NEWS

Helen Tovey repor ts on news from the world of genealog y. Do you have a stor y to share? Please email helen.t@family-tree.co.uk

From the ever-increasing use of AI for generating and indexing content, to the production of printed publications and boots-on-the-ground family history tours of a lifetime, RootsTech 2024 showcased a huge range of genealogy companies and projects from around the globe. Note: The news pages in this issue of Family Tree cover some of the technology, AI and DNA developments, and are more US-focussed than usual, due to RootsTech.

AI innovations

The past few years have seen machine learning and AI increasingly enlisted by genealogy companies and the last 12 months has seen the pace of change only grow. For instance, Storied employed AI to transcribe and index the 1950 US Census in less than six months: https://wp.storied.com/pr/unlocking-the-secrets-of-the-1950- census/. (AI was also used by Ancestry in a joint venture with FamilySearch to work on the 1950 US Census in 2022, completing the project with an innovative algorithm that could read handwriting (as opposed to typescript), even on old and damaged pages). In recent months, the use of AI by Ancestry to create new newspaper indexes that can infer possible relationships, and its use by MyHeritage to help you search for records (like a ChatGPT for genealogy) and write ancestor biographies, indicate further innovations and applications of AI in the genealogy world.

Ancestry’s ‘Stories & Events Index’

2024, the AI focus is on newspapers – across Ancestry, MyHeritage and Storied, each of which offer newspaper collections as either standalone or higher tier databases.

AI is being used by Ancestry.com to glean the details of individuals from newspaper accounts, and match these details with those in their site users’ family trees. The outcome is the Ancestry ‘Stories & Events Index’. Crista Cowan, Corporate Genealogist at Ancestry explains a little more about the project: ‘Ancestry has gone through the entire collection at Newspapers. com and created a searchable index for over 16 billion records’ – and has accomplished this in just 14 months.

AI is being utilised to make connections and suggest hints between people in the newspaper collections and people in your family tree – even when an ancestor in the newspaper may not be mentioned by their own full name, but may instead, be recorded under their husband’s name.

MyHeritage has plans similarly to implement this development in the coming months – for instance matching newspaper details, such as the names of people found in obituaries to the people in the family trees of MyHeritage users. This is a significant development as not only is AI being used to help digitise and index the records, as seen with the US 1950 Census mentioned, AI is also interpreting the details found in the records to infer possible relations. It seems plausible that we may see similar developments in the use of AI by Storied at some point in the future.