Sometimes you try to break through a brick wall only to become dismayed by what you find between the cracks. That is what has been happening with my maternal Reed brick wall: my 3rd-great-grandfather, John Reed, born in Virginia in 1793 and later transplanted to Muskingum County, Ohio. When I began this latest effort to break through the wall, I was excited to find records that mentioned both John Reed and a William Reed, with John serving as administrator of William's estate. A brother, perhaps? A record that would make me happy and proud? Time to dig.
Before I describe the search and its outcome, though, this is really two stories: one about my search for John Reed's lineage and another about a new research tool I'm using—Gemini's NotebookLM. I'll write more about NotebookLM as I become more familiar with it and, hopefully, as I get closer to breaking through this brick wall. For now, however, this progress report contains enough drama on its own.
To tackle this particular problem, I have been using FamilySearch's Full Text Search to gather court cases (with so many involving my John Reed, I should have been prepared for the shocking findings) along with their transcripts, saving images to both my FamilySearch Source Box and my own computer. As I collected names from what became the Reed family's ever-expanding FAN club—or perhaps "circle of litigants" would be more accurate—I began following those families to see how they were connected.
A brief primer on NotebookLM: a notebook is a collection of documents that Gemini analyzes together, allowing it to identify connections, summarize evidence, and suggest conclusions with citations back to the original sources. Into my notebook have gone pedigree chart reports for families of interest, court case transcripts, probate records, deeds, timelines, census data, research notes, FAN-club information, and more. At this point, the notebook contains about over a dozen records, including a document with transcripts from more than one hundred images. Sorting through all of that manually would have been a nightmare. With AI, it takes only a few seconds.
My first clue that I might be able to reconstruct John Reed's family came from discovering that he had administered the estate of William Reed, who lived in the neighboring county. William was born in 1811, so perhaps he was a younger brother? The good news was that I learned much more about their relationship. The bad news was that, as I read the records more carefully, John looked less and less like the family hero. William died in 1852, and when his children came of age, they apparently believed that John had used their inheritance to benefit his own family. At the same time, William's probable pedigree suggested that he and John were not brothers after all.
But it gets worse.
John—and, after his death in 1872, his estate—became entangled in a web of lawsuits.
William's heirs sued John for gross mismanagement of the estate. That case was followed by a series of lawsuits and countersuits involving John, his sons, the administrator of his own estate, and several sons-in-law. Did I mention that two of John’s daughters married two Miller brothers? Or that after his first wife, Sarah Harrison, died, John married the Miller brothers' mother? Or that another son-in-law eventually sued John's estate, even though John had spent his final months living in that son's home?
At best, John was a poor estate administrator. At worst, he was a liar, a fraud, and a thief.
Here is the conclusion reached by Gemini after analyzing the records:
Summary of Findings
The dealings between John Reed and the William Reed estate demonstrate that while they were not brothers, they were deeply and hostiley intertwined. John used his authority as administrator to transfer William’s assets into his own extended family network (via Daniel Sims), leading to a judgment of "unfaithful administration" that was still being litigated and settled years after his death.
On the positive side, there has been plenty of material to work with. As ChatGPT told me, "Family harmony rarely generates records."
So, the records I had hoped would lead to a breakthrough instead revealed much more about John's character than his lineage. Even so, the research was far from wasted. I was able to clean up numerous records, make several merges, and reconnect parents with their children in FamilySearch. What first appeared to be a promising clue led instead to a collection of court cases that cast John in a decidedly unfavorable light—but they also taught me a great deal about an interconnected group of families.
The search continues. I still hope to identify John's parents, but even if I haven't solved that mystery yet, I've uncovered a fascinating—if somewhat sordid—family story along the way.
Note: The top picture is the old Muskingum County courthouse, which was replaced in 1870 by a new Courthouse, which may have been built to accommodate all of the cases against John Reed. Or so it seems.
Photos:
By Unknown author - Marker #7-60 Second Capital of Ohio. Remarkable Ohio - a project of the Ohio Historical Society and Ohio Channel (before 1874)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36544028
By Tristan Blatt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51849568
