RLP 391: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 4 Research Planning

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 391: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia Dillard Royston, part four–Research Planning. 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?

Nicole (51s):
Doing really well and it’s the new year, Happy New Year!

Diana (54s):
Well, thank you. Happy New Year to you too. And to all of our listeners.

Nicole (58s):
Yay. Well what have you been doing lately?

Diana (1m 1s):
Lately I have been thinking about presentations, getting ready for RootsTech and I spent quite a bit of time getting ready for our Research Like a Pro webinar that I did in December. It was on Henderson Weatherford and all the research I’ve done on him and that was so fun to go back and revisit the research and put it together in a presentation and to share with other people. You know, that’s always kind of tricky so that others can understand what you’re doing. But it was really fun to do that webinar and share my three phases of research and just to think about how amazing it was that I actually figured some stuff out for him and found a likely father.

Diana (1m 43s):
You know, sometimes these cases where we feel like we are never gonna figure it out and then we do, it’s kind of exciting. So I still have a little bit more research to do, but I have such a good strong hypothesis that I am feeling very confident in, you know, the the Izard County, Arkansas people, that those are his family.

Nicole (2m 4s):
Yes, it makes so much more sense. It’s really cool to see that you were able to take a, an assumption that was made just due to living in the same county but not even that close to each other and then overturn that and come up with a new hypothesis that seems much more likely based on actual proximity in Izard County within the same area and stuff.

Diana (2m 26s):
Right. Yeah, it’s so interesting how we get things in our heads that that must have been the family it and it’s just really good to revisit our research and rethink through our hypotheses of the past or how we connect to people in the past. Once we have more knowledge, more experience, I think we often can see some holes in some of the thinking we had back in the day.

Nicole (2m 50s):
Right. And I think it’s a common error as a genealogist to assume that because someone, someone’s in the same county that they’re related or they live near each other. Counties can be large. And especially with the name that, I wouldn’t say Weatherford is a common name, but I learned that Dyer is a common name. And when I was doing my Dyer research in Granger County, Tennessee, there were several different Dyer families living there and I had to separate them all out and, and so it’s just a common thing. I think that as genealogists we see, oh this, this family who lived in that county, everyone must be related to each other if they have the same surname. So a lot of things had gotten mixed up there, which I know we’ve talked about this in the past, but it’s just interesting to see that happening again and again with online trees and people in our family tree.

Diana (3m 41s):
Absolutely takes good research to separate that out.

Nicole (3m 45s):
Well your webinar was really fun for that. And speaking of the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series, this month in January, we are going to hear from Emma Lowe, one of our FamilyLocket Genealogists and she’ll be talking about German research. The title of her webinar is Reconstructing the Family of Dorothea Radloff in Pomerania. After tracing Dorothea Radloff from the Midwestern United States to her birthplace in a small village in Pomerania, meticulously kept German church records, carefully analyzed, enabled the discovery of many new Radloff relatives. This case study follows the Research Like a Pro process to systematically identify and search relevant German record collections, following the clues that enabled the discovery of many new Radloff relatives in Dorothea’s homeland of Pomerania.

Nicole (4m 30s):
So this will cover Germany, FAN club research, Evangelical-Lutheran church records, locality survey, German research resources, Archion. And Emma is a professional genealogist pursuing a Master’s degree in Genealogical, Paleographic, and Heraldic Studies from the University of Strathclyde. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Family History with an emphasis in German-American immigrant research from Brigham Young University, where she also minored in Korean and Mathematics. So she’s so well-rounded, she enjoys British, African-American and DNA research. And in her free time she volunteers as an independent genealogy consultant for the ConnectMyVariant project, and that has to do with reducing the risk of inherited cancer.

Nicole (5m 14s):
She also likes hiking, knitting, playing badminton, spending time with family. We’re really excited for Emma’s presentation and we hope that if you have not signed up for the 2026 Research Like a Pro Webinar Series that you’ll consider doing so. And each webinar comes with a research report that you can read and it really helps you to learn about all the different ways people can write research reports in genealogy. So if that’s something you’re working on improving is research report writing, then you’ll probably enjoy this Research Like a Pro Webinar Series. Also, our DNA study group for Research Like a Pro at DNA begins February 5th, I believe. Make sure you register if you’d like to join us.

