Ancestors and Algorithms: AI for Genealogy
Stuck on a family history brick wall? It's time to add the most powerful tool to your genealogy toolkit: Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to Ancestors and Algorithms, the definitive guide to revolutionizing your family t...
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| Date | Episode | Description | Length | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10/27/26 | Ep. 61: The Informant Test - Death Certificates and AI | Who told the clerk your ancestor's parents? On this 1938 death certificate, the informant was born 24 years after the birth she reported. The parents' names on a death certificate come from an informant, often a child or grandchild who wasn't there. In Episode 61, Brian works a composite Missouri case built from real record types. Ida Belle Corwin died in Holden, Johnson County, in 1938. Her certificate names her mother as Martha Dowell. The informant was Ida's daughter, born in 1898. With Cl... | 32m 55s | ||||||
| 10/20/26 | Ep. 60: The Leeds Method and AI - Finding an Unknown Father | How do you find an unknown father among more than 2,000 DNA matches? Sort 20 of them into four grandparent groups with the Leeds Method and AI. In this composite case, Lorraine was born in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1944. Her birth registration left her father's name blank, and her mother told her only one thing: he was a Yank. This episode walks through every step of her search, from match list to a short list of candidates. In this episode you'll learn: - How the Leeds Method sorts Ancestry... | 35m 40s | ||||||
| 10/13/26 | Ep. 59: Find Your German Ancestor's Village - Research Questions & AI | Four records said Hanover, Prussia or Germany, and not one named his village. Here's how to find a German immigrant's village of origin with AI, step by step. When every record says "Germany," the problem is usually the research question, not the records. In this episode, we follow Friedrich Eckhoff, a Lutheran cooper who came from Bremen to Baltimore in 1869 (a composite case built on real record types). You'll learn the method that finally led to his village, one click at a time, with thre... | 28m 33s | ||||||
| 10/6/26 | Ep. 58: Same Name, Two Men - Untangle a Merged Family Tree With AI | Two men named Giovanni Farruggia registered for the World War I draft in Tampa on the same day in 1917. An online family tree fused them into one ancestor. Identity separation for genealogists: how to tell two same-name ancestors apart with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini Notebook, using a Sicilian case from Ybor City, Tampa. This episode is for you if: You attached a record because the name matched and something feels off. Your ancestor seems to live in two houses in the same year. You suspect ... | 33m 38s | ||||||
| 9/29/26 | Ep. 57: Find Her Maiden Name: Proving Parents with Indirect Evidence and AI | No record names her parents, and you can still prove them. This episode shows how, step by step, with 5 ordinary records and 3 free AI tools. Every family tree has a woman like Nancy Brockway: a first name, a married surname, and nothing before that. Our case is a composite family built from real 1850s New York record types. Nancy lived in New Berlin, Chenango County, and was born about 1816 in Otsego County. There's no marriage record and no will. There is a Hannah Pettibone, 67, in her 185... | 32m 07s | ||||||
| 9/22/26 | Ep. 56: Negative Evidence: Dating a Death in Czech Texas | Texas did not register deaths statewide until 1903, so if your ancestor died there in the 1890s, no death certificate was ever created. This week, a county tax roll dated one anyway. Cyril Sebesta came to Fayette County, Texas from Moravia in 1873 and bought eighty acres in 1881. His headstone carries a birth year and nothing else. Three generations left a question mark in the death column. The record that finally narrowed it never mentions his death or his burial. This is a Partial Answer ep... | 31m 45s | ||||||
| 9/15/26 | Ep. 55: The Blast Radius Method - Audit Your Family Tree With AI | Most genealogists audit a family tree by hunting for blanks. The dangerous conclusions are the ones that already have a source attached. In this episode, Brian builds a fifteen-person test GEDCOM with five deliberately planted errors, then turns AI loose on it to see how many it catches. Four found. One missed. And the one it missed was the most dangerous error in the file. This is the opposite of how the genealogy world is using AI right now. Everyone is running it forward to find new ance... | 31m 01s | ||||||
| 9/8/26 | Ep. 54: The Marine They Couldn't Bring Home - WWII DNA Identification & AI Genealogy Research | A Marine killed at Tarawa in 1943 was declared non-recoverable in 1949, but DNA proved eighty-one years later he had actually been buried within days. It was the paperwork that failed him, not the men who buried him. This episode is for you if you've hit a record whose final-sounding language you never verified, if your family tree has a WWII, Korean, or Vietnam War service member whose fate was never fully confirmed, or if you want to see Gemini Notebook, Claude, and Perplexity with the Com... | 30m 08s | ||||||
