RLP 392: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 5 Research Logging and Citations

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 392: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston: Part 5 Research Logging and Citations. 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 (44s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com. Hello everyone, welcome to Research Like a Pro.

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

Nicole (54s):
I’m doing well and I’ve been really working on my research report for my portfolio with certification. I already passed the first half and now I need to finish my research report and my case study. So since my research report is something I’ve been working on, it’s almost done, I’ve figured I’ll just finish that up. Then I’ll focus in on the case study and my goal is to have it all done by June, which is one year from when I found out that I passed the first half. So it’s my first deadline and then if I don’t finish by then I can extend for one more year and then I have to finish by the end of that year because I’m part of the pilot program and that’s when it ends.

Diana (1m 36s):
Oh wow. Okay. Those are some good deadlines.

Nicole (1m 39s):
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting how I was very motivated to finish to be in the pilot program and then like a whole year went by and I hardly worked on it at all.

Diana (1m 52s):
Well, I’m sure you’re getting really motivated now to finish it.

Nicole (1m 55s):
I don’t know. It’s interesting how motivation comes and goes and with finding out that I passed, it kind of feels like I’m done now. I already did that even though I didn’t pass the whole thing, I just passed the first half.

Diana (2m 9s):
Yeah.

Nicole (2m 9s):
So I am trying to just work on it when I can, even though I’m not feeling super excited about it. I think I’ll be more interested in the the case study since it’s my own family. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the fact that the research report is something I’ve been kind of working on off and on for so long, but it, I’m just kind of bored of it, so I think I just need to be done.

Diana (2m 32s):
Yeah, you do. Consider it like a professional project where your hours are up. Time to be done.

Nicole (2m 38s):
Yeah, time to be done.

Diana (2m 40s):
Well, let’s do some announcements. We are so excited to have our January Research Like a Pro webinar coming up. This will be on the 17th, which is a Saturday at 11:00 AM Mountain Time and Emma Lowe will be our presenter. Her title 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.

Diana (3m 29s):
So our topics will be German research, FAN club research, Evangelical-Lutheran church records, locality survey, German research resources, and Archion. So for any of our listeners who are stuck on German research, this will be such a good webinar. Master’s degree in Genealogical, Paleographic, and Heraldic Studies from the University of Strathclyde, and she has a Bachelor’s degree in Family History with an emphasis in German-American immigrant research from Brigham Young University. So we’re so happy to have Emma presenting. She’s one of our team members and does excellent work.

Diana (4m 10s):
Well, our next study group will be with a DNA focus and it begins February, 2026 and we’re excited to start working again on DNA projects. I always like to take an existing project and add DNA to it and see what I can discover. And if you do not yet have our newsletter coming into your inbox every Monday morning, you might consider subscribing and learning all about our new blog posts, podcast episodes, upcoming lectures and coupon codes for any sales that we might be having. And we are excited for RootsTech, which is coming really quick in just a couple of months, and that will be held March 5th through 7th downtown Salt Lake City and also the online version that they have so you can also watch things from home.

Diana (4m 60s):
Well, let’s dive into our topic. We talked in our previous episodes all about my project on finding a father candidate for Cynthia Dillard and in the last episode we talked about making the research plan. So one of my favorite parts, of course, is actually doing the research. That’s where we can have those really exciting finds and we have to be patient to get to this point, but it really, really is helpful to have done the work before. I have learned from sad experience that if I don’t methodically log my research as I go, I will forget what I’ve done. And so this is something that I learned during accreditation was to keep a good research log.

Diana (5m 44s):
Also, it just makes sure that I don’t miss anything because I’m very careful and I like to create my source citation, the very first thing I do as I fill out my research log. So the reason I do that is because it helps me understand the source that I’m looking at better in order to create that citation. You gotta take a good look at all the information you can find at that source. And then my other reason is that I just get it done and I know a lot of our listeners don’t love source citations, but if you just do it first, it’s kind of a motivation. Get the citation done and then go look for the records. And it’s so nice to not have to go back and create it later. Sometimes I’ll go back and refine it, but I like getting some some real basics down.