Nicole (5m 55s):
And also if you’re not getting our Monday newsletter, you can sign up for that to receive new posts and upcoming lectures and coupon codes and information that we send out every Monday. And hopefully we’ll see many of you at the RootsTech Conference in Salt Lake City on March 5th through 7th of 2026, this year. And we look forward to having our FamilyLocket booth and speaking and seeing so many of you there. Our topic today is about Research Planning and this is such an important step in the Research Like a Pro process. Rather than haphazardly clicking on record sets in various websites, we can think through our research objective and what we know about the family and locality and then plan searches in specific record sets.

Nicole (6m 39s):
And for this part of the process, we have several steps within it that help solidify what we know and give us a good jumping off point and then prioritize the next best steps to take.

Diana (6m 51s):
Well, we’re working on understanding my project about Cynthia Dillard. So let’s review the objective that I had and then I’ll talk about my Research Planning. So I had discovered this new location for Cynthia’s husband, Thomas B. Royston, in Cass County, Georgia, which gave me this new place to look for her family. And this was a new area. I hadn’t researched any Dillard’s there. So I left the objective fairly open-ended, and this is what I wrote, “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.

Diana (7m 34s):
Cynthia married Thomas B Royston in about 1833 or 1834, possibly in Cass County, Georgia.” After we have that objective, we’ve done the timeline and the analysis, we’ve done the locality research. Then Research Planning has several steps, and the first one is to go back to that timeline and create a summary of known facts in the timeline. Sometimes we have just gathered everything on the family and we really want to hone that down to be the most relevant facts about our research subject. So I included Elijah Dillard, who I think is a probable brother or cousin of Cynthia based on DNA. So I included him in the summary as well because that helps to put him in the timeline and what could have happened.

Diana (8m 21s):
So my summary of known facts has Cynthia Dillard and it has her birthdate and her birth locality is Georgia taken from the census records of her life. And then I have her marriage about 1833, 1834, and that is based on the birthdate of her oldest daughter, Mary E Royston. Then I’ve got Cynthia in the 1850 census. So I’ve got her residence in Chambers County, Alabama. And then I’ve got that she was widowed on September 21st, 1868 because that’s the probate recording of Thomas’s death.

Diana (9m 1s):
And then in that same probate packet, it records her death of 22 August, 1882 and she is in Collin County, Texas. So I have a pretty good outline of her life, but she’s not named in the records until that first census of 1850. Then for Elijah, he is born a similar timeframe of of Cynthia, somewhere in the maybe 1815, 1816, kind of tricky figuring out exactly his birth. And then we’ve got a land patent for him in Alabama in 1848 and we have a marriage record for him in Alabama in 1855.

Diana (9m 46s):
His census resident in 1860. And then his death there is a death register in Coffee County, Alabama on 6 September, 1886. And so I have a fairly decent outline of Elijah and then I also have a summary for Thomas B Royston because his life pretty much mirrors Cynthia’s after their marriage. And so I do have him in the summary with his Georgia County, his first Georgia County residence of 1831 in Morgan County, and then his move to Alabama by about 1836 and his census and his death.

Diana (10m 30s):
So had a pretty good idea of the life events of these three individuals, which just helped me to see what was going on with them and where to try to pinpoint some records where Cynthia’s family would have been when she married. You know, the best hypothesis, because we all know people don’t necessarily stay put and maybe she had gone off on, you know, with another family and didn’t stay with her birth family or her family of origin before she got married. But I’m starting with the most usual case.

Nicole (11m 3s):
Well, it’s so smart to put together a detailed timeline like this because if you don’t do that, then you just end up searching like broad collections like Georgia marriages and then you don’t find anything, you know? And so it’s kind of hard to really do reasonably exhaustive research unless you really know where to look for specific sources that maybe aren’t included in those big collections.

Diana (11m 28s):
Exactly. You really have to pinpoint very specific searches to see if you’ve done reasonably exhaustive research ’cause you won’t know unless you go pretty specific.

Nicole (11m 41s):
So true. So for the background information, which is kind of like understanding the history and locality, AI helped a lot with that and helped summarize the main points of the history of Cass County that would impact the research. And in the last episode we talked about how the Locality Research was done with AI. So let’s just review some of these points of background information, and Cass County. So the formation and naming, it was created December 3rd, 1832 from Cherokee County. Cassville was surveyed and established as a county seat in July, 1833.

Nicole (12m 22s):
And then it was renamed Bartow County on December 6th, 1861, honoring Colonel Francis S Bartow, which was kind of after the time period we’re interested in. So at the time it was called Cass County. The area was inhabited by the Cherokee Nation before 1832, and Cherokee Territory was placed under Georgia jurisdiction in 1830, and then it was distributed through the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery, which was the largest of Georgia’s land lotteries. Over 85,000 people competed for 18,309 land lots. And typically these were 160 acres each.

Nicole (13m 1s):
In 1835, the Treaty of New Echota was signed and the Cherokee were forcibly removed via the Trail of Tears. This was then completed by 1838 to 1839. So it’s pretty hard to hear about all of the Trail of Tears and how they were forcibly removed and then seeing the white settlers come in, it’s just, it’s hard to see that and think about that. Then after the Cherokee people were removed, the settlers came primarily from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas and the Mississippi. And what’s interesting is that many of these early settlers were Revolutionary War veterans.

Nicole (13m 44s):
And the 1860 census showed only five foreign born residents. So they’re mostly all from other parts of the country. The settlement was concentrated along river valleys and lottery land lots. Some more points of background information about Cass County: it’s located in the ridge and valley region of northwest Georgia. It’s about 40 to 50 miles northwest of Atlanta along the Etowah River. The terrain includes fertile river valleys and Appalachian foothills. The northern portion became Gordon County in 1850. And then the last section here is the Civil War impact.

Nicole (14m 25s):
So a little bit later on, the Union troops burned Cassville on October 30th, 1864 during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. And the County Clerk Tom Word, saved marriage deed and probate books before the courthouse destruction. So he is a celebrity for the county. And then after the war, Cassville never recovered and the county government was relocated to Cartersville in 1867. So that’s kind of the background for the county, its history, its geography, some points of information about the capital of the county changing and things like that.

Diana (15m 4s):
All right, and the interesting thing to me as a researcher was this fact that many of the records had been saved because of course that’s what we really, really need are records. But for the hypothesis, this is where we write out all of our ideas about the research subject and what we hope to accomplish in the research. So I wrote, “Cynthia Dillard was born between 1815 and 1818 in Georgia. She married Thomas B Royston in about 1833. No marriage records have been found in Morgan and Clark counties, Georgia, where Thomas lived in 1830 and 1831. He moved northwest with family associates to Cass County, Georgia by 1832, where he resided for about two years.

Diana (15m 48s):
He likely met and married Cynthia about 1833. While in this area, no marriage records are extant for this time period, which would explain the lack of a marriage if the couple married here. Elijah Dillard, born between 1816 and 1823, was previously proven to be a genetic relative of Cynthia, likely a brother. Elijah could be part of this family group, and the name part of a family naming pattern. Two Dillard individuals who were old enough to be a parent for Cynthia headed households in Cass County in 1840. John Dillard born 1771 to 1780, and Elizabeth Dillard born 1791 to 1799. Less likely are other household heads, William Dillard and Elijah Dillard, both born between 1801 and 1810.

Diana (16m 34s):
The Dillards probably moved to Cass County when the area was open to settlement following the removal of the Cherokee tribal members. The 1832 Cherokee and Gold lotteries were significant factors, and one of the Dillards may have received a draw in the lottery. These settlers came from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Georgia. Further identifying these Dillards could provide a connection to Cynthia and Elijah.” So you can see in my hypothesis, I’m basically putting all of my ideas about what happened here. And remember, this is the hypothesis. So I don’t know about these new Dillards, what’s going to happen with them. I just have to to give some ideas.

Diana (17m 15s):
So after doing that, then I wanted to identify some sources that could help. And this is where we do a brainstorming session using our locality guides, just all the different record types, specific collections, all sorts of things that we want to cover when we’re researching. And so I put together a list of the census records, including state censuses, land records, probate records, marriage records, court records, county histories, newspapers, bible records, compiled genealogies, military records, tax records, and online research guides and databases.

Diana (17m 56s):
So you can see I had a pretty long list since this was a new county to me, there were a lot of things that I could work on, a lot of different avenues for research. So obviously I can’t do all of these. I’d have to prioritize, but it’s a good solid list to be thinking about.

Nicole (18m 13s):
Yeah, that is a really good solid list. And it seems like identifying more about the Elijah Dillard family by just checking all of these main record types that are available in that area would turn up probably enough details that you could either rule them out or continue to keep them as a candidate for the family of Cynthia.