| 9/1/26 | Ep. 53: The Recording I Almost Didn't Make | A family told the same story about a 1948 move for nearly eighty years. One recorded interview and three AI tools changed that. Effie Napier is eighty-eight, and by her family's account, the last person alive who actually remembers why they left the West Virginia coal fields for Dayton, Ohio. The story everyone told was simple: better money, a fresh start. It's the version repeated at every reunion. Then her grandson sat down with a recorder and one question built from an actual document inst... | 31m 34s | ||||||
| 8/25/26 | Ep. 52: The Parish That Wouldn't Take Him Back - English Poor Law Records | In 1836, a Yorkshire parish legally removed a laborer to a village he'd probably never lived in, over his father's old apprenticeship. This episode uses Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to trace an English settlement dispute through parish chest records most genealogists never open. This episode is for you if: - You have English ancestors and don't know where to start before 1837 - You've heard the term "parish chest" and want to know what's actually in one - You want to see Claude, Gemini, and C... | 31m 23s | ||||||
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| 8/18/26 | Ep. 51: The Jewish Shtetl No Map Remembers | A Jewish ancestor's hometown was spelled three different ways across three documents. A 1985 algorithm and three AI tools narrowed it down. This episode shows exactly how, and exactly where the method stops working. This episode is for you if you are researching Eastern European Jewish ancestors, if a hometown name on an old document does not match any map you can find, or if you want to see how Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM actually perform on real historical documents rather than a marketi... | 30m 05s | ||||||
| 8/11/26 | Ep. 50: Can the New Genealogy AI Crack Hazel's Wall? | FamilySearch AI Research Assistant vs Ancestry AncestryAI and Get Ideas, Tested | Episode 50, The AI Lab: Brian tests four AI features built directly into FamilySearch and Ancestry, using a five-question trust rubric built live with Claude, to find out which ones you can actually trust with your family tree. One of the four had not even shipped yet when this episode was first outlined, which becomes part of the story you'll hear. THIS EPISODE IS FOR YOU IF YOU HAVE SEARCHED: Is FamilySearch's AI Research Assistant accurate? Can you trust AncestryAI's AI Stories feature? Wh... | 30m 48s | ||||||
| 8/4/26 | Ep. 49: The Research Assistant That Remembers (AI for Genealogy) | Ancestors and Algorithms Episode 49, "The Research Assistant That Remembers," teaches genealogists how to build a persistent AI research assistant across three free tools: Claude Projects, Gemini Gems, and ChatGPT Custom Instructions, so you stop re-explaining your family history case to a brand new chat every single session. Host Brian walks through the exact custom instructions he wrote into each AI tool, with the Genealogical Proof Standard's Golden Rule, AI is your research assistant, no... | 30m 17s | ||||||
| 7/28/26 | Ep. 48: Also Known As - French Canadian Genealogy, Quebec Dit Names & AI Tools | A Quebec family's baptismal records begin abruptly in 1850, though family memory said they were French Canadian for generations before that. The answer is a dit name: Quebec's centuries-old tradition of alternate family surnames, in which a family could be baptized under one name and married under another, and it is hiding more genealogy brick walls than most researchers realize. This episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, a genealogy and artificial intelligence podcast, follows a real French ... | 31m 52s | ||||||
| 7/21/26 | Ep. 47: The Pardon on the Wall - An Australian Convict Ancestor Uncovered with AI | A family believed their ancestor arrived in Australia a free man in the 1830s. A 190-year-old government pardon said otherwise, and nobody had ever read past the word "Pardon" printed across the top of it. In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian uses AI genealogy tools to work a full case study built around Australian convict records, a first for this show. More than 76,000 convicts were transported to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, between 1804 and 1853, and this episode wa... | 29m 45s | ||||||
| 7/14/26 | Ep. 46: The Paper Son - Chinese Roots and AI | Cracking a Chinese Exclusion Act Case | During the Chinese Exclusion Act, one immigrant's 200-page federal case file was built to hide his real name, and nearly succeeded. For sixty-one years, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred an entire ethnicity from immigrating to the United States, with one narrow exception: the children of Chinese American citizens. That loophole created the "paper son" system, families with no blood relation to a citizen buying a purchased identity, memorizing a stranger's village and household, and surviving a... | 29m 55s | ||||||
