RLP 359: Until Death Do Us Part… Or Five Weeks Later- A Tale of Marital Woe in 1875 Dallas

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 359 Until Death Do Us Part Or Five Weeks Later – A Tale of Marital Woe in 1875 Dallas. 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 (43s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro today.

Diana (51s):
Hi Nicole, how are you doing?

Nicole (53s):
Hey there. I’m doing great and I’ve been really thinking about how I’m going to use AI to help me with my research plan that I’m working on for my Sally Keaton project. And the objective is to prove that her sister is my ancestor Lucinda Keaton. And it’s kind of a different objective than usual, but I’ve been trying to trace all of the siblings of Lucinda Keaton that I discovered in her father’s estate file. So she was the most difficult one so far because she and her husband moved away and they had a common name. Her husband’s name was William Reeves and there were like 10 to 20 candidates that I was looking at in Tennessee with that name.

Nicole (1m 34s):
And I really kind of got to the end of a research project and thought I hadn’t found anything when at the last minute I thought let’s look in family trees. And I found a name that I recognized as a fan club member that was used as a middle name for one of the potential William Reeve’s sons. And that was a huge breakthrough. So I thought I would try to confirm this hypothesis with DNA evidence to see if I could find DNA matches between this Sally Keaton Reeves descendants and my ancestors’ descendants, Lucinda Keaton. And I found a couple matches. So now my research plan is probably going to be to verify the family trees of these matches going back to the common ancestral couple.

Nicole (2m 18s):
So I think that my research plan is gonna be pretty simple, but I do wanna find a few more DNA matches to add to the mix. So it’ll be kind of like looking in shared matches and verifying parent-child links basically.

Diana (2m 31s):
Right, which is like where you start, you know, you do the basics. Well, I love that and doing a research plan is so amazing. I know when I was working on my Henderson Weatherford research plan, I started looking at all the work that I had done before and and just really trying to think, okay, what do I really need to do here? And it clarified so much what the research needed to show and do. So I love doing a research plan. So good job.

Nicole (2m 59s):
Yeah, I think what I’ll have AI do is just to give me kind of like the writing and it’s all in my head of kind of what I wanna do, but I will have probably AI look at my previous research report and compile the known facts and then I’ll probably give it like a brief synopsis of my hypothesis and have it flesh that out. It’ll kind of be like my writing assistant because I can just tell it what I want it to write and then I’ll put down like some ideas for what I wanna do and then it can prioritize those for me. But it kind of already is in my mind. I just, I think I’ll use AI to help get it all written faster.

Diana (3m 37s):
It will be your coworker. Yeah, it will be great. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our next Research Like a Pro webinar coming up on Tuesday, June 10th. And this will be presented by Beth Snyder. The title is Discovering the Shrader Family through a Family Reunion Photograph. And in this webinar we’re going to learn all about Nebraska, Census Records, Old Photos. So the basis of it is that Lawrence and Leona Salsow, who are Beth’s husband’s grandparents, had an old picture among their belongings from a family reunion and they had a number of lists of the names and an overlay of the picture with the number of each person in the photo.

Diana (4m 19s):
And the original objective was to determine how everyone was related and when the picture was made. But Beth ended up meeting a new “cousin” who helped with the research and is named as a co-researcher. So that’s so neat. And this researcher also did additional work, not in the report, but which took the line back a couple more generations. So that’s so fun to have a research project based on a photo. I love that. Well, the next study group will be Research Like a Pro. So this will be our documentary study group and it begins August 27th, 2025 and registration is now open. And so we invite you to register and join us. Such a great way to work through a project with a small group of peers and to get feedback and to really focus.

Diana (5m 6s):
And a lot of people will do our study group multiple times because they find it so beneficial the registration will close on August 21st. So you’ve got all somewhere to think about it. But we encourage you to register sooner rather than later. Registration is limited. And if you have done the Research Like a Pro process in one of our study groups or courses or work through the book, we invite you to apply to be a peer group leader and have complimentary registration. Please join our newsletter that comes out every Monday where we give information about our latest blog posts and podcasts, upcoming lectures and coupon codes for any products that we have on sale.

