Welcome to October and it’s time for another round of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver.

This week’s challenge is right on trend:

1)   Share one way in which you’ve implemented Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your genealogy research  (You can do more than one if you like!).  What AI tools did you use? 

First, I have to admit that while the behind the scene use of AI in terms of aiding searches, etc. is great, and it’s fun having AI create stories, poems, songs and what have you about genealogy and our ancestors, I am not particularly enamored with the idea of AI actually writing an essay or book or news article. For those who think “everyone” will use AI to develop ideas and then will edit and add their own touches, that is pie on the sky that isn’t ever going to happen. Have you seen the news articles this week about college students at elite universities in America who are whining to their professors that reading even so much as 20 pages a week is challenging for them? These are Ivy League students who say they were never required to read an ENTIRE book in junior or senior high school and they can’t handle it.

I digressed a bit, but not really, because AI creating written pieces is going to create students who not only can’t read a whole book, they won’t be able to write at any length on a given topic.

Okay, my rant about the negative uses is done.

There are some positives for genealogy research. The foremost example is FamilySearch full-text search, which is fabulous. I use it multiple times every week, both at home and at my local FamilySearch center when the records I need to view are locked.

I’ve also used – rarely – ChatGPT 4o to ask questions to which I know the answer, or am pretty sure of the answer. The best example of this is when I recently wrote a life sketch about my 3X great grandfather, George Tarbox, born and raised in New Gloucester, Maine, the son of a farmer. However, he was always a business man and, when he settled in Lowell, Massachusetts for a few years in the middle of the 1800s, I knew he was there for some kind of business connected to the textile mills. He then moved for a just a couple of years to Nashua, New Hampshire and then on to Newburyport, Massachusetts.

I wanted to figure out why George moved to Nashua and Newburyport, already suspecting that they had some type of factories starting up.

I queried ChatGPT and asked “What was life like in Nashua, New Hampshire in the 1850s” and the quick response was that the city was becoming a New Hampshire leader in the opening of factories and industrialized businesses. I asked the same question about life in Newburyport and received a very similar answer. It was easy to look at Wikipedia and the history of those towns to verify that factories became very important in the daily lives of their residents.

Other than that, I haven’t used Artificial Intelligence all that much.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge.