Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Genealogy Education Bytes - Week of 25 June to 1 July 2026

 Welcome to Genealogy Education Bytes, posted on Wednesday afternoon for the past week, where we try to highlight some of the most important genealogy and family history education items that came across my desktop since the last issue.




1) Upcoming Conferences and Institutes:

* Conference Keeper Calendar - has many links to register for and/or view seminars, conferences and institutes.

*  FEEFHS Annual Conference ($$, In-person, in Salt Lake City) -- 5 to 7 August 2026.

*  Pennsylvania's Genealogy Event "PaGE" 2026 Conference ($$, Virtual) -- 6 to 8 August 2026.

2 ) Upcoming Webinars and Online Classes (times are US Pacific):

* Conference Keeper Calendar - has many links to register for and/or view seminars, webinars and classes.

* FamilySearch MonthlyWebinars (Free)

* RootsTech 2019-2026 On-Demand Sessions (Free)

*  Legacy Family Tree Webinar -- Wednesday, 1 July, 11 a.m.: Automating Oral History: Best Tools for Transcribing Audio by Rhonda Lauritzen.

*  Legacy Family Tree Webinar -- Wednesday, 8 July, 11 a.m.:  Only A Date? Five Things You May Be Missing in Kentucky and Virginia Marriages by Gail Jackson Miller.

*  Legacy Family Tree Webinar -- Friday, 10 July, 11 a.m.:  Researching in Warwickshire by Donna Rutherford.

3) Recent Podcasts:

* Ancestors and Algorithms: Ep. 44: The Email That Gets Results - AI Archive Correspondence in English and German



*  Hittin' the Bricks With Kathleen:  Preserving Our Heritage: Supporting Local Genealogy Societies
*  Hittin' the Bricks With Kathleen:  Genealogy in Black & White


4) Recent YouTube Videos:







*  Denyse Allen • Chronicle Makers:  Everything I Learned About 1776 Was Wrong









* GeneaVlogger:  Building YOUR Family Tree

*  Int'l Institute od Genealogical Studies:  DNA—The Surprising Ancestry Of Virginia Pioneer James McCallister
*  Int'l Institute od Genealogical Studies:  Where were your Colonial ancestors on 4 July 1776?



*  Marcia Philbrick:  The Paper Pioneer






*  Trace Your New England Roots:  The Most Meaningful Gift Isn't Wrapped—It's Found
*  Trace Your New England Roots:  Your Vermont Family Tree Brick Wall Just Got Solved


*  Write Your Family History With Devon Noel Lee:  The Feedback Problem in Family History Writing (and How to Fix It)

5) Did you miss the last post in this series -- Genealogy Education Bytes - Week of 18 to 24 June 2026?

Read past Genealogy Education Bytes here.

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NOTE: If I missed an upcoming conference or webinar, or a useful podcast or video, in this time period, please let me know in a comment or an email.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2026/07/genealogy-education-bytes-week-of-25.html

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share your comment on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Note that all comments are moderated and may not appear immediately.

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Life Memoir of Herman Schaffner (1851-1921) of San Francisco in Early 1921

 I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for the family of my wife's great-grandparents Herman and Mary Ann (Paul) Schaffner in ABC Biography of Herman Schaffner (1851-1921) and Mary Ann Paul (1854-1908) Family of San Francisco, California,  based on my genealogical research over 38 years. 

I wondered what Herman Schaffner might have told his grandchildren in a life memoir in 1921.

(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic for Herman Schaffner's life memoir)

1)  I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to   "Please write a life memoir for Herman Schaffner based on the attached biography, as he might tell his grandchildren in early 1921."

2)  The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:  


The Memoir of Herman Schaffner

As told in his own words, San Francisco, 1921

New York Beginnings

I was born in November of 1851, in the city of New York, the only child my mother Susanna ever gave my father. I do not remember her face. She was gone before I had memories enough to keep, taken from us sometime around my third year, and so my earliest recollections are not of a mother's arms but of my father Friedrich's hands—rough hands, a workingman's hands, holding mine as we walked the crowded streets of that great teeming city.

My father was no stranger to starting over. He had come from Germany seeking his fortune in America, and when he lost Susanna, he did what practical men of his generation did: he found another wife to help raise his motherless boy. Martha Matilda came into our lives when I was perhaps four years old, an Irishwoman with a steady hand and, in time, five children of her own to add to our family. I do not recall resenting her. A boy of four does not much care where kindness comes from, only that it comes.

Westward to California

It was Martha who was beside my father when we made the great decision of our lives—to leave New York behind entirely and join the multitudes streaming toward California. I was not yet five years old when we arrived in San Francisco, and so in truth, California is the only home I have ever known. New York remains to me a place of vague impressions—crowded streets, my mother's absence, the rocking of a ship or train I cannot now distinguish in memory.

We became citizens of this country in November of 1856, shortly after our arrival, my father standing before whatever official such matters required, declaring his allegiance, securing for all of us a stake in this new land. I was too young to understand the gravity of it then. Now, looking back across seven decades, I understand it was perhaps the most important day of my young life—the day my family planted itself permanently in American soil.

San Francisco in those years was no proper city as we would understand the word today. It was raw, energetic, still finding its shape after the chaos of the Gold Rush years. But it was growing, and we grew with it. My half-siblings arrived one after another—Matilda, then Frederick, then Louis, then Charles, then little Nellie—until our house was full of the noise and chaos that only a large family can produce. I was the eldest, and though we did not share a mother, I felt the weight and privilege of that position.

A Young Man's Trade

I came of age watching San Francisco transform itself. I was eighteen when the great railroad was completed, linking us at last to the rest of the nation—I remember the celebrations, the sense that our isolated city by the bay had suddenly been tethered to the wider world.

I apprenticed myself to the printing trade, learning the careful, exacting work of the bookbinder. There is a particular satisfaction in that craft—taking loose pages, raw and unprotected, and giving them structure, permanence, a spine to stand upon. I did not know it then, but the discipline I learned binding books would serve me well in later years, when precision and record-keeping became my life's true calling.

These were not easy years for my family. In January of 1875, my stepmother Martha died in Oakland, leaving my father a widower for the second time. He married again within the year—to a woman named Dora—though they had no children together. By then I was a grown man of nearly twenty-five, and my own life was about to take its decisive turn.

Marriage and Family

I married Mary Ann Paul before the year 1876 had run its course. She was a woman of quiet strength, the eldest daughter of a large family herself, with roots in Massachusetts and a childhood spent crossing half the continent—Massachusetts to Chicago, Chicago to San Francisco—before our paths finally converged in this city we both called home.

We began our married life in a household full of her family—her widowed mother Maria, her siblings, all of us together at a house on Acheson Street. Our first son, Paul Frederick, was born there in August of 1879, a babe of nine months when the census man came to our door and found three generations under one roof. I was working still as a bookbinder then, building toward something, though I did not yet know what.

Two more sons followed. Herman Jr. arrived in June of 1881, and then, after some years, our youngest, Frederick, in March of 1889. Three boys to carry the Schaffner name forward into a new century I would not live to see in full.

V. The Knights of Pythias

It was in the work of brotherhood that I found my true vocation. I came to San Francisco's chapter of the Knights of Pythias and discovered there a calling that would occupy the better part of my adult life. I was elected Grand Keeper of Records and Seals for the entire Domain of California, a position I would hold with pride for thirty-five years.

There is something in record-keeping that suits my temperament—perhaps it traces back to those early years binding books, learning that information properly preserved becomes a kind of permanence, a defense against the forgetting that time inflicts on all things. I rose further still, becoming Past Grand Chancellor, and even achieved the curious honor of Past Imperial Prince of the Dramatic Order of Knights of Khorasan—a side degree known for its theatrical ritual, which I confess I rather enjoyed, having always harbored some small flair for ceremony and pageant.

By 1900, we had moved to Castro Street, and I had left bookbinding behind entirely, devoting myself fully to my duties as Grand Secretary. My sons Paul and Herman Jr. had grown into fine young stenographers, working in San Francisco's offices, while young Freddie still sat at his school desk. We had built, Mary Ann and I, a solid and respectable home.

I vividly recall the Great Earthquake and fire that hit San Francisco on the morning of April 19, 1906. We were awakened by a sound like the world ending—not thunder, not any sound you could name, but a grinding, tearing roar from beneath the earth itself. The house bucked like a horse trying to throw its rider. Plaster fell from the walls. The chimney cracked. Windows shattered. We got the children outside—Paul, Herman and Frederick were all still at home, and we stood in Castro Street in our nightclothes with our neighbors, watching the smoke begin to rise from the direction of downtown.

Our home was south of the fires, and did not suffer any fire damage. We spent the night on the street huddled in our blankets. Over the next days, we ventured out to assess the damage, and the full scope of the catastrophe became clear. Downtown was destroyed. Chinatown was ashes. Nob Hill's mansions were ruins. The beautiful City Hall with its grand dome had collapsed into rubble.