Diana (5m 48s):
And we are looking forward to the summer and Institutes, and for the Institute that Nicole is coordinating, which is titled Integrating AI into Genealogical Research and Writing. This will be held June 16th through the 20th. It’s all virtual and it’s through the Texas Institute of Genealogy. And so we invite you to join us. We’ll be having so much fun all week working with AI and our research. Well, our topic for today is all about our ancestor Isabel Royston. And she was married, first of all to a John W.

Diana (6m 32s):
Carpenter. And so we’re calling her Belle Carpenter in the title of, of the blog post that goes along with this because we are talking all about her divorce. So I had her married on January 3rd, 1875 to this John W. Carpenter and her daughter Clem, their daughter was born on October 3rd, 1875. And then I had that she married secondly to Robert Royston, who is my ancestor. My line comes through him and she married him on January 16th, 1877. But I had no death record for this John Carpenter and I had assumed that he perhaps had died or deserted Isabella, but she wouldn’t have been able to marry again legally without being a widow or divorced.

Diana (7m 23s):
And so it was really exciting when a fellow researcher came across a notice in the Dallas Daily Herald from 1875 that provided a clue that actually helped me resolve this part of her history. So it just showed in the newspaper that it was the docket for Thursday, October 28th, 1875. It was Dallas County, Texas and it gave the number, number 2745, you know, on the docket. And it was for Belle Carpenter versus John W. Carpenter. So I was so excited to see that and I went right away to FamilySearch and found that the court records were there for Dallas County and they were arranged by case number.

Diana (8m 9s):
So that was so great because I had the case number thanks to the newspaper article and it was digitized microfilm that I could just browse from home and I did have to browse through to get to that case number, but it was pretty easy to get there just with the newspaper information and I found her case.

Nicole (8m 27s):
That is so exciting. Do you think you would’ve found it if you had searched for Carpenter in the Full Text Search?

Diana (8m 35s):
Maybe, but John Carpenter’s super common name and I don’t know if I would’ve searched for Belle, you know, ’cause I’d never seen her going by Belle. She was always Isabelle or Isabella in other records. So I, that’s a good question. You know, I should go try Full Text Search now that I have this and see if it does pop up.

Nicole (8m 54s):
Right? I think that’s so cool that there was a newspaper article and that a listener had searched for something about John Carpenter in Dallas County and found that article That’s so cool.

Diana (9m 4s):
And sent it to me. So Thank you listeners who help us with our research. So amazing.

Nicole (9m 10s):
Right? And so it just makes me think of you had thought like maybe they needed to have been divorced or that she was widowed in order for her to get remarried and then like what records could show that. And I think sometimes we don’t realize what court records could hold within them. I think court records are one of those record types that maybe we’re not always as familiar with because they’re harder to search. Like you have to look through a lot of pages and they’re not always indexed. And so it’s just one of those source types where we could always dig in a little more.

Nicole (9m 51s):
And I, I have put a lot of court records into research plans in the past and not found anything helpful. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it’s so hit or miss, like you just never know. And this one had just happened to be a gold mine of information.

Diana (10m 7s):
Exactly. Well, and Full Text Search is really changing the game too, as you mentioned, because for my Weatherford project, which is Belle’s father, I put in the William Weatherford I’m researching into Full Text Search, and it actually pulled up four court records that were for him and it would’ve been hard to have found them otherwise. So it, and it all depends on if FamilySearch has put those, you know, into the Full Text Search system, you know, they’re, they’re getting more and more records and so what isn’t there now might be there tomorrow.

Nicole (10m 40s):
That is so true. And I have noticed they have added a lot of things like that. A lot of court records, notarial records, things that they’ve been digitized, but they haven’t been really indexed. And so it’s a lot harder to find people in them. Well next, after you found the case, you transcribed the file and it had 26 images that needed to be transcribed. And so to speed up the process, you used Claude.ai and created a project titled the Isabella Weatherford Divorce Case File. So when we say, created a project, that is a specific feature within Claude, which is a chatbot like ChatGPT, and Claude’s projects allow you to set instructions for multiple chats that are saved as well as upload project knowledge.

Nicole (11m 30s):
So like if you have a report, or some kind of document to upload. So for this project in Claude, Diana gave AI the following prompt, “you are an expert genealogist and transcriptionist. I have a divorce court file from 1875 for Belle Carpenter versus John W Carpenter in Dallas County, Texas. I’ll be uploading the documents. You are to transcribe the documents, keeping the line breaks accurate. Put any unknown or undecipherable words in square brackets.” Next, Diana started a document in Google Docs where she would put all the transcriptions. She started with the source citation and then gave each document an image number and a description in the Google Doc.

Nicole (12m 17s):
Then she uploaded the image to Claude to transcribe and then added the transcription to the Google doc. So how did Claude do with the transcription? Large language models are getting better and better with reading handwritten text and images. Well the answer is that it did amazing. She only had to correct about three items in the entire case file. This is a huge improvement over large language models past transcription ability. And Claude even handled the certificates with lines, type text, handwritten numbers, and words beautifully. In the past it has struggled with mixed documents like this that have some type text, some forms, some table data, things like that.

Nicole (13m 5s):
But it did well this time. So when the transcription was complete, she copied the entire transcription from the Google doc back into the Claude project and said in a prompt, “using the complete transcription of the court case, provide a table of the key dates and events, the table should first have the date, then persons involved, then the action, and then the image number and description.”

Diana (13m 34s):
Right. So I had learned from past experiences with AI and doing something like this that it was important for me to have it include that image number and description as the source reach items so I could go double check it against the Google Doc. I wanted an easy way to, you know, make sure it was reporting dates and and events correctly. And the great thing was, because it was using the data I had first transcribed and checked, document by document, and there were no hallucinations, and it saved me so much time. So looking at the timeline, I noticed something really interesting and that is that the marriage certificate that I had stated January 3rd, 1874 as the marriage date but the court document stated January 3rd, 1875.

Diana (14m 22s):
So when I went and looked really closely at the marriage document, I noticed it was very blurry and the date was obscured. But on the same document, it clearly read, “witnessed my hand this fifth day of February ad 1875.” So you know, it’s one of those cases where the recorder mixed up the year on the first date. And I think we have all been there when it’s the new year. You know, you’re so used to writing 1874 and now it’s January, three days into January and you’re supposed to be writing 1875. You know, I know I’ve done that at the beginning of the year many times. So probably that was what happened. So the final prompt I gave AI was to write a blog post explaining this court case.

Diana (15m 6s):
And you know, it is a really sad story and we’re going to share what AI wrote. But even though it’s sad, I am so grateful to now know and what happened to Isabella and to have this chapter in her life. And I’m also happy to know that her second marriage was happier. She had an additional six children and she left a widow’s pension that details her later life. So with Isabella, you know, this is kind of unusual for a woman of this era to have two complete files of information about her. So she died in 1942. At the age of 84, she had lived through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and multiple moves between Missouri, Texas, Indian Territory/Oklahoma, and New Mexico.

Diana (15m 54s):
So maybe going through this challenge so early in life, because she was young, she was just 16, she was born on March 4th, 1858. And so maybe this just helped her to deal with all the other trials that she would have throughout her life. So Claude wrote a blog post, basically a story from what I had uploaded to the project, which was the complete transcription, and it did such a good job. So we’re just going to read through it because it really is kind of a fascinating story. So the title given by AI: Until Death Do Us Part, Or Five Weeks Later, A Tale of Marital Woe in 1875 Dallas.

Diana (16m 38s):
All right, so Claude writes, “In the Archives of Dallas County Civil District Court lies a poignant story that offers a window into both marriage and legal proceedings in post Civil War Texas. The case of Belle Carpenter vs. John W Carpenter, 1875 to 1877 provides a fascinating glimpse into 19th century divorce proceedings, women’s legal standing, and how courts handled allegations of abandonment and cruelty. On January 3rd, 1875, Belle and John W. Carpenter exchanged vows in Dallas County, Texas. According to Belle’s testimony, their marriage began happily with Belle functioning as what was then considered an exemplary wife, “faithful and affectionate,” managing household affairs “with prudence and economy,” and treating her husband “with kindness and forbearance.” But this domestic bliss proved startlingly brief.

Diana (17m 36s):
After approximately five weeks, Belle claimed that John “commenced a course of cruel, outrageous, and inhuman treatment” toward her.

Nicole (17m 45s):
Okay? Wow. So far AI is doing a pretty good job of writing this

Diana (17m 49s):
Right? And I loved how it took specific pieces from her testimony and put it in quotes. So I actually have her words, you know, in this story.

