2025 was a pretty good genealogy year for me and Genea-Musings - Artificial Intelligence (AI) and FamilySearch Full-Text Search were the highlights for me.
Looking back over the past year, I see that I pursued these genealogy and family history related activities:
(image created by Meta AI)
1) Genealogy Society Work
- Moderated and presented 11 CVGS Research Group monthly meetings (in Zoom meetings) with 15 to 25 in attendance, usually providing two hours of content.
- Moderated and presented 8 CVGS DNA Interest Group monthly meetings (in Zoom meetings) and 4 CVGS Family History Roundtable monthly meetings (in Zoom meetings), with 15 to 30 in attendance, usually providing two hours of content.
- Attended 10 CVGS monthly General Meetings (in Zoom meetings) with 20 to 50 in attendance.
- Attended in-person 9 CVGS education meetings and helped answer questions for new genealogists.
- Attended the CVGS annual picnic (June) and holiday party (December) in-person and enjoyed seeing my CVGS colleagues.
- Wrote, edited, published, and emailed 12 CVGS monthly Newsletters (8 pages each month) to the CVGS membership in the 16th year of my editorship.
- Served on the CVGS Board of Directors for the 23rd consecutive year as Research Group Chair, Roundtable Chair, and Newsletter Editor, and attended monthly Board meetings.
2) Education
- Watched about 20 Legacy Family Tree Webinars as part of my subscription to the service (like having a really big genealogical society program!).
- Attended RootsTech Connect 2025 virtually over three days, and watched over 100 presentations.
- Attended 10 San Diego Genealogical Society monthly program meetings (including two seminars) on Zoom. Also attended the Genealogy Day at the San Diego Historical society building in Balboa Park in October.
- Attended most of the SDGS DNA Interest Group meetings on Zoom hosted by Colin Whitney, often with speakers.
- Attended most of the SDGS British Isles Interest Group on Zoom hosted by Colin Whitney.
- Watched hundreds of YouTube videos about genealogy-related topics - I subscribe to about 150 YouTube channels for genealogy.
- Read the NEHGS magazines and downloaded them to my genealogy education folders. American Ancestors also provides digital editions of a number of periodicals for New England which I search occasionally and download articles about my ancestral families to my genealogy digital folders.
- Downloaded syllabus articles from RootsTech, Legacy Family Tree Webinars, CVGS programs, and SDGS programs, and saved them to my education digital folders.
- Read thousands of genealogy-related blog posts from hundreds of geneabloggers using Feedly on a daily basis.
3) Blogging
- Investigated and wrote about new genealogy research, family tree, family stories, DNA and artificial intelligence tools as they appeared over the year.
- Wrote "Ask AI" articles about topics of interest using the free Artificial Intelligence chatbots (OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft CoPilot, Google Gemini, X Grok, Meta, and Perplexity). Had lots of "genealogy fun" creating AI images to support blog posts.
- Wrote over 60 ABC Biographies (AI-assisted) of my ancestors from parents through the 3rd great-grandparents, including a poem, song lyrics, a song, an audio overview and video overview.
- Wrote many AI-assisted family stories based on my genealogical research and my own memories, including life memoirs, ancestor "day in the life," memorable events, and even some serial stories.
- Created NotebookLM AI Biographies, Audio Overviews, Video Overviews, Infographics and Slide Decks about selected ancestors and myself. Transferred Audio Overview audio to text using AI tools.
- Tried to keep abreast of AI technology and news in the Artificial Intelligence Compendium as a Genea-Musings page to capture significant articles, webinars, blog and video content.
- Created the Randy's AI and Genealogy Genea-Musings page for my own work about genealogy and AI and added to it weekly.
- Wrote over 1,110 blog posts (most ever for me) on Genea-Musings in the 20th year of the blog. Some of my posts are about my own research (e.g., Amanuensis Monday, Genealogy Pot-Pourri, Seavers in the News, Wordless Wednesday, Treasure Chest Thursday, and Saturday Night Genealogy Fun), but some are genea-curation about the industry (e.g., New and Updated Ancestry Collections; New and Updated FamilySearch Collections; New and Updated MyHeritage Collections; Findmypast Friday; Genealogy News Bytes, Genealogy Education Bytes; and Best of the Genea-Blogs), occasional guest posts, press releases, Artificial Intelligence questions, trials, biographies and stories, genealogy software, online collections, and genealogy industry issues. See:
- Randy's "Best Of" Genea-Musings Posts in 2025
- Top 60 Most Viewed Posts in 2025 on Genea-Musings
- Started a Substack page and usually post one article every day, which goes to the 200+ subscribers via email and is available to read by anyone on Substack.
- I now have about 18,915 posts and 29.4 million page views on the Genea-Musings blog since April 2006 according to Google, with 7.8 million page views added in 2025.
