RLP 345: Edward Raymond Kelsey – Horseman and Sheriff’s Posse Member

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 345, Edward Raymond Kelsey Horseman and Sheriff’s Posse Member. 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.

Nicole (44s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro, the Genealogy podcast.

Diana (52s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (53s):
Great, we just had our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group meeting, so that was really fun and exciting. I’m excited to get started on that. What about you? How are you feeling about it?

Diana (1m 4s):
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to starting a new project with DNA and of continuing from some of my past work on the Clines and Weatherfords and really hoping to make some good discoveries on the Weatherfords. You know, the last study group, I pretty much discounted that we had the wrong parents or possible two sets of parents. So now I gotta see if I can find a new set of parents.

Nicole (1m 27s):
Yeah, that is exciting to have like a little blink in this pedigree now where you can find hopefully the right ancestors. And this has happened to us before where we had someone in a spot on the pedigree and then we realized it was wrong and we had to fill it in with new people, so

Diana (1m 44s):
Right. It’s always an adventure.

Nicole (1m 45s):
It is. And I love how documentary and DNA evidence can kind of counterbalance and check each other.

Diana (1m 51s):
I do too. That’s really the beauty of using DNA with your work.

Nicole (1m 54s):
Alright, well today we have a few announcements. Tomorrow actually is our next Research Like a Pro webinar by Cathy Duncan. And it’s about Texas Migration Patterns and DNA Connect Lucinda Wright Rinker to Her Father. And she’s going to share the first two phases of her research with us and what she’s currently working on using DNA evidence to continue adding to the body of evidence for her hypothesis. So it should be really fun to learn about that. The next Research Like a Pro study group will be in August of 2025. If you’re interested in joining us, we’ll start registration this summer and if you’ve already done a Research Like a Pro project, perhaps you’d like to join us for the stay group as a peer group leader and you can have free registration if you’re a peer group leader.

Nicole (2m 43s):
So just email us or apply on our website. Every Monday we send out a newsletter with our latest blog posts and any news, coupons and things like that. So if you haven’t yet signed up for our newsletter, you should do that. And then upcoming conferences in just a couple weeks, we have the RootsTech Conference, which is going to be virtual and in person at Salt Lake City. We will be there in person. We hope to see you there. We will have a booth in the exhibit hall and we’ll be giving several lectures. So we look forward to that. Then in May we have the National Genealogical Society Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, where we will also be in person, but we’re not going to do a booth, we’re just going to be there and be speaking at the conference and enjoying going to other classes.

Nicole (3m 27s):
And we’re going to be doing some of our own research on the first day of the conference where we’re taking the research trip to Frankfort. So I’m really looking forward to this and if you haven’t yet attended an NGS conference, but you feel like you wanna take your skills to the next level, you’ll find lots of really great classes there. A little bit more intermediate to advanced, some very specific to localities and topics and just a lot of great information.

Diana (3m 51s):
Well, we are excited to have some in-person conferences. It’s always so fun to get together and to see people and present. So we’re excited. Well, let’s get going on our topic for the day. We’re going to talk today about some research I did. This was for one of my 52 Ancestors blog posts, which I am trying to do weekly. And this was a fun topic, it was a favorite photo and I think we all have those photos that are so interesting to us and we want to learn a little bit more. Last time I did this challenge, I chose my grandma Kelsey. And so this time I chose her husband, my grandfather Edward Raymond Kelsey.

Diana (4m 33s):
And it’s a fun photo. He’s on his horse and my mother had labeled this as Edward Raymond Kelsey on his horse, Pal. And it was 1948 and he was 62 years old. So I thought this would be perfect to learn about grandpa on Pal. And I decided to start my research by seeing what was written about him. And so my mother, Anna, his daughter, had written his life history. And so I found that where I had uploaded it to FamilySearch, and this is what she said about his love of horses, “From the time he was a young man, he was always interested in horses.

Diana (5m 13s):
He spent many hours at a time in the saddle carrying out the operation, maintenance and development of his grassland and taking care of his livestock. He was a member of the Cassiaa County Sheriff’s Posse for many years. He had a black and white pinto pony named Jim. Jim could do many tricks such as kneeling on one or two legs, lying down, etc. He also had a horse named Pal and a palomino horse. He was deeply saddened at the death of Princess his horse in the early sixties. After this, he purchased Rusty, a big bone bay to ride the range to look after the cattle. When Rusty began to shy so much, he purchased a strawberry roan. He said one time he wanted to die on his horse.”

