The Family Tree Is Growing Again — Faster Than I Can Follow It

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about returning to my family tree after a break of roughly ten years.

At the time, I knew that I wanted to restart the research seriously. What I did not expect was how quickly the project would begin to grow.

It is growing geographically, historically and, perhaps most dangerously, in the amount of material accumulating around me.

I now have research running across Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey and other places connected with different branches of our families. I am researching my own ancestors and, for the first time, incorporating Viorica's family as well.

And I have already managed to push parts of my own family tree back into the early 1800s.

That may not sound extraordinary to an experienced genealogist. For me, after leaving the project largely untouched for a decade, it feels like opening a door that I had forgotten was there.

The willingness of people to help

One of the most encouraging parts of the experience has had nothing to do with technology.

It has been people.

I have been particularly impressed by the responses from Italy.

I have contacted municipalities and institutions asking about people who lived many decades ago. These are requests coming from somebody they do not know, concerning families that left their towns generations ago.

And people have actually taken the time to look.

Municipal offices have answered questions, checked records and provided information about my mother, grandparents and earlier generations. Each answer gives me another date, another place, another parent or another document to pursue.

There is something rather nice about this.

Behind every archive, Comune and email address there is ultimately a person. Somebody has to read the message and decide that helping this stranger reconstruct the history of his family is worth a few minutes of their day.

Genealogy depends on documents, but very often it progresses because somebody, somewhere, is willing to help another person find them.

I am extremely grateful for that help.

Italy has put an extraordinary archive online

There is another resource that deserves special mention.

The Italian Ministry of Culture operates the Portale Antenati, an enormous online collection created specifically to make historical civil records preserved by the Italian State Archives accessible for genealogical and historical research.

It can be accessed here:

Portale Antenati — Gli Archivi per la ricerca anagrafica

The scale of it is remarkable. The Italian government has digitised an enormous quantity of material from its State Archives, including images of historical birth, marriage and death records, in many cases reaching back into the early nineteenth century and sometimes even further.

This also corrected one of my own assumptions. I initially thought I still needed to locate a separate online source for historical birth and death records. In fact, those records are also part of Antenati where the relevant archive and period have been digitised.

Of course, digitisation does not magically make genealogical research trivial.

Not every place and period is equally covered. A record may not be indexed by name. Handwriting can be difficult. Names change spelling. A person may appear in a neighbouring Comune rather than the one expected. More recent certificates may still have to be requested from the relevant municipal civil registry.

But compare this with genealogy a generation ago.

A document that once required travelling to Italy, finding the correct archive and manually examining a physical register may now be an image sitting on a government server waiting to be discovered from my desk in Moldova.

That is an extraordinary change.

Then there is ChatGPT

The other enormous difference between doing this research now and doing it ten years ago is artificial intelligence.

For this type of project, ChatGPT is becoming an invaluable research assistant.

Not because it somehow knows my family history. It does not.

The evidence still has to come from certificates, registers, archives, photographs, correspondence and people who actually know the family.

What AI can do is remove an astonishing amount of the mechanical work surrounding that evidence.

I can provide a name, a place and the information already known, and use ChatGPT to help identify which municipality, archive, church, cemetery or institution might hold the next record.

Then comes correspondence.

Instead of spending twenty or thirty minutes composing an appropriate message in Italian, German, Portuguese, Romanian or another language, I can explain what I need and have a properly structured email prepared almost immediately.

Replies arrive. They can be translated, analysed and compared with what is already known. The next questions can be identified and another message prepared.

When everything works properly, a process that previously consumed a substantial part of an evening can take minutes.

AI is not replacing genealogical research. It is dramatically reducing the administrative, linguistic and organisational friction surrounding the research.

That distinction matters.

An AI-generated relationship is not evidence. An original civil record is.

But a tool that helps me find that record, read difficult text, translate it, extract the relevant names and dates, organise the information and prepare the next enquiry can save an enormous amount of time.

And time has already become my biggest problem.

I now have more material than time

This is perhaps the best possible problem to have.

I have accumulated photographs. Lots of them.

