Trying out NotebookLM has been on my to-do list for months. I just did, and I was blown away by it. The accessibility of technologies that I knew existed but had so well not seen integrated was impressive. You can chat with the AI about what has been added to the Notebook, and you can generate products based on what the uploaded documents. The AI-generated media and responses in the Notebook are all based on the documents that you upload to it, which should reduce the opportunity for AI hallucinations. Keep in mind that the best idea is to enter documents with text; there is no guarantee that images will be transcribed properly.
I had already identified a couple of ancestors as test cases. One is all-time family favorite who was born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island, served in the Army during Spanish-American War, then settled on a homestead out in Oregon. He was a poet and a raconteur who loved to travel and was always involved in social movements.
Another ancestor is one of my brick walls. He is the only German immigrant in my tree (so far), and while I have clues about his origins in Germany, I cannot pin down his arrival to the United States or from whence he came. What I have learned about him is in the U.S., and begins when he was married to an Irish woman, after he had anglicized his name. From the time of his marriage, he never lived near other German immigrants. Very knowledgeable and generous researchers in Brooklyn, New York, and in Germany have helped me follow up on the very limited clues I have developed. The ability to pull together the material and look at it from different perspectives has the potential to help with this brick wall.
If you have not had a chance to try out NotebookLM, here is the link:
For researching a WWI or a WWII soldier, have you considered using the Rosters at NARA? They are located Series: Muster Rolls and Rosters, November 1, 1912–December 31, 1943 within Record Group 64. This blog post will show where to search for rosters, including how to use an online finding aid for finding WWII rosters that will make your task much easier.
The rosters are arranged in three subseries within Muster Rolls and Rosters, November 1, 1912–December 31, 1943:
Muster Rolls, November 1, 1912 – June 30, 1918 and Enlisted and Officer Rosters, July 1, 1918 – December 31, 1939,
Officer Rosters, 1920 – 1939,
Army and Army Air Force (Air Corp) Rosters, 1940 – 1943
On this page, you will find information about how to locate WWII rosters organized by:
Army enlisted service members
Army officers
Army Air Force (Air Corp) enlisted service members
Army Air Force (Air Corp) officers
Within those categories, the rosters are organized by type of reporting unit.
To use the finding aid, click on the plus sign to expand the link to locate the type of unit. There will be box numbers shown, but some entries will contain links to digitized rosters, or to a pdf that contains the National Archives Identifier (NAID) in NARA’s Catalog to use when locating the online rosters.
In this example, I am searching for the rosters for a soldier in Battery A of the 500th AAA Gun Battalion, so clicked on the plus sign next to “Chemical and Antiaircraft Artillery” to expand the section.
I licked on the link for “Antiaircraft Battalion – Boxes 246-348.”
The PDF file shows that the rosters are stored by increasing NAID numbers, by the number of the organization.The first page contains the column headers. (They are not repeated on subsequent pages.)
Scrolling down to the beginning of page 4 of the PDF, I find Btry C, 500th AAA Gn Bn, 1943. That means Roll Number 307 (2 of 3), which begins with Battery C of that Battalion has NAID Identifier 371744319.
Since the soldier is in Battery A, I will want to check the previous part of the roll, listed at the bottom of page 3 of the PDF, NAID 371744318, Roll Number 307 (1 of 3). I would expect that rosters for Battery A would be closer to the end of the Roll. (Remember to use the Chrome Browser to see the images in order, as Firefox has a documented bug of showing images in reverse order.)
There is a blank page between the months, so I began by checking the image after the blank pages in the image range of 800-900.
I recommend building a list or a table with the information for the organization, to keep track of links. (Note: Organization and Link appear in the same column for readability. In my Excel worksheet, they appear in separate columns.)
I would want to continue to go backwards chronologically to collect the rosters for the time the soldier I am researching was in the Battery.
Another option, as described in our blog post about locating WWII Morning Reports in PDF Files can also make the task easier. Search the NARA catalog for: 371745320, which is the NAID for the final part of the Roll Number 307, part 3 of 3.
From there, the PDF files containing groups of 125 images from the Roll can be downloaded. Images for Battery A can be found in the files Roll-0307_07.pdf and Roll-0307_08.pdf
Are you researching Ancestors in New York State? If so, you will probably be interested in the free on-demand online course from The New York Genealogy & Biographical Society: “Tracing Your New York Ancestors with the NYG&B.”
