An email that arrived in my inbox last week pulled me back to Gill before it was so named, and nudged me into a stream-of-consciousness realm. I guess I was ripe for it, given the elusive subjects I’ve been exploring in recent weeks and months.

The email query came from transplanted Vermonter Andrea Varney, who grew up in Greenfield as Andrea Liebenow. Her mother, who died at 88 in 2015, was Sylvia Gallagher, born to her Smead family’s Greenfield Meadows dairy farm. A dedicated schoolteacher and longtime Greenfield historical commissioner, Sylvia was a proud member of a founding Connecticut Valley family, with deep roots in Deerfield and the surrounding Franklin County communities that peeled off from it.

The retired Ms. Gallagher had a dream. In her golden years, she was tunnel-visioned on publishing a book chronicling her Smead genealogy and the family’s extensive land holdings. Admirably focused and organized, she assembled quite a collection of data aimed at accomplishing her goal.

Problem was that she finally ran out of time. Now daughter Andrea is lugging her mother’s baton to the finish line. In the process over the past few years, we have met and talked often, mostly collaborating to unravel confusing land records. The book is expected to hit the street no later than June.

Andrea’s latest question came to me during her final fact-checking round. The subject immediately tickled my curiosity, because in many ways it reminded me of problems I have been encountering regarding a Revolutionary War powder horn, which I mentioned in my last column. Like me, she was trying to identify the site of a place name that has become obsolete and hasn’t been recognized for ages. This is not unusual in the lexicon of old place names, even among those once used in everyday conversation.

Ms. Varney’s mystery site was “Fall Hill,” mentioned in 1730s Deerfield proprietors’ records associated with Ebenezer Smead’s land in what is now Gill, but was then the northeast corner of Deerfield. Gill was originally divvied up into irregularly-shaped “pitch lots” assigned to proprietors within a vast parcel referred to in documents as “east of the Green River and north of Cheapside.”

My own mystery site is “Ft. No. 10,” inscribed on an illustrated powder horn I believe was carried by Greenfield Revolutionary militiaman Tubel Nash (1754-1813). Nash served on the so-called “Northern Campaign,” located between Albany and the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point.

Ms. Varney’s mystery place name and mine both appear to have vanished from collective memory, which makes fact-checking a daunting task indeed when trying to interpret old deeds, proprietors’ records, probate documents and, yes, powder-horn inscriptions.

So, at the time of her query we were both chasing similar types of information.

Enter the newfangled research tool called “artificial intelligence,” acronym AI, feared by many as a future job-killer. At the insistence of a friend with genealogical focus, I started dabbling in Free ChatGPT a few months ago with remarkable success in some areas of inquiry. Though the AI Genie hasn’t been much help in my pursuit of “Ft. No. 10,” it did strike gold regarding Ms. Varney’s “Fall Hill,” agreeing with my own previous interpretation, based on deed research, as the hill overlooking Great Falls from the north.

Here’s what the AI Genie found in less than five seconds about Gill’s “Fall Hill,” located within the 1736 boundary of the Deerfield land grants on acreage east of the Green River and north of Cheapside:

“Fall Hill (sometimes referred to as the Hill at the Falls) is a prominent topographical landmark located in what is now Gill, Massachusetts;

“It is specifically located near the Great Falls, now Turners Falls, on the Connecticut River;

“The hill served as a reference point for laying out lots;

“Records from the proprietors often used Fall Hill as a boundary marker for the ‘Falls Woods’ or ‘Falls Field’ divisions.”

So, there you have it: Fall Hill, rising north across the road from what is now the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge, bordered south by Route 2, west by Factory Hollow, and east by Main Road. It was up this steep slope from Fall River that Captain William Turner, after tethering horses in the hollow, led his militiamen to their infamous predawn Falls Fight on May 19, 1676.

Thus far, I’ve had no such luck with the AI Genie on several attempts to learn more about “Fort No. 10.” I’ve asked basically the same question many different ways and have come up empty. No promising leads have arisen from direct inquiries, accompanied by powder-horn photos, to historians, museums, historical societies, and even fine-tuned Facebook groups.

One recent path of inquiry led me to Fort Massachusetts – at North Adams, dismantled before the Revolution – and the so-called “line of forts” that hugged the northern border of Massachusetts between the Connecticut and Hudson valleys during the French and Indian War (FIW). Could there have been a numbered sequence of forts known to earlier soldiers like Greenfield’s Agrippa Wells, who served in both the FIW and Revolution? Wells was Nash’s captain and would have served with his father, miller Daniel Nash, in the earlier war.

Maybe Wells’ Revolutionary troopers from the Deerfield area marched to their own drummer, accompanied by a private map that numbering a sequence of dismantled FIW fort sites potentially available as staging sites.

In his 1904 Origins of Williamstown: A History, author Arthur Latham Perry puts Captain Ephrain Williams “in unbroken command of the line of forts, twelve in all, including Deerfield, from Dec. 10, 1745 to Dec. 10, 1746.” Problem is, he fails to name these forts.

Nonetheless, we know the list included Fort Shirley in Heath and Fort Pelham in Rowe, plus some of the other 21 forts that stood between Fort Massachusetts and Northfield and are named in Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe’s 2006 book The Line of Forts: Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts.

Hmmm? Lots of questions. Few answers.

Oh well. At least we got Ms. Varney squared away.