I disagree that future generations won't have any genealogical challenges. A big part of genealogy is compiling biographies and stories about one's ancestors, not simply tallying up names and dates. No one ever learned history because they wanted to memorize a long string of dates, but because they weres fascinated by *people*. I am fascinated by my ancestors' lives and I have questions that may not be answerable: I have several lines from Colonial Maryland that trace back to Royalist and even Catholic Recusant families in England -- and then became Quaker within 50 years of being in America. I find myself wondering to what extent their political and religious views played in their immigration (and it's not simply Maryland was started to be a safe haven for English Catholics because one of the lines was Anglican and assisted in the Puritan attempt to take over Maryland, not converting to Catholicism until later) and why they eventually joined the Society of Friends.
I hear you, Matthew, but I fear there won't be much biography to compile either. Our ancestors will become "knowable" to the maximum we are able to know them. The sources mentioning any given Stuart-era recusant (unless they were a public figure) must number in the dozens at most, and surely are fewer than a hundred. It won't be long before all of that is mined, and it may well already have been.
I don't mean to say they will cease to interest us. Only that we will cease to have any real research to do.
When it comes to we contemporaries, we leave our digital trail everywhere we go. I'm probably becoming tiresome saying this, but absent a catastrophe, no genealogist will care to "research" me. I will be a fully known quantity. Once my records are aged enough to become public, an LLM could write a highly detailed biography in seconds. It could do that already if it only had the information.
"As with the crudely fabricated biography of Jane Crespigny, MyHeritage’s sketch of the life and times of James Cudmore is a disgraceful fraud and an insult to the reader’s intelligence.
“Designed to mine scholarship and appropriate and re-shuffle commonplace opinion on historical matters, the AI squeezes out platitude upon platitude in turgid prose like a butcher making sausages, plop plop plop. The recipe is simple: find a plausible historical context for a person’s actions and announce, breathless with excitement at the discovery, that he had a place in it. In 1914 Joe Blow found himself caught up in one of the great historical upheavals of the twentieth century. He joined the Army. Mick O’Brien, short of spuds, emigrated to Australia in search of a better life, like countless others at the time.
“The scheme employs boiler-plated historical factoids as a cheap substitute for a careful survey of the period and Cudmore’s place in it, with no attempt made to weigh and consider the nature and causes of the historical trends to which he was exposed and to which he supposedly contributed.
“Take the first paragraph. Cudmore was born ‘into a period of colonial expansion’, says the sausage-machine. But wasn’t everyone born in this period born in it? How was Cudmore different? His birth came ‘just’—what does this imply?—three decades after South Australia was established as a British province. So what? And as for free settlement, that was the idea with the Swan River too, wasn’t it? How did James Cudmore’s arrival on the ‘Siren’ symbolise (what?) the influx of settlers seeking new opportunities. That is what new settlers do. They seek new opportunities. And how did his mother’s emigration from Scotland ‘represent’ the Scottish contribution and how and why should it be considered ‘significant’?
“In the next paragraph, the AI boiler-plates Cudmore into a large family, large because of high birth-rates don’t you know, and Jim finds himself farming, rather than developing a career in car manufacturing, say, or aeronautical engineering.
“Quite soon afterwards, James Kenneth, now too busy for a surname, is undergoing significant (?) social changes, forging national identity, creating economic progress, moving towards federation (which, we are told, united separate colonies under one government—well, it would, wouldn’t it?) and simultaneously raising four children.
“Then, after that, with wool a cornerstone, Australia transitioned from its vast roots, especially after WW1, and in Mosman Cudmore genteelly ‘passed away’.
“No doubt in his headlong rush through History James Cudmore came across a certain amount of fraudulent non-scholarship and bad prose. At least he was spared AI.”
The company models (like MyHeritage) are particularly bad. If you're willing to work iteratively with Claude or ChatGPT (and you feed it the information and carefully monitor the hallucinations), you can get something tasteful. Not going to beat a great, creative human writer (not yet, anyway), but a great human writer can't knock out 512 biographies of your 7x g-grandparents in a few minutes. I struggle to write, but I love to edit. So perhaps the LLMs fill a need for me that not everyone has.
Having just read a book which is basically the genealogy of American genealogy (Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America by François Weil), I think we're in the same boat as were genealogists in the past when cash-for-pedigree work was popular and profitable. People were so eager to "prove' their family heritage, and thus their status as rightful heirs of America's history/noble ancestry/colonial mythology/yaddyada that they didn't really care if their family tree was well-rooted or not. They just wanted the paper and stamp of approval.
Later, of course, serious genealogists had to step in to rewrite and correct all those documents and artificial trees, and I think we will see that in the the years ahead. The convenience of online research means people add all sorts of nonsense to their trees, collecting ancestors like it's a competitive sport, and replacing quality with quantity. It's a holy mess!
That's where we come in, and where, I think, genealogists will continue to thrive - in coaxing truth and order from the chaos, and then telling the stories, not as someone might want them to be told, but as the facts and historical context dictate.
