Can AI Actually Help With Genealogy?

What It Can — and Can’t — Do in Real Research

Artificial Intelligence is all over the news right now — writing poems, planning vacations, summarizing court cases. So naturally, clients and colleagues are asking: Can it help with genealogy?

The answer is yes — with limitations. AI can speed up specific tasks and help organize information, but it can’t (and shouldn’t) replace a real researcher. It doesn't do well with ambiguity, it doesn’t verify its own sources, and it frequently misinterprets historical context. In some cases, it outright fabricates.

Here’s what AI is good for in the family history world — and where it can quietly sabotage your research if you’re not careful.

What AI Can Do Well

1. Translating Old Documents
Tools like ChatGPT and DeepL can rapidly translate records written in German, Russian, Latin, or French — especially typed ones. This can be a major timesaver when working with immigration papers, church registers, or military files.

2. Summarizing Dense Material
AI can distill long texts like legal proceedings, emigration lists, or court depositions into digestible summaries. If you're sifting through 15 pages of 18th-century land grants, it can quickly highlight names, places, and dates worth flagging.

3. Sorting Raw Data into Chronology
When working with a cluster of scattered records — census data, birth registrations, burial notes — AI can lay it out into a draft timeline. That can be useful for catching gaps or overlaps you may have missed.

4. Brainstorming Leads
When asked the right way, AI can suggest next research steps or flag regional repositories you hadn’t thought of — for example, recommending militia rolls or land tax assessments based on location and date.

5. Spotting Patterned Errors
AI is good at picking up on spelling variations, repeated entries, or duplicated individuals across a dataset. That’s helpful for weeding out transcription errors or identifying which “John Smith” really belongs to your line.

What AI Does Poorly — or Dangerously

1. Misinterpreting Relationships or Context
Genealogy hinges on nuance — a phrase like “daughter-in-law” might mean something different in an 1830s Slavic context than in modern English. AI often flattens those distinctions and misrepresents family relationships, especially in translated records.

2. Hallucinating Connections
AI sometimes invents plausible-sounding connections between people or events that aren't related. It may present a neatly woven timeline or lineage based on assumptions — not on verifiable evidence. This is especially risky when there are gaps in the data or overlapping names.

3. Blindly Accepting Incorrect Information
AI takes whatever you feed it at face value. If you input an incorrect date, unproven lineage, or speculative family story, it will build conclusions around it without question — often reinforcing errors instead of flagging them. It doesn’t know what’s true. It just tries to make it all “fit.”

4. Confusing Source Quality
It doesn’t know the difference between a thoroughly cited academic journal and an unsourced public Ancestry tree. Unless you guide it carefully, it treats both as equally trustworthy — which they’re not.

5. Failing at Complex Geography or Migration Logic
AI doesn’t always grasp real-world limitations. It might assume someone born in Devonshire could easily appear in Perthshire five years later — ignoring travel realities, language barriers, or border controls of the time. That leads to false assumptions about who a person could or couldn’t be.

6. Compromising Narrative Accuracy
Even when asked to summarize a documented story, AI can try to “fill in the gaps” in ways that distort the truth. It may mix individuals, omit key evidence, or overstate conclusions — especially when the prompt suggests there’s a single neat answer. Genealogy is rarely neat.

What I Use — and Why It Matters

In my professional research at GGS, I occasionally use AI tools for supporting tasks like translation, record summarization, or bulk text analysis — but never for drawing conclusions, validating relationships, or building lineages. That still requires trained human judgment and historical literacy.

AI is a tool — not a substitute for research.

It can help you get through the information faster, but it can’t decide what the information actually means. And if the information you give it is flawed, it will reinforce those flaws without hesitation.

Final Thoughts

AI is here to stay. And in genealogy, it has its uses — especially for time-saving tasks like document translation or large-scale data cleaning. But it’s not a magic wand. It doesn’t understand family systems, historical nuance, or the ethical implications of publishing bad lineage data. It doesn't question the premise it’s given — it just builds around it, for better or worse.

If you’ve hit a brick wall, or have a box of records in another language, or want a second opinion on a speculative family story — I can help. Not with AI guesswork, but with real analysis, real evidence, and a human understanding of where your family fits into history.

📩 Contact me here for a FREE consult or quote.