I'm still looking for the best way to provide a "perfect" genealogical sketch that would satisfy my family members' interest in meaningful stories with brevity, and this genealogist's desire for documenting sourced records with historical context.
1) Over 37 years of genealogical research, I collected family notes, records galore (including birth, marriage, death, baptism, burial, census, residence, occupation, military service, passenger list, naturalization,census, land, probate, voting records, book and periodical text, etc.). I try to write genealogical sketches for my ancestors and some of their offspring, including source citations. In the process, this blog has hosted many genealogical sketches, with sources, that fit the genealogist's view, including over 600 listed in 52 Ancestors/Relatives Biographies.
Over the years, the collected records, notes and sources have been added to my genealogical software program - most recently RootsMagic, but earlier Family Tree Maker and Legacy Family Tree. Each of the programs can "write" a genealogical sketch, or even a multi-generation book, based on the information available at the time of writing and the user's writing style. What is in my RootsMagic program has been added to my Ancestry Member Tree (as Notes), my MyHeritage Family Tree (as Notes), the WikiTree collaborative tree (as research notes), FamilySearch Family Tree (in Life Stories), and more.
2) The challenge is: My writing style is imperfect! Veteran Genea-Musings readers know how imperfect my style is! My wife's cousin emails me several times a week to help me fix my writing misteaks. [Thank you, Bonnie!] How do I incorporate new records or content into earlier work? How do I document the research process? All of those are challenges for every researcher who wants to write genealogical sketches.
3) And then: Along comes the Artificial Intelligence tools that can "help" a researcher write a grammatically correct and spell-checked text - just tell the AI tool what you want it to include. Hopefully, it does not hallucinate and give you information you did not provide.
The AI tools can help you write your genealogical sketch, and you can tell it a style to write in, or tell it to add more details, or add historical and social context, etc. They can create a realistic image of a specified scene, write a poem and/or song lyrics, create a song in your favored style or genre, or even write historical fiction. The tools can transcribe handwritten or typed text, translate from one language to another, abstract a record, summarize a lengthy document, create a podcast, analyze a photograph, craft a research plan,
I have tried to use these types of documents to have the AI tools write a genealogical sketch for me (while asking it to create a sketch, biography, poem or song lyrics):
- Type one-line event summaries into the Chat box
- Copy/paste my RootsMagic Notes into the Chat box
- Copy/past the event timeline from RootsMagic into a document and attach it to the AI chat box
- Copy/paste the blog post into a word processor, create a PDF, and attach it to the AI chat box
4) Those all work but require a significant amount of time and effort on my part to massage the input so that I get the desired output from the AI tool. There may be better ways.
- Diane Henriks wrote a blog post several months ago titled "AI and Family History: Creating a Perfect Ancestor Biography Using ChatGPT" I thought that was impressive. It works, but still requires copy/paste from the Ancestry profile into a document or a Chat box.
- Today, I watched John Beaumont's YouTube video for Turn Ancestry Profiles into Research Plans – Here's How!. This is great - it can create both the biographical sketch and also the research plan, and provide resource suggestions.
5) John's workflow takes the profile of an ancestor, and uses the click string Tools > Print > Customize (select items) > Print (select print to PDF). The PDF includes all of your information in your Ancestry Member Tree, including names, relationships, events, sources and notes (but it doesn't link the sources to the notes).
6) As an example, the information in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 41: #48 Henry Carringer (1800-1879) is what I have in the Notes on my Ancestry Member Tree for Henry Carringer.
I created a PDF using John's workflow that looks like this before I create the PDF:
Disclosure: I pay for an All-Access subscription, and Pro Tools, from Ancestry.com. In past years, Ancestry.com provided a complimentary All Access subscription, an autosomal DNA test, material considerations for travel expenses to meetings, and hosted events and meals that I attended in Salt Lake City.
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Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver
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