Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Last January, the Association of Professional Genealogists  @APGgenealogy started requiring that members report at least 12 hours of Continuing Education each year. I found the task of listing my CE time for 2022 quite interesting and last January I posted what I had done.

Below is my Continuing Education activity list for 2023. Each event was 1 hour unless otherwise noted.

Webinars – Total 25.5 hours

• Jan 4 – The 5 steps to organizing your DNA in 2023 – Diahan Southard
• Jan 19 – The Basics of Jewish American Genealogy, Rhonda McClure
• Feb 11 – 10 Tips of Successful Online/Onsite Research in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus – Alina Khuda, Virtual Genealogical Association
• Mar 14 – FamilySearch GEDCOM Technical Q&A – Gordon Clarke
• Mar 14 – RootsTech Recap – Daniel Horowitz, MyHeritage
• Mar 28 – New Developments of MyHeritage DNA by Gal Zrihen, MyHeritage
• Mar 29 – Predicting Unknown Close DNA Relationships Just Got Better! Segcm Tool – Andy Lee, Family History Fanatics
• Mar 29 – The Alex Krakovsky Project – Navigating the Wiki to Locate Town Records, JewishGen
• Apr 11 – First Steps First: Rootstech Recap – Daniel Horowitz
• Apr 21 – DNA Roundtable: Relationship Predictors – Leah Larkin (90 min)
• May 25 – Test. Analyze. Repeat: Long-term DNA Strategies for Success – Diahan Southard.
• Jun 16 – Finding Your Ancestors in Canadian Land Records – Tara Shymanski, Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Jul 14 – Celebrating 2,000 Webinars! plus 10 tips you can use today – Geoff Rasmussen, Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Aug 8 – Ten MORE Secrets to Using MyHeritage – Daniel Horowitz, Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Aug 23 – DNA Painter Basics: Strategies to Enhance Your Genealogical Research – Adina Newman, Virtual Genealogical Association
• Oct 2 – Ask the Experts: Katy Rowe-Schurwanz from FamilyTreeDNA – Diahan Southard (30 min)
• Oct 9 – Ask the Experts: Blaine Bettinger – Diahan Southard (30 min)
• Oct 23 - Ask the Experts: DNA Painter – Diahan Southard (30 min)
• Nov 14 – New Updates on Your MyHeritage Family Tree – Uri Gonen
• Nov 16 – Ask the Wife: A Powerful DNA Strategy – Diahan Southard
• Nov 20 – Ask the Experts: Michelle Leonard – Diahan Southard (30 min)
• Nov 28 – The Good News About Historical Newspapers – Daniel Horowitz
• Nov 30 – Organize Your DNA Matches – Kelli Bergheimer
• Dec 9 – Ten Awesome Things You Can Do on WikiTree – Connie Davis, Virtual Genealogy Association
• Dec 12 – The Lastest Developments in Searching Historical Records on MyHeritage – Maya Geier, MyHeritage
• Dec 15 – Landscape of Dreams: Jewish Genealogy in Canada – Kaye Prince-Hollenberg, Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Dec 20 – Got Old negatives? Scan Them With Your Phone and These 5 (Mostly) Free Apps! Elizabeth Swanay O’Neal – Family Tree Webinars

Conferences (Online) – Total 14 hours

1. Mar 2 to 4 – RootsTech 2023
• Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy – Ellen Kowitt
• What’s New at FamilySearch in 2023 – Craig MIller
• Using DNA to Determine Relationships in 2023 – Beth Taylor
• How third-party DNA tools can help with your family history research – Jonny Perl
• Different Ways to Work with Your family Trees – Uri Gonen
• Tracing Your Jewish Roots in Ukraine – Ellie Vance (30 min)
• Using Maps and Gazetteers to Locate the Hometown – Ellie Vance (30 min)
• What’s New in RootsMagic 9 – RootsMagic
2. Nov 2 to 5 – WikiTree Symposium and WikiTree Day
• Mastering the Updated Library and Archives Canada Website – Kathryn Lake Hogan
• DNA Consultations at AmericanAncestors.org – Melanie McComb
• DNA Group Projects and WikiTree – Mags Gaulden
• Tech Troubleshooting – What Would You Do? – Thomas MacEntee
• Keep Your Family’s History Safe for the Future – Marian Burk Wood
• Reverse Phasing – What and Why? – Kevin Borland
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Genealogy Panel Discussion, Drew Smith, Dana Leeds, Steve Little, Thomas MacEntee, Rob Warthen, Willie

In total, my time for 2023 was 39.5 hours, which is very similar to my 2022 total of 38 hours.

Planning for 2024

Now is a good time to plan in advance your 2024 activities. I like to add them to my calendar as soon as I find something of interest to me that might contain new or updated information.

I plan again to attend RootsTech online from Feb 29 to Mar 2.

You can go to their Search the On-Demand Library page and look through their catalog of 4,423 results for over 1,500 sessions from 2019 to 2023 that are still available online. I’m sure you’ll find something of interest there.

