RLP 397: What Genealogists Can Learn from Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic: Writing Family History

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 397: What Genealogists Can Learn from Colum McCann’s “TransAtlantic”: Writing Family History. 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. This episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hello everybody, welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (52s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (54s):
Hey, I am great mom, It’s good to be here and I have been working on testing out all the different AI models to see which one is the best at transcribing handwritten text. So that’s been fun and probably anyone who’s heard me talk about this won’t be surprised to hear that Gemini is still the best. Gemini 3 Pro accessed via Google AI Studio provides the most accurate transcriptions of English handwritten text from about the 1750s forward. And I’ve tested one record from 1717 that had kind of that English secretarial hand look to it and it actually did a really good job with that too. So still have to test things out and see how far back it can recognize handwriting, but it does struggle with like other languages that it hasn’t been trained on as well, but.

Diana (1m 42s):
Well, I’ve been working on my lecture for AI and Court Records, and I am using some examples from my latest project, which was doing a bunch of court records for John Royston as the runaway apprentice and his apprenticet, if that’s a word, of Samuel Daniel and the… Pres, what is that…

Nicole (2m 6s):
The master? His Master? Is that the word?

Diana (2m 7s):
Master? Yeah, his master. So anyway, the records are 1768, 1772, and the handwriting has been a bit difficult to read and I’ve been very impressed with Google AI Studio and how well it’s done, just almost flawless transcription. So it’s been really nice to have for this project. And that is what, what I teach pretty much, you know, when I’m teaching transcription, I tell people to use that as well. It’s just better, you know, we used to use some of the other large language models, which now are just not as good as they used to be.

Diana (2m 48s):
So I think you were giving some tips before we started recording that the latest ones are these thinking reasoning models just overthink it and that kind of gets them into trouble. Is that what you’re thinking after all of your research?

Nicole (3m 3s):
Right, yes, it is so funny because for most things you want a reasoning model, but for transcription you don’t. And I just really noticed a big difference between, you know, ChatGPT 5.2 thinking versus 5.2, instant, instant was better. And same with Claude. And actually with Claude I noticed a big difference between Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet. So Opus did a lot better of a job. So if you’re going to use Claude or ChatGPT, just know that they do best when they’re not on extended thinking or reasoning mode and same with Gemini. If you do Gemini, make sure you turn off the thinking and just do fast.

Nicole (3m 45s):
But yeah, they all do a pretty good job. They always tend to get dates and names confused because those are the hardest to figure out with context. And so they’re really good at using vision to look at the image and figure out what the letters say but then when a letter’s unclear, then it goes to its processing for language and trying to figure out based on all the words and letters around it, what’s the best, you know, answer for this word that it could be. And when there’s something like a date or a name where it can’t rely on the context, it just has to do its best with reading the actual letter forms. And if those are illegible or difficult then it can get ’em wrong.

Nicole (4m 26s):
So just be aware that you’ve gotta check those names and dates. But it is currently the best to use Gemini 3 fast or whatever in Google AI Studio. And even In the Gemini chatbot application on your webpage, it still does a pretty good job, but for some reason Gemini struggles with getting the line breaks, but when you’re in AI studio, Google’s AI studio, it gets the line breaks correct. So I just love using it there.

Diana (4m 53s):
I do too. I’m so glad you discovered that several months ago because that’s all I use. It’s amazing and it makes your work go so much faster if you don’t have to spend a bunch of time telling the AI tool to do it better, you know, if it just hasn’t good the first time is so nice.

Nicole (5m 7s):
Yeah, and it’s free, so that is a really big benefit. Yeah,

Diana (5m 11s):
Yeah, it’s free, it’s great. Well, let’s do some announcements. We’re excited for the institute course coming up in April, and this is being coordinated by Jan Joyce. So if you’re interested in learning more about it, here you go, here’s some details. Have you ever hit a brick wall because you can’t figure out which John Smith is your John Smith? You are not alone. Genealogists everywhere struggle with the same frustrating problem, multiple people with the same name in the same place and time period. That’s exactly why Jan Joyce created Merging and Separating Identities, a multi-week intensive course that teaches you proven strategies to solve your most complex identity puzzles.

Diana (5m 52s):
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Diana (6m 40s):
The course will be taking place weekly on Thursdays from April 30th to June 11th at 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM Mountain time. Now, for our next Research Like a Pro webinar coming up in February, we’ll have that on Tuesday, February 17th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The title is, fFrom Georgia to Florida: Reconstructing the Family of Seth Howard Through DNA and Historical Evidence, and our presenter is Sunni Mohammadbhoy. The description is, Seth Howard was born about 1804 in Georgia and migrated to the Territory of Florida in 1816.

Diana (7m 20s):
He is a registered “Florida Pioneer” with the Florida Genealogical Society. He is well-researched by professional genealogists and his numerous descendants, yet the identity of his parents has never been discovered.

Diana (8m 10s):
Thorough analysis of the documentary evidence gathered from his adult life seemed to yield no clues to his parentage. This case study uses atDNA cluster analysis along with pedigree triangulation as a lead toward possibly identifying his parents. Additional correlation of documentary evidence, geographical and historical context, and onomastic clues provides a compelling circumstantial case to support the report’s conclusion. So in this webinar, Sunni will talk about Georgia, Florida, DNA Gedcom, Clustering, BanyanDNA, Pedigree Collapse, Pedigree Triangulation, Georgia Land Lotteries, the Patriot War, Frontier Migration, Tax Records, Court Records, 19th-Century Research, Onomastic Clues, FAN Club, Correlation of Documentary Evidence, Segment Triangulation, Y-DNA, Deeds, Probate Documents. Well, that is a lot of interesting things we’ll be covering. A little bit about Sunni is that she is a recent empty nester who caught the genealogy bug when her kids bought her an Ancestry.com DNA kit for Christmas in 2018. While waiting for her results, she clicked on her first shaky leaf and has never looked back. She holds a B.A.

Diana (8m 55s):
in Actuarial Science from Florida State University and worked for many years as a pension consultant. Later, she chose to become a stay-at-home mom and helped run her husband’s business as the office manager. Sunni is a graduate of the Research Like a Pro with DNA Study Group. She enjoys attending FSU football games, searching for sharks’ teeth, reading about Florida history, SCUBA diving, and traveling. Well, it’s so fun to learn about her and we’re excited for that webinar. Our next study group will be purely documentary, starting In the fall, our Research Like a Pro study group, the end of August, 2026. So if you’re interested in joining us, if you’ve done the study group before and you’d like to be a peer group leader, the application is on our website, and we would invite you to join our newsletter that comes out every Monday, if you haven’t done that yet so you can learn about new blog posts, podcast episodes, upcoming lectures, and have coupon codes for any specials we’re running.

Diana (9m 50s):
And then lastly, we are excited about RootsTech, which is coming up very, very soon when this podcast airs, and we hope to see a lot of you there in person. Nicole and I will both be presenting, we each have an online class, so if you are watching virtually, you’ll also be able to see one of our classes, and that will be March 5th through 7th in downtown Salt Lake City. All right, well our topic for the day is all about a book that I read and reviewed titled “TransAtlantic” by Irish Author Colum McCann. And I was interested in this because we do a lot of work with Irish immigrants in our client research.

Diana (10m 36s):
I don’t have any recent immigrants myself, but I’ve done a lot of Irish research and followed a lot of projects so I know it’s really difficult. And this one isn’t necessarily about research, Instead it’s a very interesting take. It’s following an Irish immigrant and then three subsequent generations. And as we are thinking about our own research and writing about our ancestors, I think it’s really beneficial to read historical accounts based on the author’s research. And in this case, we can get some important contextual information and insight into the plight of our immigrant ancestors.

Diana (11m 18s):
So in “TransAtlantic” the book, we view the immigration story from the Irish perspective with a young Lily Duggan braving the Atlantic Ocean to start a new life in America. And I loved the writing. Sometimes the writing the prose is just so lovely. And in this case it takes us on several journeys across the Atlantic through the eyes of very different characters. Author McCann ties each fictional character to a true story and an actual historical figure, which is a really interesting idea for writing our own family history, thinking about what famous people our ancestors could have encountered in their lives. And famous people often have a lot more written about them than our ancestors do.

Diana (12m 2s):
So these stories in TransAtlantic give us some food for thought. The novel does jump around in time, but In the end, it’s all tied together through one document, a letter.

