Brooklyn 2026, Day 0. Monday, September 7, 2026
Tomorrow morning, about twelve hours from now, I fly out of Cincinnati for ten days in Brooklyn. Nine research days, four parishes, one cemetery, one microfilm appointment in Jamaica, Queens, and a lot of time at my aunt’s kitchen table in the Kensington house, the house my family has lived in since 1905. The Plunketts, the Dowlings, the McAuliffes, and, lightly this time, the Stens.
I have been writing about this trip for weeks. What I have not written about is how I planned it, and I want to do that now, before the trip starts rewriting the Master Trip Plan for me. Because I planned most of it with AI, and I want to be honest about what that looked like. Not a sales pitch. I get enough of those.
So this is the first of a daily series. Today is the setup. Tomorrow is a travel day, so that one will be short. Every day after this will be short too: what the plan said, what actually happened, and what changed in the decision log that night. When I get home I will go back through the whole thing and tell you what the tools got right, what I had to fix, and what only a phone call or a body in the room could do.
What the plan actually is
The Master Trip Plan runs 66 pages, and I am not proud of that number so much as resigned to it. It has four layers. The day-by-day itinerary up front, so I know what happens Wednesday. Site sheets for every cemetery, parish, and repository, so I know what to ask for when I walk in the door. A family home visit kit for the days at the house: an artifact survey checklist, a digitization workflow, an oral history interview guide, a DNA testing plan for my aunt, and a section on consent and shipping things home. And then the pre-trip section, which is where most of the summer went: request letters, a vital records triage table, a newspaper search checklist, one-page research objectives per family line, a budget, and a packing list.
Seven appendices at the back. Worksheets for the deed research. The Find a Grave virtual cemetery lists. And Appendix G, the parish follow-up call script, which gets its own post on Wednesday.
The one rule that shaped everything is what the plan calls the online-first rule. Anything I can get online, I get online, before I go. Free certificates from the Municipal Archives portal, the 1940 tax photo of the house, city directories on the Internet Archive, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Trip time goes only to what needs a body in the room: parish registers, graves, microfilmed deeds, interviews, and the house itself. That rule cut a Manhattan repository day, a New Jersey cemetery, Calvary Cemetery in Queens, and eventually most of the Center for Brooklyn History stop. None of that is lost. It all sits in a section at the end called Future Genealogy Research, which is a polite name for the list of things I wanted and could not have.
Four tools, four jobs
I did not do this in one tool, and I think that matters, because each one turned out to be good at something different.
Perplexity assisted with the parish research. Which parishes existed when, where the boundaries fell, which ones closed and where their registers went, whether the Diocese of Brooklyn had centralized sacramental records (it has not; open parishes keep their own, the Diocesan Archives holds the closed ones). That was the most useful research help I got all summer, and I want to say that plainly because I am about to be harder on the other tools.
Copilot helped draft the request letters. Then ChatGPT helped revise them. Four parish letters, a Diocese of Brooklyn Archives request for the closed parish Our Lady of Mercy, and a Holy Cross Cemetery interment request. The letters are fine. They are letters. The one sentence in them that matters, asking for a photocopy or photograph of the original register entry rather than a typed certificate, was mine, because that is where the marginal notes live, and marginal notes are where Irish parishes and townlands hide.
Claude, in Cowork, and I built and rebuilt the Master Trip Plan itself. Thirty-six revisions and a FINAL, between July 8 and today. Every one of them is logged.
The living decision log
This is the part I most want other genealogists to steal.
At the beginning of the Master Trip Plan there is a revision history table. Rev number, date, what changed. I started it because my “pesky job that pays the bills” trained me to version everything, and because I could not remember from one week to the next whether I had moved the cemetery day or only meant to. It turned into the most honest document I own about this trip.