My boys walked with me to Market Street and stood staring at the devastation. Everything was gone—just block after block of smoking ruins, brick chimneys standing like lonely sentinels among the destruction. We survived, fixed the house, and lived the rest of our lives remembering that day.

Loss

I must speak now of the hardest chapter of my life. In February of 1908, my beloved Mary Ann was taken from me. Twenty-five years we had shared—a quarter century of marriage, of raising our three sons together, of building a life in this city we both loved. Her death notice called her my "idolized wife," and I will not dispute the word. We carried her from our home on Castro Street to Woodlawn in Colma, traveling by electric funeral car, as was the custom by then—San Francisco having long since closed its gates to the dead, sending us all out to that quiet city of stone beyond the southern hills.

I do not know how to describe the years that followed except to say that a man learns to carry grief the way he carries everything else—one foot before the other, one day following the next. My sons were grown, beginning families of their own. My granddaughter Muriel was born into our household, a small bright light in difficult years. I continued my work for the Pythian order, finding in its rituals and responsibilities a structure to hold onto when so much else had fallen away.

VII. Two More Marriages

I did not remain alone forever. In 1912, on the leap day of February, I married Mary Jane McWhirter, hoping perhaps to recapture some of what I had lost. But fate is not always generous. Mary Jane died that same year, in December, scarcely ten months a bride. I buried a second wife before the year was finished.

Four years later, in 1916, I married a third time—to Fredericka Hartman, a native San Franciscan who brought companionship to my later years. I will not pretend these later marriages held the same depth as my years with Mary Ann, but a man does not wish to face his final years entirely alone, and Fredericka gave me that comfort.

A Life of Service Recalled

As I sit now in the autumn of my years—seventy years old, my hair white, my step slower than it once was—I find myself taking stock of a life that has spanned the entire transformation of San Francisco from rough frontier outpost to great American city. I arrived here a boy of not yet five; I remain here a man of seventy-one, having watched this place become something extraordinary, and having played whatever small part I could in its civic and fraternal life.

Thirty-five years I served the Knights of Pythias as keeper of its records and seals. I take some quiet pride in that span of service—longer than many marriages, longer than most careers. I am told men still speak my name at grand lodge sessions throughout the state, that I am known to brothers in lodges I have never visited. There is a kind of immortality in that, I think—not the immortality of poets or kings, but the more modest immortality of a man who did his duty faithfully, year upon year, and was trusted to do it well.

My three sons have built their own lives now. Paul manages the Valvoline Company's affairs in this city. Fred works as a teller at the Humboldt Savings Bank. Herman Jr. has followed his own path. They have given me grandchildren, carrying the Schaffner name into a century I increasingly understand will not be mine to see grow old.

Final Reflections

I think often of my mother Susanna, whom I never knew, and wonder what she would make of the life her infant son built so far from where she rests. I think of my father Friedrich, who had the courage to cross an ocean and then a continent, planting our family in soil that would prove fertile beyond his imagining. I think of Mary Ann, twenty-five years my wife, mother of my sons, whose loss I have never entirely ceased to feel.

I came to this city as a child too young to understand the journey he was making. I leave it now—for I feel my own time growing short—as an old man who understands, finally, that the journey was the point all along. Not the destination, not the records I kept or the offices I held, but the accumulated weight of years lived in service to family, to brotherhood, to a city that took in a fatherless—motherless—boy from New York and gave him a life worth the living.

San Francisco has been good to me. I hope, in whatever small way a man can hope such things, that I have been good to San Francisco in return.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Herman Schaffner died on December 8, 1921, in San Francisco, following an illness of some four months. He was laid to rest in Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, beside his first wife, Mary Ann. He was remembered by the Knights of Pythias as one of the most prominent members of the order in the United States, and by his obituary as a devoted father to his surviving sons, Paul, Herman and Fred.

===========================

3)  The Video Overview of Herman Schaffner's life memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is:      

4)  I edited the Claude memoir text to correct minor inconsistencies and errors. Every large language model (LLM) AI tool writes descriptive text much better than I can write. The AI tools are very perceptive, insightful and inspiring, creating engaging text in seconds, including local and national historical events and social history detail when requested.

5)  This is historical fiction, based on my own genealogical research and family records. It is what Herman Schaffner might have told his grandchildren in 1921.  

