Claude.ai has been one of my favorite apps for genealogical writing for the past couple years. When I first started experimenting with Claude, I was curious if it could transform my spreadsheet research log into a research report. The process proved more challenging than I expected, requiring numerous chain-of-thought prompts and a good deal of fine-tuning. In April of 2024, I tested this task with a research log I created several years ago about Baldy...
Claude 4.5 Sonnet assisted with organizing and writing this blog post based on my research report and a syllabus about using AI for court records. In part 1 of this series, we learned how AI assisted my research on finding, logging, and organizing a series of court orders between Samuel Daniel and my Roystons. In this blog post, we’ll go through the cases and see how AI helps us understand the legal context of court...
Claude 4.5 Sonnet assisted with organizing and writing this blog post based on my research report and a syllabus about using AI for court records. For generations, genealogists have known that court records contain some of the richest genealogical information available—and some of the most challenging to access. Unlike vital records or census enumerations, court records rarely come with indexes. The researcher faces the daunting task of browsing court books page by page, deciphering cryptic...
A good case study can give us excellent ideas for tackling our challenging research. Enjoy this blog post by one of our Family Locket team members, Jill, who shares her success using AI as an assistant. by Jill Leonard Nock, AG® Historical deed research can be simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. The thrill of discovery often comes after hours of deciphering 18th- or 19th-century handwriting, tracking chains of title, and piecing together family relationships. But what if...
Welcome to Research Like a Pro! In this episode, Nicole and Diana discuss high-quality handwritten text recognition with Gemini 2.5 Pro in Google AI Studio. Nicole shares her experience transcribing a 1791 South Carolina deed, highlighting how accurate the transcription was using Google AI Studio. She explains that Google AI Studio is a free, web-based tool for prototyping and testing Google’s Gemini AI models, and she finds it to be the most accurate way to...
After my first day uncovering over twenty Harris family records, I returned to the Love County Clerk’s office with curiosity about what other records might exist, particularly from the county’s earliest years. I didn’t have a specific research plan beyond exploring the oldest volumes to see what I might find. Day two would prove interesting in unexpected ways—sometimes courthouse research yields valuable discoveries not because you know exactly what you’re looking for, but because you...
Today’s episode, sponsored by Newspapers.com, focuses on decoding the 1819 Weatherford Assault Case in Frontier Arkansas. Diana introduces the topic of researching challenging court records and how new AI tools can assist with finding, transcribing, and understanding them. She discusses her project to discover the father of Henderson Weatherford, which led her to Lawrence County, Arkansas, court records. Diana explains how FamilySearch’s Full-Text search capability helped her find records for William and Buman/Bunyan Weatherford. Diana...
Today I pasted three screenshots of a 1791 South Carolina deed into Google AI Studio, and the resulting transcription was so good, I almost didn’t have to change anything. The deed spanned three pages, so I simply took three screenshots and pasted them one at a time into the same conversation, with the prompt to “transcribe and keep line breaks.” Google AI Studio is a free tool for anyone to try Google’s AI model, Gemini....
On the podcast episode, Nicole shares her experience identifying people in old family photos, specifically those of her great-great-grandparents, Daniel O’Connell Elder and Jessie Estelle (Ross) Elder, and their children. Nicole begins by describing a 1914 photo where only a few people are identified. She uses letters and information shared from a relative who was a DNA match to figure out who some of the people are. Then, Nicole discusses a tool called Related Faces,...
In this episode, Nicole and Diana discuss the ancestral home of Diana’s great-grandparents, Charles Cannon Creer and Mary Margaret Peterson. Nicole introduces the topic of researching ancestral homes, emphasizing the importance of exploring the architecture and records like city directories, taxes, maps, and newspapers. Diana shares the story of Charles building a home in Spanish Fork, Utah, for his bride in 1892, which remained in the family for over a century. They talk about Charles’...
