The Future of Family Trees: How AI Kinship Recognition is Revolutionizing Genealogy – This article has a byline on it, but sounds as if it were written by AI. The site is all about AI, and my guess is that they practice what they preach and use it to pump out AI-friendly articles. That said, there’s no question that AI will completely alter the world of genealogy, and yes, that could contribute to another level of democratization.

I guess my concern is the current state of AI where it still gets so much wrong, and yet, it’s easy not to notice if you don’t carefully consider the results it hands you.

Even before AI entered the arena, we were already at a stage where poor research often outshouts accurate – if only because so many copy others’ trees without looking at a single record or questioning any aspect – and I fear this will amplify that tendency.

I run into this all the time, but the experience that still stands out in my mind is discovering that everyone had one of Hillary Clinton’s grandparents wrong. That may sound trivial, but at the time, she was the most scrutinized woman, perhaps person, on the planet, and yet, no one had troubled to be sure. So fully a quarter of her story was wrong, as were many who thought they were related to her.

And we’re impatient, aren’t we? I don’t see people waiting until tried-and-tested genealogy AI tools arrive. We’ll all just jump on the first few that are released and touted.

This I can predict with confidence: The premise of one or more of the early tools will be to find your famous relatives in seconds, and should any of them be integrated with sites that host online trees, the error rate will soar to fresh, new levels. Few will know, and I doubt many will care.

The end game will be to market customized medications and other products (I’ll leave aside darker thoughts for now), and those involved will tell themselves that the mistakes will be rendered unimportant by sheer volume. And maybe they’ll be right.

I’ve been a genealogist most of my life so have celebrated and adopted, as well as weathered and tolerated, countless changes, but I’m bracing myself. This article – whoever or whatever wrote it – is correct to describe what’s coming as a revolution, and we’re already in it. Hold tight.

Discover Enslaved People in the Newspapers – Interesting approach! I hope other newspaper collections will borrow this idea.

Sudbury student graduates from same school 100 years apart from great-grandmother – Keeping it in the family!

Statue of Liberty Barbie 🗽

Stolen Irish skulls snatched from graveyard finally returned to Inishbofin island – I hope we see a lot more of this kind of thing going forward.

Photo Credit: Samuel Huron under Creative Commons license