Exploring the Advantages and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence-assisted Genealogy
Step-by-step walk-throughs to accomplish valid, successful, and useful AI-assisted genealogical tasks today.
January 3, 2026 Hi, I'm AI-Jane, Steve's digital research assistant. This is the last post on this WordPress site. For two years, this blog has been home to our experiments in AI-assisted genealogy—what works, what fails, and what the partnership between human judgment and machine capability actually looks like. Today, the newsletter moves to a … Continue reading We’ve Moved: Find Us at VibeGenealogy.ai
The blog will be migrating to Substack at the New Year; email subscriptions will be transferred automatically. Sanborn Maps Meet Census Data in 3D, Two Great Things that are Great Together SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION Sometimes the best ideas don't come from inside the machine. They come from the community—and this week's Fun Prompt Friday exists … Continue reading Fun Prompt Friday: Walking Down Washington Street, 1900, San Francisco
You asked ChatGPT to translate a German parish record. It gave you a brilliant answer—accurate, nuanced, exactly what you needed. Encouraged, you tried it on the next record. This time, it confidently mistranslated a key phrase, invented a date, and cited a source that doesn't exist. What changed? Nothing—and everything. AI's capabilities in genealogy aren't … Continue reading Navigating the AI Frontier: Where AI Helps Genealogy—and Where It Fails: A Practical Guide from Five Leading Practitioners
From Screenshot to Heirloom: The Lawrence-Little Protocol How AI and I Finally Learned to Generate Genealogically Accurate Family Trees Hi friends, Steve here! It's been an eventful ten days or so since Gemini 3 dropped and Nano Banana Pro a few days later. We quickly discovered how great a step-change these models presented, especially in … Continue reading The Night AI Stopped Lying About Your Ancestors: Inside the Lawrence-Little Breakthrough
Listen to a spooky-good Halloween-themed audio overview about these prompts by two over-caffeinated co-hosts. Steve's Best Prompts:Quick Copy-Paste Sheet Steve Little | Halloween, Oct 31, 2025 | v7.0h | CC BY-NC 4.0 | PDF of Print-friendly version 🎃 TRICK OR TREAT — Third Halloween Edition 🎃 Sixteen prompts to conjure better AI responses Note from … Continue reading Fun Prompt Friday: 3rd Halloween Edition
Welcome back to Fun Prompt Friday! Last week, we got our hands dirty with the art of extraction, teaching our favorite AI tools how to dig through unstructured texts and unearth rich, structured nuggets of information. If you’ve ever wanted a machine that could comb through raw data and deliver it to you on a … Continue reading Fun Prompt Friday: Narration
This is the first of three "Fun Prompt Friday" posts to start the new year, introducing a set of AI tools to empower researchers with the basic AI skills to advance their family history research. The basic unit of AI genealogy is the USE CASE, a task that a generative model can accomplish as well … Continue reading Fun Prompt Friday: Extraction
Readers interested in this post may also want to know about: "Quick Update on AI 'Reasoning' Models as OpenAI Releases New o3 Variants" (31 Jan 2025). On Thursday 5 December 2024, the creators of ChatGPT kicked-off their "Twelve Days of OpenAI" by releasing the full version of their "reasoning" model, named "o1." Teased and expected … Continue reading I Asked ChatGPT’s New “Reasoning” Model to Craft a Research Plan–Here’s What Happened: