Genealogy

My grandfather had scribbled a rough start: about 80 people, his parents, his siblings, the line down to us.

The urge to digitize it, and go further. AI could help scan genealogy sites (Geneanet, FamilySearch) in my place. But I want to check what it finds, so I still need the archives themselves. Once the search legwork is done, the birth, marriage, and death records are easy to track down: I know where to look, what, who, and roughly when.

These records themselves get harder to read over time: paper degradation, cursive script, sometimes Latin. AI helps here too, transcribing and checking. Any fact found gets kept, even outside direct lineage: an occupation, a place, it can still come in handy.

The engineer's reflex stays the same: from data source to visualization, through deployment, with quality checks at every step. That's how 80 people became over 1,200 today.

Past the tedious slog through genealogy sites, this is where AI has helped me the most. I feed it the archive images, and it gives me a line-by-line transcription of each handwritten record. It's on me to confirm or correct that transcription. The original spelling is always kept as written, as an image, and the proposed reading makes each individual card in the graph easier to check.

Le lundy treizième jour de janvier l'an mil six cens furent épousez François Gouaud et Gillette Gérard à Campbon

type: mariage
date: 13.01.1600
location: Campbon
persons:
  - francois-gouaud
  - gillette-gerard

An uncertain reading is flagged as such, never shown with the same confidence as a sure one.

A family "tree" always has one privileged root. Taken strictly, it leaves out uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews, and so on. That's not enough to represent what I want: the storage is a graph that can grow sideways.

The result: sibling groups and their children find their place, with no root forced on the graph. The "tree" you see on screen is just one walk through the graph from a chosen focus person, not the actual shape of the data.

Honestly, past a certain depth of ancestry, those sibling groups stop being interesting. Only the direct line stays in the graph.