On this Father’s Day, I’ve been reminiscing about my dad, Bobby Gene Shults. He was one of the “greatest generation” who served in World War II and went on to build a life and raise a family afterward. He wrote his own life history, which is filled with stories about the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and his adventures as a young boy in Texas, Oklahoma, and California. When we visited, he’d tell those stories...
Do you have any photos of family members by their cars? What can you add to a family’s story by analyzing the make, model, and price of the car? It turns out, this is another great use of artificial intelligence. For this 52 Ancestor blog post around the theme of “Wheels,” I chose a photo of my mother, Anna Mae Kelsey, where the family car is the backdrop. Using AI to help with the analysis,...
If you need a good reason to start writing your ancestor’s stories, let me introduce you to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge created by Amy Johnson Crow. Amy has engineered prompts for several years to stimulate our brains and help us brainstorm story ideas. I participated in 2022 and wrote several blog posts about my ancestors. I loved the motivation to write and discovered some neat things about people I thought I knew!...
With the holidays approaching, it’s a great time to consider gathering family stories. Although it can seem daunting to start an interview project, a few simple steps will get you on your way. With the new advances in artificial intelligence, we can streamline and personalize the interview process. AI can then help us organize and write the stories. Consider asking a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude for ideas during each step of the...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about an ancestor who died too soon, Diana’s great-grandmother, Mary Margaret (Peterson) Creer. We discuss Mary’s Danish parents, their immigration, and settlement in Spanish Fork, Utah in the late 1800s. Mary married Charles Cannon Creer in Manti and had a wedding reception in a white brick house Charles built for his bride. Mary was the mother of eleven children, but had an accident that shortened her life....
What would you do if your aunt gave you the charge never to forget your family’s history and then gave you a book about the family but forbade you to read it? For years, author, Meryl Frank, kept her promise to her aunt but did start researching the events during World War II in Lithuania that resulted in the death of her Jewish family. Eventually, her research led to uncovering the stories and finally to...
When thinking of an ancestor who was an outcast, who comes to mind? Various situations could result in a person becoming an outcast from their family or from society. These ancestors may be the subject of a family story that entails some kind of crime, misdeed, argument, or another event. Uncovering the facts behind the story can lead you on a quest to discover more. In this blog post, I’ll discuss an “outcast” in my...
It is an excellent time of year to think about the things we are thankful for! I’ve been thinking about DNA-specific blessings, and I made a list of my top 5. What are you grateful for in the realms of family history and DNA? I’m thankful for: DNA tests that can help us discover ancestors whose names and lives are lost due to time and memory. Newly discovered family members. Renewed connections with cousins and...
As family historians, we know the power of learning the stories of our ancestors. We’ve discovered how they overcame losing loved ones, economic struggles, mental and physical challenges, and more. We research from the comfort of our homes with many resources like computers, the internet, and access to records through online databases. What about the homeless, who are simply struggling for survival? Can learning their ancestor stories help them as well? In this guest post,...
As family historians we recognize the need to gather our family stories, but what happens when we uncover stories that were never discussed? What if we found our family was part of one of the most dramatic and disturbing eras of the 20th century – the Holocaust of World War II? In Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones we learn the remarkable story of her family’s survival as Polish Jews. Georgia made the discovery of...
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