RLP 390: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 3 Locality Research

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 390: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 3 Locality Research. 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 (42s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone, welcome to Research Like a Pro.

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

Nicole (51s):
Hey, I’m doing well. I’m excited. It’s coming up soon to January and we’re gonna be doing our 14 day Research Like a Pro challenge. It’ll be fun to start the new year off doing a mini project, working for 30 minutes a day on a, on an objective.

Diana (1m 7s):
I agree. I’ve been thinking about what I want to do and I kind of wanna do the one that we talked about a couple episodes ago with the John Royston apprentice story and who his, I can’t think what you would call him, you know, anyway, the one who had sponsored the apprenticeship, who was put the advertisement in as a runaway, I think his name was Daniels. So I kind of want to explore that more. And I was thinking that this 14 day challenge, I also want to do the whole project using AI. I mean, I always use AI in my projects, but I really want to again, go back to trying each step of Research Like a Pro with AI and get some new fun examples.

Nicole (1m 48s):
Yeah, I have no idea what I’m gonna work on. I need to figure that out. But it is so fun to think about what I need to figure out in the family. And I’ve been working so hard on Lucinda Keaton’s siblings, and I know I have a couple of her brothers that kind of get lost in Mississippi that I should work on. So maybe I’ll keep working on those. But it’s been fun. There were 13 children in that family, so it’s been really interesting to figure out who they all were.

Diana (2m 14s):
Oh wow. That is a lot to track.

Nicole (2m 17s):
Yeah, and they all seem to do that whole westward migration, getting lost, type of thing. Only one or two stayed in South Carolina.

Diana (2m 25s):
That was what everybody was doing. Move west and get lost.

Nicole (2m 30s):
I’m getting lost, especially in those states that are a little bit newer, like the territories and places where not a lot of structure was in place when they, when they moved out there,

Diana (2m 42s):
Right. The record keeping isn’t as good. Or it took a while after the county was organized to really get a good system for keeping records and you know, they’re basically working on building roads and surviving in the wilderness, So it took a while.

Nicole (2m 57s):
So true. Well, I hope a lot of you will join us in the 14 day Research Like a Pro challenge. Well, our announcements for today are that the next webinar in the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series is by Emma Lowe, one of the researchers on our FamilyLocket genealogist research team. It’s titled, Reconstructing the Family of Dorothea Radloff in Pomerania. And she is going to talk about tracing Dorothea from the Midwestern United States to her birthplace in a small village in Pomerania. She’s going to talk about German church records and finding a bunch of new Radloff relatives. She’s going to show how following the Research Like a Pro process can help identify which German record collections would be relevant and helping to make all these new discoveries.

Nicole (3m 42s):
So this will include FAN club research, Evangelical-Lutheran church records, locality survey, and the website Archion. So we’re excited to have Emma with that lecture coming up. Also coming up is our next Research Like a Pro with DNA study group that starts in February. And we hope a lot of you will join us and maybe you have a family line that you’d like to confirm with DNA evidence, or maybe you have a hypothesized set of parents that you’d like to test to see if that’s accurate using DNA matches. And so we hope that many of you will join us in our DNA study group that starts in February, join our newsletter that comes out every Monday for new updates and posts.

Nicole (4m 24s):
And then we hope to see many of you at RootsTech March 5th through 7th in Salt Lake City.

Diana (4m 29s):
Well, let’s jump into our topic for the day. We are returning to the research on Cynthia Dillard Royston and phase three or part three of the process is Locality Research and researching a new locality is always exciting and fun. I love seeing what is available and learning the background of the area. And this really helps us set the stage for the research phase. The exciting thing for this project was I had a new area of Georgia to explore, and so I used AI to help me create a locality guide for Cass County, Georgia. And that really speeded up this part of the process. It gave me some great insights.

Diana (5m 11s):
I will note that Cass County’s name was changed to Bartow in 1861, but I am just continuing to call it Cass County throughout this project because for the era that the family was there, that’s what it was called. So it’s a one of those confusing things. And the records under the catalog entries are all always under Bartow. So it, it’s kind of an interesting situation. Well, I had settled on this area in Georgia because I had recently found new records for Cynthia’s husband Thomas B Royston in Cass County, and I was hoping that I could find some Dillards there at the same time that could be her family of origin.

Diana (5m 54s):
So my objective clearly pinpoints this location. My research objective states, Discover a candidate for Cynthia Dillard Royston’s father residing in Cass County, Georgia during the 1830s. Cynthia was born about 1815 in Georgia and died on August 22nd, 1882 in Collin County, Texas. Cynthia married Thomas B Royston about 1833 or 1834, possibly in Cass County, Georgia.

