Curious about how artificial intelligence is changing family history?
Wednesday, the first day for Legacy Tree Webinars Webtember series, streamed three back-to-back sessions, tackling AI from different angles — transcription, land records, and locality research.
For non-subscribers they are available for playback for a week.
Using AI to Answer the Big Three: What, Where, and Why of Ancestor Locations — Diana Elder, AG, AGL
Diana Elder, focused on locality research — arguably one of the most time-consuming parts of genealogy — and how AI tools can speed up the process of identifying what records exist for a place, where to find them, and why an ancestor might have settled there in the first place.
Top 5 AI Tools for Transcribing Handwritten Historical Documents — Nicole Elder Dyer
Deciphering old, faded, and unfamiliar handwriting is a familiar challenge for the family historian.. Her webinar was notable for evaluating the Large Language Models — ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude in their various flavours, giving comparative results on character and word recognition rates. She then sumarizes her explorations some lesser-known tools, including Archive Studio, a Canadian model.
Using AI to Analyze Land Records and Reconstruct Family Narratives — Thomas MacEntee
Rounding out the day, Thomas MacEntee’s session covered how AI can help interpret dense legal language in deeds and court records, map family migrations across property transactions, and turn raw record data into a coherent narrative about an ancestor’s life. US oriented.
None of the speakers suggest AI replaces the researcher — accuracy checks and source verification are still for your due diligence, especially for challenging names and dates. Recent improvements are impressive — each shows a concrete way to fold these tools into your existing research process to save time and, in some cases, spot connections you might otherwise miss.
I generally only use AI for confirming my transcriptions…I’ve seen enough errors in its analysis, even when given direction, to not trust it. People have to keep using their OWN brains to do this work, not just giving everything over to AI. Also, there’s the environmental cost for something that just isn’t necessary.