RLP 351: Separating Women of the Same Name: A Tale of Two Cleo Zinns

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 351, Separating Women of the Same Name – Two Cleo Zinns. 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.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro. Hi Mom.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
Great. What are you working on?

Diana (53s):
Well, I’ve been working on doing a locality guide for Arkansas territory or the area that I’m researching, Izard County, in the territorial era because this project that I’m doing is going to really be pre-1830 to see if I can find something about Henderson Weatherford’s proposed father, William. So it was kind of fun, it was exciting to see that there are some new avenues for research and of course I turned to AI to try this out and I used deep research on several of the platforms. And it was so interesting to see what they came up with.

Diana (1m 34s):
So here’s what I did, I, I tried a little experiment, so I did deep research and of course I’d given it my locality guide template that we use here at FamilyLocket. And then I just would take the entire guide that it generated for me and I put it in a Google doc. So I did this for all four platforms that I used. I used Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. Then I took that Google doc, I put that into Claude and asked it to do a summary to put everything all together in a guide. So I was hoping that it would take the best of each one of those and put it together in just a beautiful guide, but it wasn’t as great as I had hoped.

Diana (2m 19s):
So I still had to go through and really do a lot of fact checking. You know, sometimes we think AI can read our minds maybe and do everything we want it to do exactly as we would’ve done it, but I don’t think my prompt was as good or maybe it just wasn’t that smart that day. I don’t know. But it did give me a, a good jumpstart on the guide that I then went and worked with a little bit.

Nicole (2m 40s):
Interesting. Yeah, I think sometimes my prompts are not as good as they could be, you know, when I don’t get the desired result. So it’s interesting to think about how we could say things in a different way to get it to produce the results that we want. And sometimes it’s challenging to know how to say it

Diana (2m 57s):
Right. And especially when it’s something, something a little bit new or different that we’re trying out. I also think that I probably just gave it too much. So maybe if I had said take just the history section from all four of these locality guides and summarize that, I think if I had broken it down, you know, we teach to do prompt chaining or to break things up, I think that probably would’ve been better and then I could have done some fact checking there and then gone on to the next section. So I’ll have to try it again with another locality guide. But it’s fun to explore and try things. And one of the great things in the process of doing this was I found out or realized that Independence County was the parent county of Izard and their records were not burned.

Diana (3m 48s):
You know, Izard is a burned county and Independence County has records that go back into the 1820s. So that was exciting. I have no idea if my William Weatherford was there that early and would have records in Independence, but maybe, so at least I can check and that can be part of my research plan. So that was a good thing that came outta my locality research.

Nicole (4m 12s):
Fantastic. Good job. I was thinking what I might do differently with that locality guide when you were trying to combine all of those four together. And I was thinking it might be interesting to say put everything together from all four of these and then after that remove duplicated information. Like, you know what I mean?

Diana (4m 32s):
I like that I’m gonna have to play with this ’cause I still have that combined Google Doc, you know, I am saving that. So I think I will definitely try some different things with that. Yeah, I like that idea. Have combine it and then remove duplicates and then maybe do a summary. Very interesting. It’s fun. And it’s been fun just to see Claude get deep research or no, excuse me, they already had like a reasoning model. They have searched the web now

Nicole (4m 60s):
Those are all three different features. So Claude did not have web searching, right? Claude did have reasoning, which I think Google calls it thinking, Claude still does not have deep research, but it does at least have web searching now. Right,

Diana (5m 14s):
Right. So interesting. And they sometimes have the same names for things, sometimes different names, just to keep us on our toes and trying to understand what we can do with each of them. And it changes week by week, which is fun.

Nicole (5m 27s):
It has been changing so much, which is great because every time we get a new feature we get to do more and we can test more things out. That’s great. Well for our announcements today, our next webinar in the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series will be Tuesday, April 15th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time by Jill Knock is called A Mighty Duo: Autosomal DNA and Indirect Evidence Reveal Harrison Johnson’s Biological Father. This will include testing a hypothesis, autosomal DNA, my Heritage and Ancestry, migration diagramming, the Shared Center Morgan Project, a Gephi Network Graph and Tennessee.

