My things

Today was a barbecue day. Nothing particularly unusual about that by itself. It was a family birthday celebration for my partner and her parents. Yes, there were several birthdays involved. In this family, apparently September is not so much a month as a scheduling problem. Then came the first surprise. My cunhada — the Portuguese word I naturally use for my partner's sister — was there. She lives in Sweden and had flown all the way to Moldova specifically for the family celebration. That was already unexpected. Then came the second surprise: it was her birthday as well. At that point the barbecue had become less a birthday party and more a small statistical anomaly involving one family, several generations and a remarkable concentration of birthdays. But somewhere during the afternoon I noticed something else, something much less obvious and much more interesting. I looked around the table Apart from my partner and my cunhada , everybody ar...

 

Today I did something with my family-tree research that would have been almost impossible when I first started working on genealogy many years ago. I took a story written by my father, gave the research problem to artificial intelligence, and allowed it to spend the day following the evidence wherever it led. The subject could almost have been an episode of How I Met Your Mother , except that this really is about how my father met my mother. By the end of the day, what began as an entertaining family story written almost half a century after the events had acquired a surprisingly substantial historical framework around it. The story itself is wonderful. It involves my father managing Ferrostaal in Porto Alegre, his mother wondering why he was still unmarried, a circle of Jesuit priests in São Leopoldo deciding that perhaps they could help, an introduction to a young woman, a Chinese restaurant, an unexpected disappearance, and eventually a prospective bride apparently running away...

 

While our house in Chișinău is still being renovated, my partner and I are living with her parents. Before describing what happened, there is an important part of my own background that probably explains why I reacted so strongly. I was raised with animals around me all the time: dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, hamsters and others over the years. They were not animals that existed somewhere outside the household. They were part of the household. Our animals lived inside the house with us. I took dogs to the beach. I had dogs sleeping beside me. One of my cats even chose the middle of the night, between my legs in bed, as the place to give birth to her kittens — a particularly strange experience to wake up to. Animals, for me, have always been part of life in a very direct and connected way. They occupied the same spaces, participated in everyday routines and developed individual relationships with the people around them. They were never simply something we happened to keep. ...

Researching a family tree eventually changes character. At the beginning, progress can be surprisingly fast. A name appears on a certificate, that certificate identifies two parents, a marriage record adds another generation, and each discovery produces several new directions to investigate. For some time, much of my work followed this pattern. I would find a promising person in an online archive, open the relevant record, download the image and give it to an artificial-intelligence tool. The AI would examine the old handwriting, produce a verbatim—or ipsis litteris —transcription of the page, translate it into English and help me identify the information that belonged in my family-tree database. This is already an extraordinary capability. Many of these documents were written in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in handwriting that is difficult for a modern reader to decipher. They may be in Italian, German, Portuguese, Latin or another language, and the vocabulary and adm...