The brick wall that causes me lay awake at night is Peter Dill, my 5x-great-grandfather. He showed up out of nowhere in Georgia sometime in the 1790s, married a Quaker (Phebe Brown), witnessed his father-in-law’s will, bought some land and promptly sold it, then moved with his family to Ohio.
There is family lore (unproven) that his father, also named Peter Dill, was one of three brothers who arrived in Georgia from Germany in 1740. Genealogy stories involving “three brothers” are actually kind of common and nearly always made-up. But this lore comes from my great-grandmother Lola’s notes and she’s generally pretty credible. She didn’t make stuff up, she wrote down oral history. So although I can’t guarantee that the story is true, I also know that it doesn’t seem to have been invented to defend some weird conclusion or fact. Plus, there really were a bunch of Germans who came to Georgia in 1740 so there might be a kernel of truth here somewhere.
Digging around the records of early Georgia, we find some other Dill people there. While Georgia was still a British Colony, we find men named Philip Dill Sr., Philip Dill Jr, and James Dill. After the war and statehood, in the 1790s, we find other Dill men listed in records: Daniel Dill and Philip Dill (presumed to be the Philip Dill Jr. from earlier years).
As I mentioned, Peter Dill moved with his family to Ohio in 1805. For some reason, his son Daniel returned to Georgia in 1820 and became a rather successful businessman in Augusta, and married one of the daughters of Philip Dill (yes, I think he married a cousin). During this time frame, more Dill men crop up in the records: Andrew, Jacob, Job, John and Joseph – a biblical who’s who of Dills.
Who are all these people? How are they related? If we put the puzzle pieces together, can we find the parents of Peter Dill? It’s messy because there are apparently at least two Peters, two Daniels and two Philips. This point actually supports the idea that these men are in fact all related somehow.
Over the past fifteen years or so, I’ve aimlessly searched around for records and evidence about all these Dill people. I’ve found newspaper articles, deeds, tax records, and census records. It’s been very haphazardly organized and frankly just a big mess. A big breakthrough a few years ago was finding the probate file for Daniel Dill (Peter Dill’s son – the one who moved back to Georgia in 1820). Daniel ended up in Mobile, Alabama where his estate was probated. It was a huge 350-page file with all kinds of twists and turns and fun characters and high drama and issues to explore. Another family member was uncovered: the first administrator of his estate was Bolin Smith of Montgomery, Alabama, identified as “kin”. And lo and behold, I’ve discovered that there were at least two Bolin Smiths hanging around in Georgia when Daniel lived there in the 1820s and 1830s.
Who ARE all these people? AAaauugh! Like I said, I lay awake at night wondering about it.
The use of “AI” (artificial intelligence) is all the rage in genealogy right now. There are a lot of wonderful use cases for genealogists: transcribing and translating documents, analyzing old photographs, and writing summaries and timelines (to name a few). There are also some silly uses such as using AI to create a cheesy image of your family standing in front of a random farmhouse in 1880 (I’m sure some people love that stuff and sorry if I’ve offended anyone, but to me it’s kind of dumb and probably perpetuates stereotypes).
But I got to wondering if AI could help me sort out all these disparate and unorganized pieces of evidence about my Dill family. A lot of people are using Airtable for this purpose and I’ve had some amount of success with that in some of my Swedish research. But ugh! it’s so confining to force your data into what is essentially a spreadsheet. Sure everything is stored and organized but it’s…well…ugly. It brings me no joy. So I started out talking with Google Gemini about alternatives to Airtable, and after a lot of false starts and dead ends, we landed on a completely different tool: Obsidian.
Obsidian is a free note-taking app with some special superpowers: you can dynamically link notes to each other; you can create metadata fields so that your notes can operate like a database; and you can create templates that not only help you be consistent in your metadata but also help you generate complex lists and data compilations on the fly. It’s really more than I can explain in this blog post; YouTube is full of tutorials and show-and-tell about how people use Obsidian for different kinds of stuff.
So anyway, Gemini and I collaborated on an Obsidian setup whereby I can put each individual piece of evidence into a note. The metadata identifies the “who, what, when, where” stuff, and I can kind of freestyle the rest of the note – citing its source, a transcription, a link to the online image or source, and a link to a local image if I’ve downloaded it. I can also record my own (and/or Gemini’s) analysis of the data and note any questions or conflicts that I find. Obsidian can create network graphs showing how all your notes are linked to each other and to specific people.
Well that’s all well and good and super-organized and everything but so what?
Well, here’s what: I can consolidate my whole Obsidian collection into a single giant note (actually, a markdown file), upload it to Google NotebookLM, and then really get cooking! Once all that stuff’s organized and uploaded, voilá! I now have my own personal Dill Family History Expert. Gemini (NotebookLM) can tell me where my research gaps are and gives me suggestions on how to fill in the gaps. Gemini knows what was going on in Georgia in the 1770s and 1780s and can give me amazing insights into what Philip Dill Sr. was up to and what all these weird newspaper articles and court cases were about. Gemini can connect the dots, see patterns in the data, expose conflicting information, and tell me how the Panic of 1819 was making a mess of my ancestors’ lives (did you even know there was a Panic of 1819? Did we learn anything in our history classes?)
Since early January, I have logged over 130 individual pieces of evidence from Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Ohio. Gemini has helped me figure out what to look for and where. In a span of about 20 minutes, I can find an old court case, download it, transcribe it, log it into Obsidian with appropriate metadata, and then have Gemini explain for me what the court case was about, its relevance, and advise me whether I should look for other related documents or follow-up hearings. I have done more relevant Dill family research in the last 30 days than I’ve done in the last 15 years. I’m no longer aimlessly looking for records, hoping to find needles in haystacks. I have specific research plans and tasks and know exactly what to do next. FINALLY.
And I have made some discoveries! I have a hypothesis about how at least some of these Dill men are related, and I have some amazing stories to tell – especially about Philip Dill Sr.
So stay tuned! The new age of genealogy is upon us.
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