Exploring the Advantages and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence-assisted Genealogy
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
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
(Note: This blog post was originally published on the blog, Genealogy with Dana Leeds: Creator of the Leeds Method.) A Revolutionary Tool: FamilySearch "Full-Text Search" During RootsTech, an exciting development was announced: the launch of FamilySearch Labs. Among these experimental tools is one described as "Find Results with Full-Text Search." Although more databases will soon … Continue reading Exploring FamilySearch’s New Full-Text Search Tool & AI Transcription Comparison
ChatGPT with Vision (GPT-4V) analyzes a handwritten WWII draft card, and not only reads handwriting correctly but also accurately identifies text fields (name, address, next of kin, date of birth, occupation, etc.). This draft card, from my maternal grandfather Dean Lawrence (1921-2003) was chosen for the average block print handwriting; testing will continue to determine … Continue reading New Use Case: Handwriting Recognition to Structured Data
ChatGPT Plus with Vision (GPT-4V) is going to be able to do some cool stuff. New Use Case: Intelligent Image Analysis. I attached an image of a headstone commemorating my maternal second great-grandparents, David S. Lawrence and Marget M. Lawrence. I thought about what I'd like to know about the image, and I wrote this … Continue reading New Use Case: Intelligent Image Analysis