4) DNA Tests and Analysis
- I have autosomal DNA test results at AncestryDNA (test), MyHeritageDNA (upload), FamilyTreeDNA (test), 23andMe (test), Living DNA (upload), and GEDmatch (upload).
- Reviewed my DNA matches on a regular basis, and made notes about the match data, including known relationships and common ancestors. I have spreadsheets for the highest matches on AncestryDNA, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and MyHeritageDNA matches with collected information. I occasionally downloaded my Shared DNA segments from MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe.
- Created updated AutoCluster groups for MyHeritage.
- Explored the AncestryDNA AutoClusters with some success in identifying distant cousins.
- Did not add anything to my DNA Painter chromosome mapping based on known common ancestors on MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe.
5) Genealogy Research and Family Trees
- Had several breakthrough moments doing research using FamilySearch Full-Text Search, including:
- Land records for several of my New England Seaver ancestors.
- Land records for 3rd great-grandfather Alexander Sovereen in Norfolk County. Ontario.
- Used RootsMagic 11 as my "master" family tree program on my desktop and laptop computers. See RootsMagic Genealogy Database Statistics Update - 1 January 2026 for my progress on my family tree.
- Continued to research, find, source and enter information on my ancestors and descendants of my 4th great-grandparents to help find common ancestors with DNA matches.
- Used the WebHints for Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, and FamilySearch to add content (names, relationships, events, dates, places, notes and source citations) for records found that apply to each profile.
- Searched for more records for selected profiles on all of the sites, adding content and source citations for records found that apply to each person profile.
- Matched my RootsMagic profiles with FamilySearch Family Tree profiles on a regular basis using the FamilySearch tools in RootsMagic, and added or edited Family Tree profiles and/or RootsMagic profiles to add content, notes and source citations.
- Found several more caches of family photos and artifacts hiding in file cabinets, file boxes, and piles.
- Colorized and enhanced over 100 more family photos using the MyHeritage photograph tools and sharpened, enhanced and colorized some family photographs using ChatGPT and Gemini AI Tools.
7) Family Stories
- Experimented with Artificial Intelligence programs to write ancestor biographies using Anthropic Claude and other LLMs, plus creating poems, song lyrics and songs (using Suno) to commemorate their lives.
- Wrote many life memoirs and family stories using Anthropic Claude to add historical context and "how it might have been" to my ancestor' stories.
- Used the AI biographies, memoirs, and stories to create Audio Overviews and Video Overviews, and starting in November I used Infographics and Slide Decks using Google NotebookLM. Created several slide shows using Google Slides and Google Vids for several ancestral couples. Used Canva to create videos of some of the audio overviews and Suno songs.
- Added the Video Overviews and some songs and Audio Overviews to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@RandySeaver.
- Added digital images of genealogy records, downloaded books, or articles, to my ancestral education, surname and family digital files on a regular "as found" basis.
- Added other genealogy-related documents (e.g., society newsletters, presentation handouts, artificial intelligence images, AI text content, etc.) to my Genealogy digital file folders.
- Backed up the digital files to Google Drive occasionally and iDrive in the cloud daily, and some files to Dropbox for transfer to the laptop on an as-needed basis.
9) Summary
- I "advanced the genealogy ball" by making some genealogy and family tree discoveries, trying new methods and resources, and had a lot of genea-fun.
- I do the above activities almost every day for 5 to 8 hours a day, seemingly chained to my computer chair. A lot of my reading of email, blogs and social media are done on my phone now in my recliner. I worked about 2,000 hours on genealogy-related activities in 2025. I didn't make any money doing this but spent some. I think I'm my own boss.
10) Real Life
- I love having time for family activities (occasional visits from or with our two daughters and grandkids - some calls on Facetime). I visit Linda in her skilled nursing and memory care facility 3-4 times a week for an hour.
- The year saw improved health for me (knocking on wood!) - my pacemaker has stabilized my heart rate, I had two more skin cancers on my head, and one on my chest, removed in 2025. I'm trying to walk a bit every day, and work in the yard weekly.
- I watch Padres baseball on TV, Chargers and NFL football on TV, and SDSU Aztecs football and basketball on TV.
- I read the local newspaper, genealogy books and magazines, and fiction books (mostly mystery books from the public library) while watching TV.
- I check Facebook, Substack and X daily, and read or watch local news and political news/events online, on my phone, and on TV.
- I faithfully attend and sometimes lead a church Men's Bible Study on the first Saturday of each month for breakfast.
- I sporadically attend a Rohr/Goodrich Retired Engineer's lunch on the third Thursday of each month.
- Then there's the household chores (bills, mail, shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry and cleaning), but I'm pretty lax.
- Pretty boring, eh?
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