Seriously, read Weil's book. It has changed how I see genealogy.
I expect something like Wikitree, or Werelate, will eventually become the principal secondary source for all genealogy. One profile for each human being watched over by a community that prizes accuracy.
The gentlemen begat farm laborers is a great thing to take note of. Social classes were distinct then and few researchers mention this in their writing. Glad you pointed it out.
Oh, now this is a fascinating discussion, Genealogian and Matthew Robare. I've been steeped in tech long enough to have watched this sword battle before. It's interesting as a question of the future of a storied profession, but... honestly, a bit of a sideshow.
I think the factual connections between ancestors, think bloodlines, marriages, divorces, and awards will live in the world of fact. I think of it as Math, there's some quibbling over irrational numbers and fancy bits, but as time moves on it'll be easier and easier to find those determinative facts. Perhaps we'll always need more-and-more advanced professionals to sort out the facts and intentionally hidden secrets, but it's hardly a hunt. The internet has killed the hunt for a silver dollar in thrift shops and antique stores. Just go to eBay and buy one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To me, the interesting bits come in the soft squishy parts where stories are born and family relationships are built. With both of my own parents gone now, I find that the excuse of family history gives me a chance to engage my older cousins in stories of our past. I'm chasing an understanding of character, motivations, and affections more than the facts themselves.
Along the way, it's also created an opportunity to bond with relative strangers who've shared the same past and current curiosity.
I love to hear that, and I do think its a reason for optimism. But while I'm also fascinated by the people behind the facts, it's ultimately the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going. Maybe it would be better to say that genealogy is bound to change (as it has done many times before). The part of it I love best, while wider now and more accessible than it's ever been, will soon begin to shrink.
The silver dollar analogy is apt. Anyone can continue to be interested in the aesthetics/history of an antique. But the people who used to criss-cross small towns looking for diamonds in the rough aren't going to have anything to do.
Hey, are you up on our little MissionGenealogy.Substack.com? I'd love to have you join us. Robin Stewart of GenealogyMatters.Substack.com and I have put it together as a way to help each other and provide something of an onramp to Substack for family historians and genealogists. It's all free, we're just a community helping each other out. I'd love to have your clear thinking be part of the group.
As for the hunt... I do expect there will still be a lot of questions and details that will be around for a few more generations. Our AI overlords just might make a few mistakes connecting family members based on official records, or we'll bump into those lost collections of records and the "John Jones" family... Fun chatting, my friend! 👋
I disagree that future generations won't have any genealogical challenges. A big part of genealogy is compiling biographies and stories about one's ancestors, not simply tallying up names and dates. No one ever learned history because they wanted to memorize a long string of dates, but because they weres fascinated by *people*. I am fascinated by my ancestors' lives and I have questions that may not be answerable: I have several lines from Colonial Maryland that trace back to Royalist and even Catholic Recusant families in England -- and then became Quaker within 50 years of being in America. I find myself wondering to what extent their political and religious views played in their immigration (and it's not simply Maryland was started to be a safe haven for English Catholics because one of the lines was Anglican and assisted in the Puritan attempt to take over Maryland, not converting to Catholicism until later) and why they eventually joined the Society of Friends.
I hear you, Matthew, but I fear there won't be much biography to compile either. Our ancestors will become "knowable" to the maximum we are able to know them. The sources mentioning any given Stuart-era recusant (unless they were a public figure) must number in the dozens at most, and surely are fewer than a hundred. It won't be long before all of that is mined, and it may well already have been.
I don't mean to say they will cease to interest us. Only that we will cease to have any real research to do.
When it comes to we contemporaries, we leave our digital trail everywhere we go. I'm probably becoming tiresome saying this, but absent a catastrophe, no genealogist will care to "research" me. I will be a fully known quantity. Once my records are aged enough to become public, an LLM could write a highly detailed biography in seconds. It could do that already if it only had the information.
I really dislike the auto biographies written by LLMs aka AI - see for example my post at https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/myheritage-ai-review-part-2/ where my husband contributed the observations:
"As with the crudely fabricated biography of Jane Crespigny, MyHeritage’s sketch of the life and times of James Cudmore is a disgraceful fraud and an insult to the reader’s intelligence.
“Designed to mine scholarship and appropriate and re-shuffle commonplace opinion on historical matters, the AI squeezes out platitude upon platitude in turgid prose like a butcher making sausages, plop plop plop. The recipe is simple: find a plausible historical context for a person’s actions and announce, breathless with excitement at the discovery, that he had a place in it. In 1914 Joe Blow found himself caught up in one of the great historical upheavals of the twentieth century. He joined the Army. Mick O’Brien, short of spuds, emigrated to Australia in search of a better life, like countless others at the time.
“The scheme employs boiler-plated historical factoids as a cheap substitute for a careful survey of the period and Cudmore’s place in it, with no attempt made to weigh and consider the nature and causes of the historical trends to which he was exposed and to which he supposedly contributed.
“Take the first paragraph. Cudmore was born ‘into a period of colonial expansion’, says the sausage-machine. But wasn’t everyone born in this period born in it? How was Cudmore different? His birth came ‘just’—what does this imply?—three decades after South Australia was established as a British province. So what? And as for free settlement, that was the idea with the Swan River too, wasn’t it? How did James Cudmore’s arrival on the ‘Siren’ symbolise (what?) the influx of settlers seeking new opportunities. That is what new settlers do. They seek new opportunities. And how did his mother’s emigration from Scotland ‘represent’ the Scottish contribution and how and why should it be considered ‘significant’?
“In the next paragraph, the AI boiler-plates Cudmore into a large family, large because of high birth-rates don’t you know, and Jim finds himself farming, rather than developing a career in car manufacturing, say, or aeronautical engineering.
“Quite soon afterwards, James Kenneth, now too busy for a surname, is undergoing significant (?) social changes, forging national identity, creating economic progress, moving towards federation (which, we are told, united separate colonies under one government—well, it would, wouldn’t it?) and simultaneously raising four children.
“Then, after that, with wool a cornerstone, Australia transitioned from its vast roots, especially after WW1, and in Mosman Cudmore genteelly ‘passed away’.
“No doubt in his headlong rush through History James Cudmore came across a certain amount of fraudulent non-scholarship and bad prose. At least he was spared AI.”
The company models (like MyHeritage) are particularly bad. If you're willing to work iteratively with Claude or ChatGPT (and you feed it the information and carefully monitor the hallucinations), you can get something tasteful. Not going to beat a great, creative human writer (not yet, anyway), but a great human writer can't knock out 512 biographies of your 7x g-grandparents in a few minutes. I struggle to write, but I love to edit. So perhaps the LLMs fill a need for me that not everyone has.
Having just read a book which is basically the genealogy of American genealogy (Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America by François Weil), I think we're in the same boat as were genealogists in the past when cash-for-pedigree work was popular and profitable. People were so eager to "prove' their family heritage, and thus their status as rightful heirs of America's history/noble ancestry/colonial mythology/yaddyada that they didn't really care if their family tree was well-rooted or not. They just wanted the paper and stamp of approval.
Later, of course, serious genealogists had to step in to rewrite and correct all those documents and artificial trees, and I think we will see that in the the years ahead. The convenience of online research means people add all sorts of nonsense to their trees, collecting ancestors like it's a competitive sport, and replacing quality with quantity. It's a holy mess!
That's where we come in, and where, I think, genealogists will continue to thrive - in coaxing truth and order from the chaos, and then telling the stories, not as someone might want them to be told, but as the facts and historical context dictate.
Seriously, read Weil's book. It has changed how I see genealogy.
I'll check it out!
I expect something like Wikitree, or Werelate, will eventually become the principal secondary source for all genealogy. One profile for each human being watched over by a community that prizes accuracy.
The gentlemen begat farm laborers is a great thing to take note of. Social classes were distinct then and few researchers mention this in their writing. Glad you pointed it out.
Oh, now this is a fascinating discussion, Genealogian and Matthew Robare. I've been steeped in tech long enough to have watched this sword battle before. It's interesting as a question of the future of a storied profession, but... honestly, a bit of a sideshow.
I think the factual connections between ancestors, think bloodlines, marriages, divorces, and awards will live in the world of fact. I think of it as Math, there's some quibbling over irrational numbers and fancy bits, but as time moves on it'll be easier and easier to find those determinative facts. Perhaps we'll always need more-and-more advanced professionals to sort out the facts and intentionally hidden secrets, but it's hardly a hunt. The internet has killed the hunt for a silver dollar in thrift shops and antique stores. Just go to eBay and buy one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To me, the interesting bits come in the soft squishy parts where stories are born and family relationships are built. With both of my own parents gone now, I find that the excuse of family history gives me a chance to engage my older cousins in stories of our past. I'm chasing an understanding of character, motivations, and affections more than the facts themselves.
Along the way, it's also created an opportunity to bond with relative strangers who've shared the same past and current curiosity.
I love to hear that, and I do think its a reason for optimism. But while I'm also fascinated by the people behind the facts, it's ultimately the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going. Maybe it would be better to say that genealogy is bound to change (as it has done many times before). The part of it I love best, while wider now and more accessible than it's ever been, will soon begin to shrink.
The silver dollar analogy is apt. Anyone can continue to be interested in the aesthetics/history of an antique. But the people who used to criss-cross small towns looking for diamonds in the rough aren't going to have anything to do.
Hey, are you up on our little MissionGenealogy.Substack.com? I'd love to have you join us. Robin Stewart of GenealogyMatters.Substack.com and I have put it together as a way to help each other and provide something of an onramp to Substack for family historians and genealogists. It's all free, we're just a community helping each other out. I'd love to have your clear thinking be part of the group.
As for the hunt... I do expect there will still be a lot of questions and details that will be around for a few more generations. Our AI overlords just might make a few mistakes connecting family members based on official records, or we'll bump into those lost collections of records and the "John Jones" family... Fun chatting, my friend! 👋