Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Ask AI: "What Can An AI Agent Do For a Genealogist and Family Historian?"

The 2025 Artificial Intelligence world is using Generative AI routyinely, and is heading towards AI Agents that perform a series of tasks with a single, but complicated, prompt -- with a finished product that now takes many steps or iterations to perform with the current AI techonlogy. 

1)  Google provides this definition of an AI Agent:

"An AI agent is a software system that autonomously performs tasks by using reasoning, planning, and memory to achieve goals. It can perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions to complete tasks with minimal human oversight, using tools to gather information and execute steps. Unlike simple AI chatbots, these agents can work independently over extended periods to solve complex problems and improve their performance through learning.

"Key capabilities:
  • Autonomy: AI agents can make decisions and execute tasks without step-by-step human instructions, enabling them to work independently towards a goal.
  • Reasoning and planning: They can plan a series of actions to achieve a complex objective, breaking it down into smaller, manageable steps.
  • Tool use: Agents can dynamically access and use external tools, such as APIs, databases, and other software, to gather information or perform actions.
  • Memory and learning: They can retain information from previous tasks to inform future decisions and adapt their behavior over time.
  • Multimodality: Advanced agents can process and understand various types of information, including text, voice, images, and code.
"How they work:
  • Goal-oriented: AI agents are designed to achieve a specific, often high-level, goal provided by a user.
  • Reasoning loop: They operate in a continuous loop of perceiving the environment, reasoning about the best course of action, and acting on that decision until the goal is met.
  • LLM foundation: Many are built on large language models (LLMs) to understand user intent and a wide range of inputs.
  • Dynamic task execution: They can adjust their plan and create new subtasks as they receive new information or encounter new conditions."

2)  Where AI Agents and then Agentic AI are headed can be explained in this graphic from Gen AI vs. AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: Whats the Difference and Why Your Business Should Care:

See the article for a full explanation in some detail.

3)  I wondered what types of AI Agents might be developed for the Genealogy Research and Family History Writing tasks.  Here is what Open AI ChatGPT5 told me:

My Prompt was:  "Please describe what an AI agent could provide a genealogist researching his ancestry. What could an AI agent provide a family historian trying to write a book or stories about his ancestors with more than just collected facts."

4)  OpenAI ChatGPT5 offered this response:

A. AI Agents for Genealogical Research

An AI agent trained or configured for genealogy could function as a personal research assistant, helping with every phase of your ancestral investigation. It could:

🧭 Data Gathering and Organization

  • Ingest and index your family tree files (GEDCOMs, documents, photos, notes) to create a searchable knowledge base.

  • Identify missing data or research gaps (e.g., missing birthplaces, unknown parents, inconsistent dates).

  • Suggest next steps—such as likely record types or repositories to search (e.g., “You might find this family in Mercer County tax lists 1830–1850”).

  • Cross-reference DNA matches with tree data to detect probable shared ancestors.

🔍 Analytical Research

  • Correlate evidence across sources automatically to detect conflicts or confirm identities.

  • Cluster DNA matches by genetic network and suggest hypothesized relationships.

  • Timeline construction—build detailed, sourced life timelines, noting historical context.

  • Geographic mapping—visualize migrations, property holdings, or family clusters.

🧠 Smart Record Searching

  • Automatically query online databases (e.g., FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage) using tailored search strategies.

  • Use fuzzy matching to locate misindexed names (“Carenger” for “Carringer”).

  • Learn from your past searches to improve its own precision and focus.


B. AI Agents for Family History Writing

For a family historian writing a narrative or book, the AI agent could evolve into an editorial collaborator and storyteller—helping turn facts into a living history. It could:

✍️ Transform Data into Story

  • Draft biographical sketches for each ancestor using known facts, adding rich historical context (e.g., local events, occupations, migration routes).

  • Blend narrative and analysis—for example, explaining what an 1840s Pennsylvania farmer’s daily life looked like, or what it meant for a family to move westward.

  • Offer tone and structure options—from formal genealogical summaries to accessible family stories or creative nonfiction.

🧭 Contextual Enrichment

  • Insert historical sidebars: social customs, clothing styles, transportation, and the cost of goods relevant to your ancestor’s time and place.

  • Provide maps and visuals, such as family migration routes or reconstructed neighborhoods.

  • Suggest period quotes, diaries, or newspaper extracts to add authentic voices.

📖 Manuscript Development Support

  • Organize your chapters and genealogical lines into a coherent structure.

  • Check for factual consistency and sourcing completeness.

  • Help you develop themes—such as perseverance, migration, or innovation—that connect generations.

  • Edit for readability and historical accuracy while preserving your personal style.


C. Future Vision: Personalized Genealogy Companion

Imagine an always-available “Family History AI Companion” that:

  • Knows every ancestor you’ve researched and can instantly recall any fact, photo, or citation.

  • Converses naturally about your findings (“Let’s compare the Carringer family’s 1850 and 1860 census data”)

  • Learns your writing style and helps you maintain narrative continuity.

  • Even simulates conversations or interviews with ancestors based on their known life facts—clearly marked as creative reconstructions, but deeply evocative.


Would you like me to sketch what a realistic AI genealogy agent could look like—its interface, functions, and workflow—for someone like you (a genealogist writing ancestral biographies)? I can outline its capabilities and even show sample interactions.

5) Those examples look interesting but challenging. 
  •  How does an AI agent search on a subscription or password-protected website? 
  • How does an AI Agent find all of the published information for a person in books and periodicals?  Most of them can search online resources, including WikiTree, Find A Grave,  and FamilySearch pages. 
  • How does a user add all of their research findings for the AI Agent to work on? A large family tree GEDCOM with thousands of profiles is humongous.  Then there's the images of records or text to add for the AI Agent to work on.
  • The family history book example seems more realistic, although it would require many biographical sketches.
  • What will this super-duper genealogy AI Agent going to cost?
6)  If the Family History Writing example sounds familiar, it incorporates some of the elements that I am doing for individual ancestors in my ABC Biography series of posts (see Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC) Process).  All of my ABC Biographies to date are listed on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. 

7)  Are any genealogy industry companies creating sophisticated AI Agents for genealogy research and family history writing at this time?  My guess is that they are working on it!  Some of the desktop family tree programs can produce individual summaries and multi-generational ancestor or descendant reports, including notes and sources. Some of the online tree companies can provide a fairly simple biography from a profile in an online family tree, but they don't utilize available notes and sources. However, none of them can effectively integrate historical events or social history information into the biography the way that current generative AI tools can provide.  

8)  In my next post in this series, I will ask OpenAI ChatGPT5 more questions, including the suggestion in the final paragraph in the ChatGPT5 response above. 

9)  What questions or issues do my readers have about AI Agents for genealogy and family history? Your comments are welcome!

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page.  Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver

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