| 7/7/26 | Ep. 45: The Name on the Draft Card | A single 1917 WWI draft card, plus a naturalization petition filed seven years later, reveal an Italian immigrant's real birth name. This is a real, start-to-finish example of using AI for genealogy research, ChatGPT, Claude, and NotebookLM working together to solve it. If you've searched "AI genealogy tools," "ChatGPT for family history," or "how to use AI to research my ancestors" and wondered where to start, this episode is a full case study, not just a list of tips. This episode is for yo... | 31m 46s | ||||||
| 6/30/26 | Ep. 44: The Email That Gets Results - AI Archive Correspondence in English and German | Use ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to email any archive in the world, including drafting a formal German-language request, in under 15 minutes. Most genealogists stop when online records run out. But the records you need are often one professional email away, whether it is a US county courthouse or a German Catholic archive that has been keeping baptism registers since the 1500s. Brian demonstrates a complete AI workflow: ChatGPT maps what records exist and what to ask for, Perplexity finds ... | 26m 23s | ||||||
| 6/23/26 | Ep. 43: Crossing the U.S. Border - Hispanic Roots and AI | Three AI tools, one 1866 Mexican parish register, and the family that a U.S. census reduced to a single word: México. Brian traces composite ancestor Esteban Vasquez through two Arizona census records where birthplace reads only "México" and no naturalization record exists. The research pivots to FamilySearch's Mexico-Sonora Catholic Church records, a collection covering roughly 21 specific parishes from the mid-1600s onward, and finds the 1866 baptismal e... | 30m 58s | ||||||
| 6/16/26 | Ep. 42: Writing the Proof - How AI Helps You Make Your Case | You can write a genealogical proof argument using 3 AI tools in one afternoon: NotebookLM organizes your evidence, Claude drafts and stress-tests the argument, and ChatGPT reviews it for plain-language clarity. This is the GPS Mini-Series capstone on Element 5. What you'll learn: The three-part proof argument structure: Statement to be Proved, Evidence Presentation, Analysis and ReasoningHow to prompt NotebookLM to surface inconsistencies in your sources before you write a single sentenceHow ... | 32m 55s | ||||||
| 6/9/26 | Ep. 41: Tracing Enslaved Ancestors with AI | Using Perplexity, Claude, NotebookLM, and ChatGPT to Navigate the 1870 Wall | Brian uses 4 AI tools to trace a formerly enslaved Mississippi ancestor across 6 record collections and through the 1870 Wall. This is what African American genealogy research looks like when AI and the Genealogical Proof Standard work together. If your ancestor was enslaved, the census did not record their name before 1870. Every year before that belongs to a completely different research strategy, and today you will learn exactly what that strategy looks like in action. What you will learn ... | 33m 08s | ||||||
| 6/2/26 | Ep. 40: Seven Heirs - How AI Decodes a Tennessee Probate Mystery | You've found the estate settlement. You've counted the heirs in the distribution sheet. And the math doesn't add up. Nine children appear in the 1860 census. Seven names appear in the 1874 settlement. Two heirs are gone with no explanation, no death notation, and no trace in the legal record. That is where this episode begins. Probate records are among the most underused sources in American genealogy. When an ancestor died without a will, the intestate settlement process required the court to... | 30m 33s | ||||||
| 5/26/26 | Ep. 39: Norwegian Genealogy - AI Solves the Patronymic Mystery | If you can't find your Norwegian ancestor in genealogy records, the problem is almost certainly the name. Norway used a patronymic naming system until 1923, meaning most Norwegian-Americans carried completely different surnames in their homeland than the names their families kept in America. A woman who appears in Minnesota records as Astrid Solberg was never called Astrid Solberg in Norway. Not once. In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian works through a complete AI-powered ... | 40m 49s | ||||||
| 5/19/26 | Ep. 38: The Research Map - How AI Finds the Records You're Missing | Most genealogists search 4-6 databases and miss 70% of the records that exist for their ancestor. In this episode, we fix that. If you have ever searched Ancestry, FamilySearch, and a couple of other databases and still hit a wall, this episode is for you. The problem is not that the records do not exist. The problem is that you do not know what records exist or where to find them before you start searching. That is the gap this episode closes. In Episode 38, Brian introduces the Research Map... | 37m 53s | ||||||
| 5/12/26 | Ep. 37: What Grandma Never Said - Using AI to Uncover Hidden Ancestors in Census Records | Every family has a story that got quietly handed down across the generations. A birthplace. A number of children. One marriage, one life, neatly summarized. But what happens when you sit down with the actual records and the story doesn't match? In this episode of Ancestors and Algorithms, Brian walks through one of the most universal genealogy research scenarios there is: testing a family oral history against primary documents using four free AI tools. What starts as a simple census compariso... | 39m 34s | ||||||
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