Nicole (17m 59s):
Well, let’s come back to this in a minute, and right now we’ll have a word from our Sponsor. Well, 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 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. Their easy to use search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, specific paper and more.

Nicole (18m 42s):
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Diana (19m 0s):
All right, so let’s continue with our story, which is all about the next section, which is illness and abandonment. So Claude wrote, The situation deteriorated dramatically when Belle fell seriously ill in mid-February 1875. Her petition describes her as “confined to her bed by a severe spell of sickness,” during which John allegedly neglected to provide her with medical attention or medicine. Belle’s court filings paint a harrowing picture of a bedridden woman who “begged and implored” her husband for medical assistance, which he refused “at all times” despite being “amply able” to provide it.

Diana (19m 43s):
On February 25, 1875—less than two months after their wedding—John abandoned Belle while she remained ill. According to her petition, he “wholly neglected and refuses to receive her as his wife or to furnish her the necessaries of life,” leaving her without arrangements for care or support during her illness. Belle’s petition further alleged that after deserting her, John engaged in character assassination, using “slanderous words calculated to bring her into public infamy and disgrace.” Specifically, she claimed that in public places and in front of various people, John declared that Belle “had been guilty of adultery” and was “a common prostitute”—allegations she vehemently denied as “false and wholly unfounded.”

Nicole (20m 28s):
Gosh, that’s so awful to imagine that.

Diana (20m 30s):
Yeah, and she was so young dealing with this and we don’t have any idea how old he was, but I imagine he was probably older, you know, not a teenager for sure.

Nicole (20m 40s):
Yeah, it’s been difficult to identify John Carpenter.

Diana (20m 42s):
Yeah.

Nicole (20m 42s):
Like, who was he? When was he born? Like we haven’t really been able to figure that much out.

Diana (20m 48s):
Nope. Or find him anywhere else.

Nicole (20m 49s):
Yeah. Well maybe he was a criminal and he had to change his name. Well, the next part of the blog post that Claude wrote says the legal process begins on May 21st, 1875. Belle initiated divorce proceedings in Dallas County District Court. Unable to afford the legal costs, she filed an affidavit of poverty, stating she was “too poore to pay the costs of said suit.” The court issued summonses to locate John, but he proved difficult to find, with the sheriff returning one summons noting he was “not found in Dallas Co Texas.” Eventually, on June 7, 1875, John acknowledged the petition, writing directly on the court document: “I hereby accept service on the within Petition & Waive citation & service of copy of Petition.” An Unexpected Development.

Nicole (21m 39s):
The case took an unexpected turn when, on October 3, 1875, Belle gave birth to a daughter named Clem Carpenter. This revealed that Belle had been pregnant during the early months of their marriage and throughout the initial legal proceedings. In March 1876, Belle amended her petition to address this new circumstance, adding in July 1876 a specific request for custody, arguing that John was “wholly incompetent to have the Care & Control of said Child” while she was “fully Competent & able to take the proper Care of said Child.”

Diana (22m 15s):
Okay, then we have the, the section titled, John’s Defense and the Court’s Decision. John finally filed his answer on February 8, 1876, through his attorney W.K. Young. His response was brief but direct: he “denies all and singular the allegations in Plaintiff’s Petition.” Despite this denial, the court ultimately sided with Belle. A jury, led by foreman George W. Baird, found “the allegations as set forth in the petition of Plaintiff to be true.” The final hearing dissolved the bonds of matrimony between Belle and John, restored to Belle “all the privileges of a single Person,” and ordered John to pay court costs.

Diana (22m 59s):
And then Aftermath and Enforcement The section reads, Collecting the $8.20 in court costs proved challenging. On December 27, 1876, the court issued an execution order against John’s property to recover the costs. However, when Sheriff W.M. Moon attempted to execute this order, he reported on June 16, 1877: “No property found on which to levy this Execution.”

Nicole (23m 27s):
That is interesting. You know, he must have been poor as well, or maybe he had gambled away his property. Who knows what happened. But that really paints a picture of a difficult marriage where they were poor and also he was not kind. And I have to think that, you know, she was sick because of her pregnancy.

Diana (23m 49s):
Exactly. And we all know cases of women who are deathly ill with pregnancy and that very well could be it.

