Ancestors and Algorithms: AI for Genealogy

Episode 50, The AI Lab: Brian tests four AI features built directly into FamilySearch and Ancestry, using a five-question trust rubric built live with Claude, to find out which ones you can actually trust with your family tree. One of the four had not even shipped yet when this episode was first outlined, which becomes part of the story you'll hear.

THIS EPISODE IS FOR YOU IF YOU HAVE SEARCHED: Is FamilySearch's AI Research Assistan...

Ancestors and Algorithms Episode 49, "The Research Assistant That Remembers," teaches genealogists how to build a persistent AI research assistant across three free tools: Claude Projects, Gemini Gems, and ChatGPT Custom Instructions, so you stop re-explaining your family history case to a brand new chat every single session.

Host Brian walks through the exact custom instructions he wrote into each AI tool, with the Genealog...

A Quebec family's baptismal records begin abruptly in 1850, though family memory said they were French Canadian for generations before that. The answer is a dit name: Quebec's centuries-old tradition of alternate family surnames, in which a family could be baptized under one name and married under another, and it is hiding more genealogy brick walls than most researchers realize.

This episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, a g...

A family believed their ancestor arrived in Australia a free man in the 1830s. A 190-year-old government pardon said otherwise, and nobody had ever read past the word "Pardon" printed across the top of it.

In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian uses AI genealogy tools to work a full case study built around Australian convict records, a first for this show. More than 76,000 convicts were transported to Van Diemen's L...

During the Chinese Exclusion Act, one immigrant's 200-page federal case file was built to hide his real name, and nearly succeeded.

For sixty-one years, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred an entire ethnicity from immigrating to the United States, with one narrow exception: the children of Chinese American citizens. That loophole created the "paper son" system, families with no blood relation to a citizen buying a purchased identity, m...

A single 1917 WWI draft card, plus a naturalization petition filed seven years later, reveal an Italian immigrant's real birth name. This is a real, start-to-finish example of using AI for genealogy research, ChatGPT, Claude, and NotebookLM working together to solve it.

If you've searched "AI genealogy tools," "ChatGPT for family history," or "how to use AI to research my ancestors" and wondered where to start, this episode is a ful...

Use ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to email any archive in the world, including drafting a formal German-language request, in under 15 minutes.

Most genealogists stop when online records run out. But the records you need are often one professional email away, whether it is a US county courthouse or a German Catholic archive that has been keeping baptism registers since the 1500s. Brian demonstrates a complete AI workflow: ChatGPT m...

Three AI tools, one 1866 Mexican parish register, and the family 
that a U.S. census reduced to a single word: México.

Brian traces composite ancestor Esteban Vasquez through two Arizona 
census records where birthplace reads only "México" and no 
naturalization record exists. The research pivots to FamilySearch's 
Mexico-Sonora Catholic Church records, a collection covering roughly 
2...

You can write a genealogical proof argument using 3 AI tools in one afternoon: NotebookLM organizes your evidence, Claude drafts and stress-tests the argument, and ChatGPT reviews it for plain-language clarity. This is the GPS Mini-Series capstone on Element 5.

What you'll learn:

• The three-part proof argument structure: Statement to be Proved, Evidence Presentation, Analysis and Reasoning
• How to prompt NotebookLM to surface incons...

Brian uses 4 AI tools to trace a formerly enslaved Mississippi ancestor across 6 record collections and through the 1870 Wall. This is what African American genealogy research looks like when AI and the Genealogical Proof Standard work together.

If your ancestor was enslaved, the census did not record their name before 1870. Every year before that belongs to a completely different research strategy, and today you will learn exactly ...

You've found the estate settlement. You've counted the heirs in the distribution sheet. And the math doesn't add up.

Nine children appear in the 1860 census. Seven names appear in the 1874 settlement. Two heirs are gone with no explanation, no death notation, and no trace in the legal record.

That is where this episode begins.

Probate records are among the most underused sources in American genealogy. When an ancestor died without a w...

If you can't find your Norwegian ancestor in genealogy records, the problem is almost certainly the name. Norway used a patronymic naming system until 1923, meaning most Norwegian-Americans carried completely different surnames in their homeland than the names their families kept in America. A woman who appears in Minnesota records as Astrid Solberg was never called Astrid Solberg in Norway. Not once.

In this episode of Ancestors an...

Most genealogists search 4-6 databases and miss 70% of the records that exist for their ancestor. In this episode, we fix that.

If you have ever searched Ancestry, FamilySearch, and a couple of other databases and still hit a wall, this episode is for you. The problem is not that the records do not exist. The problem is that you do not know what records exist or where to find them before you start searching. That is the gap this epi...

Every family has a story that got quietly handed down across the generations. A birthplace. A number of children. One marriage, one life, neatly summarized. But what happens when you sit down with the actual records and the story doesn't match?

In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, Brian walks through one of the most universal genealogy research scenarios there is: testing a family oral history against primary documents using...

If you have Scottish Highland ancestry and your family tree hits a wall before 1855, this episode was made for you.

In Episode 36 of Ancestors and Algorithms, Brian traces a MacLeod family from the Isle of Skye using three AI tools and a research workflow that works for any Scottish Highland, Hebridean, or Inverness-shire ancestry. Whether your ancestors were MacLeods, MacDonalds, Morrisons, Campbells, Camerons, or any of the great ...

Three records. Three completely different birthplace answers. A German Lutheran church register from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania says New York. The 1880 US Federal Census says Germany. A Pennsylvania death certificate says Pennsylvania. All three claim to document the same German immigrant ancestor. Not one of them agrees.

In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, Brian walks through a step-by-step AI-powered workflow for res...

Your ancestor went to California in 1849 as a forty-niner. The family says he struck it rich. But when you search the mining records for his name? Nothing. No claim. No miner's registration. No county tax list. He's a ghost.

That is exactly where Episode 34 begins, and where four AI tools working in sequence completely rewrite everything the family thought they knew.

Host Brian traces a Gold Rush ancestor through the scattered, incom...

If you have a brick wall ancestor with a common name; a William Harrison, a Mary Smith, a John Thomas this episode will change how you research forever.

In Episode 33 of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian walks through a completely upgraded FAN Club cluster research workflow that goes far beyond what was covered in Episode 16. The FAN Club method, coined by renowned genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, teaches researchers to find an...

"All the Irish records burned." Every genealogist with Irish ancestry has heard this warning and most have believed it long enough to stop searching. In Episode 32 of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian shows why that warning is not the whole story.

In a live AI-assisted genealogy research session, Brian traces his own Irish ancestor, Caitlin Flanagan, born around 1831 in County Clare, Ireland, who emigrated to Boston during the Gr...