Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Describe One of Your Own, or an Ancestor's, Life Turning Point

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)  Every historical person has major events, milestones and "turning points" in their life, from birth through death and even beyond.  These events, milestones and turning points can be the basis for family stories of the historical person.

2)  Please share one of those events in your own life, or the life of one of your ancestors. 

2)  Share your information about your major event, milestone or turning point in your own blog post, writing a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

Here's mine:

I usually ask my AI assistant to help me define milestones and turning points in an ancestor's life because the LLM is always more perceptive than I am.  For instance, I asked ChatGPT5 about the major events and milestones in Isaac Seaver's life today in Major Events and Milestones In the Life of Isaac Seaver (1823-1901) of Massachusetts. I asked for turning points in Devier J. Smith's life in Using Artificial Intelligence Tools To Find Possible Family Stories. 

I'm going to resist asking Claude for my own milestones and turning points and share about my own turning point in my genealogy and family history work in the recent past.

After 36 years of doing genealogy research, collecting hundreds of tens of thousands of records (who's counting?), adding over 75,000 historical persons to my family tree, and writing over 17,000 blog posts and over 500 genealogical sketches for my ancestors, I decided to start writing family stories about my own life and about the lives of my closest ancestors (well, from 3rd great-grandparents forward in time).  But, and it's a BIG but, I don't have stories about the day-to-day lives of my ancestors -- I have only records of events about their lives and a few family stories about my parents and grandparents, plus my own life experiences.  How best can I tell their stories so that my descendants and relatives can understand and appreciate them?

One of my turning points over 82 years happened in early 2024: As I was experimenting with artificial intelligence LLMs, I found that they could write a much better genealogical sketch, biography, memoir, family story, poem, song lyrics, and dialogue from rough notes, timelines, and the genealogical sketches.  Then I found in 2025 the infographics to illustrate my blog posts, the audio overviews to describe the ancestor, the video overviews to describe them with images, and slide show presentations to summarize their lives.  

I've often said that my AI writings is like having a ghostwriter and asking it to "take my genealogical sketch and write an engaging biography or family story."  And it does so without fail, subject to my review and editing, I can combine the biography with the infographic, poem/song, stories, audio and video overviews, etc. into an ABC Biography (my term, described in Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC) Process - Updated.

As a result, I have written, with the help of the LLMs, over 800 blog posts using AI about my own life and the lives of those closest ancestors (plus my wife's closest ancestors and my Revolutionary War ancestors - about 100 historical persons) in the past two-plus years, all based on my ancestor genealogical sketches and my own memories.  All of my own writings with AI are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. It's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot about the times and places that they might have experienced.  

I've also written a book about my own life experiences using StoryWorth in 2024 to tell about 40 of my own stories in my technical writing style (just the facts, no emotion, boring).  I published that book in late 2024 and provided copies of the book as a Christmas gift to my two daughters and their children. I'm not sure anybody read them!   I used the same text, edited the stories a bit, and published them in a MyHeritage MyStories book in early 2025.  I have a second MyStories book in work using my "The Watchful House" series of stories (see my Randy's AI and Genealogy page). 

So what's next for me in this adventure in using a ghostwriter to write biographies and family stories? The obvious answer is to "write a book" about an ancestral family or a string of families (e.g., "My Seaver Family Story From 1608 to the Present").  Or several, or many, books.  The challenge for me is to find the time to put the book(s) together.  And then determine how to distribute them. 

I'm leaning toward a PDF for a person or family, with photographs if I have them, including the genelaogical sketch, biography, memoir, stories, etc., and links to the videos and slide presentations on my YouTube channel. I can print a copy of the PDF for my own library, send a link to it to my descendants and relatives (and anyone else who is interested), post it to an online website (Scribd, or similar), and donate copies to the FamilySearch Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and any other repository that wants it.

So that's my personal turning point -- I'm in the middle of it right now and I hope that I can finish the work before the inevitable mortality turning point happens. 

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