Old family photographs, photographs of documents, photographs from cemeteries and other material that still needs to be examined, identified, classified and connected to the correct people.

At this point it feels as though I have kilos of photographs waiting for attention.

I simply do not have enough time to go through everything.

This is another area where I expect artificial intelligence to become extremely useful, provided the tools work reliably and are used carefully.

Old photographs can be faded, damaged, badly exposed, scratched or discoloured. Digital tools can already help with conservative restoration: improving contrast, reducing damage, correcting orientation and making details easier to inspect.

There is an important boundary here. I do not want to manufacture history.

If an AI system invents a face, replaces missing details with plausible-looking ones or changes what was actually present in the photograph, the result may look beautiful but its documentary value has been compromised.

For genealogy, I want enhancement rather than reinvention — and I want the untouched original preserved alongside any restored version.

An old photograph is historical evidence. Restoration should help us see what is there, not create what we wish had been there.

MacFamilyTree has become the centre of it all

Of course, collecting information is only useful if I can structure it.

For that, I am using MacFamilyTree, and I continue to be impressed by it.

A serious family tree rapidly becomes much more complicated than a diagram showing parents and children.

There are people, marriages, divorces, places, occupations, residences, migrations, photographs, certificates, sources, notes, alternative names, uncertain dates and relationships that still need to be proven.

Then the same information needs to be viewed from different directions.

I may want to start with myself and move backwards through my ancestors. I may want to begin with somebody born in the nineteenth century and follow all their descendants. I may want to concentrate on one branch, one surname or one geographical area.

MacFamilyTree gives me a structured place in which all of those fragments can gradually become a coherent model of the family.

That is important because I do not want merely to collect documents.

I want to understand the relationships between them.

From Germany and Italy to a much larger map

When I originally worked on the family tree many years ago, I thought primarily in terms of my German and Italian ancestry.

The map is considerably larger now.

Germany and Italy remain fundamental, but the research is extending through South America — including Brazil, Argentina and Chile — while Viorica's family introduces Moldova, the former Soviet world and other parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

Each country presents a different research problem.

Different languages. Different civil-registration systems. Different rules concerning access to historical documents. Different archives. Different naming conventions. Different political histories.

And that is precisely why I find it so interesting.

My family tree is slowly becoming more than a diagram of biological relationships. It is becoming a geographical and historical map.

People move. Borders move. Countries disappear. Languages change. A person can be born under one administration, marry under another and die under a third without necessarily travelling very far at all.

Once the tree reaches the early nineteenth century, history stops being background scenery and starts becoming part of the data.

And I have only just restarted

That may be the most motivating part.

I restarted this project only recently.

Already, municipalities have sent information. Archives have opened new paths. Previously unknown relatives and family branches are appearing. Parts of the tree now reach the early 1800s. I have more photographs and documents waiting to be processed than I currently have time to examine.

And unlike when I first started doing genealogy, I am now physically in Europe.

A German town connected with an ancestor is no longer on the other side of the planet.

Neither is an Italian village.

I can actually drive there.

I can visit the cemetery. I can see the church. I can walk through the town. I can visit an archive and perhaps hold a document concerning somebody whose name currently exists only as a line in my database.

Technology is making the research faster, but geography is making it more real.

Ten years ago I stopped building the family tree. Today the problem is almost the opposite: discoveries are arriving faster than I can process them.

I cannot think of a better reason to continue.

There are still hundreds of questions, probably thousands of documents to find, kilograms of photographs to examine and entire branches of the family about which I currently know almost nothing.

Some searches will undoubtedly end in dead ends.

Some records will have disappeared.

Some relationships may never be proven.

But somewhere in an Italian register, a German archive, a South American civil record, an old cemetery or a box of photographs may be the next small piece of the story.

And right now, finding those pieces is enormously good fun.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This article is based on my original ideas, experience, analysis and conclusions. Artificial intelligence tools were subsequently used as editorial and research assistants to review grammar and wording, improve structure and presentation, organise some arguments into clearer logical sections, and help review references to historical, archival and technical concepts.

Where relevant, factual references were checked against the sources cited in the article. AI assistance does not replace professional historical or genealogical research, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.