RLP 328: Using AI in Research Logging

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 328 using AI with Research Logs. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com.

Nicole (43s):
Hi everyone. welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How. are you today?

Nicole (51s):
Really good. I’ve been just having such a great time going through all of my pictures from my research trip to Oklahoma. What about you, what have you been doing?

Diana (60s):
Well, I’ve been working on a case study that I’m writing and revisiting some of my research from my accreditation project on the Roystons and the Cessnas and I am going through and finding the now digitized records because back when I did this in 2015, 2016, I used a lot of microfilm up at the Family History Library because it wasn’t digitized yet. And so now I’m going back updating my research log, updating my citations with the new image group number and finding all the direct links. And in the process, of course, as I’m looking at the records, I’m making more connections because I know so much more about the records, especially tax records.

Diana (1m 45s):
And it’s kind of exciting. I am finding a few avenues of new research for this family. And you know how it’s fun to go back and see something new that you didn’t see before? So for instance, we have our Robert Cessna, who was a half-brother to Thomas Beverly Royston and I was looking at his tax records and at one point he’s the agent for M Cessna and we’ve hypothesized that’s his mother Mary, and she took her Cessna name back, I think because she divorced John Royston. Well, it has a different location for her residence of Henry County where I have never done any research in Henry County.

Diana (2m 25s):
And so I don’t know if I just missed that before or if it wasn’t directly applicable to the project I was doing, but now I’m very interested in seeing if I can find out more about her. I don’t know, land taxes, whatever, in Henry County. So there may not be anything because this is really early 1817, but it was fun to notice that little tidbit that I had either noticed and forgotten or just never even paid attention.

Nicole (2m 54s):
Yeah, it’s so fun when you go back to research you did a while ago and you can see it with new eyes and with more experience, like you mentioned, we can have new insights because we’ve worked with tax records or whatever it may be a lot more. And so we kind of have a better understanding of things. So that’s neat.

Diana (3m 10s):
It is. and I also looked at the poll taxes. She didn’t pay a poll tax because she was a woman. Women didn’t have to pay poll taxes. And so, you know, I’ve often looked at that M. Cessna and thought, okay, is this really a woman? But there is the other thing that she wasn’t residing in the county and so she wouldn’t have to pay a poll tax either. So there’s always so many scenarios to think of, but we put it all together, this is what it is called, indirect evidence and put all the pieces together and come up with the best hypothesis, the best conclusion we can with what we have.

Nicole (3m 45s):
Yeah, that’s so true. Our announcements for today are that our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for November is going to be by myself, Nicole Dyer. And the topic is Four Generations of the Elder Family: Verifying Documentary Research with DNA. And I’m excited to present this topic. I’ve presented this a couple other times before and it’s really just kind of a good overview of the process for proving your pedigree and looking at a line that you have researched with documentary records and then combining that with DNA evidence to see if what you have from paper records lines up with DNA and the biological line.

Nicole (4m 30s):
So it’s really fun. The main type of DNA used is autosomal DNA. And it’s actually my dad’s patrilineal line, but because I was doing my dad to his father and back to like third great grandparents, there were no YDNA matches that were relevant to those generations. So it really was mostly autosomal DNA. Then I use the leads method and the Shared CentiMorgan project. I talk about standard deviation, independent descent lines, targeted testing. And the locations are Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon and Washington. So that will be fun. And that again, that’s on November 16th.

Nicole (5m 12s):
And if you haven’t signed up for the 2024 Research Like a Pro Webinar Series, there are monthly webinars. You can sign up anytime this year and you’ll have access to all 12 of the webinars. They’re recorded and it’s lifetime access. Each one comes with a research report that is like the syllabus for the webinar so that you can read the person’s research and see their documentation. And that helps kind of understand the case study. So I’ll be going over the Research Like a Pro steps and that case study and hope you’ll join me. The next Research Like a Pro with DNA study group begins February 5th, 2025, and registration begins on December 1st.

