Mam-ma's Southern Family

George Wilson Lancaster, born 3 April 1839 in Missouri, likely Lewis County, and died 14 Jan 1919 in Erath County. He also lived in Kaufman County as he married Martha Jane Polly there on 25 October 1871. He is my 3x-great-grandfather on my mother’s side. This session of research is using full-text search at FamilySearch . My methodology is to search for the each of the variations of George’s name: “George W. Lancaster,” “Geo. W. Lancaster,” and “G. W. Lancaster.” I began by filtering the results to Texas, and selecting the counties of Erath, Rockwall, and Kaufman. I later conducted the same search in Arizona, as he lived there shortly in the late 1880s. The results brought up lots of negative hits, i.e., records that were not him. Many were Texas Death Certificates state-wide or documents dated after his death in 1919. The record of findings lists the results I believe pertain to him. Summary of results From this targeted search for G.W. Lancaster in the various spellings, I fou...

I spent a day and a half using the Portal to Texas History website searching for articles about William Carlton Lancaster in newspapers, primarily in Erath County. However, it appears he moved to a town in Lubbock County in the 1920s and 30s. I searched using the following terms: “William Carlton Lancaster,” “William Carl Lancaster,” “William C. Lancaster,” “Wm C. Lancaster,” “W.C. Lancaster,” “Carl Lancaster,” “Corrie Lancaster,” and “C. Lancaster.” The last was in papers in Lynn County. Originally, I recorded them in a Word document chronologically by the name I searched, but I have now presented them in date order, the oldest first, so I can see any patterns. My comments are in blue. These total 144 articles. I uploaded them to Claude AI and after some discussion on how to format it, the articles were converted into a csv file with headings that I chose. I then uploaded the csv file to AirTable where I will analyze to choose the best articles for W.C. Lancaster’s biography in...