[Genealogy] Grandpa's Truck from the Air, Yes...But, Consults, More Metes and Bounds
Michael John Neill
mjnrootdig at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 08:46:14 CDT 2026
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Genealogy Update 28 Sept 2026
** Grandpa's Truck as Seen from the Air
** Intro Price on Using AI as a Genealogy Consultant--Consult Yourself
** Yes,But.
** More Land Platting with AI and Getting the Most From the Census
** Recorded Webinars
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Grandpa's Truck as Seen from the Air
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<https://vintageaerial.com/>
I can almost see a barefoot Grandma Neill in the backyard of this picture,
headed towards the chicken house to gather the eggs. But my favorite part
of this image is my Grandpa’s truck sitting in the driveway. The magnified
illustration focusing on the house and the truck is only a portion of the
picture of my Grandparents’ farm taken “from the air” one year before my
Grandpa Neill’s death.
The house no longer stands and there’s a Kirby machine shed due west of
where the home was (and slightly south west of the chicken coop), but the
larger barns and silo are still there. A few of the smaller outbuildings
have been razed. Grandma’s garden can be seen north of her house and there
appear to be a few chickens showing as well. Not everything that looks like
chickens are chickens–a few of those white blurry images are flowerpots
Grandma made from retired kitchen pots.
The images included in this post have been reproduced here with the
permission of Vintage Aerial <http://www.vintageaerial.com/>. Some of the
outlying farmland where no buildings are seen has been cropped from the
original photo. This image is one of millions that Vintage Aerial
<http://www.vintageaerial.com/> hosts from the era on their site. There is
one difference: the overview of the farm shown in this post is not the
image that can be viewed for free on the Vintage Aerial
<http://www.vintageaerial.com/> site. It’s the image that can be purchased
from the site for personal use and personal printing.
<https://vintageaerial.com/>Actual photo of Cecil and Ida Neill farm from
Vintage Aerial (www.vintageaerial.com), Hancock County, Illinois, 1967
photographs, Roll 23, Image 10.
The images document rural America at one brief moment in time.
The images are not perfect as they were taking from a flying airplane with
1960s-era technology. They were not created with modern digital cameras and
enhancement technology cannot improve what was not in the image. There’s
just one challenge: you have to find the image yourself. This is not a
genealogical database that has a names attached to every image and where
you can type in a name and have a result magically appear for you.
*A Different Perspective*
The geographic organization of the photographs is as specific as the
county. After that (with an exception we will discuss), searchers will have
to manually search for images. This can be a time-consuming process and is
not necessarily as easy as you think. Looking at things from above is a
different perspective and takes a little adjustment. Think of it as getting
used to reading someone’s handwriting. Even when one is familiar with the
area, as I was with my paternal grandparents’ farm (shown in the
illustrations) and my parents’ farm (located only a half mile from each
other), it takes a while to start recognizing houses or barns. The
occasional picture is taken from “the back” of the property. This, at least
for me, makes recognition somewhat more difficult–especially for farms that
I only ever saw from the road.
Things can be a little more challenging if your memory does not extend to
the year the photographs were taken. Things change. Buildings are torn
down. Buildings are put up. Tree lines are bulldozed. Timber is cleared.
Time marches on. The model year of vehicles shown should not present a
problem.
*Order of the Pictures*
Fortunately the pictures are in the sequence they were taken by the pilot,
so there is some geographic ordering to them. Pilots tended to fly along
roads, likely because it made identification of the locations easier later.
The problem is there’s always the time when they have, so to speak, flown
themselves into a corner and there is a geographic jump in the images.
Users of the site may find it helpful to have a contemporary plat book
handy. Even if one is familiar with the area it helps to have one so that
located places can be marked with the roll and image numbers used on the
site.
The home I few up in was only a half a mile from my Grandparents’ farm, but
it was quite a few images away–simply because of how the pilot flew and
took pictures. One has to turn around somewhere. The location of these
farms is two dimensional and pilots (and census takers) do their work in
lines. Those lines may be criss-crossed, but every so often there has to be
a point where one turns around and goes back. Do not assume places that are
“close” will be “close” in terms of image location. That is not necessarily
true.
When I viewed the home I grew up in and the nearby images, I could see how
the pilot flew north from the town of Carthage along the road my home was
on and took pictures of every home on the east side of the road for about
two miles. He then turned around and took pictures on the west side of the
road. This is easier to notice if you have a map or are familiar with the
area. My maternal grandparents lived seven miles south of where I grew up
and I’m not as familiar with that area–which has made locating their home
more difficult.
*Getting Help*
The website that hosts the images allows users to interact with them and
post comments. These comments are searchable. I would start my search by
searching the images of the county of interest for the last being searched
for. If that does not locate the family of interest, search for nearby
families, churches, schools, etc. in an attempt to pinpoint which section
of the images contain the area of the county in which your family lived.
Keep in mind that anyone can tag images and that there can be mistakes.
Perspective will throw you off when viewing these images. Some pictures
were taken “from the back” and if the only view you ever had was “from the
road,” recognizing a place with which you are familiar can occasionally be
a challenge. Additional challenges are houses and barns that were torn down
between the photography and your personal memory, vegetation that has been
changed significantly, etc.
Lastly, consider letting others who may know the area know about the site.
They may be able to help. Relatives, former neighbors, classmates, etc. who
are not necessarily interested in genealogy or family history may find it a
challenge to find their farm or property in the image set. Any images that
can be identified may help you find your own people.
*Reminders and Suggestions*
- Have a plat map of the area showing landowners as close to picture
time as possible.
