My things

By the time Saturday was finally winding down, it was already well past 22:00. The New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I had unexpectedly found in a Moldovan supermarket earlier that evening was now open beside me. I had a computer in front of me, a nice bottle of wine within reach and, more importantly, the entire Internet available for entertainment. There are probably more sensible ways to spend a Saturday night. I opened my family-tree database. That was the end of any realistic prospect of going to bed at a reasonable hour. The doctor with three wives One of the important unresolved points in the German side of my family tree concerns my great-grandfather — the father of my German grandfather. He was a medical doctor and, over the course of his life, had three wives. That much I knew. What happened around those marriages, however, had become obscured by the usual family fog that accumulates when information is passed verbally from one generation to ...

For some time I have had a box here that was sent to me by “ P ” from New Zealand. It arrived while the family-tree project was already expanding in several directions, and there always seemed to be something more immediate demanding attention: another archive to search, another document to process, another email to answer, another branch of the family suddenly producing new information. Today I finally had enough time to sit down, open the box properly and begin looking through what was inside. I was expecting family material, of course, but I was not quite prepared for what I found. Among the contents is a set of old handwritten sheets containing names, relationships and dates from the family tree. As I carefully worked my way through what I could decipher, the chronology kept moving backwards: through the nineteenth century, then the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, until eventually I found information apparently reaching all the way back to 1546 . That is an extraordin...

A few days ago, I wrote about using two different artificial-intelligence systems in the same family-tree project. Grok had produced scripts that could identify the historical registers returned by a search on Italy’s Portale Antenati and then download the images from those books. ChatGPT was better at the next stage: transcribing difficult handwriting, translating the records, comparing names and relationships, and organising the evidence for entry into MacFamilyTree. The first result felt almost magical. I described what I wanted, received a script and watched it work on the first attempt. Something that might have taken me several days to investigate and write was running within minutes. Then reality arrived in the form of repeated HTTP 403 responses. The first solution met the WAF An HTTP 403 response means that the server understood the request but refused to fulfil it. In this case, the refusals were associated with the protection surrounding the Antenati website and ...

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...