AI: Your Genealogy Search Assistant

By Phyllis Smith

Caveat: I do not call myself an expert on using AI. I have been on a learning curve over the past year or two, just like many others who have accepted that AI is here to stay. If you can’t beat them, join them; but don’t let go of what you know to be true. Also, know that AI is changing quickly. What I am sharing may be obsolete by the time you’re reading this.

My experience as a government librarian who spent years using paper resources and then databases, even before the Internet was invented, to support other people's research has coloured my opinions of AI as a search tool. I see the potential value of AI in our genealogy work, but I don’t see it replacing human knowledge, critical thinking skills, or experience.

First of all, let’s talk about the difference between “doing research” and “searching.” They’re not the same thing. People will say, “I did some research and found a parish record for my great-grandfather.” No. That’s a search. It can contribute to research on the life of the great-grandfather. Searching is the process of finding something.

Research has multiple steps and stages. It can start with a research plan to understand what you want to discover. There might be multiple searches to collect all the data. And there is analysis of all that data to interpret it and arrive at a conclusion. That’s much more involved than asking ChatGPT a question and expecting an answer. Some AI ‘bots can bring back useful data, but they won’t do your research for you.

Consider the following as food for thought:

An AI tool is NOT an answer or fact machine.

Steve Little is the Artificial Intelligence Program Director for the National Genealogical Society and an actual AI expert. He has said that research is still not AI’s greatest strength. At least not yet. An AI chatbot does not know anything, and it can’t easily understand your research needs. It does not review, contrast & compare, evaluate, or fact-check anything it presents to you in response to a query.

Think of it this way: AI deals in words, not facts. It does not retrieve facts and answers; rather, it assembles words to form possible or likely answers. It can find the words that sound plausible, but that’s not the same as bringing you facts you can trust.

Also, AI chatbots do not access a secret cache of data that is beyond your reach. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are treasure troves of genealogical data that the AI chatbot can’t use. In genealogy, we use repositories such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, or Icelandic Roots to locate reliable facts. That information is generally behind firewalls, and AI tools can’t search these repositories for you. In addition, we should never restrict our genealogy searches to what is digitized and available on the Internet. We shouldn’t forget the archives, museums, and libraries that hold valuable print documents. So much data is still not digitized, and it’s all invisible to AI chatbots.

Lesson: Don’t ask an AI tool to provide facts to answer your questions. Even if it gets lucky from time to time, it’s not a reliable search engine. Instead, ask it to help you develop an effective research plan and identify which databases or repositories are worth searching. Instead of asking for answers, ask the tool to find the best sources to search, or for specialized archives you might visit or contact.

Envision your AI chatbot as your very smart, very keen, but very inexperienced intern that requires you to review and evaluate the quality of its work.

AI tools will do anything to impress you. A ‘bot can get lucky and present you with useful data. More likely, it will confidently present its work even when it doesn’t understand the full context and lacks the expertise to fact-check itself.

You are the critical thinker in this partnership. It is your responsibility to review and evaluate everything that the chatbot tells you. You decide whether it found a trustworthy source that answers your question accurately. If you don’t have the background knowledge to do that, you won’t recognize when the chatbot makes up an answer.

Lesson: An AI tool should never be cited as a source. Take responsibility for personally evaluating any sources used by the AI tool; analyze the answers it brings to you. Derive conclusions yourself based on your knowledge of your search problem. Cite the source, not the tool.

AI is increasingly a powerful tool for genealogy if you give it the right jobs to do and monitor its work.

It can analyze your source data, extract key facts, summarize those facts, and generate effective narratives from them. And it can help you brainstorm your projects, develop research plans, organize your work, and identify leads for new avenues of research.

Lesson: Learn what your AI tools can do well. Attend Legacy Family Tree webinars, Rootstech sessions, and other webinars. Stay current with new developments in AI chatbots by following experts, such as Steve Little, Andrew Redfern, Diana & Nicole Elder, and others who make it their business to study the best use of AI tools for genealogy research. 

Also, learn how to use your search tools so that you can search like a pro. All of the big repositories, including Icelandic Roots, offer tutorials, webinars, and other advice to search their databases more effectively. There are many webinars focused on how to find good-quality data. Take advantage of them to become a better researcher.

Conclusions

AI tools are evolving quickly. Steve Little has predicted that virtually every and app already has AI baked in or AI functions will be added to stay relevant. We can see this happening to our genealogy tools with every update. We need to evolve along with the tools.

We’ve touched on three brief ideas:

1.  Don’t assume AI tools are effective search engines that can do your research for you.

2.  Do take responsibility for what the AI tool does: review, evaluate, and cite actual sources.

And most importantly,

3.  Keep learning.

Author’s note: This article was written without any assistance from an AI chatbot beyond asking Gemini to generate a cartoon image to go with the article. Note the watermark in the lower right corner.

Source

1.     St. Edwards School; Peter B. Benedict Library. (08 Oct 2025). Research Process 101. Retrieved from: https://steds.libguides.com/c.php?g=1274379 ; 10 Jun 2026.