year I am studying the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the context surrounding my ancestors’ membership in the early church. Many of my ancestors and my husband’s ancestors were baptized into the Church in the 1830s and 1840s. A study of the digitized manuscripts available from The Joseph Smith Papers as well as The Church History Catalog shed light on the context surrounding our ancestor’s lives. My goal is to […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 13, 2025 LDS Family History

The Nitty Gritty of Reading Handwritten German Church Records: Helpful Details for the German Researcher

by Beccy Martin, professional genealogist If you read Heidi Mathis’s 2021 six-part blog series, “Tracing Your 19th Century German Ancestors,” you are likely feeling ready to go hunt down records for your German research projects. Heidi’s excellent article provides rich context and numerous resources to get you to them, as well as tips and clues about how to tease out the information they contain. If you haven’t read it, or it’s been a while, I […]

By Beccy Martin January 12, 2025 Research Tips

RLP 339: Customizing an Airtable Research Log for Tax Research

In Episode #339 of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss customizing an Airtable research log for tax research. Tax records are invaluable for genealogy research because they were taken annually, filling in the gaps between federal censuses. The challenge is finding a good way to track and analyze the data. Airtable is a favorite research log tool, and by adding a linked table to the log, researchers can tame tax data and make […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer January 6, 2025 Podcast

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge: Let’s Get Started!

If you need a good reason to start writing your ancestor’s stories, let me introduce you to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge created by Amy Johnson Crow. Amy has engineered prompts for several years to stimulate our brains and help us brainstorm story ideas. I participated in 2022 and wrote several blog posts about my ancestors. I loved the motivation to write and discovered some neat things about people I thought I knew! […]

By Diana Elder January 5, 2025 Creating and Sharing Family History

RLP 338: When City Directory Indexing Goes Wrong

In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss the challenges of using city directories in genealogical research. Nicole shares her experience with the Trinidad, Colorado, city directory, where she encountered indexing errors due to the directory’s unique formatting. The directory included the post office location after each person’s name, which the indexing process misinterpreted as a middle name. This led to difficulties in finding her research subject using the search function. […]

By Nicole Elder Dyer December 30, 2024 Podcast