Nicole (5m 56s):
So we hope you’ll join us for that. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader, then go ahead and email us or apply on our website by sending us one of your DNA research reports that you’ve written. if you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, you can get a weekly email from us with new blog posts, podcast episodes and coupons. So make sure you sign up for that on our website. As for upcoming conferences, on November 1st and second, there’s the Texas State Genealogical Society Family History Conference. So if you are doing any Texas research, this might be a great conference for you.

Diana (6m 32s):
I’m excited to be part of that conference. And looking at the schedule, there are so many good classes. They’ve got DNA classes, AI classes, specifics. I’m doing one on settlers of Indian territory, which is pretty specific, but will be just so great for anyone who has settlers of Indian territory. That’s such a tricky place to to research. But then there’s just a lot of great methodology classes too. so I would encourage everyone to take a look at the program, it’s all virtual and see if it’s something you’d like to join us at. Well, let’s get into our topic for today. Today we are talking all about my project on Isabel Weatherford and how I used AI to help me in this project.

Diana (7m 20s):
And today we’re going to talk about logging my research. So previously we’ve talked about forming a research objective and how I did the timeline and transcribed and organized a 57 page pension file for the timeline. I made a locality guide for Dallas County, Texas and created the research plan. And so it’s been so fun to talk about this and today we’ll talk all about the results. What did I find as I was following that plan? It’s always so interesting in the research process how much work you do to finally get to the point where you can start researching.

Diana (8m 1s):
There’s just a lot of things we do first. And as you can see, as I went through all those, I did a significant amount of work before I even did my first search. But I also, you know, reveal a little bit about how I used AI to log the research and I used Airtable. you know, that’s my go-to for my research log. But of course anyone listening, you can use your own research log that you have developed and that you love, and you can use AI with that as well.

Nicole (8m 32s):
Well, that’ll be great. Before talking about the research log, let’s review the research to this point. So the objective of your project was to examine the economic and social conditions in Dallas County, Texas in the early 1800s and their influence on Isabella Weatherford’s life and marriage prospects. For the summary of known facts, there was a bulleted list of key facts about Isabella’s life, including her birth marriages and known residences. And then for the working hypothesis, there was kind of the idea that there were gonna be impacts on Isabella and her life from the Civil War and from her early marriages. So the research plan included county histories that can really give us that context of the social and economic conditions.

Nicole (9m 19s):
Also, newspapers that could hopefully provide the same census records, which there was one year missing tax records and then migration patterns and kind of studying different resources that could help us understand migration.

Diana (9m 34s):
Right. So what happened when I started following my research plan, well the first step was to look at county histories and I love starting with county histories in my research because it can set a good tone for the research. Sometimes I will do this in the locality guide part of my project, but in this one I had just scanned those. And this time I really wanted to dive in and understand what was in the county history and learn all about Dallas County for this time. But the only problem was John Henry Brown’s history was written in the 1800s.

Diana (10m 13s):
It was, I believe, right after this era in of Reconstruction, and it was written so densely and I could tell there was some good stuff in there, but I did not want to go through that line by line trying to understand what he was talking about because it was pretty difficult to get to the nub, you know? So I used AI to help me summarize it. And this one I had to download individual pages because of how the copyright was set up. So what I did was I carefully looked through the book and I found the four pages that specifically dealt with the Civil War and reconstruction in Dallas County.

Diana (10m 57s):
And then I did a screenshot or downloaded those pages and then added those to a Google Doc for AI analysis. And then I use Claude as an assistant, and I asked Claude to transcribe it first and summarize each image individually. And that was wonderful because this process transformed those four pages of dense, difficult text into four readable engaging paragraphs. So it was so much better. and I did include in my prompt to have Claude put direct quotes in brackets so that I would not plagiarize as I was using this in my report And, it also helped me to fact check and make sure it was just actually using the text and not anything else.

Diana (11m 44s):
So I took that summary and I put it in my Google Doc, and then I did a detailed entry in my research log, including the full source citation. That was such a great way to use AI. And then I had two additional county histories that I wanted to use. And in both cases I also used Claude to transcribe or summarize the narrative. And they really did give me some valuable insight into the history and economics of the area right after the Civil War and during reconstruction. so I felt like that was a really successful part of my research.