Diana (6m 30s):
Well, this project involved a lot of records on FamilySearch and I devised a strategy that worked really well for quickly creating citations. So I’ll be sharing that and some of my findings in this episode.

Nicole (6m 46s):
Well, I’m excited to hear more about your findings. Let’s talk about setting up the research log since you used Airtable for this. Obviously we love the ability to quickly group in Airtable, you can group by a record type, you can group by a person, a locality. You can sort by the date, you can create specialized views and save those views to come back to them again later. So it really is powerful. The research log in Airtable is linked to the timeline and set up so you can automatically add a record to the ancestors’ timeline if you found something that needs to go into the timeline.

Nicole (7m 26s):
So it’s really helpful to be able to update the timeline as you go. And if you haven’t tried the newest template that includes this feature, then go to Airtable Universe and it’s called RLP with DNA 4.1 2025. And that template has the automation. You just have to turn on the automation before you start using it. In the research log table, there’s a little box to check if you want to add that source to the timeline and then it’ll be there for you. Well, the basic Airtable plan is free and we encourage everyone to just use the free plan. And if you find that you really like using the AI features to generate text, then that might be a situation where you’d want to upgrade, but, but most of the time the free plan is all you need.

Nicole (8m 16s):
And you can either use a template that is blank and ready to use, or you can copy the template base that has all the examples to help you learn how to fill it in. So both of these are available for free, and once you make a copy of the template, then you can put a title and add your research objective under the base guide dropdown, and you can give it a unique title that relates to your project such as Dillard Research 2025. And as you’re researching the objective right there at the top will keep you focused and provide useful dates and locations when you need to check it. Let’s talk now about filling out the research log.

Nicole (8m 57s):
The Airtable Research log template has a formula for the short description field. This is the very first column or field in every Airtable base table. And so in that short description field, you can’t type into it ’cause it’s a formula. So to get that to populate, you just have to go to the next few columns and fill them out. So first you put in the source type in that column, the website or repository in that column, the name of the person involved and the locality. And then the short description pulls from those fields and automatically gets filled out. And that reduces duplicate data entry. You don’t have to describe that row, it will just be automatically done.

Nicole (9m 39s):
So let’s look at one of the entries and see how it was filled out.

Diana (9m 44s):
So one of my candidates for a parent of Cynthia was Elizabeth Dillard, and my original objective was to find a father. But Elizabeth was in the 1840 census of Cass County, Georgia and she was the head of household and she wasn’t of appropriate age to be possibly a mother for Cynthia, so I decided to continue to research her. And I looked in the 1850th census of Cass County for Elizabeth, but there were no hits. Then I tried the 1830 census and I found Elizabeth Dillard heading a household in Lawrence County, South Carolina. And I wondered if she was already a widow and had moved west to Georgia seeking land.

Diana (10m 27s):
So next I tried the Full Text Search feature on FamilySearch and found a deed for Elizabeth Dillard in Cass County in 1838. And this was two years before the 1840 census and it could show her purchase of land in the county. So once I found this, then I filled out the Airtable base. So the source type I put as deed, the person was Elizabeth Dillard. I copied and pasted the URL from FamilySearch. The website was FamilySearch, the locality, Cass County, Georgia, and the source date 1838. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor.

Diana (11m 8s):
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Diana (11m 51s):
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Diana (12m 33s):
And so I like to get that filled in right away. And when creating the source citation, I decided to fill out the digital layer first because it was really easy, that part. So I did in my finished citation, have the physical layer first and then the semicolon signaling signaling the digital layer, but I actually created the digital layer first. So what I did was I put the semicolon to remind me that I needed to put the physical layer before the digital, and then I used the word imaged and then FamilySearch in italics because a website is a publication and we italicize publications, so think of a book or newspaper magazine, websites are the same.

Diana (13m 24s):
Then I captured the publication information and that would be the URL. And I cut it off at the question mark, everything before the question mark for FamilySearch. We can do this because these are archived URLs. And I put that in and then I put the access date. And then finally I added the image group number. So if you’re using FamilySearch, you can look on the page somewhere, sometimes you have to click a button and have it tell you the information, but you want to find that actual image group number, and I, I abbreviate it to IGN, and then I put the image number.

