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...