Although we know there are likely more records of our ancestors somewhere, it is difficult to know precisely where to search when the known locations are exhausted. Full-text search by FamilySearch has been a game changer in this respect. Introduced at RootsTech 2024, I jumped on and started using it to discover more about my ancestor, Thomas Beverly Royston. I didn’t find anything new for him then, but during RootsTech 2025, I again did a...
In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Diana and Nicole discuss how to choose a favorite photo out of a large collection. Diana shares a photo of her grandfather, Edward Raymond Kelsey, on his horse, Pal, and talks about his love for horses. She experimented with using AI to analyze the photo and shares her findings. Diana used Mark Thompson’s Historical Photo Analyzer custom GPT and was impressed with the results. The AI provided...
How do you choose a favorite photo out of a large collection? I came across this photo of my grandfather, Edward Raymond Kelsey, on his horse, Pal, and decided it would be a perfect time to write about Grandpa Kelsey and his love for horses. I also wanted to experiment with using AI to help analyze a photo and learned its a great way to start researching a photo from your collection. Ed and His...
In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss using AI to analyze tax records. Tax research involves a lot of data, and once you’ve extracted the data, analyzing it can be a challenge. Diana explains how she exported data from Airtable into a CSV file, and Nicole explains how she used Claude AI to create a table from the data. Diana provides an example of how she used the AI analysis...
2024 was the year the genealogy community embraced artificial intelligence as a useful tool for our work as genealogists and family historians. Nicole and I spent many hours learning and teaching about incorporating AI into our research flow. For this final blog post of the year, it’s only fitting that we look back at where we’ve come. Since we’ve written many blog posts and recorded many podcasts on AI, I’m providing a curated list. If...
In this episode of the Research Like a Pro Genealogy podcast, Diana and Nicole discuss the advancements in handwritten text recognition by large language models (LLMs), specifically Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Nicole shares her experience testing Claude’s transcription abilities with an 1829 North Carolina deed. She is impressed with the accuracy, noting that Claude even outperformed her manual transcription in some instances. Diana and Nicole then provide listeners with valuable tips for transcribing handwritten text using...
In this episode of Research Like a Pro, Nicole and Diana discuss Transkribus, a platform that uses AI to transcribe handwritten documents. They explain how Transkribus works, the benefits it offers for genealogy research, and how to get started using it. Diana and Nicole outline the transcription process, including uploading documents, choosing the right model, and reviewing the results. They also highlight advanced features like language models, Smart Search, and Super Models, which can improve...
As researchers, we often need to reference past research plans, reports, logs, documents, and locality guides. If you’ve done multiple phases for the same research question, you will have a lot of data to use moving forward. What if you had an AI assistant that could help you pull out specific information from your research and use it in various ways? If this sounds appealing, you can check out Projects on Claude.ai by Anthropic. Like...
Tax research involves a lot of data – land, property, associates, amount of tax paid, and more. You may be working with a run of tax lists for several years and dealing with several individuals in those tax lists. Once you’ve carefully extracted the data, the next challenge is analyzing it. I recently wrote about customizing an Airtable research log for tax research to match the headings in the Dallas County, Texas, rolls from 1847...
Nicole and Diana discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in report writing for genealogy research. They talk about the different roles AI can play, such as a coworker, creative assistant, tutor, and coach. Diana and Nicole acknowledge the challenges of using AI, including the need to track its use, fact-check responses, and maintain a personal writing style. Nicole shares how to use AI for various sections of a research report, such as...
