From transcribing parish records to hallucinating ancestors, AI has the ability to impact every stage of family history research.
Millions of people research their family histories every year, sifting through census records, deciphering centuries-old handwriting, and following paper trails across borders and languages. The work is slow by nature, governed by whatever records survived and whoever transcribed them. AI has begun reshaping every stage of that process.
Processing the archives
Genealogy runs on historical records: census forms, ship manifests, parish registers, military draft cards. Archives hold millions of these documents in handwritten form, and until recently only human volunteers could make them searchable, transcribing one document at a time. That bottleneck left the vast majority invisible to researchers.
FamilySearch deployed AI handwriting recognition to read those documents at scale, extracting names, dates, and genealogically relevant information from records that volunteers would have taken decades to process. Ancestry invested $450 million over 10–15 years in digitizing records and applying AI to them, an effort that CEO Howard Hochhauser described as the engine behind the company’s return to growth.......
