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 ...

  Tree of Life by lilipilyspirit.deviantart.com Not All Stories Need Words Art can speak to us in photos, plays, poems, skits, dioramas, quilts, songs, photographs, even maps and diagrams.  Family trees are stories, too . When you view a timeline of an ancestor's life, does a story spring to mind? Those who think they can't write, can record their story on their phones, or computers. Both Word and Google Docs have voice transcription power.   Tell Your Own Story The magic moment is when a person realizes that they have a story to tell. Is it one of walking hand in hand down a dusty road with great-grandmother? Whether or nit she told her story, your memory is yours; tell it! Sometimes it is the little moments, such as after the ghost story is told around the campfire, when all the kids suddenly feel the urge to get back to the cabin and out of the dark night. Or the feeling after catching your first fish, proudly walking past the crowd to clean it so you can eat yo...

Courtesy PublicDomainImages.net "Car Burning Rubber" Deadlines I used to dread writing reports, from grade school on. Deadlines caused dread, and there was no pleasure (or learning) from scrabbling together all the sources into something readable. When I began doing genealogy research, writing reports of my findings never entered my mind! Not even when I found massive help from various books and articles. I never saw myself then as a contributor to the body of knowledge; only as a consumer.  From Consumer to Contributor https://www.wikitree.com/ Two things changed my viewpoint. The first was finding Wikitree, where I took responsibility for the linked profiles for many of the family members I had found through my years of research. The Wikitree focus on sourcing, collaboration and narrative, not just a bare skein of facts, began to change that "consumer" stance, into becoming a contributor.  Focus and Collaboration The other event that taught me how to contribute be...