Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Condense Your Research Notes Into a Genelaogical Sketch Using AI

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  Do you have Research Notes for some of your ancestors in a number of sources and papers, or perhaps in a Person Note or Research Note in your desktop family tree program, and dread trying to put them into a coherent genealogical sketch or research note?  

2)  This week, take all of the Research Notes you have for one person in your tree and put them all in one word processor document. Organize them if you want - you don't have to.  Make a PDF file of your new word processor document and name it.  

3)  Go to your favorite LLM (you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or any other LLM), load the document, and ask the LLM to "Please organize the research notes in the attached document for [your ancestor's name, birth and death year] and create an engaging biography about him and his family. Do not use any information other than what is provided."

2) Tell us about your experiment in condensing your notes and creating a biography of an ancestor in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status  post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Here's mine:

1)  My selected ancestor is my 5th great-grandfather, William Hutchinson (1745-1826), born in New Jersey and died in Upper Canada.  He is one of my United Empire Loyalists ancestors who fought against the American colonists in the Revolution.  My notes in RootsMagic for him are 15 pages single-spaced.  They are haphazardly organized - an Individual Report from RootsMagic, notes from multiple sources, transcriptions from books, etc., all with in-line sources because I added them decades ago.  I dreaded trying to put it all together.  I won't show you what I have - I'm embarrassed that it took so long to do this. 

2)  I did a Ctrl-A ("all") in the RootsMagic Person Note field for William Hutchinson (1745-1826), and then a Ctrl-C ("copy"), and opened my word processor and titled it and did a Ctrl-V ("paste") and saved the research notes - as is - as a PDF file.  

3)  I opened my AI assistant, the FREE Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, attached the PDF of the Notes,  and typed in the above query into the prompt field.  I clicked the Enter button and Claude went to work.  It gave me five pages of text organized into sections.  I then asked it to add more detail to every section, and then it gave me 12 pages of text.  

4)  Here is the first page as I copied it into my word processor after reading it through.

I will post the whole biography after proofreading it and asking Claude to add source citations from the in-line citations.  I should have done that but I forgot to do it. 

5)  I don't positively know the parents and siblings of William Hutchinson (1745-1826). There are family trees on the Internet that say his parents are Isaac Hutchinson and Phoebe Storr of New Jersey.  They might be his parents, but I have not followed up on the lead.

6)  What do I think of this process?  This is a fantastic way to condense and summarize my Research Notes as long as I have them in some sort of digital format.  Why didn't I, or somebody else, think of this sooner?

7)  How accurate is it?  I am quite sure that it is only as good as the research notes that were in my Person Note but that was based on my own research and the research of several other descendants of William Hutchinson. 

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