The Family History AI Show The Family History AI Show recently discussed " the year's top AI breakthroughs for genealogists, " analyzing what we genealogists can do now at year's end which we could not on January one. Steve and Mark presented their list:  #5. Chatbots Learn How to Reason (OpenAI’s o1-preview)   Because it is still in "preview," this does not have widespread use yet, but both hosts agreed that it will be great for multi-step big projects.  #4. Content Creation Within Chatbots (Artifacts, Canvas)  Work entirely inside the chatbot, not hopping over to Word, Excel, Photoshop, or other tools for parts of your project. Changes, additions and corrections can happen real-time, not over in another tab, enabling a sense of flow and ease. #3. Collaborative Research Spaces (NotebookLM, Claude Projects, Perplexity Spaces) Chat with and query your own written work, documents for use in your ongoing project, research plans, and collaborate with workmates ...

Best Reason to Throw a Party The best excuse to clean your house , I once read, is to ready it for a party . While cleaning house, I thought, is the same true about "writing it up"? Writing the stories of our ancestors and relatives is the culmination of our work. When we know that our place is welcoming to guests, we feel free to celebrate; telling stories of the past unlocks the lives of our families to all who hear them. Writing the stories is t he best excuse to research. Write while researching so that that your thoughts have somewhere to go‒directly into the notes, before they evaporate. Writing soothes the itch in the brain instead of sending us down rabbit holes. Now is a great time to get started writing, in preparation for Family History Month in October . Courtesy of the National Genealogical Society Writing tests our research and thinking It is while writing that holes in the story are exposed, inconsistencies glare, and leaps of logic fall flat. If our analysis...

Generated by Bing Image Creator 2 August 2024 This post is for all of you who do not want to use AI .  If you're hesitant about using AI, you're not alone. Many people are wary of handing their privacy over to a machine. However, AI can be a powerful tool for genealogists, and you may find it more helpful than you first thought. You may have felt the same about spreadsheets and calculators, yet now they are tools in your daily life.  Just as calculators and spreadsheets revolutionized how we handle numbers and budgets, AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs) are transforming our interaction with language and information. So you may eventually use AI to help you do your work in research, document transcription and analysis, writing, research reports, timelines , DNA analysis, emails and other record-keeping. Some can analyze photos and other images or to pull out family connections from a will, and draw a family tree. Of course, you must check the work, as you do your...

  "Helping You Find & Tell Your Family Stories"; generated by Bing Image Creator July 21 July 2024  We often ask for volunteers; after all, South King County Genealogical Society is an all-volunteer organization. Perhaps we don't focus enough on how we can help YOU . Incorporated in 1984 as "educational in character and  devoted exclusively to furthering genealogical research and interest in family and local history [1], we are here for YOU.  How Can We Help YOU Find and Tell Your Family Stories? Education When asked to suggest what they wanted to present to readers, here are some of the responses from your Board members:  (Barbara Mattoon) " SKCGS offers educational opportunities for a variety of genealogical interests and experience levels." Small sample of our educational offerings. SKCGS.org for details Entry level classes  offered to the community through the King County Library System . The Family Tree Maker User group discusses features of the ...

Dark Matter Structure Courtesy  https://newatlas.com/dark-matter-filaments-found/23281/ Physics Scientists estimate that there is five times the amount of "dark matter" in the universe than regular matter. Matter is everything that we can see, measure, or experience outside of thought, imagination and spiritual experience. But dark matter can so far only be simulated, although it must exist because of the powerful gravitational force it exerts within our cosmos. The latest NOVA on PBS, " Decoding the Universe: Cosmos " is about the discoveries in astrophysics in the past 50 years. An image of the theoretical structure of this dark matter struck me so strongly I had to pause the program and begin writing to you and thinking about why that image stopped me. The scientists are working with dark matter, and dark energy, about which they still know little, and yet it surrounds us, unseen . Re-watching this NOVA, I'm struck over and over by the parallels between our r...

Generated with Bing ImageCreator (AI), March 13, 2024 Where is YOUR Needle, Your Missing Record? Genealogical Proof Standard When we use the GPS (Genealogical Proof Standard) as our guide, we all know that "exhaustive research" can be both tedious and exhausting. Is life long enough to search page by page through all the counties where all the members of a family might have lived, paid taxes, bought, leased or sold property, made a will or died intestate? It is possible that the new Full Text Search at FamilySearch will  eventually  allow us to do just that. It has been estimated that 75% or more of the records at FamilySearch were browsable but not searchable; the only indexes those found in the records themselves. Those records are certainly attainable by using those indexes and browsing to the record of interest, but the process is tedious, often frustrating, and slow. And once found, the record must be read and transcribed to be useful. This new Full Text Search tackles a...

Courtesy  https://picryl.com/amp/media/medelssohngenealogy-27a4b2 "AI for Genealogy" is a hot topic these days, but often it is discussed as if it's new. In fact, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for all kinds of research for a long time. It all depends on how we "AI" define it. Remember, genealogy tree diagrams such as the above diagram were a revolution in how to think about and display family relationships. New: Chatbots Chatbot Courtesy VectorPortal.Com What's new is the chatbots such as ChatGPT. A recent article at ZDnet says, "Whether unlocking your phone through face recognition or telling Alexa to play a song, artificial intelligence has filtered into our everyday lives. Now, you can harness the power of AI to do your writing, too. At your command, AI chatbots can write that paper you have been dreading to start, write code, compose emails, generate art or even write Excel formulas for you.  "ChatGPT has made quite a splash, moti...