They have more than 200 new online sessions planned for 2024. The new session are not yet listed on their site, but they will be soon. When they are ready, you’ll be able to filter your search by year, and 2024 will be an option. Then you can plan the sessions that you’ll want to watch.

Another planning activity to do right now is to check out which Legacy Family Tree Webinars you’ll want to see in 2024. They just came out with their planned classes and they will feature 112 speakers who will be giving 168 talks. That’s almost one every second day. You can find their list and register for the sessions you want here: Upcoming Webinars - Legacy Family Tree Webinars

I found 17 sessions that I’m already interested in that I’ve now registered for.

Most of the Legacy Family Tree Webinars are free to watch live. Usually, if you miss the live session, you can still watch it for free for about a week.

Of course, another way to get some Continuing Education is to attend a genealogy conference. I have not attended an in-person conference since before Covid. I was planning to finally go on a Genealogy European River Cruise in October 2024 which was to have featured Judy Russell and Blaine Bettinger as the speakers. I was really looking forward to this, but unfortunately it had to be cancelled. It seems I’ll have to wait a while longer until I find another in-person genealogy conference of interest to me.

Now its up to you to get to it. There’s no time like the present to plan some of your genealogical activities for 2024.

My previous post ran through MyHeritage’s new AI Record Finder tool. Now I’m going to try out the other tool MyHeritage released today. You can find their blog post describing the AI Biographer here: Introducing AI Biographer™: Create a Wikipedia-like biography for any ancestor using AI, enriched with historical context - MyHeritage Blog

A Biography by MyHeritage’s Deep Story Tool

Before I go into their new tool, I should mention that MyHeritage already had a very innovative AI biography tool. It’s available from the Photos menu and is called DeepStory.

I have tried this tool and it produces very interesting results, if not a little bit creepy, by having your (now deceased) relative being the one telling you his/her own story in a one to two minute video. 

The main subject of my previous post was my maternal grandfather Joseph German. To make a DeepStory, all you have to do is click on the person’s picture. The tool will first enhance my grandfather’s picture, and then use the facts and records I have entered for my grandfather to create his story.

Unfortunately, the DeepStory tool seems to have a problem with my grandfather’s photo or maybe his biography and was giving me: “An error occurred. Please try again later”, so for now I’ll use his wife, my grandmother’s story for comparison in this article.

You can see the DeepStory MyHeritage generated for my grandmother Esther-Beyla (Goretsky) German here: MyHeritage DeepStory, give voice to your family stories with AI technology – MyHeritage – If you don’t like your relative saying things like “I married the love of my life” or “love and kisses”, you can edit the script to say anything you want and then recreate the story.

A Biography by MyHeritage’s AI Biographer

So now lets try out AI Biographer on my grandmother and see what this new tool provides. With this tool, you select a deceased person in your tree and there is now an option to “Create AI Biography”. Clicking on that brings up this window:

DeepStory only uses information from your tree. Whereas AI Biographer’s default is “Enhanced”, which uses external material as well so I’ll go with that.

It really doesn’t take that long. I got my email notification in less than 5 minutes.

The biography is sent as a PDF attachment. Here is what AI Biographer sent me:

The “Consistency Issues” section which compares the facts from the different sources is a really nice touch. I don’t know of too many programs that produce those.

A Human Written Biography at WikiTree

Now how does this compare to a human-written biography?  Below is a biography written about my grandmother on WikiTree by the volunteers during My Week as the WikiTree Challenge Guest.

You can see the above profile for my grandmother on WikiTree here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Goretsky-5

Conclusion

All three biographies are very good and although they all use basically the same information, they each tell the story in a their own unique way. Each purposely includes and highlights the information it prefers.

Of course, the human written biography takes the most work, especially if you are the human doing the writing, whereas the two AI tools can produce a result with little effort on your part.

The DeepStory tool, being a video, is definitely the most eye-catching, and it allows you to modify the script any way you want.

The new AI Biographer tool is just in early beta and MyHeritage will likely add enhancements to it over time.

All in all, there is no reason any more why you shouldn’t be able to have a  biography created for each of your ancestors.

You may not have heard of this yet, but MyHeritage has just launched their new AI Record Finder. I got the email from them about it earlier today. Rather than me describe it, you can read about it on MyHeritage’s blog post:  Introducing AI Record Finder™, the World’s First AI Chat-Based Search Engine for Historical Records - MyHeritage Blog

I’ve not personally gone much into the AI (Artificial Intelligence) aspect of genealogy. I am a member of the Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence Facebook group led by Blaine Bettinger, but I haven’t yet tried ChatGPT or any other AI tools with respect to my genealogy.

I was involved in the early days of AI with regards to the chess program I wrote in the 1970s and I remember well all the discussion about Eliza, who was an early ancestor of ChatGPT.

