This podcast episode centers around Diana’s research trip to the Alabama Department of Archives & History (ADAH) in search of information about her ancestor, Thomas B. Royston. Diana shares how she wanted to fill gaps in his timeline, particularly regarding his move to Chambers County, Alabama. She details the process of researching at ADAH, from registering and receiving a research card to working with archivists. Diana sought tax records specifically, as they often reveal residency....
In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss using AI to analyze tax records. Tax research involves a lot of data, and once you’ve extracted the data, analyzing it can be a challenge. Diana explains how she exported data from Airtable into a CSV file, and Nicole explains how she used Claude AI to create a table from the data. Diana provides an example of how she used the AI analysis...
In Episode #339 of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss customizing an Airtable research log for tax research. Tax records are invaluable for genealogy research because they were taken annually, filling in the gaps between federal censuses. The challenge is finding a good way to track and analyze the data. Airtable is a favorite research log tool, and by adding a linked table to the log, researchers can tame tax data and make...
This blog post was written with the assistance of AI based on the Henderson Weatherford Research project uploaded to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. See the report link at the end of the article for all information fully cited. In genealogy, what we don’t find can be just as important as what we do find. The case of Henderson Weatherford, born about 1815 in Tennessee, demonstrates how careful attention to negative evidence helped break down a long-standing...
Tax research involves a lot of data – land, property, associates, amount of tax paid, and more. You may be working with a run of tax lists for several years and dealing with several individuals in those tax lists. Once you’ve carefully extracted the data, the next challenge is analyzing it. I recently wrote about customizing an Airtable research log for tax research to match the headings in the Dallas County, Texas, rolls from 1847...
If you’ve studied tax records when tracking an ancestor, you know how much data there can be to enter. Tax records are invaluable in research because they were taken annually, filling in the years between the federal census. The challenge comes in finding a good way to track and analyze the data. Airtable is my favorite research log tool, and by adding a linked table to the log, I can tame that tax data and...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is a discussion with Alice Childs, AG, about additional record types that can help with Pennsylvania German research, including tax records, military records, naturalization records, court records, German Newspapers, and family records. We go over Fraktur and Taufschein and where those can be found as well. Transcript Nicole (2s): This is Research Like a Pro episode, 211 Pennsylvania Germans part five more records. Welcome to Research Like a...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about how to find tax records. We discuss our go-to places to search, starting with the FamilySearch Wiki. Diana shares how she found the Maryland tax records transcribed and indexed at the Maryland Archives website through a link in the Wiki. We also discuss using the FamilySearch catalog to tap into all the digitized microfilm available online at FamilySearch that is typically unindexed, browse only microfilm. This...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about U.S. tax records and the various types you might encounter. Each state decided how to tax their citizens a little differently. Colonial Virginia had tithables and quitrents. Later, these were replaced with poll taxes. Most tax records fall into three categories, which we discuss – poll, real property, and personal property. Nicole shares how poll taxes in North Carolina help determine the ages of John Johnson’s...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about using tax records to solve genealogy research questions. This is the first of a three part series about tax records. Our examples are from U.S. research, but most countries tax their citizens, and the same general principles apply to researching there as well. In this part of the series, we tell you about three steps for extracting information from tax records, putting the data in a...