Nicole (23m 58s):
Alright, well the next section written by Claude is titled, Historical Significance. This case provides valuable insights into divorce proceedings in post-Civil War Texas.

Nicole (24m 42s):
Though divorce was stigmatized in the 19th century, Texas law provided legal avenues for women to escape abusive or untenable marriages. Belle’s successful petition demonstrates that courts could be receptive to women’s claims of cruelty and abandonment, particularly when physical welfare was at stake The case also illuminates aspects of marriage, gender roles, and legal proceedings in 1870s Texas. Belle’s petition carefully emphasized her fulfillment of expected wifely duties, suggesting that proving oneself a “good wife” was important to securing a favorable divorce outcome. Meanwhile, John’s alleged slander about Belle’s sexual conduct points to the double standards of the era, where a woman’s reputation was particularly vulnerable to such accusations. Belle Carpenter v. John W. Carpenter reminds us that behind the formal legal documents of historical court cases lie very human stories of hope, disappointment, suffering, and the pursuit of justice. This brief marriage and lengthy legal proceeding offers a window into both personal tragedy and the evolving legal protections for women in 19th-century America.

Diana (25m 17s):
Well, what did you think Nicole, did Claude write a good blog post for me?

Nicole (25m 24s):
Yeah, I mean, we have always loved Claude for its down to earth writing style. And I think this is an excellent example of that. It is not overly flowery, it’s not adding a lot of commentary. It’s quoting the court case a lot. And I know that the listeners can’t tell when it’s quoting the court case because we didn’t use quote, no property found on which to levy this execution unquote. But if you read the blog post that’s part of the show notes, then you can see all of the quotes. So it really did a good job incorporating quotes directly from the court records into the story. And I think that the writing doesn’t detract from the story it helps people understand the story and that’s what a good story should do.

Nicole (26m 10s):
So success.

Diana (26m 10s):
Right, and I think it’s pretty fascinating at the end that it did the historical significance, ’cause I hadn’t asked it to do that, but it was absolutely right that it really did show that women could, you know, rid themselves of a bad marriage in this era. And I like the final statement where it says, this brief marriage and lengthy legal proceeding offers a window into both personal tragedy and the evolving legal protections for women. So that is so interesting, and I like that it also pointed out that it restored her to her single status, all the privileges of a single person.

Diana (26m 50s):
And so we have talked before that on the podcast, that once a woman married in this era, they became femme covert, meaning that their husband had all control of the family, the property, everything a woman could do very little on her own. And you know, throughout the 1800s we see that getting better and better. But you know, there was a long way to go for women to get all of their rights. So this is such an interesting example and I was just so grateful to whoever found that for me. I can’t remember their name now. Sorry if you’re listening, but you know, I probably should have done a real project on trying to discover what happened.

Diana (27m 33s):
But sometimes serendipity is just great and you, you get a little boost, a little help. So I appreciate that.

Nicole (27m 40s):
I love that. You know, one takeaway from this also is that you spent the time to transcribe the court case accurately with the help of AI, but then fact checking it, but then the AI can use that as an input to then craft a whole story for you. So putting in the work to accurately transcribe historical records is a really important part of using AI in our genealogical writing because once we have that really good transcription, we can then transform it into so many different formats. And you chose a blog post here, but this could easily be transformed into multiple types of genealogical writing from biography to a family narrative to a research report or a proof argument.

Nicole (28m 24s):
There’s so many different ways that AI can help you use that transcription once it’s done.

Diana (28m 30s):
Right, and it’s now in a Claude Project, so I can return to this time and time again and get more information from it. So I could do something, for example, to ask it to really analyze the court proceedings. You know, how, what was the court supposed to do in a case like this? And I could ask it to do its extended thinking and web search to go out and draw on historical knowledge about court cases. I mean, I could do a lot with what I’ve got here and then compare that to how it was worked in Belle’s case. So it’s kind of exciting to think about how we build that foundation with the documents and then how we can use AI and historical context to really help us understand our ancestors better.

Nicole (29m 18s):
Absolutely. Well, Thank you for sharing that with us.

Diana (29m 21s):
All right, well thanks everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed the story of Belle and that had a happy ending, and we will talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye-bye.

Nicole (29m 34s):
Bye-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.