Without further ado, let me get to my first attempt with MyHeritage’s AI Record Finder (click on the image for a larger rendition):

Above is what I saw when I started up the AI Record Finder. It asked for a name and clues. My genealogical research is quite challenging since all my grandparents are immigrants from what is now Romania and Ukraine. So I decided to find out what it could dig up about my maternal grandfather.

I entered my query which cannot exceed 350 characters (see the green text below) and in less than 30 seconds I got my response:

It provided me with 10 records about Joseph German which I can scroll through using the orange arrow on the right. The records included:

1. MyHeritage Family Trees, which was from my own MyHeritage tree.
2. Geni World Family Tree - information I put up on Geni.
3. 1910 U.S. Federal Census – was the wrong Joseph German
4. MyHeritage Family Tree – my grandfather on another person’s tree.
5. Family Search Family Tree - information I put up there.
6. 1920 U.S. Federal Census – wrong Joseph German
7. 1910 U.S. Federal Census – wrong Joseph German
8. 1911 Canada Census – wrong Joseph German
9. 1910 U.S. Federal Census – wrong Joseph German
10. FamilySearch Family Tree – wrong Joseph German

So 4 records were for my grandfather, and 6 were not. 3 of the 4 were my own information, and the 4th was another tree that included my information.

I really didn’t expect to find new information about my grandfather, but I decided to test the AI to see if it could find some real information that I might be able to use. So I added some more breadcrumbs as it requested:

I asked for information about 4 different immigrants and it gave me another 10 records:

1. Wolf Mendes, U.S. City Directories.  Wrong person
2. Wolf Mindis, Canada, Montreal Jewish Synagogue records.  Wrong person
3. Wolf Mindes, US Border Crossings to Canada. Wrong person
4. Wolf Mindis, US Border Crossings to Canada. Wrong person
5. Wolf (Wolfel) Mendes (Mindiez), US Naturalization Record. Wrong person
6. Wolf Mendes, US Border Crossings to Canada. Wrong person
7. Wolf Mendis, US Border Crossings to Canada. Wrong person
8. Wolf Mendes, US Social Security Applications. Wrong person
9. Wolf Mendes, US City Directories. Wrong person
10. Wolf Rabbi Mondes, Newspaper Name Index. Wrong person

So this result only found records for the first person of the 4 that I asked for, and none of the results were for the correct person. The birth and death years I gave and the Winnipeg clue weren’t enough for it to hone in on the correct Wolf Mindess.

Whoops. I realize now that I entered 1959 rather than 1859 as his birth year. The AI likely didn’t notice that or use the birth and death years or it surely would have said that something is wrong because my year range had him born (1959) after he died (1915).

If I use MyHeritage’s “Search Historical Records” form and look for Wolf Mindess using the incorrect birth year, the death year and listing Winnipeg as the place, then I get a similar set of results to what the AI provided.

But if I correct the birth year and use the regular search, then the results are a bit better:

I presume the AI would have given me these results instead, which include 7 different MyHeritage trees, a valid FamilySearch Family Tree result and a valid Geni tree result. The other 521 records are not the correct Wolf Mindess.

The bottom line is of course, their AI can only supply you with what information is in the MyHeritage record collection. Wolf Mindess came to Canada and is buried in Winnipeg. But MyHeritage does not have any life or death records for him (he’s not on Billion Graves) so there is nothing to supply except for his listing in family trees.

Before I left this, I thought I’d respond to the AI’s last request for a few more “golden nuggets”, as I wanted to see if something I could say would improve its search. So I said this:

This did a bit better:

1. Wolf Mindess, MyHeritage Family Trees – Correct person
2. Wolf Mindess, FamilySearch Family Tree – Correct person
3. Wolf Mindess, Geni World Family Tree – Correct person
4. Wolf Mandes, U.S. City Directories – Wrong person
5. Wolf Mandes, U.S. City Directories – Wrong person
6. Wilhelm Wolf Mindus, MyHeritage Family Trees – Wrong person
7. Wolf (Wolfel) Mendes (Mindiez), US Naturalization Record - Wrong person
8. Wolf Mindis, Canada, Montreal Jewish Synagogue records - Wrong person

Despite my incorrect date, this did improve its results, as it included 3 of the 9 records MyHeritage lists for the correct Wolf Mindess.

I’m not yet completely sold on AI technology. There is an art to formulating request to the AI just as there is an art to formulating record queries. The AI technology is designed to help you through it, and some people may find that easier than learning how to use the search tool, and might provide different results that you wouldn’t have found otherwise. I don’t think I’ll get much mileage out of it, but some people might find it very useful.

The main takeaway is that I’m very glad that MyHeritage keeps adding new and innovative tools. No other genealogy company has tried anything like this yet. This tool is a first-cut beta version, and I’m sure it will improve over time as additional functionality is added and as the AI “learns”.

There is a 2nd AI tool that MyHeritage released at the same time which the call the AI Biographer. I will try that one for my next article, which I will post in a couple of hours.