Diana (5m 53s):
So that was fun to read my mom’s little bit of history and I thought it was so interesting that she named all the horses and talked about each one. So you could see it was really important to my grandfather. Well, Ed rode his horses every day of his life right up until he died in a car accident at the age of 86. And I found online in an article called The Sugarbeet and the editor had spent the whole day with Ed and he reported this fun part of the trip. So the editor said, “Further over in another section of his range, we spotted a white mare obviously shy and running spooked. Close at her heels a black foal was matching her run, floating a white tail and stocking feet.

Diana (6m 38s):
The youngster was a mule colt, one hand grabbing at my camera and the other poise at the dashboard as Ed slammed the truck to a stop and vaulted out of the door his hat waving. She had her colt, by damn, she had her colt.” So that was so fun to read that because I could just picture my grandpa saying that he would’ve been so excited about seeing this development of his colt and the mare.

Nicole (7m 1s):
Oh my goodness. Wow, that’s so fun. What a great story. What is The Sugarbeet ? Is that a newspaper?

Diana (7m 6s):
It was like a publication. So there, this is Declo-Burley Idaho area in Cassia County, Idaho, and lots of farms and there’s a big sugar beet factory there and lots of farmers that raise sugar beets. And so it’s a, was a journal and it’s still going today. So apparently, you know, this editor was spending the day with my grandfather.

Nicole (7m 30s):
That’s so cool. So we’ve got like a quarterly journal, like some kind of agricultural journal and grandpa was interviewed basically on site.

Diana (7m 41s):
Yes, that’s right, that’s right. Well he had, this is not a subject for this article or this blog post, he had been named The Grass Man of the Year for the State of Idaho. So I think maybe it was partly because of that, ’cause he had won this pretty cool thing, You know, this big award. But he was also, you know, just a very interesting individual.

Nicole (8m 3s):
Yeah, he definitely seems like an interesting individual and it’s cool because you knew him, but I didn’t know him, so I’m learning a lot from you about him. And it’s neat to hear about his love for horses and I’ve seen quite a few pictures of your grandpa and several of them he is on a horse. So with that segue, let’s do talk about photos and AI photo analysis while analyzing a favorite photo with artificial intelligence can help us gain insight into details we might have missed the first time we looked at the picture, especially if it’s a photo that we’ve had in our collection for a long time. You decided to put this photo into a custom GPT and see what you could learn.

Nicole (8m 48s):
And so you uploaded it to the custom GPT by Mark Thompson to see what it would say about Grandpa Kelsey. Mark’s GPT is called Mark’s Historical Photo Analyzer, and it’s free to use, you don’t need a Pro account. Mark had to have a Pro account to create and share this custom GPT, but free users can still use it. So sign in to Chat GPT and click explore GPTs and then search for Mark Thompson. And he has already created guidelines and rules and prompts for the AI. So all you need to do when you use it is to upload your photo to the chat and see what the response is.

Diana (9m 25s):
So curious to see what AI could tell me about the photo. I decided to upload it with the simple prompt and AI’s first pass at the photo was fairly generic. It described the study in clothing and it was decent analysis and it ended with the statement, if you have additional family history documentation or other photographs, we could refine the interpretation further. So I gave the AI my grandfather’s name and additional information. So I said, this is Edward Raymond Kelsey, who was a member of the Burley Idaho Sheriff’s Posse for years. He’s shown here with his horse, Pal. This was the official uniform for the posse.

Diana (10m 5s):
Then the analysis was a lot better and it was nicely organized into a table and it was based on the custom GPTs instructions that Mark had given it. And I thought it had so many good ideas for research. So some of the things that it said, first it talked about the uniform, which was official Sheriff’s Posse attire, which I had told it, but then I loved how it just went on to explain exactly what he was wearing. He says the embroidered shirt, bolo tie and white brimmed hat represent the standard uniform for the Burley Sheriff’s Posse. Which kind of cracked me up because yes, that was true, but it was making an assumption there.

Diana (10m 46s):
Then it said these uniforms reflect to both their law enforcement affiliation and the western heritage of the region. So some other topics that it covered were the symbolism of the uniform, the role in the community, and then it talked about the horse and the horse’s tack, which is the saddle blanket and the bridle. And it said those align with the formal appearance of the uniform emphasizing the ceremonial nature of the Posse’s public presence. And you know, I have looked at that picture so many times and not really even notice that there was this special blanket on the horse. And so this is the beauty of AI. Sometimes it can take something we’re so used to looking at and give us a whole new idea about what we should research.

Diana (11m 32s):
So I also had a really interesting point AI did where it said official documentation, and it said this photo may have been taken to document Edward Raymond Kelsey’s service in the Posse, either as a personal keepsake or for community records. It could also have been used for promotional materials, highlighting, the Posse’s role. So that was great too. I, I really didn’t know why this picture was taken. It just gave me a lot of insights and gave me some different thoughts and points to research.

Nicole (12m 4s):
Well it’s a really cool photograph and this is actually a pretty cool analysis by ChatGPT. So thanks for sharing that.

Diana (12m 11s):
It’s fun. I would encourage everybody to try this with their photos. AI can give you some really interesting ideas. Well now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Have you ever wished you could step back in time and see the world your ancestors lived in? With Newspapers.com you can. It’s like having a time machine right at your fingertips. With a single search you can explore more than a billion pages of historical newspapers dating from 1690 to 2025 from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Uncover the details that bring your family story to life in birth notices, wedding announcements and obituaries. But it’s not just about facts, it’s about experiencing the moments they live through. Imagine reading the same headlines they saw or finding an article about your great-grandfather’s farm.

Diana (12m 57s):
Newspapers.com doesn’t just show you the history, it helps you feel it. Start your journey today at Newspapers.com because sometimes the past isn’t just history, it’s a story waiting to be discovered. Come make infinite discoveries today on Newspapers.com. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. Well of course I was curious to learn more about this photo and I had seen in the corner of the photo the name Sherrod, S-H-E-R-R-O-D, and it said Sherrod’s Studio of Burley, Idaho. So not always do we get the actual photographer shown on the the photo, but in this case we did.

Diana (13m 39s):
So I went to Newspapers.com and the Burley Herald mentioned Fred Sherrod of Sherrod’s Studio multiple times. It was all through the newspaper and there were advertisements for his services, but then also some just about his photography. So you know, that verified, he really was the photographer there. But then I wanted to learn more about the Sheriff’s Posse and there was so many articles, things that I had no idea I would ever find. And in 1948, just the exact date when Ed posts on his horse for the photo, the Cassia County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse competed in several events and he went first place in the pleasure horse class.

Diana (14m 20s):
And so then I could hypothesize that maybe they took photos of all the winners. The Posse was popular in the local news and a photo of the entire posse with Ed Kelsey, it listed every single man and I found him fifth from the right in the first row and it was featured right there on the front page. So it was a big deal in this small town. It was so cool. And I noticed that all the men were in the same uniform and they all had the same saddle blanket. So it was absolutely correct that it was his posse uniform and a ceremonial blanket. So that was really neat to see those pictures and to be able to really put that picture into its context.

Nicole (15m 3s):
That’s great that you could find out more about Sherrod’s Studio in Burley, Idaho and kind of looking in the newspapers to help with that, great job.

Diana (15m 11s):
It was fun and I honestly didn’t know what I would find. No idea. But you know, it just really goes to show that those newspapers can be extremely valuable. Well I guess in any era, but especially if you’re 20th century, you know, like I knew my grandpa, I had seen the Sheriff’s Posse perform in the Cassia County rodeo every year. So I knew what they did and you know, it was just fun to see him and see why that was such a big deal in 1948.

Nicole (15m 38s):
Yeah, and that’s fun to learn about how he won first place in one of the events that he competed in.

Diana (15m 45s):
Well, and I had to do a little research on what that actually meant, what was a pleasure horse class. And I learned it was a horse that would just obey you. It would do everything you wanted it to do. And so, you know, I think he really worked with training his horses to step forward, step back, step to the side, you know, turn around in a circle, you know, do all, all those types of things. And someone listening who really is a real horseman, maybe would know more about this. But that’s what I gathered from my research.

Nicole (16m 16s):
Yeah, and I noticed that in your blog post on this topic, you have another picture of Grandpa Kelsey on a horse where the horse is like kneeling down with one leg. So it seems like he was telling him what to do and horse was doing it.

Diana (16m 30s):
Yes, that’s the horse that my mom talked about that would do the tricks. And that was fun to see as well. I, I’ve got a couple pictures there, one with this horse whose name was Jim, which would’ve been in the 1940s. And I was able to date that one because there were a series of pictures of Jim at this time and one of them had a cousin on it and then kind of estimating his age, you know, he was a young boy, I could pinpoint it to the 1940s. And then the other picture was on grandpa 20 years later at least he died in 1969, 1970ish, I can’t remember exactly, but he was on his big Roan, Rusty in that picture.