Nicole (12m 21s):
Fantastic. It’s always helpful to get the information from those county histories that were written a lot closer to the time you’re studying usually. So that’s always really nice. Well, next you worked on newspaper research and searching for the surname Weatherford yielded negative results. Unfortunately, the Dallas Herald images online were difficult to read and the text was very dense. So this turned out to be one that you decided not to continue with because it would’ve been challenging, probably due to time constraints, but you logged it in your research log and added your comments, and then you even added a new field called future research to your research log, so that when you used Airtable AI to help you, you could be aware of these gaps in the research and potentially suggest new avenues for exploration later on.

Nicole (13m 14s):
Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Did you know that Newspapers.com has over 1 billion pages of digitized newspapers dating back to 1690? Their growing collection includes papers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Discover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries and everyday stories about your ancestors in seconds. Newspapers.com can help you fill in the gaps between vital records and reveal details about your ancestors’ lives that you can’t find anywhere else. They’re easy to use. Search features lets you filter your results by date, location, specific paper and more.

Nicole (13m 55s):
When you find something interesting, Newspapers.com makes it a snap to share it with your family and friends. You can even save it directly to your Ancestry tree. Come explore 1 billion pages and make infinite discoveries today on Newspapers.com. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. Now, we just talked about newspapers and searching for the name Weatherford and looking at the Dallas Herald images online. Now, where were you looking at those images and searching

Diana (14m 26s):
Those were actually on a special Texas website. I believe it was Texas history?

Nicole (14m 34s):
Oh yeah, the Portal to Texas History.

Diana (14m 37s):
Yes.

Nicole (14m 37s):
Yeah, it’s great. They have a lot of stuff on there, including newspapers and more,

Diana (14m 42s):
Right? So you know, if you’re doing newspaper research, you wanna make sure you are looking everywhere because there are newspapers in all sorts of places, including just on microfilm in a local library. So we have the big companies that have digitized, but don’t neglect going really local and trying to find exactly the newspapers that were being published at the time. And this is what we like to put in our locality guides. so we have that right there in this case, you know, sometimes you find great things in newspapers and other times it’s going to be too hard to use it. And that was the case here that the newspapers just were not in very good condition.

Diana (15m 23s):
And, it was really difficult to read. So I decided, nope, I’m not gonna spend hours and hours looking through this for context, because I did have the county histories already that gave me some good context. so I put that in future research. If I wanted to do more with that,

Nicole (15m 39s):
That’s great because sometimes we think we have to spend so much time on each of the things in our research plan, but we can be so flexible. I love that you just put that in your research log. you know, I did this search and I discontinued working more on this because of this challenge and I have other things to do in my plan.

Diana (15m 56s):
Exactly, you know, that was a end all there. So the next part was the census research. And this is where it got exciting and very interesting. Whenever we’ve got a family that we can’t find in a census, you know, often we’ll return to it and try again, you know, just putting in our search terms. and I had almost decided that the Weatherford family in 1870 just were missed because we had them in 1860 in Dallas, County, Texas Precinct 6. And then Isabella was married in Dallas County in 1874. so I just figured they were still there and somehow they were missed because we do know that the 1870 census did miss a lot of southerners.

Diana (16m 42s):
You know, just with the challenges of reconstruction and people not wanting to talk to a government, a federal government person coming through trying to learn about them. I put it in my plan though, ’cause I thought at least this time I can log into my research log and put all of the search parameters and know that I’ve done my best to actually find that. Well, when I returned to this, I had, you know, done my timeline, I’d looked at this family again, and I knew that Isabel’s two older sisters had married by this time, so I thought, well, maybe I should see where they were living. Could it be that the family was under a weird spelling of the surname and they’re just living by the sisters?