Nicole (6m 22s):
Okay, great. Well, let’s talk about narrowing the timeframe. And this is a really essential step in creating a locality guide. And it’s the idea that you need to focus on specific years so that you’re not looking at all of the different record collections available like in the 1940s when your project is in the 1840s. So we suggest using a span of several years before the ancestor arrived in the area and several years after they left. And in the case of Cynthia, we knew that Cass County, Georgia wasn’t formed until 1832. So we wanted a guide focused on the county’s beginning to 1860, at least 20 years after Cynthia and Thomas migrated west to Alabama.

Nicole (7m 8s):
So Cass County is in the northwestern corner of Georgia, and Thomas and family moved across the border to DeKalb County, Alabama by 1837. So the Roystons did not stay long in the area, however, perhaps Cynthia Dillard’s family did. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. The air is getting crisp, and for many of us that means a little extra time to dive into our family history. As Genealogists, we spend years building our family trees. But what if you could do more than just connect the dots? What if you could bring in those names on your tree to life? This is where Newspapers.com comes in.

Nicole (7m 48s):
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Nicole (8m 30s):
Just head over to Newspapers.com/gift and use promo code, FamilyLocket to purchase a subscription for someone special. That’s newspapers.com/gift. Your favorite genealogist will thank you. So now that we have a timeframe for when we want the locality guide to be from the beginning of the county up until 1860, we can now work on creating a locality guide and using the deep research capabilities of the large language models saved time and provided a good foundation to start the guide. And the process that Diana used is to query each model. So she’ll do like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude, and then choose the one that she likes best as her main guide, and then copy and paste sections from the other models’ guides as needed.

Nicole (9m 17s):
So she’s kind of piecing things together from each of them. And it’s interesting how similar, yet different the results are with the exact same prompt. And so Diana has a Claude project titled Locality Guides that has our Research Like a Pro locality guide template in the project knowledge and the project instructions give specifics about how she wants Claude to create the guide. She also used these instructions for the other large language models and gave it the template. So here are the instructions: you are an expert genealogist. I am creating a locality guide to be used in research.

Nicole (9m 60s):
I want to learn about a specific location for my research project. Search your knowledge and identify online and offline research for my specific county. Provide details about the various sections of the locality guide template provided in the project knowledge. Provide links to sources whenever possible, structure the format, preserving the given categories and using bulleted topics in markdown.

Diana (10m 22s):
All right, so let’s take a look at how the different large language models did with this query. When I did this in Claude, it was model 4.5 Sonnet, and it used its reasoning model to search and think through the various sections of the guide. And the output was an artifact that opened to the site of the main chat. And when I copied that into a Google Doc, it gave me eight pages of succinct information with links, and it had 25 unique sources. So that was pretty good. Now, when I tried Perplexity, I used a locality guide space, which is like a project, and Nicole had created this and shared this with me. She had provided custom instructions and the same template to use.

Diana (11m 5s):
Perplexity created the guide based on 20 unique sources, and it used its deep research capabilities. It took several minutes as it searched and thought about each section and came up with a six page guide. And I copied that into a Google doc, and I added a link to the specific chat so I could continue if I decided I wanted to. Then ChatGPT, I used the deep research feature and it provided 213 pages when copied into my Google Doc, which sounds amazing, but it is also a bit overwhelming. So since it had worked off of my template, it imported the headings and I could easily click on a heading to review the section, which was really nice.

Diana (11m 47s):
Gemini also used deep research, and it provided 32 pages of information with endnotes, so the work cited. So my biggest challenge when working with these locality guides for multiple models was correlating the answers. I wanted something succinct but complete, and I also wanted to be able to access the more in-depth treatment that some of the models provided, like ChatGPT and those 213 pages. So what I decided to do was I created another project in Claude, and I put all of the locality guides into that project. And so now I can just go into Claude and ask any question about locality and it can search the guides for an answer.

Diana (12m 28s):
I also had Claude do some taking all of it and putting it together for me. So that was, that was kind of a fun process.

Nicole (12m 36s):
That’s so much information, and what a good idea to put all of it into its own project. So now you have a great resource for Cass County, Georgia.

Diana (12m 45s):
Right.

Nicole (12m 47s):
Well, Diana tried out her new Cass County project in Claude and asked it to provide a summary about any record loss the county had experienced. So it searched through the four guides that she had linked to in the project knowledge and Claude replied with the following: major record loss event November 5th, 1864. The most significant record loss for Cass County occurred when Union Forces burned the courthouse in Cassville on November 5th, 1864 during the Civil War. Fortunately, many county records survived thanks to heroic efforts by Cass County Clerk, Tom Ward, also referred to as Thomas A. Ward. According to local tradition, Ward loaded vital record books into a buggy or wagon and fled just ahead of the flames.

Nicole (13m 34s):
The following bound volumes were preserved: Deed books – continuous from the 1830s with no known volume gaps. Marriage registers – most marriages from 1833 onward survived (Book B starts around 1837). Probate and estate books, Will Book A covering the 1830s-1850s survived. Court minutes – Superior Court minutes survived. These saved volumes were later used in Cartersville to continue the record series.

