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.

Here’s a fun activity.

Jarrett Ross, the @GeneaVlogger today posted a video where he ranks Genealogy Websites.

He uses an interesting site I’ve never seen before called Tiermaker to do this. The site lets you drag and drop genealogy website logos into tiers that can mean whatever you want. The site includes the category “genealogy sites” which has 52 pre-defined logos of some of most popular websites for genealogy.

Jarrett in his 3 hour video goes through the sites one by one and explains how he uses each site and decides where he plans to put them.

My Own Ranking

Jarrett debated how he wanted to rank sites and used a combination of how often he uses the site, how user friendly the website is, and how useful the site is genealogically.

I’m going to rank the sites only on how often I use the site and how useful it is to me personally. Here is how I would place them:

The “S” line for me are the sites I use the most often. The ranking then go A, B, C, D where D are sites that I use but not very often.

My go to site that I use almost every day is MyHeritage. I have a complete subscription with them, and that is where I maintain my family trees. I have their Family Tree Builder software on my desktop which I can sync with my online tree, and I have their MyHeritage app on my phone. MyHeritage has billions of records that give me hints and every day I check for them and I incorporate whatever is correct and useful into my tree.

MyHeritage’s hints include people in the WikiTree, Geni and FamilySearch family trees. So I have free accounts at those sites to view the information there.

I have a site at Ancestry as well which I have some of my tree at. My primary use there is for the records they have that MyHeritage does not, such as Canadian immigration lists, and also family trees of those who I connect to or who I DNA match.

With regards to the the DNA sites, I use Ancestry DNA the most because I have the most matches who I’m related to there, and they also have their Thru Lines. 23andMe is next. MyHeritage DNA, even though I have few matches I know, is useful for its connection to the family trees at MyHeritage. Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch are less useful to me.

The Internet Archive is an amazing site, and I use it all the time to get information from web oages that no longer exist or have changed.

Cyndi’s List is a wonderful site that I should use more often than I do.

You’ll notice I have a lot of popular sites that I never use. My personal genealogy research comes from my and my wife’s ancestors who all immigrated to Canada in the early 1900s from what is now Romania and Ukraine. So sites such as American Ancestors, Find My Past, Fold3, etc., just don’t have anything for me.

A Few Bonus Sites

I custom added these 5 sites to my list because I they are very valuable to me.

MyHeritage uses BillionGraves in its web hints, and I find most of the gravesites I need with that. I rarely use Find A Grave.

BYU TV is important because of the wonderful show Relative Race that they produce. They just finished season 12 and more seasons are expected. Watch Relative Race here.

The next logo is for Tamura Jones’ Modern Software Experience site. Tamura is a genealogy and technology expert, and the best technical articles about GEDCOM and genealogy software can be found there.

I’ve added Microsoft Bing, because the default list only had Google. I use Bing first and only if I don’t find what I want or I need a specialty search, then I go to Google.

Finally, Legacy Family Tree Webinars deserves mention. They have over 2,100 webinars recorded and they are all free when they are first broadcast. I watch several dozen of their webinars every year.

Try It Yourself

The Tiermaker site with the 52 pre-defined genealogy logos ready for you to rank is available here:  https://tiermaker.com/create/genealogy-sites-15434469.

Maybe it isn’t for you, but it likely is for me.

I’m not talking about using DNA to find close family members, e.g. if you are adopted or don’t know who a grandparent is. That’s still a big thing. And I’m not talking about forensic genealogy used for finding killers and solving cold cases. That is still going on in the background to the dismay of many. And there are still many medical reasons why a person might want to do Whole Genome Testing.

I’m talking about my personal use of the DNA information that DNA companies and third parties are providing me.

DNA for Genealogy

I started my use of DNA tests for genealogy fairly early, but not at the beginning. It was 2016 when Judy Russell implored me to get my 93 year old uncle, the last of his generation, DNA tested. I did that using Family Tree DNA, and when he matched a fellow researcher of the family who I knew was a 3rd cousin of mine, it was very exciting.

I followed that up with my own tests at Family Tree DNA, Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage and LivingDNA, and uploaded my uncle’s DNA to the latter two. I also uploaded my and my uncle’s DNA to GEDmatch, Geni, Geneanet and Borland Genetics.