In the six video sessions of the course, you will learn about NYG&B, its services, membership and publications. The sessions cover the use of their online collections.
When you sign up for the course, you have 60 days to complete it. During that time you can review the on-demand lectures and revisit the materials. When the 60 days expires, you can re-register for the course again. When you complete the videos for all the sessions you can enter your name to receive a personalized digital certificate.
The opportunity to learn about the resources of the NYG&B through the sessions given by their esteemed experts is terrific. The information that I found most interesting were about the resources available on their website, addressing how to navigate their website and ways to search their databases. The demonstration of how to search their collections through the New York Public Library catalog were invaluable.
It was fascinating to learn about the products created by the scholars in residence, who have created work about the resources at the NYG&B. Those products are available on the website, and might be leveraged in our own research.
Insights into the educational programs and how to use the tools were also important parts of the course. Be sure to download the handouts that accompany each class.
Having earned a Ph.D., worked as a professor, and published research, I know that citing sources is essential in academic work. Having published in multiple disciplines, I have used different styles of citations and variations of those styles. Students can usually understand why direct quotations need to be cited, but do not always grasp why the facts they use in their writing must also be attributed. The methods in technical papers are explained so that they can be reproducible. For a technical discipline, citations can be used by readers to go upstream to the authoritative sources and investigate the source material for themselves. Those sources are typically published and readily accessible.
Genealogical writing is different. Using historical sources can be far more complicated. They are evidence of the past events, which support interpretations of that past. The access to an historical source may limited. A source may exist in one location with restrictions limiting its physical access, which means that readers may not be able to examine the source themselves. A source may have been destroyed or lost, leaving us with only an image or description of it. It may exist only in the private files of a researcher or in unpublished manuscripts. Primary sources may also be subjective, which introduces another layer of evaluation. Therefore, citations of historical sources need to convey to readers the information about the source and the implications about its reliability.
This is where Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing & Using History Sources becomes invaluable. Ms. Mills wants us to understand why and how to do this effectively. Improving how we cite our sources will result in better products. As we evaluate our sources our citations present evaluation of their reliability to others. She guides us as we turn our evidence into proof.
There are sobering thoughts throughout this book. Without DNA evidence, attributing relationships between individuals in the past is built on trust in the informants. The authenticity of a tombstone image downloaded from an online cemetery website differs from that of an image we photographed on our own in-person visit to a cemetery.
All sources are not created equal, nor do all have the same weight when considered as proof. From the very start of our research, we need to not only be tracking where our sources come from but evaluating them as we collect them. We must also be wary of bad data; multiple references to it should not be mistaken for proof of its veracity. There is a good reminder to put full citations on the front page of all our notes or copies of documents.
Enjoy the guidelines for analyzing evidence. The book also includes universal templates and construction notes for our use, including templates for the daunting layered citations with an explanation of why they are important. While you might be tempted to ignore Appendix One until you need to define terms, I recommend that you review it early to make sure that you understand the language of citing and using historical sources. (The first term you look up should be “q.v.”)
Consider allowing Ms. Mills to guide you toward stronger, clearer, more reliable research!
The book can be found at: https://genealogical.com/store/your-stripped-bare-guide-to-citing-using-history-sources/
Note: A review copy was provided by the publisher.
As a reminder, I search from the main catalog page at https://catalog.archives.gov/ so that I can benefit from the links to the search terms in the results. To see if more Morning Report are available I search for terms such as: “Morning Reports” AND “October 1944”
This time there were results! I kept searching, and Morning Reports up to December 1944 are available. (Search terms: “Morning Reports” AND “December 1944”) I did check for any from 1945, there were no results (yet!).
Of course, I did search for my father, by name and by serial number. This time I did find a mention of him. My brother was the first to know of this find, grateful that this was not a middle-of-the-night call!
For tonight, I will share that SGT James C. McMahon appeared in a Morning Report for 13 October 1944, still in Narsarssuak, Greenland. July 1944 had left me with a cliffhanger, and this record provided data about two military organizations with which he served after the 500th AAA Gun Battalion left Greenland.
I will post about my continuing research as I use Morning Reports to reconstruct my father’s WWII service. From here, I will be busy moving forward and backward in time to track what was happening in Greenland.
Thank you to NARA! Good luck searching, and let me know how you do!