Diana (17m 13s):
So he was not afraid of anything. Grandpa wasn’t. And he would take his horses and mules and go with his sons up into the mountains for like a week at a time and go hunting. He loves outdoors.

Nicole (17m 26s):
Wow. So what about that last big photo of the Sheriff’s mounted Posse? Was that one you had in your collection or you found it?

Diana (17m 35s):
That was from the newspaper. Nice. Yeah, the newspaper, it was a big deal. Apparently they were going all over, went down to Utah to be in a competition and were in Idaho doing competitions. So apparently these posses would get together and do individual events as well as the whole event. So at the beginning of a rodeo, the sheriff’s posse would come in and do their thing. So I can’t even tell how many men there are, maybe 20, maybe 25. They would do these really intricate maneuvers where they would cut really closely, like in diagonals and horses going back and forth between each other. And it was amazing to watch.

Diana (18m 15s):
They were so good and he loved that. So you know, this entire group of men that loved training and coming up with these very intricate things. So think of, you know, like halftime show on the football field and you have the bands and they’re doing all these really cool maneuverings. Well, same thing only with horses.

Nicole (18m 35s):
I love that. Well, let’s talk about some takeaways for using artificial intelligence with our photographs. So uploading a photo to a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude can be a really helpful way to give you new ideas for research and analysis on your photograph. And using a custom GPT, like Mark’s historical photo analyzer can speed up the process because it already has some really good instructions written by Mark Thompson and has some parameters set up already. And if you are new to using custom GPTs like this, a good way to learn about a custom GPT is just to ask it what it can do and then you’ll hopefully get some ideas and you can upload your photo and ask some questions and think about possibilities for researching your ancestor based on the photograph.

Diana (19m 27s):
Right. And in the blog post I put an image of the answer when I asked ChatGPT or and the GPT about it. I said, tell me about yourself. And it said, “Hey there, I’m Mark’s historical photo analyzer, your go-to expert for uncovering the stories hidden in old photos. I’ve been customized to help you explore all the little details that might get overlooked. Things like the fashion architecture tools, or even the mood captured in an image. Basically I’m here to help you answer the big questions, who, what, where, when, and why about your photo. I don’t just describe what’s in the frame. I also analyze the photos, age format, technique, and any clues that might reveal its history or context. If there’s a connection to genealogy, a specific historical period or a photographer signature style, I’m ready to dig in.

Diana (20m 13s):
Think of me as your very detailed oriented detective for the past. What about you? Got a photo or a topic in mind?” So I thought that was such a fun description and it gives us some ideas just even reading that about how to analyze a photo and learn more about an ancestor from it.

Nicole (20m 29s):
That’s so fun. Well, thank you for sharing that today. It’s been interesting and fun to learn about Grandpa Kelsey and your photo research. I just wanna put in a plug also for writing periodically about your ancestors. And we’ve both been working on doing these blog posts every week for 2025, and it has been so valuable to just have various topics to write about in genealogy and our family and to go on different lines of our family and learn about ancestors we’ve never researched before. Seeing what sources are available and just writing a short vignette that captures a part of their life. And diving into the historical context, analyzing a source you’ve never seen before and getting to know different ancestors in your tree.

Nicole (21m 14s):
And you don’t even need a blog to do it. You can just write it in your own word processor and save it and eventually you’ll have a lot of different pieces of writing that you can share and pass down with your family. It has been an enjoyable exercise so far and you should all try it.

Diana (21m 31s):
I agree. I really want to write a comprehensive history of my grandfather, especially researching the Grassman of the Year thing. But he had an amazing life. You know, we’ve podcasted and written before about how he was a hobo when he was young and then he went up to Idaho and homesteaded. I mean, he just said so many different things throughout his life, but it was always overwhelming to me to think about sitting down and really writing this up. But writing these short blog posts, I’m able to create source citations for like these newspaper articles and you know, be very specific so that one day I’m hoping to pull all this together into a larger history and it will be much easier.

Nicole (22m 10s):
That’s so true. It’s really all about doing it in smaller bites. Alright everyone, well, I hope you have a great week and we will talk to you again next week. Bye

Diana (22m 19s):
Bye everyone.

Nicole (22m 22s):
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.