Nicole (12m 13s):
Ooh, that sounds like a fun novel. I need to put this on my library list of audio books to get. Well, let’s dive in a little bit more to Lily Duggan, the Irish immigrant and Frederick Douglass. So of course I’m going to recognize Frederick Douglass’s name. He’s famous for anyone who studied American history you’ll know that name. Well, in 1845 and 1846, the formerly enslaved African American Frederick Douglass visited Ireland. He was writing his autobiography and sought support from the Irish in his cause of the abolition of slavery in America. In the novel, housemaid Lily Duggan meets Douglass and, inspired by his cause for freedom, seeks her own freedom from the class system in Ireland by immigrating to the US.

Nicole (13m 2s):
Then fast forward to a later time period, it’s 1919, and the characters are Emily and Lottie, and Alcock and Brown. So Lily’s daughter, Emily and granddaughter Lottie experienced another Atlantic crossing this time in 1919. And they witnessed aviators and World War I veterans Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown who make the first nonstop TransAtlantic flight from Newfoundland in Ireland. Oh, so sorry, from Newfoundland to Ireland in a modified bomber. Emily sends a letter with Alcock and Brown to be delivered to friends of her mother Lily in Ireland, should they safely land.

Nicole (13m 46s):
Unfortunately, Alcock forgets about the letter and returns it to Emily unopened. Then the letter is passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter.

Diana (13m 57s):
Well, our next portion of the story jumps a long time or many years later, and that’s to 1998. And this is between Lottie, who was Lily’s granddaughter, and Senator George Mitchell. So Lottie meets Senator Mitchell during a visit of his to Ireland where he was brokering a peace agreement between Northern Ireland and England. And this book section depicts the violence that haunted Northern Ireland during the era of bombings and shootings. And I remember hearing about Senator Mitchell and I’ve read a bit about that violence and the bombings, it was just a terrible time.

Diana (14m 39s):
So I think it’s just so interesting that the author brought that into the story. The final chapter of TransAtlantic finds Lily’s great-granddaughter, Hannah, who is the keeper of the unopened letter. It keeps getting passed, you know, from mother to daughter and Hannah by this time, has fallen into financial difficulties. She’s an older woman and she wonders if the letter could be worth something to a collector since it made that ocean crossing with Alcock and Brown. And we follow her trying to find someone who will give her an idea of how much the letter could be worth. But she finds that it’s not worth, you know, a huge amount of money, just, just a bit, maybe a couple thousand I, I can’t quite remember the exact number.

Diana (15m 27s):
But ultimately the true value of the letter lies In the bond between the women of the family and the story passed down. And I think we can really relate to this, that we all have memorabilia, whether it’s a letter or it’s a like a little dish or it’s a book, you know, something that’s been passed down through the years and you know, we’re not gonna make a lot of money on that, selling that on eBay. We all see the stories on Genealogy or Antiques Roadshow where somebody finds this little memorabilia piece and it’s worth a ton of money, but usually it’s not that. However, the story behind the letter, the dish, the dress, is the most valuable way to preserve our family’s history.

Nicole (16m 14s):
Absolutely. And I love being able to see the heirlooms that you have kept and then to hear the stories behind them from you. And it’s so valuable to write those down and to keep the keep track of them, especially in a like an online tree, like FamilySearch.

Diana (16m 29s):
Right. I was just gonna say that I think that when you do that, only one person can inherit an heirloom physically, but if you take pictures and share the story, then others can look at it and imagine the ancestor using the dishes or whatever it is that you’ve posted. So it’s a really great idea to take pictures and post those in your ancestors’ memory section on FamilySearch.

Nicole (16m 54s):
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Nicole (17m 37s):
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Diana (17m 44s):
So in talking about TransAtlantic, the the novel by Colum McCann, I really think it’s so interesting to think how we might frame our own family stories. And if we have an object that has been passed down through the generations, we might have a dishes, a pocket watch, or even a piece of furniture, and that could be the focal point for the story. In the novel, the author used the fictional letter to connect Lily’s descendants to Ireland and to each other. The other thing that I had not seen before, and I thought was pretty fascinating, was this idea of using historical characters that our ancestors may have met.

Diana (18m 23s):
So in TransAtlantic were introduced to Frederick Douglass, Alcock and Brown, and George Mitchell. And their stories are very loosely tied to the fictional women. They’re, they’re basically chance meetings, but this could be a really interesting way to tie historical context to our own family members who may not have left many details about their lives. We can also research important events in the time and place where our ancestors lived and how those events may have impacted them. Interestingly enough, the author in TransAtlantic gives us three distinct snapshots of Irish history. So we have the abolitionist movement, which is something we don’t hear a lot about, which was part of Frederick Douglass’s story.