Diana (17m 25s):
And I was surprised to notice or relearn, you know, sometimes we forget that her two older sisters were actually in Missouri in 1870 living in Benton County, and the family had been in Missouri before they moved to Texas. so I decided to expand my search to Missouri, something I had not done. And I kept trying different combinations of names and birth years. So I was looking for Henderson Weatherford and Clemsy Weatherford, his wife, and Isabella Weatherford. And so finally I did a search for Samuel, who was the youngest child, Samuel H Weatherford.

Diana (18m 5s):
And I finally had a breakthrough. I found a Samuel H Wellaford and the mother was indexed as Clarissy and the sister as Talitha, and there was no father. And they were in Camden County, Missouri, which was neighboring to Benton in that same area. And when I went and looked at it, I could see clearly it was Clemsy Wellaford. But that’s kind of an unusual name. And maybe the indexer just didn’t think of it, you know, I could see how they would think it was Clarissy. And Talitha threw me at first until I remembered that in the pension record, she always said her middle initial was D.

Diana (18m 51s):
And so it was always Isabella D Royston at that time she was married. And when I told that to you, you’re the one that said, well, maybe the D stands for Delitha and Talitha, Delitha sound very much the same. And the census enumerator just wrote it as Talitha. And when you did a Google search and you sent that to me, indeed a lot of people had Delitha/Talitha where the name had been spelled, you know, both ways in the records And, it was the exact same age, the birthplaces of the family were correct. And the thing that really made me know that this was the family was they were just a few households away from Clemsy’s sister Mahala Shockley, and I hadn’t known they were sisters years and years ago.

Diana (19m 42s):
I discovered that in my Clemsy Cline DNA project. So you know, here we have the household and guess he is missing the dad, Henderson is not in the household. And so now I have a new hypothesis that he probably had died in Texas, maybe he died. And that’s why Clemsy decided to move back to Missouri to be near her daughters and her sister. You know, now there’s more things to uncover there, but I was pretty confident that this was the family. And Isabella was back in Missouri in 1870. So that was very exciting.

Nicole (20m 24s):
I love that. It’s so great to finally find a missing family in a census that you’ve been searching for. and I know, so many of our listeners have done that same thing, you know, have thought, where are they in the census year? And maybe they got missed, but it’s really neat to hear how you found them. you know, you expanded your search to include more locations. You searched for all of the children, each family member in the household that you might be looking for. And yeah, the father was missing, so you weren’t gonna find him. And then the mother’s name was misspelled and our ancestors’ name, apparently she was going by her middle name. The only one that was the same was the Samuel. So we just have to keep trying with these censuses, don’t we?

Diana (21m 8s):
We absolutely do. And the other fun thing about the name Talitha was that I had discovered in my Cline research that there was a niece, so Clemsy’s niece was also a Talitha, and I am hypothesizing that perhaps that was their mother, her mother’s name, maybe this was Isabelle’s grandmother, but this was a family name. So you know, that also lent me to think, okay, this could be the family because I recognize that name.

Nicole (21m 36s):
Totally. And maybe the niece was named after her aunt. You never know.

Diana (21m 42s):
Yeah.

Nicole (21m 42s):
That’s so great. Well, following the research plan, the next step was to examine the Dallas County tax rolls. You were able to locate Henderson Weatherford, Isabella’s father in the 1860 tax list. And this record provided valuable information about Henderson’s property and his tax obligations. And so adding this to the research log and making a citation was the next step. And then looking at the 1860 census, he was listed as a blacksmith and his two acres of land in the tax list correlate with his occupation. He didn’t need a lot of land for farming because he was being a blacksmith.

Nicole (22m 22s):
And this was an era of agriculture in Texas, and land was relatively cheap. So if he were farming, he would’ve had many more acres like his neighbors. So looking at the neighbors they had from 64 to over a thousand acres. Many other WeatherFords are listed in the subsequent Dallas County tax records. But this is the only mention of Henderson. And he likely died soon after the 1860 census and tax list. His last son, Samuel Henderson Weatherford, was born in January of 1862, so we can hypothesize that Henderson died between March, 1861 and January, 1862.

