Muskogee County Genealogical Society

05/18/2026

It's time to register and save your virtual spot. https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/xoVLBV6PSvKr9TfniceQxA

05/15/2026

Memorial Day is fast approaching. Even though it is officially the day to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, many people use the occasion to visit and decorate the graves of their loved ones, regardless of their military status. Here's a good guide by William Dollarhide to keep handy for your visit to a cemetery as well as your cemetery research.

05/15/2026

Monitoring new digital collections for relevant items

Periodically feed AI announcement feeds or blog posts from archives and major genealogy platforms and ask it to extract only those new collections that match your focus surnames, localities, or time periods, creating a watch list with links and dates.

05/13/2026

Girl Scout Cookies documentary:

View the e-Edition for Wednesday, May 13, 2026

05/12/2026

Use this prompt In a product that uses Perplexity’s 19‑model Computer:

“Identify all major online record sets for Muskogee County, Oklahoma, 1880–2020, across Ancestry, FamilySearch, state archives, and local libraries. Since Muskogee County is in both the Creek and Cherokee nation reservations, be sure to identify those relevant records sets as well to include both contexts, OHS American Indian Archives, FamilySearch Cherokee/Dawes guides, and NARA Dawes/BIA references. Produce a table with collection name, date span, URL and Tribal/Jurisdiction Scope.”

05/09/2026

Genealogy Platforms Weekly Briefing: May 2–9, 2026

The past seven days (May 2–9, 2026) have been relatively quiet across major genealogy platforms, with no major feature announcements or tool launches reported. Activity continues to center on incremental record additions, particularly in newspaper databases, as platforms maintain the steady expansion patterns established in April 2026.

Platform Updates

FamilySearch.org
FamilySearch published its April 2026 monthly update on April 9, adding over 1 billion free historical records focused heavily on the United States (1 billion records including public/vital records, military/cemetery records, and immigration/naturalization), United Kingdom (13 million vital, military, and emigration records), and Ireland (10 million civil registrations and session court records). No new platform features or tools were reported this week. The platform continues its shift to monthly (rather than weekly) record updates, with the next monthly report expected in early June 2026.

Ancestry.com
No feature updates or major collection announcements were reported for the week of May 2–9. At RootsTech 2026 (March 5–7), Ancestry announced a $450 million investment in new content and showcased Revolutionary War pension files with 10 million searchable names via full-text search and handwriting recognition. These initiatives are rolling out gradually throughout 2026, but no specific updates tied to this past week were documented.

MyHeritage.com
MyHeritage's most recent collection update covered April 1–30, 2026, adding 6 new and 10 updated collections, including Austria Vienna Catholic Church Births and Baptisms 1850–1920, California Deaths 1905–1939, Hungary World War I Casualty Lists 1914–1919, and Netherlands Names Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com. No updates specific to May 2–9 were reported. Earlier this year, MyHeritage announced its transition to Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) for DNA tests and expansion by 6.6 billion historical records in 2025.

Newspapers.com
GenealogyBank (a competitor subscription newspaper site) announced 14 titles added or updated for May 2026 on May 4. Newspapers.com itself has not published a dedicated May update, but April/May aggregate reports indicate over 1,000 new titles added across various free and subscription newspaper databases. Earlier reports from January and March 2026 documented 218 and 90 new newspapers respectively, reinforcing the pattern of large monthly batches.

Elephind.com
Elephind continues operating with a refreshed interface and over 13 million newspaper pages indexed, with additional pages queued. No updates specific to the May 2–9 window were found.

Archive-It.org
The Internet Archive's Archive-It program published recent posts about community web-archiving initiatives, including projects digitizing local LGBTQ+ organizational records, photographs, and related materials through partner institutions. No genealogy-specific announcements for May 2–9 were identified.

AdvantageArchives.com
Advantage Archives Collections (735 collections from 44 U.S. states) continues expanding, with updates documented in April/May aggregate newspaper reports showing participation in the 1,000+ new titles added across databases. No platform-specific updates for this week were reported.

Notable Examples to Try This Week

1. Revolutionary War pension files on Ancestry: Search the newly full-text-searchable Revolutionary War pension files (10 million searchable names announced at RootsTech 2026) for collateral surnames, place names, and enslaved individuals mentioned in narrative sections. Even if you explored these files before, the handwriting recognition and full-text capability makes previously "invisible" mentions searchable for the first time.

2. FamilySearch April 2026 U.S. or Ireland collections: Run a targeted search in the freshly expanded April 2026 collections (1 billion U.S. records; 10 million Ireland civil registrations and session court records) for brick-wall ancestors in those jurisdictions. Even quiet collection expansions in civil registrations or parish material can break open stalled lines.

3. MyHeritage Netherlands OldNews.com newspaper collection: Explore the new Netherlands Names Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com collection added in April 2026. Search for Dutch surnames or emigration-related mentions to surface family stories, departure notices, or community context.

Send a message to learn more

05/07/2026

Why obituaries are a sweet spot for AI help

- Newspaper and library guides call historical newspapers “one of the most important resources” for genealogists, with obituaries, marriage notices, and legal ads adding rich detail to the bare bones of civil records.
- How‑to articles stress that obituaries can supply names of relatives, residences, burial places, religious affiliation, occupations, and cause of death, but also warn that they must be checked against other sources for accuracy.
- Platforms and tutorials recommend systematic approaches—writing down known facts first, then using time, place, and variant spellings to target searches in databases like NewspaperArchive, Newspapers.com, Chronicling America, and library‑licensed collections.

AI fits best **after** you’ve located candidate obituaries: extracting people, relationships, places, and dates into structured notes, plus synthesizing them with census, vital, and probate data you already have.

05/07/2026

The AI headline for genealogists is that the default models you already use (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) just became more capable for long, document-heavy, and web-connected work—without you needing to change tools. GPT‑5.5 Instant’s upgrade plus Claude’s higher limits and Gemini’s agent/file-generation features mean you can push bigger research packets (multiple census pages, a run of deeds, or a timeline of notes) through a single conversation and still expect coherent, less hallucination-prone output.

At the same time, agentic AI and “deep research” modes are becoming the norm across providers, which maps nicely onto the multi-step workflows genealogists already use: survey, locality research, source hunts, correlation, and writing. Instead of just asking for a single answer, you can now delegate mini-projects: “audit this proof argument for gaps,” “turn these 15 records into a locality guide,” or “sweep the web for potential FAN club leads,” and let agents loop over sources with more autonomy.

Finally, open-weight advances (like Gemma 4) matter if you are building your own tools or working with developers in your society or local group. Self-hosted or institution-hosted genealogy assistants can now use stronger open models without sending data to a commercial provider, which is attractive for archives, local societies, or church repositories concerned about privacy but eager to leverage AI over their collections.

05/05/2026

How AI is being used around probate today

These developments are aimed at lawyers and executors but illustrate what’s possible for genealogists.
• Estate administration platforms now use AI to extract parties, assets, dates, and bequests from wills and probate paperwork, then auto populate court forms, inventories, and estate accounting.
• Legal sector tools highlight the same strengths genealogists can exploit: summarizing lengthy files, extracting key details, organizing financial transactions, and flagging missing information or inconsistencies for human review.
For a working family historian, the most relevant lesson is that AI is very good at “heavy lifting” on long, dense records when you already have images or transcriptions, but you still decide what is evidence and how much to trust it.
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Genealogy specific guidance on probate + AI
Family history writers are already recommending AI for the “grunt work” on probate files.
• Genealogy educators show that you can take a multi page probate packet (20+ pages) and have a chatbot separate people, list inventory items, and show who received what, all from a full text transcription.
• Articles and blogs aimed at genealogists emphasize using AI to summarize long probate inventories, extract names, dates, relationships, and item lists into organized notes, and then build timelines and research questions.
In other words, today’s “best practice” is: you transcribe or OCR the probate material, then let AI help you break it into usable pieces—without relinquishing control over interpretation.

Practical probate workflows to try
These are concrete, drop in tasks built on what educators and legal tools are already doing.
1. Turn a probate packet into a people index
o Start with a complete or partial transcription of a probate file (petition, will, inventory, distributions, receipts).
o Ask AI to create an alphabetical list of all named individuals with columns for name, role (decedent, executor, heir, witness, creditor), and how they appear (petition, inventory, distribution, etc.).

2. Extract a structured inventory
o From a long inventory list, have AI pull items into a table with fields like item description, category (household, livestock, tools, books), quantity, and appraised value.
o You can then sort this in a spreadsheet to see patterns in occupation, economic status, or gendered divisions of property.

3. Map bequests to relationships
o Paste the will and distribution sections and ask AI to list each bequest: who receives what, and any explicit relationship statements (for example, “my daughter Sarah,” “my nephew John Brown”).
o Use that list to build or refine a kinship chart, noting which relationships are explicit and which remain inferred.

4. Create a probate specific timeline
o Combine dates from petitions, appraisals, sales, distributions, and final settlement into one AI generated timeline.
o This can highlight gaps (such as missing accountings) and suggest where to look for additional court entries, guardianships, or land sales.

See: Prompt of the Day - "From Probate Packet to Research‑ready Notes" https://promptofthedayseries.blogspot.com/2026/04/prompt-of-day-from-probate-packet-to.html

🤖 AI-assisted | Reviewed by MCGS editors

02/06/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16FfvsEPPn/

Congress has restored funding of appropriated activities, and the National Archives has begun to restore normal operations. We are working to open to the public as soon as possible. Please check our website for updates

01/16/2026

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Translate, a standalone tool supporting 50+ languages that lets users adjust tone and context after translating. Try it here.

ChatGPT Translate makes it easy to translate text between dozens of languages instantly. Fast, accurate, AI-powered translations for everyday use, travel, school, and work.