Diana (14m 4s):
So because I had captured the image number first, now I could go back to the deed image and see if I could learn more about this record this, this deed book. And so I went back and looked at the deed image and found it was page 326. I added the grantor, who was John Kennedy and the grantee who was Elizabeth Dillard. And the date of 1838. And this was a little tricky for the place for my citation because it was in Cass County at the time, but then they changed the name to Bartow. So I decided to put it in my citation as Bartow parent, Cass County Georgia, because it’s, it is a little confusing.

Diana (14m 53s):
So I have a finished citation that starts with that Bartow, Cass County, Georgia Superior Court Deeds and Mortgages, Book C, and then im, page 326. And I write that as just C:326. Now how did I know it was Book C and deeds and mortgages in Superior Court? Well that is where I go back to the beginning of the deed book. I had to go back to image one or two and see what this deed book actually said on the, the digitized cover. And sometimes the FamilySearch catalog will say this microfilm, the original microfilm was for book C and D or A, B and C, and you don’t know which one your image is from.

Diana (15m 44s):
So you have to go browse that microfilm and figure out what is the appropriate book for that source citation. It’s just an important thing to do. And so, because I knew what the image number was, once I had done that browsing, I could really easily get back to my deed that I was looking at.

Nicole (16m 7s):
Yes, that’s so important. And I wish that it was easier to get the name of the volume that you’re looking at because it really isn’t listed anywhere. You have to go back in the images and find it, but at least you can find it. It would be annoying if if the covers weren’t imaged or the the spines of the books weren’t imaged, at least we have them.

Diana (16m 27s):
Right, right. And in the blog post that goes along with this episode, I do have some screenshots of what it looked like on FamilySearch. And so you can see what it looks like to go back to the beginning of a film and see what the, what it looks like when you’re on FamilySearch. And if you’ve never done that, it’s going to be fun for you to discover that ’cause it’s kind of neat.

Nicole (16m 48s):
Well the next step in research logging is to transcribe the record or put the details in an abstract into your research log. So you just have to get the information out and understand it. And so you actually used AI for this task: Google AI Studio, which uses Gemini, or you can choose whatever model, but it’s free and it’s very accurate with transcriptions of handwritten text. And the transcription prompt that you use can be important. And one of the things to do is to ask it to preserve the line breaks. And that just helps with checking the original with the transcription to see if it’s accurate.

Nicole (17m 32s):
So after doing that, in fact checking the transcription, correcting a few items in the deed, you pasted the entire transcription into the research log and into Claude for an abstract. And then you put the abstract into another field. So you would have both the original transcription and then the abstract for a quick glance at the data, which is really nice. I just, I really like doing that because sometimes you don’t want to slog through reading the whole deed, you just want the quick details. But other times you need the whole deed. So it’s good to have both columns. And in Airtable it’s also really nice that you can expand a cell and have it pop up as kind of like a bigger page or like a larger rectangle so that you can see paragraphs and you can see a whole deed transcription.

Nicole (18m 20s):
Well, the deed stated that Elizabeth Dillard was of Lawrence County, South Carolina, she purchased the Cass County land in 1838 and moved there in time to be enumerated on the 1840 census. Our Cynthia Dillard would not have been part of this family. The census always reported a Georgia birth for her and she would not have met and married Thomas B Royston in South Carolina since his residence at the time of the marriage was likely Cass County.

Diana (18m 52s):
So that was interesting. It’s always a little disappointing when something doesn’t pan out, but then it’s always good to just figure out who these people are. So I kept researching Elizabeth Dillard and I found that she had died in 1841 and her property was being sold and that was in a newspaper article. So that was very helpful. And that was found on the Georgia Historic Newspapers’ website. So I was able to say, okay, Elizabeth is from South Carolina. I went back to South Carolina, looked at probate for her husband and there was just no mention of a Cynthia, you know, I wanted to explore a little bit more about her there.

Diana (19m 36s):
So I was able to pretty much say, no, this would not be the right family. Well, also in my objective, you know, I wanted to discover other candidates and I had discovered this John Dillard who was also in the 1840 census. And I did some work on researching him and I found that he had moved from North Carolina to Tennessee and then south to Cass County, Georgia. There was a deed that named all of his heirs, and Cynthia was not in that deed at all. And I was able to also find out that Elijah Dillard, who I thought maybe was our DNA connected Elijah, was a different Elijah.

