Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become more prominent in our everyday lives, with almost daily news about the latest innovations. The field of Family History is no exception, with new tools being hailed as providing the holy grail of research and storytelling nirvana.

Is AI New in Family History?

The short answer is no. Many platforms have been using AI for years, including providing hints to our family trees, quickly indexing record sets such as the 1939 register, and suggesting links between our trees and DNA matches to name a few. The recent surge in reporting about AI is primarily due to advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence, which uses large language models to create new text, images, videos, and more.

Historical Use of AI in Genealogy

Platforms like Ancestry and MyHeritage have been leveraging AI to provide automatic hints and matches, helping researchers discover connections they might have missed. AI has also been used to transcribe and index handwritten records, making them searchable and accessible.  In fact, if it wasn’t for AI, many of the records now available to us online would still be sitting in boxes in archives requiring in person visits to discover genealogical gems.

Understanding Generative AI

Generative AI represents a natural progression in family history research. These new opportunities can be viewed as tools to employ at specific times during our work as family historians. Seeing AI as an assistant can help us understand that no computer will replace us any time soon. Instead, machines can perform some of our tasks more efficiently and accurately.  It is the combination of both Human and Artificial Intelligence that allow us to maximise the potential available to us.

The interaction of humans with AI tools allow the creation of amazing things, often enhancing the work of what we do as family historians.

The Mechanics of Generative AI

Generative AI models like GPT-4 are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to generate human-like text based on prompts. These models can create narratives, generate hypotheses, and provide context for historical events, all of which can be invaluable in genealogical research.  Further applications of generative AI can see the creation of images, videos and a wide variety of objects that capture both our ancestors and their stories.

AI as a Storyteller

One of the significant benefits of using generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, is their ability to produce text quickly. Whether it’s a blog post or an historical narrative, these tools can generate content within minutes, if not seconds. While the output needs to be monitored closely for errors (known as hallucinations in AI terms), it can often serve as a useful starting point. Providing factual information you have researched is key to eliminating errors and ensuring your written work reflects the many hours of your thorough research.

Enhancing Family Narratives

AI can help create engaging family stories by weaving together facts and filling in gaps with plausible details. By inputting basic information about your ancestors, AI can draft a narrative that can further be refined and personalised, making the storytelling process more efficient and creative.

AI as an Analyst

AI and large language models work on vast data sets. While the exact size of these training data sets is unknown, the critical point is that these tools are efficient at deconstructing data and making sense of it. For example, ChatGPT and similar models can easily identify names and places within a newspaper article or convert messy, unformatted text into well-laid-out tables. By using these tools to our advantage, family historians can reduce the tedious work of reformatting various indexes and other data sets.

Data Organisation and Interpretation

AI tools can help organise and interpret large amounts of genealogical data, identifying patterns and connections that might be missed manually. This includes sorting through DNA matches, identifying common ancestors, and suggesting potential areas of research based on existing data.

Using the power of AI, text can easily be corrected, manipulated and transcribed into a variety of formats, saving the family historian valuable time in their work.

Transcription, Correction & Summarising

AI is proving to be a valuable tool in transcribing historical documents and quickly making sense of complex artefacts such as wills and deeds.  As these are text based, the AI tools are able to predict, often with great accuracy, what the general content of these documents are and even solve transcription errors.  When poor quality scans mean words are unreadable, AI can provide useful suggestions as to what would naturally make sense.  Newspaper articles that have undergone Optical Character Recognition often have errors and require manual correction, but AI tools can automate this process saving considerable time for the family historian.

AI as a Creative Tool

The potential for AI-generated images, videos, audio, and other multimedia objects is already being explored and used in family history. While ethical considerations around these tools continue to evolve, using AI to create visually appealing aids can significantly enhance our research and the sharing of family stories. Being transparent about their use and developing skills to best employ and manipulate these tools are essential tasks for genealogists moving forward.

Multimedia Enhancements

AI can create realistic portraits of ancestors based on descriptions or old photos, generate voiceovers for family history videos, and even produce animations that bring historical events to life. These multimedia elements can make family histories more engaging and accessible to a broader audience.

A variety of portraits created by AI tools. A: Line drawing portrait created based on a given portrait, B: Image created of convict using description from Ticket of Leave documents, C: Portrait of a brother in a similar style to 2 portraits uploaded of sisters, D: Portrait of woman from yesteryear reminiscent of classic gallery portrait style.

AI as a Research Assistant

AI can act as a powerful research assistant, providing contextual information and suggesting relevant record sets to explore. By analysing the information you already have, AI can suggest additional avenues for research that you may not have considered. For example, if you find an ancestor was involved in the Mexican Independent War, AI can recommend possible data sets to investigate, archives and libraries that may hold relevant records and even lesser-known resources around the particular topic. Additionally, AI can provide context about historical events, economic conditions, or societal norms that may have influenced your ancestors’ lives, offering deeper insights into their experiences.  This background information can then be used to write more engaging narratives about your ancestors and their lives.

Ethical Considerations

As with any technology, the use of AI in family history research comes with ethical considerations. It’s important to be transparent about the use of AI, respect privacy, and ensure the accuracy of the information being generated. Genealogists should also be mindful of the potential biases in AI tools and strive to use them responsibly.  Interrogating what data has been used to train models and considering alternative viewpoints is a key part of being a responsible user of AI.  The principle of conducting a reasonably exhaustive search applies equally when using digital as well as more traditional tools and sources.

Balancing Technology and Tradition

While AI offers many benefits, it’s essential to balance these with traditional research methods. Human intuition, critical thinking, and the personal touch remain irreplaceable in genealogical research. AI should complement, not replace, the skills and expertise of family historians.

An image created with artificial intelligence showing a family historian in various scenarios. With all the various tools available, it is the combination of both Human and Artificial Intelligence that allow us to maximise the potential available to us.

Conclusion

AI offers numerous opportunities to enhance family history research, from storytelling and data analysis to creative endeavours and research assistance. By understanding and utilising these tools, family historians can work more efficiently and bring their ancestors’ stories to life in new and exciting ways. Embracing AI as a valuable partner in your genealogical journey can lead to deeper insights and more engaging narratives, enriching your understanding of your family history.  Happy researching and exploring using these new, innovative tools.

Author’s Disclaimer: All images in this post have been created using various artificial intelligence tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney.  Post editing has also been done in image manipulation software.