Nicole (6m 7s):
And Jill is an accredited genealogist on our team here at FamilyLocket. So we’re excited to have her share her research. The next Research Like a Pro study group begins August, 2025 and if you’d like to be a peer group leader, then you can apply on our website, make sure you join our weekly Monday newsletter to get news and updates from us and upcoming conferences and webinars. We are both going to be teaching in the Legacy Family Tree Webinar Marathon on April 3rd and fourth, so that’ll be fun. And Mom is teaching DNA Meets the Paper Trail: Pedigree Triangulation Strategies for Early 19th-Century Research. And I am teaching From Research to Writing: AI Tools for Genealogists.

Nicole (6m 50s):
Then on May 23rd through 26th, we will be at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. And our class that we’re teaching together is about research planning with AI. So we look forward to seeing you there.

Diana (6m 59s):
Thanks for those. It’ll be fun to be part of all of those. Well, today we are going to talk about merged identities. And this is something we all will come up against in our research more often than not. And it’s really tricky when it’s a man, but it’s even more tricky when it’s a woman. And that’s because here in the US women have a maiden name and then they get married and they could have several different married names. And so we have to try to make sure that we’ve got the correct facts and sources attached to the right woman And it can take some really good research. One of the things that I love about the Research Like a Pro process is that we have the steps to do the research log and the timeline and those really help to put together a profile for a woman that can separate her out from others of the same name.

Diana (7m 51s):
So I had this recently in a little research project and I was working on some descendancy research for DNA and I was looking for the ancestral couple in common with a DNA match. And I had this mystery match, and I’m just going to call her Ellen. She had no tree, no clue to her identity until Ancestry’s Pro Tools became available. And when I looked at her closest match I saw she connected through our common ancestor, Isabella D Weatherford and Isabella’s daughter, Mary Clem Carpenter. So Isabella married John Carpenter in 1874 and Mary was born in 1875.

Diana (8m 37s):
And I just recently discovered that John must have been a scoundrel. He was an abusive husband and so she divorced him soon after the marriage. And then Isabella then married Robert C Royston, who was my second great-grandfather, in 1877. So she only had this one child with John Carpenter and any DNA matches coming through this daughter would be half relationships. And I wanted to make sure I was identifying those correctly. One of the things that would be helpful would be that any DNA matches coming through that line, we would only have inherited DNA or have shared DNA through Isabella, not through her husband John Carpenter.

Diana (9m 19s):
And as I’m working back on that Weatherford line, I really wanted to try to separate out Weatherford DNA from the Weatherford-Royston marriage or that couple. So this was kind of the reason why I was doing this research and as I’m working on Mary Clem Carpenter’s descendants, I noticed hints for her daughter Cleo were for a Cleo Zinn born 1904. But the hints pointed to three husbands for Cleo, two different death dates, two different birthplaces. And I had no idea were any or all of these hints correct. When I sometimes have a problem like this, I’ll go over to the collaborative Family Search Family tree and that’s a really good place for descendancy research.

Diana (10m 7s):
And I can also review relationships and sources and Family Search also gives hint to help build a person’s profile. So I went to the Family Search and checking there, I found Mary Clem and Albert Carpenter, she married a man with the same name so she didn’t have to change her name when she got married and their daughter Cleo was there. However, Cleo had no marriages and very few sources attached to her. So her profile was very, very basic. So then I decided to look for a Cleo Zinn and I found another profile that seemed to match and this profile for this other Cleo had Oklahoma school records and censuses attached to her with Albert Carpenter as her father.

Diana (10m 51s):
And that was, you know, I knew she lived in Oklahoma. And it had a marriage to a Cecil Wane Zinn. So I could tell that there were things just not adding up. And so even though it was supposed to be a simple descendancy task, I decided I needed to do a real research project and started adding to my research log this little, this little bit about Cleo Zinn.

Nicole (11m 13s):
Yeah, sometimes I think we’re working along and you know, we haven’t found anything that we feel like we need to log in the research log ’cause we’re just kind of doing these tasks, like checking this descendancy line in your tree and then all of a sudden you’re stumped and it’s time to, instead of working on the tree transition over to just putting everything in the research log until you can figure things out. And it’s so nice to have a place to do that. And that’s a tool that was really missing from, you know, my research when I was a beginner.

Diana (11m 43s):
Well yeah, I think we didn’t realize how useful it would be until I did accreditation and had to do a research log and then taught you about research logs And it was like, why didn’t we do this years ago? This is amazing.

Nicole (11m 56s):
Yeah, it’s a really good problem solving tool because it allows you to put everything you find about a, a really tricky question somewhere, even when you can’t attach it to your tree.

Diana (12m 7s):
Right.

Nicole (12m 8s):
Well Diana used her Airtable research log for Isabella Weatherford and Robert Royston to sort out this Cleo Carpenter conundrum. And the research log provided a place for details to a place to just really analyze all of these sources and details about Cleo. And as she did this, she was able to build out a profile for Cleo to make sense of the records. So she began from the beginning with Cleo’s parents, Mary Clem and Albert Carpenter. And she was present in the 1910 and 1920 censuses in their Ardmore Carter County Oklahoma households both agreed on a 1904 birth in Oklahoma. Next she looked at the 1947 obituary for Mary Clem Carpenter, which stated her living relatives.

Nicole (12m 54s):
It said Mrs. Mary C Carpenter, a resident of the city for many years, died September 21st in Pittsburgh, Kansas. The body is being returned to Ardmore for services to stay at 4:00 PM in the first Methodist church, Dr. William H Mansfield conducting burial and Rose Hill Cemetery will be directed by Harvey Funeral Home. Mrs. Carpenter was 72 a member of the First Methodist Church Order of the Eastern Star, Rebecca Lodge, American Legion Auxiliary and Daughters of the American Revolution. Mrs. Carpenter had lived in Ardmore until recently. She leaves one son, Elton Carpenter of Ada, a daughter, Mrs.

Nicole (13m 34s):
RE Zinn of Columbus, Kansas, four grandchildren, a sister, Mrs. GE Huntley, Tucumcari, NM and three brothers, CB Royston, Comanche, OH Royston, and Ed Royston of Ivanhoe, California. Graveside services are to be in charge of the Eastern Star. The pallbearers will be Tom Cheney, Hardy Murphy, Ella Lofton, EM Wyatt, George Cleek and Bill Roberts. So wow, this is such a great obituary and I love that it really tells a lot about her different affiliations with community groups and her church. And then of course the best part is all of the relationships mentioned.

Diana (14m 14s):
Exactly. You know what stuck out to me as we were looking at that was that she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I need to look into that. I wonder if she has an application there for DAR.

Nicole (14m 26s):
I bet she does. I mean, how else do you become a member? That’s really interesting.

Diana (14m 30s):
I know we have never really thought of that. And it would have to be through her mother’s line, through the Weatherfords. That’s really interesting. Now we’re gonna have to go off on that tangent, see what was going on there.

Nicole (14m 43s):
Could it not be through her father’s line?

Diana (14m 45s):
Well it could be through John Carpenter. I guess we don’t know anything about him. Or maybe she went through the Royston line.

Nicole (14m 53s):
Well, if went through our ancestors, we should definitely look and see which line she joined through.

Diana (14m 59s):
Exactly. Well it was fun reading that obituary and I recognized all those living relatives. I mean, I knew the Roystons and I knew the Huntleys. The one I did not recognize was Mrs. R E Zinn, who must have been Cleo E Carpenter of the census records because in 1910, Mary had noted in the census that she had six children but only two living. And so she has, in that obituary, she has one son, Elton and a daughter, Mrs. R E Zinn. So Mrs. R E Zinn had to be Cleo. So everything up until that point, you know, made sense with Cleo’s records.

Diana (15m 40s):
But the challenge came after 1920. So I had found this Cleo Carpenter married to Cecil W Zinn that also had those sources attached that seemed to be for Mary Clem and Albert’s daughter, those Oklahoma school records. And I’ve used those records before. They are wonderful records. They have the parent, the birth date, the age for the children in the family attending school that year. And in each instance A.L. Carpenter of Ardmore gave the information about Cleo. So this would’ve been Albert L Carpenter. He gave her birthdate as either May 10th, 1904 or December 1st, 1903.

Diana (16m 23s):
So those were in two different years of the school records and Cleo’s headstones December 1st, 1904. So it was a combination of the two and probably the most accurate because apparently the dad giving the information couldn’t quite remember and sort of had it right. So there were some problems that arose when evaluating Mrs. Cecil W Zinn, the initials CW Zinn don’t match the RC Zinn in Mary Clem’s obituary and the census records for Cleo Zinn in the household show, the birth year of 1904, but a birthplace of Indiana.

Diana (17m 3s):
And then record hints from Ancestry found a marriage in 1926 for Cleo Carpenter in Carter County, Oklahoma to an AB Yeager and his obituary dated 1934. And then we also have Cleo wife of Cecil Zinn residing in his 1930 household. So if she was Cleo Carpenter, had she divorced Yeager and remarried? So I’m finding a couple different husbands and wondering what in the world is going on here? 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.

Diana (17m 46s):
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Diana (18m 27s):
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Nicole (18m 36s):
Well the next step was to really look into this AB Yeager. And isn’t it frustrating when all you have is initials? It would be a lot easier if these names are spelled out everywhere instead of Mrs. RE Zinn. Wish we just knew that full name there. And then Mr. Yeager, all we have is AB Yeager. Well, looking into this, AB Yeager, his obituary was found and it revealed the previous Miss Cleo Carpenter as his widow. So here’s what it said. Yeager rites set for Friday services for World War veteran to be held at Methodist Church delayed pending the arrival of a sister from Miami, Florida. Funeral services for AB Lefty Yeager will be held at the first Methodist Church Friday afternoon.

Nicole (19m 23s):
The hour had not been definitely set, but it was thought likely the services would be held at 5:50 in the afternoon. Yeager, a World War veteran and former professional baseball player, died in the Veteran’s Hospital at Sulfur at 1:20 Tuesday afternoon after having been taken to the hospital earlier in the day. Although he had been in poor health for several months direct cause of his death was said to have been bronchial pneumonia. Surviving, in addition to his widow, the former Miss Cleo Carpenter, are a sister, Mrs. Charles K Leyler, Miami, Florida, and one brother George Yeager, Galveston. Other relatives who will be here for the funeral include Mr. and Mrs. OH Royston, Apache and Mrs.

Nicole (20m 4s):
RB, Royston of Duncan, Mr. and Mrs. Pearl Carpenter and family, Oklahoma City, Mrs. Zach Cooper, Sulfur and Mr. and Mrs. EJ. Carpenter of Tyler, Texas. Carpenter is a brother to Mrs. Yeager. Yeager was born in Galveston, Texas. September 10th, 1901. He was married to Miss Carpenter, the daughter of Mrs. A.L. Carpenter of the city. October 25th, 1927. They had no children. His baseball career was started on the Sandlot Diamonds of Galveston, Texas. He came to Ardmore when the city entered the old Texas Oklahoma League. And later when Ardmore transferred to the Western Association, Yeager continued with the club.

Nicole (20m 45s):
During the five years he pitched for the Boomers. He was regarded as the Ace Southpaw. He saw service with Oklahoma City in the Western League and was in the Texas League for a short time. Yeager’s last professional baseball was played with Winston-Salem in the Piedmont League. His retirement coming because of ill health. Last year he was manager of the Ardmore Legionnaire. Harvey Brothers Funeral Home will have charge of the funeral arrangements. Wow, what a great obituary

Diana (21m 9s):
That was so fun. And I looked him up and he is listed on the professional baseball website. So it was fun to learn about him. And that obituary was fabulous because I could now see that it was Cleo Carpenter that was married to AB Yeager and she was widowed that year. I recognized the family members, you know, other people who would be there were the Royston. So I knew this was the right family. So I hypothesized that she had then remarried after his death in 1934. And I started looking for RE Zinn and I found Ralph Edward Zinn and Cleo residing in Harris County, Texas in 1940.

Diana (21m 53s):
She had no children. And her address in 1935 was Ardmore, Oklahoma. I had found the right Mrs. Zinn and the 1950 census found the couple living in Kansas, right where Cleo’s mother’s obituary stated her death place and married Clem Carpenter had lived with her daughter at the end of her life. So Cleo outlived Ralph who died on December 10th, 1974 in Harris County, Texas. And she died on November 25th, 1987 and was buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery Carter County back in Oklahoma near her brother Elton and her parents Albert and Mary Clem Carpenter. So the record on Find a Grave also had conflated the two Cleo Zinns and showed the cemetery as the burial place for Cleo married to Cecil Zinn.

Diana (22m 43s):
So I was so curious why anyone thought that the Cleo married to Cecil had the maiden name of Carpenter, and I concluded that the record hints for this Cleo born 1904 in the household of Mary Clem and Albert just led previous researchers to confuse the two women and the Zinn surname. And Mary Clem’s obituary certainly made a case for this conclusion. And what is the probability of two Cleo Zinns born 1904 living in the Oklahoma, Kansas area. So of course I wanted to try to see if I could clarify the other Cleo Zen’s maiden name and found the marriage record in a newspaper article and it, she was Cleo Redmond.

Diana (23m 28s):
So it was a marriage of Cecil W Zinn and Miss Cleo Redmond. So finally solved the mystery. And with this final fact, I could correct the profiles for the two Cleos on my tree, the Family Search Family tree, and Find a Grave. So that was great to be able to separate out Cleo Carpenter and Cleo Redmond. And as a bonus, I discovered the identity of my mystery match who had descended from Cleo’s brother Elton J Carpenter. And Cleo never had any children. So now I know that all matches coming through Mary Clem Carpenter’s line are through her son Elton.

Nicole (24m 3s):
Wow, what a great research project. And it’s so interesting to hear your thoughts about why you thought these two Cleos got conflated when they had different maiden names of Redmond versus Carpenter. And I think you’re right that sometimes with people who lived in the same place, especially with the same birth year, the hints can get confused and they, they just give you both hints for two different people. And I’ve seen that happen a lot where you’re looking at someone in a census page on Ancestry, and the hints on the sidebar are showing records for multiple people, not just for this one. And that just shows that we have to do the discerning and figuring out which ones are the right person. And we can’t just rely on the record hints to always be accurate because those are machine generated.

Nicole (24m 47s):
You know, that’s artificial intelligence. We need to use our real intelligence to link people together and find the records that are the match. So that’s good that you could separate those out on Family Search and Find a Grave in various places where they’d got conflated and fix that all up. And I love the bonus too, that you were able to learn a valuable piece of information that Cleo didn’t have children. And that’s so helpful and relevant with your DNA research with Descendancy and trying to figure out who the matches are. That’s really great that Elton had some descendants who had DNA tested so that you could have DNA for this branch,

Diana (25m 22s):
Right? And there are quite a few of them actually. So I am excited with this next part of my DNA project to see if some of those will help me to figure out the Weatherford line. So, you know, I think one of the problems with Cleo was that marriage record between Cleo and the others then took place in Kansas. And those marriage records were not readily available. And so I found it through newspapers, through newspaper articles. So sometimes those marriage records in the 1900s are not in a collection online and you have to write to the county or the state to get those. And so I think we have to be careful of making assumptions.

Diana (26m 3s):
So this is such a great little example of digging in and figuring it out. I loved it. It was a fun afternoon. Yes,

Nicole (26m 10s):
Sometimes it’s great when we have a research project that we can find a question, find the records to answer it and wrap it up all in one afternoon. It’s nice. It puts a little nice bow on the package. We sometimes can’t do that with our other research questions that we’re continually working on for weeks and weeks. So well, let’s just go over some tips for separating women of the same name. First, use a research log to capture all the records for both women. Then through analysis you can begin to separate the identities, seek out all possible records, whether census, marriage, newspapers, obituaries, et cetera. Look for other family relationships that prove the identity of each woman.

Nicole (26m 52s):
And when finished, correct online trees and state the reasoning you used to help other researchers know why you changed it.

Diana (26m 59s):
Well, I hope everyone who’s been listening has enjoyed this episode and this little story of the Two Cleo Zinns, and I’m sure all of our listeners are thinking of similar situations and maybe you have something that you haven’t solved yet. So I’d really highly recommend taking all those tips and seeing if you can figure out different identities for people that might have been conflated. So thanks everyone for listening, and we will talk to you next time.

Nicole (27m 30s):
Bye

Diana (27m 31s):
Bye-Bye.

Nicole (27m 33s):
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.