Diana (18m 34s):
Right.

Nicole (18m 36s):
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Nicole (19m 16s):
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Diana (19m 31s):
Well, the final step of research planning is to do that prioritized research plan. And this is where we look at that list of identified sources and really think through how likely the record will provide the information we want. How available the record is. Is it online? Is it only on site? How long will it take to search? Can we use Full Text Search? Will it be browsing microfilm? There’s so many things to think about when we are doing our prioritized plan. So taking all that into consideration, I took my identified sources list and created this following prioritized list. So first I decided to do census records.

Diana (20m 11s):
Those are so readily available for this era. And because I had not studied these new Dillards, I hoped that I would be able to find them easily in the censuses, both the 1820, 1830, 1850 and 1860 federal censuses, but also in that 1834 state census for Georgia to see if they were there that early. And then I could look at marriage records. They’re are records supposedly in Cass/Bartow, the new name for it from 1836 to 1907, just to see if I could find any Dillards there, whether it was Cynthia or not, perhaps it could pull up some possible siblings.

Diana (20m 54s):
Then I wanted to do land records and there are the Cherokee Land Lottery books, the Gold lottery deeds and mortgages from 1837 to 1902. Land records are often so helpful in identifying people. I thought next I could do probate records and there were wills from 1836 to 1922 and probate records from 1858 onwards. So it seemed like there were a decent collection of probate court records. And this is where Full Text Search is so nice because you can use that at FamilySearch to gather in perhaps surrounding counties where someone was named. I could do newspapers.

Diana (21m 35s):
Georgia Historic Newspapers is a wonderful site. You can do the name searching there. And then I always love to look at county histories and identified different counties that could work, and different genealogical societies that had publications. So I had a good list. And in Research Planning, once we start the research, we start with number one, then we let the findings there figure out where we go next. Because sometimes things that we find in the early records change the trajectory. So to find out what happened with the plan and what I discovered, you’re just gonna have to tune into next time where I start sharing some of my findings.

Nicole (22m 17s):
Yes, we are so looking forward to the findings. It’s so much buildup in the first part of the process to getting a good plan in place that a lot of the time people are like, when are we gonna research in the study group? But if you spend so much time researching and not enough time planning, you could end up just being frustrated because you’re not looking in the right place. So it’s such a, an important step.

Diana (22m 43s):
Well, and that’s what we all do when we get started, and that’s why we get stuck. So yes, the planning and then the research logging and the writing is just so important. The whole, the whole process helps us to make progress, which I’m excited to share what I found.

Nicole (23m 1s):
Yeah, it’s gonna be fun. Well, with Research Planning, I really like the part where you write up everything you already know. And I just think it’s so valuable to either put it in a timeline, make a bulleted list, or write a like paragraphs. And sometimes I just feel like it’s most valuable for that particular project to write several paragraphs of starting point information that you can then use in the report. So with your research plan, what did you do? You did a bulleted list, right?

Diana (23m 34s):
I did. But I agree with you that often I do like to write it all up and have it be just the background section of the report source divided and just get it all down. So I think it’s nice to have different ways of doing this depending on how much time you have or the type of project. So it’s just nice to know that there are some alternatives for, for some of these steps.

Nicole (24m 1s):
Awesome. Well thanks for sharing your research plan and taking us along this journey with you for the Dillard Research. And now it’s been several years that you’ve been working on the Dillard problem, so it’s always fun to revisit that.

Diana (24m 14s):
Well, I’m glad you think it’s fun. I hope that one day it’ll be really fun ’cause I discover who her parents are.

Nicole (24m 22s):
I know, right? One day I’m gonna solve the Dyer research question and you’re gonna solve the Dillards.

Diana (24m 26s):
And there you go.

Nicole (24m 27s):
And it’ll be like a conclusion in our podcast after going for, you know, three to 400, 500 episodes. Eventually we’ll have the, we’ll have the answer, right?

Diana (24m 36s):
Yes. But I think it gives, hopefully it gives everybody hope that you’re, you’re not alone in some of your searches for these elusive ancestors. We’re right there with you.

Nicole (24m 46s):
Yes.

Diana (24m 48s):
Well, thanks everyone for listening, and we will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (24m 53s):
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.