Read it top to bottom and you can watch the plan change character. Revisions 1 through 7, in the first three days, are all structure: building the itinerary, swapping the Manhattan and Holy Cross days because September 11 is the 25th anniversary, replacing the rental car with my aunt’s car, moving the worksheets into appendices. Revisions 8 and 9 are me sitting down with my own Plunkett and Dowling files and correcting the plan against them. Revision 11 removed three people from the plan entirely because they were never part of the research plan in the first place. Revision 12 killed a whole funeral-home section after I found that of twelve firms named on the death certificates, only one still operates, and I already know that one through family.
Then, from the middle of August on, the entries stop being about the document and start being about the world. Checks clearing. A records specialist at the Diocese calling to say the Archives are relocating and nothing moves until April 2027. Rosa Rosas at Immaculate Heart of Mary confirming all four baptismal records are on hand and setting a 10 AM appointment for Wednesday. The Land Records Research Library confirming by phone that everything pre-1966 for Kings County is in Jamaica, which erased a downtown Brooklyn stop that had been in the plan since July. Visitation calling back to say they found “quite a bit,” some of it hard to read, and would I come look in person. That one moved twice in four days.
Nothing in that last stretch came from AI. Every entry came from a phone call, a cleared check, or a person calling me back. The tool’s job was to keep the plan consistent with the new fact, in every place the fact touched. That is not nothing. The Visitation change alone touched the calendar, two itinerary days, a tracking box, a status line, and a route description. But the fact came from Brooklyn, not from a model.
What I had to fix
Honest section. Most of the corrections in that revision table were mine. The wrong address for the Diocese Archives. A donation figure that was off. A house number that turned out to be a transcription slip from my own address list. The formatting fixes were the tool’s own mistakes, including one where the appendices ended up out of order in the body while the table of contents was right.
The thing that actually annoyed me was the churches. My Brooklyn ancestors moved through five or six parishes over fifty years, two of which have since merged and one of which closed. The plan confused them more than once. A record would get assigned to the wrong parish, or a parish that had been ruled out would drift back into a sentence somewhere. Revision 25 alone has a list of parish corrections as long as my arm. I caught those because I had done the ward and address analysis myself and knew where the family was living in 1850 versus 1863 versus 1896. If I had not, I would have walked into the wrong office on September 16 with the wrong question.
So that is the balance, as best I can state it the night before. AI kept the plan coherent. I kept it true.
The call script
One more thing, and then I have to pack the laptop (and two printed copies of the Master Trip Plan, for backup).
I hate calling parish offices. I would rather write ten letters than make one call. So on September 3, before I dialed the four parishes, I asked for a script, and Appendix G is the result. An opening line to read word for word. Three questions, in order. A voicemail version with my last name spelled out. A “they say / you say” table for when it goes sideways. And at the top, in italics, the instruction that I did not expect to work: “Stand up. It genuinely steadies your voice.”
I made all four calls before lunch. Wednesday’s post is what came of them, because at 10 AM Wednesday I will be sitting in the parish office at Immaculate Heart of Mary, five minutes from the house, in the church where I was baptized, picking up four baptismal records that a person named Rosa found for me.
The final countdown
Two checked bags, a laptop backpack packed to the zipper, and a carry-on are lined up by the door. Tomorrow the flight lands at JFK around 1:30. My aunt is expecting me by four. The plan says to test the house Wi-Fi tomorrow night so Thursday’s work meeting (yeah, that “pesky job that pays the bills” gets a few hours this trip) is not the first time I try it, and the plan is usually right about that kind of thing.
We will see about the rest.
FAQs
- What is a Master Trip Plan for genealogy research? A single document that holds the itinerary, a site sheet for every repository, parish, and cemetery, the request letters, a records triage table, objectives per family line, a budget, and a revision history.
- Can AI plan a genealogy research trip? It can keep a plan coherent and consistent as facts change. It cannot confirm a parish holds a register, book a microfilm appointment, or tell you which office a record moved to. Those took phone calls.
- What is a decision log in genealogy trip planning? A dated table of every change to the plan and why it was made. It doubles as a research log for logistics.
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