Thread

1. loufe · 1790284798 · focus · HN ↗

   I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.

   1. 1659447091 · 1790322710 · focus · HN ↗

      I'd caution others with believing caught "mistakes". (But am also interested in how you use it)

      There is a farm cited as an ancestor origin by multiple deceased genealogist. Its a common POI that people with this shared ancestor try to find. Finding it could solidify the established line theory and finally debunk a small ancestor fraction's alternate theory.

      Different LLM searches keep returning the same colony with invalid/made up references that don't even cite a partial name match. Manual searches throughout that area returns nothing as well. But since the LLM said so, a century+ of various research and work by professional genealogist gets severed from a crowd sourced public tree because "AI" returned a colony name that ended up helping the alt line.

      I did eventually find what I believe is the origin farm, and it strengthens the history written by previous genealogist -- I tried to send the information to the tree maintainers and was outright ignored. LLMs fabricating locations apparently beats a listing in the National Heritage List for England of the exact place name, buildings from that time, and in one of the areas the larger english family is known to have been present.

      1. StableAlkyne · 1790349722 · focus · HN ↗

         > Finding it could solidify the established line theory and finally debunk a small ancestor fraction's alternate theory.

         I think this post is missing a lot of context and background. I haven't the foggiest what an "established line theory" is

         1. 1659447091 · 1790385760 · focus · HN ↗

            Once you trace back centuries, in my case early 17th century, you run into issues of everyone having the same name, scarce scrapes of documentation, and other issues that can produce more than one plausible ancestor line. This ancestor was in successive junior lines so it's a lot of implication -- showing a pedigree chart with "Henry" born to "William" in 17th century England -- that isnt very helpful without piecing together a lot of scattered context from multiple sources and without being able to see what documents/evidence those researchers had.

            So, theory is a common term used. Established theory because the family is included in 3-4 books written from the late 19th and 20th century covering large swaths of the related families and areas/interactions/movements etc.

            Once you start getting back that far in time the people who trace genealogy for money and writing books, tend to be more through and understand the quirkier nuances that can tease apart families that your typical internet sleuthing researcher (me for example) can miss/conflate.

            1. StableAlkyne · 1790576232 · focus · HN ↗

               Thank you for the explanation!

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