Diana (14m 5s):
So that was fun to see that even though the courthouse burned, a lot of things were saved. And I wanted to find the source of that story about the county clerk Tom Ward. And so it led me to an article titled, History of Cassville, on the Cassville Historical Society website, and it cites a news article by a gentleman named Joe Mahan titled, Cassville Destroyed Seventy-Five years Ago. And it was in the Tribune News of Cartersville, Georgia in 1939. So this was so neat to find out. I had noticed that the FamilySearch catalog listed many records that date from the 1830s.

Diana (14m 47s):
And so I had this idea that the record loss wasn’t catastrophic, but this is just another really good example of how we need to study the actual record loss, because although the courthouse was destroyed, not all the records were lost. So it was really neat to be able to query my Claude Project all about that record loss, which is so important to know when we are getting ready to do research planning.

Nicole (15m 12s):
That is so good to know. And I love that the AI tool that you used, Claude, was able to give such a detailed answer based on the deep research projects that you had put in the project knowledge. That’s so great. Well, the next thing Diana wanted to know was why did the county name change from Cass County to Bartow County? So she went ahead and asked her Claude Project about the name change, and this is what the answer was from Claude: Date of Change December 6th, 1861 reason for the name change, Cass County was renamed to Bartow County during the Civil War due to political considerations related to the man for whom it was originally named.

Nicole (15m 59s):
The county had been named after General Lewis Cass, 1782 to 1866, who served as US Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, and had advocated for the removal of the Cherokee Indians, which is why Georgia initially honored him with the county’s name. However, by 1861 Lewis Cass held Union sympathies during the Civil War. Due to these Unionist leanings and mid sectional tensions, Georgia chose to rename the county to honor Colonel Francis S Bartow of the Confederate Army. Colonel Bartow was killed in 1861 at the first First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), and was the first prominent Georgian to die in the Civil War, making him a Southern hero.

Nicole (16m 46s):
Important note, Colonel Francis S. Bartow had no direct connection to the geographic area aside from being honored as a Confederate martyr. And then the next section of the answer from Claude is sources. And it says, this information is documented in Georgia, legislative Acts of 1861, the December 6th, 1861 Act that states Cass is hereby renamed Bartow, can be found in the published Georgia Law’s 1861 volume, also Digital Library of Georgia’s Georgia legislative documents collection and referenced in multiple guides as the official legislative change during the Civil War period. So it, it was nice that it gave you that list of sources.

Diana (17m 28s):
Right. Because if you’re writing a report, you want to have something besides just, you know, the name was changed. And it’s always nice to go and get the official act from the state legislature to have something set in stone for that name change. Well, the next section I wanted to ask about was the 1832 Cherokee and Gold Lottery. And I’ve already done quite a bit of research in Georgia and know all about the land lottery records, but this was a new one, the 1832 lottery, and I wanted to learn more about this particular lottery. There were several, I think there were eight total, and this was the last one.

Diana (18m 10s):
I had started to think that maybe Cynthia’s father was drawn to this area because of this lottery. And so I asked Claude to summarize the 1832 lottery in that Locality Guide project where it’s drawing on all the different guides. And this is a summary. It said the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery was the largest and most significant of Georgia’s land lotteries distributing former Cherokee nation lands in northwest Georgia to state citizens. Over 85,000 people competed for 18,309 land lots in this lottery, which carved Cass County into parcels, typically consisting of 160-acre land lots and 40-acre gold lots in areas of the gold region.

Diana (18m 55s):
The lottery drawing took place in 1832 with results published in 1838 by James F. Smith. In his book, the Cherokee Land Lottery, Winners (called “drawers”) received the right to claim specific lots identified by district, section, and lot number. Many lottery winners were speculators who never moved to the area and quickly sold their lots to others. After winning the lottery, individuals had to pay a grant fee to the state of Georgia by 1838 to receive an official land grant. Essentially, the state’s deed transferring ownership, those who failed to pay by the deadline forfeited their lots, which the state subsequently sold through county land sales in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

Diana (19m 38s):
The lottery system replaced any federal land patent process as Georgia controlled all land distribution in this region. This land distribution method attracted settlers primarily from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Mississippi, including Revolutionary War veterans identified by RS after their names and lottery records. The lottery fundamentally shaped Cass County settlement patterns and early population growth during the 1830s. And then it gives a timeline from 1830 to 1840 and the specific dates everything happened. So that was a, that was a pretty nice summary there, kind of explaining the process and the details.

Nicole (20m 22s):
Yeah, that is a really good summary, and the sources that this was drawn from that Claude gave you are from James F Smith’s, the Cherokee Land Lottery, published in 1836, and the Georgia Archives Virtual Vault Land Lottery Grant book section, and the Georgia 1830 Cherokee Drawers and Grant database at the Georgia Archives. And then some of these same sources are repeated again. So it, what it is doing is citing each of the different locality guide that you had had uploaded to the project knowledge.

Nicole (21m 3s):
And then from the locality guide that Claude made, it had referenced a couple different sources, and it referenced the FamilySearch Wiki about Cass County, Georgia, and then the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website, 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery Guide there. And then the Georgia Archives, again talking about land lottery research, and then the new Georgia Encyclopedia, which was referenced for district information. So that’s a pretty great list of sources that it drew from online,

Diana (21m 38s):
Right. It really was good. The next section is maps, and I love the maps section in my locality guides. You need to have those really good links to maps. And in this section, I decided to curate my own list. I got some of the ideas from each AI model, but I really like to make sure I have found the ones that are most helpful. So I, in the blog post that accompanies this podcast, I do have a little screenshot of the different maps. And so I found one title, Cherokee Land Lottery Maps from the Georgia Archives, and then of course, the David Rumsey Map Collection is always so good.

Diana (22m 20s):
And there were specific maps there. The book James F Smith’s Cherokee Land Lottery Publication has land lottery district maps. There’s also a cool website called PastMaps, and it had old maps of Bartow County, Georgia. There’s the Etowah Valley Historical Society Map Gallery, and then a link to Library of Congress Civil War Map, a topographical map of the Etowah Property, Cass County and Digital Library of Georgia. So those were the basic websites that I found through the guides that AI had done, as well as some of my own searching.

Diana (23m 6s):
So my actual guide in Google Docs has 16 pages compiled by me and AI as my assistant. So I did not take all 213 pages from ChatGPT or you know, any of the other AI models. I basically looked through, asked my questions, and then used AI to help me compile it. But I did the actual compilation myself. What I did do that I think is really helpful is that the beginning of my guide, I linked to the complete guides that I put into a Google Doc so I can, you know, go straight to those guides if I want more details. And I also have that Claude project with each of those guides in it so I can do a quick query about any question.

Diana (23m 51s):
I just didn’t wanna have a guide of 213 pages or even 30 pages, you know, I wanted to have it be a little bit more succinct. And so the 16 pages just gives me the details, plus gives me places to go to go more in depth if I need it.

Nicole (24m 6s):
That’s so great. And I think probably having the full guides that were generated available to you is kind of handy in case you decide you need more details, but the actual locality guide that you made yourself has the information that’s most useful to you at this part of the project, so that it’s concise and it’s available to you And you can, you actually have understood all that information. You’ve digested it, you’ve decided it’s something you need to learn, which is part of the exercise of creating a locality guide. You know, like digesting the information, just getting a 200 page locality guide, yes, that completes the assignment, per se, but unless you’ve read through that and understood it all, it’s not gonna help you when you’re making a research plan.

Diana (24m 54s):
Absolutely. That is the value of the Locality Research is learning about the locality. And so if you just have AI complete those for you, and you don’t really read through it and get it yourself, then what was the point? Right? We’re trying to learn about the locality.

Nicole (25m 11s):
Yeah, and it can be interesting, I think it’s interesting that you had generated so many guides of different lengths. You probably felt a little bit overwhelmed by all the information that, oh, maybe now I have to read all of this. But I like that you, instead of feeling like you had to read it, you also used AI to help you wade through it to find the info that you wanted.

Diana (25m 34s):
Yeah, I think that when we’re using AI, we just have to think outside the box with it. You know, we get these answers, and with Chat GPT, I could have said, reduce this by half, this is way too wordy, this is way too much. You know, and, and it could have taken some of those extensive descriptions and shorten those. So we can always ask it to do it a little bit differently, or if it’s not good enough, we could ask it to do better and focus on one section better. You know, there’s just a lot of ways to work with it. So it’s fun to experiment, it’s fun to see how they’re different. And this was great. I, I was really excited to learn about Cass County and go forward with my research planning.

Nicole (26m 17s):
Yes. So I guess that brings us to the end of this episode, because research planning will be in the next episode. So thanks everyone for listening. We hope you got some ideas for how you can do your Locality Research in your own projects and maybe how you can incorporate AI to help you with doing some of the research and online websites about various aspects of the place you’re learning about. And I guess one final word of warning with that is that if there’s not any information online on the public internet about your locality, then you’re not gonna have success using AI to help you find that it could potentially make up information if there’s nothing out there to be found about it.

Nicole (26m 57s):
So just be aware of that, especially for small little towns that are lesser known. If you’re doing a larger locality like a state or a county, then it should be better. Well, thanks everyone for listening. We hope you have a great week, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (27m 17s):
All right. Bye-bye.

Nicole (27m 18s):
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.