Nicole (23m 3s):
And something else that’s interesting is that it was a practice in the South to name a child after his father, if the father had died while the mother was expecting the child. And so this gives us a decent approximation of Henderson Weatherford’s death combining the tax and census evidence. So he didn’t appear on any more tax records after 1860, and his child was named Henderson as a middle name. So all of these clues are combining. And this is interesting because we do have another ancestor who died and I believe his youngest daughter was named after him, and even though it was a man’s name.

Diana (23m 46s):
And, it was Henderson.

Nicole (23m 47s):
That’s

Diana (23m 48s):
Right. Yeah. That was William Henderson Schultz. And he died and his wife was expecting her last baby.

Nicole (23m 56s):
Yeah. And she was Henderson Elizabeth Schultz. Right?

Diana (23m 59s):
Right. But she always went by Henderson. She didn’t go by Elizabeth. So funny, funny. So interesting. Yeah. Yep. Well, it was fun because I, you know, you sometimes you just don’t know when your people died and you cannot really place them. It’s well, sometime after the census, you know, the last census you find them in. So this is giving me so much more evidence and narrowing things down. And of course I have more future research because now I want to discover more about the family in Missouri, see if I can figure out when they moved. But that can be another project. So, let’s finish up this project with my last portion of the research plan, which was migration.

Diana (24m 42s):
And of course my research took this unexpected turn when I found out that Isabel’s residence in 1870 was actually Camden County, Missouri. So now I really wanted to investigate how Clemsy might have taken her young family west, especially if she was a widow, and then returned to Texas. And I had learned through my county history research and locality research about the railway coming in to Dallas about that time. And so I focused on just learning more about the development of the railroads and specifically where they were going and I found such a good article on the history of the railway.

Diana (25m 23s):
And of course I used AI to summarize that. And the summary focused specifically on the railway’s connection to Dallas and its impact on migration patterns in the early 1870s. and I was able to find a really great map that showed a possible route that they could have taken. There were rails all the way from Missouri and into Dallas County by this time, because that was completed in 1872. So it just makes sense that they would’ve used the railroad to, to move. you know, I may never know for sure that’s something that we put in our reports or our writing and say, well this is a possibility, you know, this was a, a exciting new way of travel and it’s very possible.

Diana (26m 12s):
So I did discover that, learned a little bit more about that. And in 1880, I have got Isabella married. She actually was married twice in Dallas County, 1874. And then her first husband probably died. She had a child with him and then married Robert Royston, our ancestor, about 1876. And in 1880 they’re in Johnson County. And you know, just a little bit away from Dallas, County and Clemsy and Samuel are in nearby Wise County. So they all moved back to Texas and stayed there, as far as we know, you know, Clemsy and Samuel, our Isabella and Robert Royston moved up into Indian territory and which became Oklahoma.

Diana (27m 3s):
So just so fun to do this project. and I totally thought that I was just going to add some context to the story. I had no idea. I would discover new information, such as the possible death of Henderson and where they were living, so many new things. So, you know, it’s just another thing that we can think of to do this research, focus on even something small like this. you know, it wasn’t a great big project, it was just something small, but I had some really good dividends from it.

Nicole (27m 36s):
Well, good. It’s so great to hear all of the positive aspects of diving into this project again, and what you learned and how we can use AI in the process. And just some of the really useful aspects of AI for summarizing long texts and being able to incorporate context more easily into our reports. So useful.

Diana (28m 2s):
Right. And you know, all along I was thinking about how I was going to use the Airtable AI assist feature, and I knew that it would only be as good as the information I put into my research log. so I was really careful how I actually inputted the information into my research log. I tried to be as complete as I could so that when I used AI Assist and Airtable, it would help write my report. and I knew I couldn’t just put, you know, really small little details. I needed to write a little bit more. so I was cognizant of that and and worked hard to make sure my research log was pretty complete.

Nicole (28m 42s):
Well, good job and thanks everyone for listening, and we hope that you’ll join us again next week as we continue talking about this project and focusing on how Diana wrote the report. So have a great week and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (28m 57s):
All thanks everyone. Bye-Bye

Nicole (28m 59s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.