Ancestral homes are an important part of our family history. We can research the home’s architecture and records, such as city directories, taxes, maps, newspapers, and more. For this 52 Ancestor blog post theme of “Home Sweet Home,” I researched and wrote about the Spanish Fork home of my great-grandparents, Charles Cannon Creer and Mary Margaret Peterson. Charles built the home for his bride to move into upon their marriage on 23 March 1892, and...
Family history serendipity is real. Thanks to a kind fellow researcher, I recently discovered my ancestor’s divorce case that answers the question of what happened to Isabella Weatherford’s first husband, John W. Carpenter. I had her marriage on 3 January 1875, the birth of her first daughter, Clem, on 3 October 1875, and a second marriage to Robert Royston on 16 January 1877. With no death record, I assumed that perhaps John had died or...
Although we know there are likely more records of our ancestors somewhere, it is difficult to know precisely where to search when the known locations are exhausted. Full-text search by FamilySearch has been a game changer in this respect. Introduced at RootsTech 2024, I jumped on and started using it to discover more about my ancestor, Thomas Beverly Royston. I didn’t find anything new for him then, but during RootsTech 2025, I again did a...
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...
2024 was the year the genealogy community embraced artificial intelligence as a useful tool for our work as genealogists and family historians. Nicole and I spent many hours learning and teaching about incorporating AI into our research flow. For this final blog post of the year, it’s only fitting that we look back at where we’ve come. Since we’ve written many blog posts and recorded many podcasts on AI, I’m providing a curated list. If...
As researchers, we often need to reference past research plans, reports, logs, documents, and locality guides. If you’ve done multiple phases for the same research question, you will have a lot of data to use moving forward. What if you had an AI assistant that could help you pull out specific information from your research and use it in various ways? If this sounds appealing, you can check out Projects on Claude.ai by Anthropic. Like...
When starting the Accreditation process through the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists (ICAPGen), the first step is to decide on a regional focus and then find four connecting generations to research for the Four-Generation Project. You’ll need to analyze your pedigree to find suitable candidates. Artificial Intelligence can be a valuable tool in this process, helping to overcome common challenges and providing new perspectives on your family tree data. Challenges with Pedigree...
With the holidays approaching, it’s a great time to consider gathering family stories. Although it can seem daunting to start an interview project, a few simple steps will get you on your way. With the new advances in artificial intelligence, we can streamline and personalize the interview process. AI can then help us organize and write the stories. Consider asking a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude for ideas during each step of the...
Tax research involves a lot of data – land, property, associates, amount of tax paid, and more. You may be working with a run of tax lists for several years and dealing with several individuals in those tax lists. Once you’ve carefully extracted the data, the next challenge is analyzing it. I recently wrote about customizing an Airtable research log for tax research to match the headings in the Dallas County, Texas, rolls from 1847...
As genealogists, we constantly seek ways to enhance our research and streamline our writing process. Writing a research report can seem overwhelming, so using artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help us overcome writer’s block. This is the final blog post in my series on how I used AI for a complete project about Isabella Weatherford. Previously, I wrote about writing the objective, transcribing a lengthy pension document for the timeline, making a locality guide, creating...