Diana (19m 9s):
And then the first TransAtlantic flight by Alcock and Brown, which I knew absolutely nothing about. And then the Northern Ireland peace process. So you know, this is where we go into the context and we think about what was happening, what events were important to our ancestors, and how would those events have affected them. I love exploring ideas about how better to connect our ancestors to history. So many times we just researched them in a vacuum. So for instance, my research that I’m doing right now on John Royston, the Runaway Apprentice it’s 1770, and as I was researching about the county that he disappeared from, Middlesex County, I kept reading all of this information about how it was such a hotbed of the Revolution.

Diana (20m 0s):
And you know, there he is, I’m thinking of him as a runaway apprentice, but he was right there coming of age in an era where everything was really in an uproar and the colonies are going to revolt and we’re going to have a war. So it’s just good for us to step back sometimes and think about history and how we could tie ancestors to those events. So anyway, I thought it was a fun read. It was interesting. I learned a lot of different things that I hadn’t known before about some different characters. And I just like seeing new ideas of how to write up some history.

Nicole (20m 40s):
That’s such a good point. And I love that this novel creates a confluence of historical fact and then bringing in that fictional narrative by tying the characters in the novel to real life historical figures. And that’s something we can all do in our genealogy writing, where we’re not really even using fictional characters, but we’re using lesser known individuals like our ancestors. But then we can tie them to what’s happening in history and compare what’s going on in their lives to what we, what we know happened from the historical record for people like Frederick Douglass or you know, imagine other people who wrote autobiographies or have a lot of letters like I remember in middle school history studying a lot about John Adams and his wife, who wrote a lot of letters back and forth to each other.

Nicole (21m 32s):
And so you can really get an insight into what life was like for a husband and wife in New England in that time period by studying their letters. And if you have ancestors living in New England at that time, you can kind of draw on some of that history and you know, those primary source letters in history to help you round out the story of your ancestors who don’t have letters maybe left behind, but who lived in that same time and place. So it’s such a great technique in historical and genealogical writing to expand the context that way.

Diana (22m 8s):
I love that idea. And I have read diaries of women who were in the South, you know, during the Civil War and it’s the same thing. I remember one of them, she was writing about it, and it’s that same idea that you get in some of the movies like, oh, this war is gonna be over so fast because the South is so amazing and we’re just gonna send our men off and they’ll be back right away having won the war. That was all through her beginning entries of this diary, which I found fascinating because this was just someone writing at the time. And you could see the attitude of the people and that can really help you to perhaps even put some motivation into what your ancestors were doing.

Diana (22m 58s):
Like are they moving, are they migrating out of an area? What are they doing in their lives? And again, we don’t wanna research In the vacuum. We wanna think about what would’ve been happening In the world around them to cause them to do whatever they’re doing.

Nicole (23m 16s):
Well, thank you for sharing about this book, TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, and I was able to already reserve it, the audio book in my library app so I, it’s all downloaded already and ready to read. So I’m looking forward to diving into that and thinking about this interesting kind of three events in history that it covers. And it’s just so fun to listen to historical fiction. So if any of our listeners have great ideas or recommendations for us that we can add to our list to read, let us know. And we always enjoy talking about our FamilyLocket Book Club selections once a quarter.

Nicole (23m 58s):
So thanks for putting those together and giving us some fun books to read, Mom.

Diana (24m 2s):
Well, you’re welcome. I’ve been doing this little FamilyLocket Book Club on Good Reads for several years now. And so, you know, if any of our listeners have never joined the group, it’s completely free. You can go see all the past books. We have a bookshelf that’s actually getting pretty long. There are 91 books on there now. So all sorts of fun books that we, we love to read and we love these types of books. Some of the books I, we haven’t read yet, I have just put ’em on there as possibles to read, but it’s a pretty good book list.

Nicole (24m 36s):
Yeah, that, that’s a great list of books. And sometimes, you know, I will finish a series and I won’t know what to read next. I’ll have to remember to go look at that list because I haven’t read all of those yet, so I need to make sure I check ’em all off.

Diana (24m 50s):
There you go.

Nicole (24m 51s):
Alright everyone, thanks for listening. We hope you have fun if you decide to read or listen to this book and be sure to let us know anymore fun, historical fiction that we should try. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (25m 4s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (25m 42s):
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.