I am excited to be invited to present in person and online!
On Friday, I will be presenting Ancestors, AI, and Prompt Engineering.
On Saturday, I will be presenting a Crash Course in Researching Ancestors in the US Military.
There are great speakers, and great talks, Friday and Saturday. There is also an optional Beginner Day on Thursday, featuring four lectures just for beginners!
Have you every heard that you should be using Morning Reports?
A book has finally arrived to show how you can travel back in time through locations and events, day by day, with a U.S. Army soldier or organization during WWI or WWII military service. With Morning Reports, you can overcome and potentially go beyond burned Army personnel files! Pursue references for a specific soldier, then leverage daily records when not named or identified.
This book introduces techniques for locating Morning Reports and what is and is not included. WWI and WWII formats are described in detail, with examples allowing the reader to experience the WWII Morning Report language and abbreviations by utilizing the web, Fold3 (WWI) and the NARA catalog (WWII). The reader will discover tips for locating elusive reports and strategies for working around missing records. Useful case studies combine reports across parts of a military organization and place a soldier into the context of history.
This book contains a bonus chapter about the daily reporting for other branches of the military!
Historians will find the search techniques and pointers to additional records useful as they track a soldier or organization through a world war.
If you are interested in having Dr. McMahon speak at your society about Morning Reports, or other presentations, please contact us: https://aweekofgenealogy.com/contact-us/
It has been a while since there has been a blog post. In that time, I have been working on my newest presentation, Mining Morning Reports for Genealogical Gold. You can read a review here: https://aweekofgenealogy.com/comments
In addition to getting ready for other presentations, I have also been experimenting with the NARA Catalog API to get an alternate way of searching the catalog.
I did spend some time with AI offerings in my research into the Rev. Fr. Thomas J. Kennedy.
First, I uploaded the sketch that I have of him from the newspaper to ChatGPT and prompted it to: Change this line drawing into a picture
A few liberties were taken by the built-in DALL·E image generation system when creating this image. In the sketch it does appear that he is probably wearing a cassock of the time, but the details of buttons and the notch in the collar are not evident in the sketch.
I may need to try this process again with a stricter prompt to rein in ChatGPT’s creative vision.
I looked up his eye color recorded in a Civil War roster and asked in a follow-on prompt asked: can the image be changed so that his eyes are more grey
The resulting image looked less like the sketch.
Since the Rev. Fr. Kennedy was dying at the time of the column in the Brooklyn Eagle, it finally occurred to me that there must have been a photo of him that was used as the basis of this sketch. I have not located one yet. This image also looks like that of a younger man. My focus has been on the data, but it seems I may need to be searching for the original photo of him. Does the original photo still exist? (Although the Archivist at the Diocesan Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn was very helpful, they did not have a deceased priest personnel file for him at in their archives because he had died in Kentucky and not in Brooklyn.)
Using the original sketch, I did a Google Image search at https://images.google.com, adding the search terms: Kennedy Brooklyn
Naturally, our blog posts showed up, and data about the life of the Rev Fr. Thomas J. Kennedy extracted from the blog posts appeared in the AI summary. Many of the photos that were returned in the results were of men religious of all different faiths.
The “Dive Deeper in AI Mode” button that appeared at the end of the AI Summary made me curious, so I clicked on it. Gemini let me know the number of sites it was searching, and informed me about two sites: our blog and the New York Times. There was an article from the NY Times dated Oct. 5, 1901: “Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying.”
Our county library has a subscription to the ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which includes the New York Times, so I logged in and searched for the article using these search terms:
Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying 1901
There were three results, two of which were ads from the 1970s.
The New York Times article was succinct and did not offer more information than the article in the Brooklyn Eagle. It was actually published several days after his death in Kentucky. It mentioned that he retired about a year ago, and that his ill health for the reason for his pension. He was in Kentucky, at a Trappist Monastery. He was well-known in the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) circles.
Of course I downloaded a pdf file with the article, a pdf file with the whole newspaper page, and a (brief) citation in Chicago style: “Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying.” 1901., Oct 05 New York Times (1857-1922), 9. https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/rev-t-j-kennedy-said-be-dying/docview/96159883/se-2. (Further reproduction of New York Times articles is prohibited without permission.)
There is certainly more to do to fill in this ancestor’s story, but the use of the AI tools ChatGPT and Gemini inspired both my creativity and my next steps in the research.
Remember that it is best to use a browser other than Firefox to see the image pages in order. If you choose to download the PDF file, know that it is over 1GB in size. You might want to read it online and download only the pages of interest.
My newest presentation is about finding the genealogical gold buried in WWI and WWII Morning Reports. I have been spending time working on a companion book so that readers could a resource with them as they search for and use Morning Reports. This has been leading me to experiment with the finer points of searching for WWII Morning Reports through the NARA Catalog.
The caveats are:
1) Search from the NARA Catalog (https://catalog.archives.gov). You don’t always get links to show where the search results occur in the images within the File Unit, but searching from the Catalog (rather than within the Series) is the only way to see links at all.
2) Don’t use Firefox. Use a web browser other than Firefox for searching Morning Reports. There is a known bug where Firefox display images in reverse order, and that can make things more complicated than they need to be. (I use Chrome.)
Although I have not had confirmation from NARA that PDF files are available for every Month/Year and Roll Number combination in the Morning Report series in Record Group 64, a pattern has emerged. Rather than having to download every image separately, there appears to be a way to download the images from a Roll in the form of PDF files that contain groups of 125 images. Considering the convenience of having these Morning Reports online, the time to download each image was not objectionable. Individual images can be downloaded in .tif file format, so you may choose to that option.
For context, the Morning Reports were photographed onto Rolls (Reels) of film. These Rolls were digitized. NARA split the Rolls into File Units, which are parts of the Roll having 1000 images, with fewer images in the last part of the Roll (the end of the Roll). Those parts are File Units, and are labeled with the Roll Number and have numbers like these at the end (1 of 4), (2 of 4), (4 of 5). The number after “of” is the number of parts that the Roll was divided into.
The math that follows is just one way to calculate which PDF file to download, and how to figure the page within the PDF file. This is intended to be a primitive introduction, to go through the process step-by-step.
Example: I located a Special Order containing the search term in the Morning Reports. It was in the File Unit:
Morning Reports for January 1940 – July 1943: Roll 718 (3 of 4)
As expected, the PDF files were posted on the webpage with the end of this Roll. I downloaded the PDF file ending in -20, on page 56.
At the Coast Artillery Replacement Center in Fort Eustis, Virginia, troops were trained in anti-aircraft artillery. This Special Order was how my father came to be trained at a school for using the Stereoscopic Height Finder at Camp Davis, North Carolina.
Remember that for the best chance to have links to where search terms appear within the parts of a Roll (File Units), is to search from https://catalog.archives.gov, and remember to view the search results within the same tab.