- Search the database of located places for last names of neighbors,
landmarks, schools, churches, etc.
- Keep track of places that you have located–preferably on a map.
- Track image sets that have been viewed.
- Ask for help from locals familiar with the area.
- Add identifying information to any images on the site that you know.
Using AI as a Genealogy Consultant--revised release date
*Our approach is to always use AI responsibly and practically a**s your own
genealogy consultant.*
Maybe you can’t afford a consultant for your own research or you have too
many genealogy problems to hire help with every one. AI can serve as your
own genealogy research consultant.
As with a human consultant, you’ll need to do the initial work on your
ancestor, gather what you have, and familiarize yourself with basic sources
in the area. There is no guarantee that AI will solve your problem.
But using AI as your personal research consultant can help. Not by doing
the research for you, or inventing ancestors that never existed, but by
doing what a good consultant actually does: looking at what you have,
summarizing it, discussing it, and giving you ideas on where to look next
or to help you see things in a different way. It may even tell you where
you need to go to improve your research skills.
After using AI, you still may decide to use a human consultant. The work
you did with AI will help you prepare to get the most from that advice from
a real person and to make the best use of your time and money should that
be necessary. We acknowledge in this presentation and approach that AI does
not know everything, is not perfect, and cannot solve every problem. It’s
just another tool.
You'll see how to frame a research problem so AI gives you something useful
instead of something vague. You'll learn to recognize when it's guessing,
because it will, and how to catch hallucinations and how to use AI in a
discerning fashion.
The goal isn't to replace your judgment. It's to give you a thinking
partner available at two in the morning when you finally realize you need
to get outside your own mind on a certain ancestral problem.
Pre-order the presentation now.
<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=3SJCPREXK5EUC>
Release date: 28 September-revised
Price: $15.99
Includes the full presentation, a detailed handout, and a ready-to-use set
of prompts you can adapt to your own research problems.
--------------------------------------
Yes, But.
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The image in this illustration shows that “Penn” and “Tenn” could easily be
confused by a transcriptionist or indexer.
I realize that reading the entire page of entries would probably make it
clear how the writer of the document made his “P” and his “T.” The
difficulty with that is, if I am using an index or a database created from
this record then I am not looking at the entire page. I am using a
transcription of this page. That transcription may have been created by
someone who was not careful about determining whether it was a “P or a “T.”
That transcription may have been made by someone who was not as concerned
about looking at the entire page as I would be.
And if I am using a place of birth as one of my search terms, which is
sometimes necessary, I may not think of looking for my person as having a
place of birth in Pennsylvania if every document I have on them indicates
that they were born in Tennessee.
And while there are standard abbreviations for the states today and census
enumerators were to use standard abbreviations for the time the census was
taken, that did not always happen.
What “wrong ways” could that location in your background be transcribed?
------------------------------------
More Land Platting with AI
-----------------------------------
This session will expand on the “Metes and Bounds with AI” presentation. It
will include additional and more convoluted examples of metes and bounds
properties, discuss platting out properties in federal land states
involving sections and townships, and include an example of a metes and
bounds description in a federal land state. This session presupposes that
the listener has a basic understanding of land record terminology and knows
how to locate land deed records as those topics are not a part of this
presentation.
Release date: 15 October 2025.
Early order price: $18.99
<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=C4JG43VE263BW>
Order includes audiovisual file and handout.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Getting the Most from US Census Records
----------------------------------------------------------
This session will help you to get the most from United States census
records–covering from 1790 through 1950. We will start with what you should
do when you find any census enumeration–which is not to transcribe it. We
will highlight the questions asked, talk about using enumerator
instructions, see how to get as much from a census enumeration as possible,
determine when a census suggests other records be searched, and more.
We will cover typical errors and how those arose, concerns about
reliability of the informant (did they just guess at information?), reasons
why people lie, and more.
We will talk about research strategies for people who are difficult to
find, ways names get written and transcribed and how to formulate a census
search plan those individuals who are difficult to locate.
The presentation will last approximately ninety minutes. Purchase includes
media file and handout.
Pre-release order price is $15.99.
<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=H4MQXGKGGXM9U>
Release date: 16 October 2026.
--------------------
Webinars
--------------------
Ready-to-Go Webinars from Michael–download immediate:
-
Creating Children’s Stories from Genealogy Events
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/creating-childrens-stories-from-genealogy-information/>
-
Creating Families from pre-1850 Census Records
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/creating-families-from-pre-1850-census-records/>
-
DeedMapper webinars
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/deedmapper-intro-and-more-deedmapper-webinars/>
-
FamilySearch Catalog
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/2026/02/19/using-the-familysearch-catalog-webinar/>
-
Farming Ancestor webinars–landowner and non-landowner versions
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/rooting-around-for-farmers-and-tenants-and-laborers/>
-
Full-Text Search at FamilySearch
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/2026/08/05/updated-familysearch-full-text-search-webinar/>
-
Full-Text Search at FamilySearch with Common Names
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/2025/11/04/common-names-at-familysearch-full-text-webinar/>
-
How Errors Get in Records
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/how-errors-get-in-records-webinar/>
-
Illinois Genealogy Research
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/2026/03/10/genealogy-research-in-illinois-webinar/>
-
Metes and Bounds With AI–platting and analysis
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/using-ai-for-metes-and-bounds-deed-analysis/>
-
Unburying Funeral Home Records
<https://genealogytipoftheday.com/index.php/unburying-funeral-home-records/>
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Michael John Neill
Genealogy Tip of the Day
PO Box 17
Henderson, IL 61439
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