Keep the Dash Alive

I had all of the articles, and I presented them word for word. I did use Claude (AI) to help sort through all of the stories and suggest an organizational spine for the book. This episode goes through how I used AI to do this work and how I asked it to research KDP pricing. Book link: Killacranky

In presenting the articles my great-great-grandfather wrote, I had to separate fact from fiction. He loved to embellish, like any good southerner, with his tall tales. I used the usual sources on ancestry - like census records, etc...but I also had pulled military records, and Claude (AI) worked through various sources, matching up military history with his recollections. This episode explains var...

Almost every family history runs into it eventually: an ancestor who wrote something you can’t defend. This episode is about the hardest editorial decision there is — and why erasing the ugly parts is the real failure. My great-great-grandfather’s writing includes slurs, casual cruelty, and Lost Cause framing. I explain the line I walked — preserve the original, frame it honestly, neither sanitize...

Names and dates tell you a person existed. They don’t introduce you to who that person was. In this episode about a book I have published on one of my two times great-grandfathers' military writings, I share the moment family history stopped being a chart of dates for me — and became something far more powerful. And why anything an ancestor actually wrote might be the seed of a book. I am publishi...

KDP (the Amazon self-publishing platform) now asks questions about how AI has helped with a book's content. In writing the Loose Pearls memoir of my paternal grandparents, I definitely used AI for assistance. I walk through how I answered these questions in this episode. 📖 Loose Pearls : A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 — available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.

AI did suggest a grouping of parts and the suggested manuscript, but AI makes huge assumptions about the content unless you tell it not to or to force it to notice its own assumptions. This video describes how i, with AI help, built the manuscript of Loose Pearls 📖 Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 — available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.

548 letters is a huge archive. So, yes, it took me 8 years to figure out how to turn all these letters into a book. With the advent of AI tools, I felt I had a way to help me manage them and make them into an interesting book. In this episode I share the actual prompt I pasted at the start of every working session, the batch size that worked best, the approval pattern that kept me in control, the...

Before the writing, before the organizing — preservation. In this first method episode, Julie shares how she digitized over 500 wartime letters between her grandparents Woodrow and Vera Bonner, written across the Pacific in 1945 and 1946. The free tool she used, why fragile letters and a child's handwriting got photographed before anything else, and the systematic transcription quirks that ended u...

In February 1946, my paternal grandfather, Woodrow Bonner, found a string of cultured pearls in a shop in Kobe and wrote to my grandmother, Vera, that he was going to try to buy them. He couldn't. What followed was an eight-week hunt across occupied Japan, three loose pearls in a wooden crate, and a string of letters that never quite explained. This is the story the book is named after. // Loose P...

If you google the phrase "family history questions" you can find many pages that can give you ideas about what to share with future generations of your family. I was struck by one question that asked - do you have a toy you have kept from your childhood? When you are preserving the stories of your family, you can use Zoom and other platforms to create videos AND podcast episodes. Future generation...

In 1971, my paternal grandmother, Vera Dors (Harper) Bonner, wrote a song with her niece, Norma (Bonner) Elmore. Norma wrote the music, and Vera wrote the lyrics. Later, the song was recorded as a birthday present to me. You will hear about the technology I used to pull the audio together and the history passed to me.  I used Zoom to record the audio introduction The music was on a cassette I pull...

Welcome to Keep the Dash Alive. I’m your host, Julie Bonner, and today we explore recording family voices. These are some of the coolest family history assets you will ever produce! If you have any questions about this episode, you can email me at Julie@coeurbridge.com . Please find Keep the Dash Alive on Youtube for videos.

This the Keep the Dash Alive Podcast. This episode explores how DNA analysis helped me connect to a previously unknown half sibling in my extended family!

GPS applications on your smartphone can be a great boost to your family history research. Along with this podcast episode, I also have a video about GPS technology and family research on the Keep The Dash Alive YouTube channel. Also, on Amazon, you can find a Kindle book called "Beyond the Dash" that describes many of the technologies that can be useful to you as a family researcher. Enjoy!

Technology has brought us great online resources, but, you never know what you might find with your boots on the ground. Follow in your family footsteps to sometimes discover a nugget that would have never have been found in an online database. We also have a Keep the Dash Alive YouTube channel. If video fits your learning style, subscribe to that channel as well as this podcast!