Diana (20m 24s):
So he was part of that family group. He was one of the sons of John Dillard, but he was up in Tennessee and North Carolina. He was not, not our Elijah. So both of these candidates did not pan out from the 1840 census. But, once I discovered that pretty quickly actually in the research logging phase, I also had on my plan to look at the land lottery, that 1832 land lottery. And I did find a list of Dillards who were fortunate drawers. And so this gave me a new list to investigate and I will, you know, talk a little bit more in the next episode about writing the report and these new candidates.

Diana (21m 9s):
So we never know what twists and turns our research will take us. And that was absolutely the case with this research. But the good news is that I do have some new people to research.

Nicole (21m 22s):
Oh, okay then. That fortunate drawers list was helpful?

Diana (21m 26s):
Lots of Dillards there.

Nicole (21m 29s):
Oh, that’s so tricky. It kinda makes you wonder if they came and then left soon after, you know, if they weren’t on the 1840s census.

Diana (21m 37s):
Well, just because they were a fortunate draw doesn’t mean they ever moved there because they might’ve just sold their land right away, or you know, eventually sold it. So not everybody who drew the lot did wanted to move to this new place. So, you know, there’re just more people to consider.

Nicole (21m 58s):
Well that begs the question then, how did Cynthia get there?

Diana (22m 2s):
Yeah, well she might’ve, you know, they, maybe they moved up there and then they died or they moved on, I don’t know, but we have to start somewhere, right?

Nicole (22m 14s):
Well, maybe she came, maybe they got married somewhere else and then came there together. Is that a possibility?

Diana (22m 22s):
Well, Thomas is there, I have him in records in 1832 and 1833. He was a deputy sheriff and he’s in the whole bunch of newspaper articles where he’s in charge of the sale of property, which is probably the sale of this land. And he is also in the military in the militia there in Cass County. So yeah, he’s there. I, I have filled the holes of his life now I have him pretty solid from 1831 to this 1833 time period, so.

Nicole (22m 56s):
Kind of makes you wonder if he was a sheriff, if he was in the militia, maybe he was pretty mobile and traveled around somewhere, met her somewhere outside of the county.

Diana (23m 7s):
Could be. Yeah, this fortunate drawers list, ha, includes all the area that was part of the Gold lottery. It was kinda two parts, Land and Gold. And it includes a large area, so it’s Cass County, plus about five or six other counties all around it. And I, I gathered all the candidates that were in that lottery. So it does take in a pretty good geographic area that I could work on.

Nicole (23m 38s):
That’s perfect because it really does give you that expanding bullseye that you can move out to the localities around the Cass County area and you can do it all without one source. How great.

Diana (23m 50s):
Yeah, yeah. It gives you a really good list to investigate. And the nice thing is that you had to be a resident of Georgia to participate in this land lottery, which would make sense since Cynthia always said, or the records always say that she was born in Georgia. It would make sense that she was a daughter of someone who was a resident of Georgia, unlike those other two that we talked about that were from Tennessee and South Carolina.

Nicole (24m 19s):
Yeah. So that really does make sense.

Diana (24m 22s):
Yeah.

Nicole (24m 22s):
Well, good job. And that was fun talking through the research logging and citation process and we look forward to talking more about this next time.

Diana (24m 33s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (24m 34s):
So what’s the next episode going to be about, reports?

Diana (24m 38s):
Writing the report, and you know, a little bit more about these findings, but then diving into these new candidates because I didn’t wanna continue researching, I wanted to wrap this phase up and then this will be another project. So you know, we’re getting a little bit closer with each project. Sometimes it is just elimination.

Nicole (24m 59s):
Right? I know. I remember one of your earlier reports mentioning the Elizabeth Dillard and just kind of leaving it up to future research and so now you’ve done that.

Diana (25m 9s):
Right.

Nicole (25m 9s):
Well great job and thanks for sharing and I look forward to talking about writing the research report for the Dillard project next time. Alright, have a great week everyone, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (25m 21s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (25m 20s):
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.