I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.

I’ve written my own genealogy app as well, it has reinvigorated my efforts. I have a multi-level data model (evidentiary below, curated above) that has helped me piece together people across a multitude of disparate sources. Claude has been my sidekick, and it’s amazing- especially for the more toilsome tasks like extracting people’s details from newspaper articles.

I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).

So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.

Current models are amazing at one shot decoding hand written vital records. I thought there might be some friction, but if there is, I haven’t found any. I’ve unlocked lots of detail from records I already had just because I didn’t try to translate the handwriting due to the time required.

I also have been doing this every round of models releasing.

Thanks for reminding me to try this new round of models.

I wonder if there are some good tools/apis that can help here.

A lot of information is often login gated