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

The URL for this post is: https://www.geneamusings.com/2026/07/life-memoir-of-herman-schaffner-1851.html

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Please note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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MyHeritage Has Free U.S. and Canada Historical Records For July 4th

 I reeceived this information from Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage today:

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It's a big week for family history in North America! To celebrate Canada Day on July 1 and America's 250th anniversary on July 4, MyHeritage is offering free access to over a billion historical records from July 1–5, 2026.

                                     Search U.S. City Directories

                                      Search Canadian censuses

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, we're offering free access to our U.S. City Directories collection, featuring 1.3 billion historical records from approximately 26,000 directories published between 1860 and 1960. Consolidated records make it easy to follow individuals across multiple directories, and they're especially valuable for filling gaps left by missing census records, including much of the lost 1890 U.S. Census.

For Canada Day, we're making all 15 Canadian census collections, comprising 52.3 million historical records, free to search. These invaluable records reveal where your ancestors lived, who they lived with, their occupations, birthplaces, and many other details that help trace families across generations.






We're also continuing to celebrate America's 250th with our America 250 hub, featuring fascinating resources and American family history stories that bring the nation's history to life through the experiences of ordinary families. New stories are being added all the time, so it's well worth checking back regularly and sharing the hub with your followers if you haven't already.

Enjoy and Happy 4th of July!

                            ================================ 

See previous Genea-Musings posts about MyHeritage record collections and features in https://www.geneamusings.com/search/label/MyHeritage.com.

                          =========================================

Disclosure: I receive a complimentary PremiumPlus subscription to MyHeritage, and have received other material consideration in past years. I uploaded my autosomal DNA raw data to their DNA product. This does not affect my objective analysis of MyHeritage products. I am a paid subscriber to Family Tree Webinars and love it.

The URL for this post is: https://www.geneamusings.com/2026/07/myheritage-has-free-us-and-canada.html

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Note that all comments are moderated, so they may not appear immediately.

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Genealogy News Bytes - Week of 24 to 30 June 2026

   Welcome to Genealogy News Bytes, posted on Tuesday afternoon for the past week, where we try to highlight the most important genealogy and family history news  items that came across our desktop since the last issue.    


1)  Genealogy and Family History News Articles:










2)  America250 Family History Stories:












4)  Genealogy Book/Magazine Notices and Reviews:


5)  New or Updated Genealogy Digital Record Collections:






*  175 New Papers Added! [Fishwrap]

6)  Did you miss the last post in this series?  See Genealogy News Bytes - Week of 17 to 23 June 2026.


                          =========================================


Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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Using Artificial Intelligence Tools To Find Possible Family Stories

Genealogists and family historians learn early in their research that "Every person, every famly, has a unique story, and it is our job to identify the stories and tell them."  We were told by Judy G. Russell at RootsTech in 2015 that "A family story dies within three generations if it is not told" (paraphrased, not a direct quote). 

What if we don't have any stories handed down over the generations?  We may know that the family migrated from there to here, or served in them ilitary, or worked as a farmer or blacksmith or carpenter.  

My solution to the problem of "bringing my ancestors to life" and better understanding their lives, is to use an Artificial Intelligence LLM to tell the stories by requesting them to put the ancestral family in a place and time and to use historical events and social history for context to tell a "likely" story about them. That is a "historical fiction" story but it might be the way it was, and the reader gains a bit of historical, geographical and social context to put "meat on the bones" of their ancestral family. 

All I can say is that "I'm trying" -- that's why over the last year and a half I have been writing AI-assisted biographies, memoirs, stories and more about my close ancestors (back through my 3rd great-grandparents, so five generations back - 62 ancestors, 31 families).  I've written at least one story every day.  You can see them all in my Randy's Genealogy and AI page here.

In my post Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC) Process - Updated (posted 12 April 2026), I suggested that one way to identify interesting family stories could be to ask an Artificial Intelligence LLM to identify "turning points" or "critical decisions" based on a factual biographical sketch.  I wrote:

"You can ask the AI Tools to create suggestions for interesting 'Family Stories' or 'Turning Points' based on the Genealogical Sketch or Biography. Select specific suggestions and ask the AI Tool to tell a 'Historical Fiction' Story ("the way it might have been")."

Here is an example using the biography of my 2nd great-grandfather Devier James Lamphier Smith (1839-1894): 

(Devier J. Smith in about 1885 in Concordia, Kansas, colorized by MyHeritage photo tool)

My Prompt to Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 was: "Based on the attached biography, please provide 10 stories about Devier's life that could be told, and include a one paragraph description of each story."

The Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 response was:


Looking at Devier's remarkable life, here are ten stories that could be developed into fiction, narrative nonfiction, or family history pieces:

1. The Foundling's Secret: A story exploring Devier's mysterious origins as an infant of unknown parentage, adopted by Ranslow and Mary Smith in Jefferson County, New York. This could be told from multiple perspectives across time, weaving the 1839 adoption with the modern-day DNA discovery suggesting a connection to Isaac and Rosina Lanfear, capturing both the uncertainty he may have felt as a child and the resolution his descendants eventually found through genetic genealogy.

2. An Act of the Legislature: The story of Devier's formal 1866 petition to the Wisconsin State Senate to legally claim the Smith name as his adoptive father's heir, set against the backdrop of his adoptive mother's recent death and his father's will referring to him by both names. This narrative could dramatize the courtroom or legislative chamber scene, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and what it means to claim a family as truly one's own.

3. A Wedding on the Eve of War: A romantic tale of Devier and Abbie Vaux's courtship and marriage on April 4, 1861, just as the nation was splitting apart with the outbreak of the Civil War. This story could juxtapose the intimate joy of a young Wisconsin couple beginning their life together against the distant rumble of national catastrophe, asking how ordinary people built private happiness while history turned around them.

4. Two Small Graves: A poignant story centered on the deaths of Devier and Abbie's young children, Aggie (age two, in Iowa) and Lutie (age two, in Kansas), exploring how a pioneer family processed grief while continuing to move, work, and survive. This narrative could examine the resilience required of frontier parents who buried children in towns they would soon leave behind, never to visit the graves again.

5. The Restless Road West: An epic, multi-generational tale following the Smith family's repeated relocations—from Jefferson County, New York, to Wisconsin Territory, then Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and finally Nebraska. This story could capture the rhythm of pioneer life itself: the packing of wagons, the selling of land, the starting over again and again, framing Devier as an embodiment of America's restless westward energy.

6. Liveryman and Trader: A business-focused narrative set in Concordia, Kansas, depicting Devier's rise as a livery stable owner and cattle trader during the boom years of the Kansas cattle towns, while his wife Abbie worked as a milliner and his daughters taught music. This story could explore the entrepreneurial hustle of a frontier family pooling multiple income streams, and the social world of a cattle-town livery stable as a hub of commerce and gossip.

7. Alone at Spring Ranch: A deeply personal story built around the Bible entry Devier wrote on November 10, 1889, describing himself alone at Spring Ranch in Cheyenne County while his family was scattered between California and Nebraska. This narrative could dwell on solitude, faith, and longing, imagining his days and nights on an isolated homestead, his reading of Scripture as both comfort and discipline, and the emotional toll of a marriage and family stretched across hundreds of miles.

8. No Roof to Cover Them: An adventure story recounting Devier and John Dunbar's early exploration of the Wano valley in Cheyenne County, Kansas, where the two men reportedly slept on open ground with no shelter. This tale could focus on the physical hardship and camaraderie of frontier scouting, the gamble of staking a claim on unproven land, and the optimism required to imagine a homestead where there was, as yet, nothing.

9. The Inventor's Workshop: A story imagining the practical ingenuity behind Devier's December 1885 patent for a harness rack, exploring how a working liveryman might have identified a problem in his daily business and tinkered toward a solution. This narrative could highlight the lesser-known inventive streak running through ordinary frontier entrepreneurs, men who solved problems not in laboratories but in barns and stables.

10. The Last Days at the St. Charles Hotel: A closing story depicting Devier's sudden illness and death from heart disease at the St. Charles Hotel in McCook in May 1894, including his funeral through the M.E. church and burial under the Ancient Order of United Workmen. This narrative could serve as a bookend to his life, gathering his family, his fraternal brothers, and the McCook community he'd helped build, reflecting on the arc from mysterious foundling to respected pioneer businessman.

Several of these (especially #1, #3, #7, and #8) could work well as first-person fictional pieces in Devier's or Abbie's voice, similar to the approach you've taken with other ancestors like Philip Jacob König.

Each of those suggestions could be a story about Devier's life and family. I have written several "historical fiction stories" about Devier's life and family in:

I may do several of the suggested stories for Devier J. Smith as time passes.

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Please note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

Subscribe to receive a free daily email from Genea-Musings using www.Blogtrottr.com. 


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