Amen.

I've been doing family history on my aboriginal Australian side, there were a bunch of Lutheran missions, and ever so kindly they digitized 800 pages for me, but it was all written in German. I transcribed and translated all of it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1en9gDgZRP7EmSHU72k6g2Iz3RRf...

I sent it back and they didn't acknowledge it, probably for various reasons, and I doubt they would like me linking it above.

Beyond being fascinating in general, I also found that from a different state in Australia there was an aboriginal who became a man of letters came to my ancestral state and was the first to write the language of the tribe, I think (not something easy to prove) it's the first ever written version of the tribal language circa ~1870 of Kuku Yalanji.

I'd caution others with believing caught "mistakes". (But am also interested in how you use it)

There is a farm cited as an ancestor origin by multiple deceased genealogist. Its a common POI that people with this shared ancestor try to find. Finding it could solidify the established line theory and finally debunk a small ancestor fraction's alternate theory.

Different LLM searches keep returning the same colony with invalid/made up references that don't even cite a partial name match. Manual searches throughout that area returns nothing as well. But since the LLM said so, a century+ of various research and work by professional genealogist gets severed from a crowd sourced public tree because "AI" returned a colony name that ended up helping the alt line.

I did eventually find what I believe is the origin farm, and it strengthens the history written by previous genealogist -- I tried to send the information to the tree maintainers and was outright ignored. LLMs fabricating locations apparently beats a listing in the National Heritage List for England of the exact place name, buildings from that time, and in one of the areas the larger english family is known to have been present.

Current models are amazing at one shot decoding hand written vital records. I thought there might be some friction, but if there is, I haven’t found any. I’ve unlocked lots of detail from records I already had just because I didn’t try to translate the handwriting due to the time required.

> AI [...] catching mistakes

Make sure you document why/how you determined that a previous research conclusion was a mistake -- generations after you may discover additional information and should be able to weigh the same evidence rather than simply accept (or reject) your novel conclusions.

I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).

So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.

Absolutely fascinated by it, both the contents, as well as getting the UI right. Getting the OCR right is also a major achievement. Is there a write-up somewhere on the technical aspects of the work? I have tried using llms for some 19th century books (in Greek) with limited success.

This is a brilliant idea and I've had the idea for gathering the worlds spiritual texts in a similar fashion.

One question I would have, why not put the extracted English txt contents onto github or some other repository? The API and MCP are definitely awesome features, but providing an LLM ready repository seems like it would be very useful as well. Your service then still serves the purpose for original scans/images/illustrations but the bulk of the content is then immediately searchable by an agent locally using the standard cli tools (grep/rg, etc).

This is an amazing collection. Thank you.

One of my favorite LLM use-cases is alternate history extrapolation. Since there’s no formal ‘right’ to a counterfactual, then it can’t be ‘wrong’, and it pretty much always clies me into other events of relevance that are hinge points on my history bead of interest.