What did I find that was useful for genealogy?  The ethnicity tests confirmed that I was 100% Ashkenazi. The Y-DNA confirmed that I and my uncle were both from the Levite tribe. The mtDNA test confirmed my mother’s Jewish roots. And the autosomal tests connected me to about 40 different relatives whose exact connection I knew or was able to determine, and hundreds of thousands whose connection I don’t know and cannot determine.

I had one close surprise match, and together we worked to determine our connection. Turned out this was a first cousin once removed whose father was an unknown child of my mother’s brother who was no longer living. This was a fantastic find and I will forever be thankful to my DNA testing for this discovery alone and the friendship that I now have with my new cousin.

DNA Tools

I spent the next few years learning everything I could about DNA and how to get the most out of the test information.

The DNA Testing sites include various tools to help get the most out of their DNA data, including match lists, chromosome browsers, segment data and shared match lists, and both MyHeritage and Ancestry had connections to their family trees that let you see your match’s family tree and even give suggestions (Theory of Family Relativity and Thru Lines) that attempt to connect your and your DNA matches’ trees together.

Other tools and methodologies such as DNA Painter, DNAGedcom, the Leeds Method, various clustering programs, Visual Phasing, Genome Mate Pro (now Genealogy DNA Analysis Tool) and others popped up. I tried them all. I even developed my own tool Double Match Triangulator (DMT) for what I thought would aid segment analysis.

As hard as I tried, none of these tools helped me add any people to my genealogy. Maybe it was the problems of Jewish endogamy, or due to my inability to research more than 5 generations back simply because records don’t exist before 1800 where my ancestors are from in what is now Romania and Ukraine.

For several years, I worked with Terry Lasky, my wife’s third cousin who I was helping with his DNA project. He got about 60 people to DNA test on his and my wife’s Zaslavsky line who were all descendants of maybe 6 siblings or half-siblings or cousins. There were marriages between their children (1st cousins) and other problems such as spouses being siblings. We attempted to use the cM matches between these 60 people to figure out the connections. We had limited success because many of the cM values were surprisingly much higher than they should be, more than endogamy would suggest. We did the best we could, which did not meet our expectations, even after aided by a few records we were lucky enough to acquire.

Of the 60 people, Terry was able to provide me with about 25 segment match files. I used DMT and other analysis techniques to see if that might better help determine the siblings. There was a LOT of data here. I had trouble making headway. Ultimately, I was able to use Visual Phasing on Terry and two of his siblings to determine their grandparents segments. It was only then that I saw how many of the cousins’ matches were falling on the wrong grandparent – a result of endogamy. That was what was making the segment analysis almost impossible.

So despite a lot of time and effort on these analyses, it hasn’t produced that much help with respect to my genealogy.

Other Attempts

I took two Whole Genome Tests, one short reads and one long reads, to see if those would provide me with anything useful. I learned a lot from these and have a number of blog posts about them. But other than some health information which (fortunately for me) wasn’t too interesting, these were not very useful for genealogy.

I uploaded my and my uncle’s raw dna to Borland Genetics. That allowed me to generate parts of my father and mother’s DNA and a few other relatives on my father’s side. But there was really no way to use that to help me with my genealogy.

My YDNA test matches were not helpful in going back because of my 5 generation record limitation as well as the fact that my ancestors only started adopting surnames in the early 1800s. My closest matches have different surnames, come from different countries, and are estimated to be from the 1500s.

The Past Couple of Years

Each year, about 3 or 4 known cousins of mine get a DNA test and show up in my match list at one of the companies, but there’s never anything new to further my research going further back or sideways.

The number of people taking DNA tests each year is still rising, but not nearly as much as it did from 2017 to 2020. See Leah Larkin’s article on DNA tests:

Not only that, but the DNA sites are providing less information than before. 23andMe last month had an issue that caused them to stop making certain data available such as shared matches and segment matches. MyHeritage and Family Tree DNA also eliminated some features and downloads. And Ancestry is shutting down the DNA features of GeneaNet which it acquired last year.

I have just 29 Thru Lines at Ancestry and 2 Theories of Family Relativity at MyHeritage which either are connections I know about, or are wrong.

What’s Next?

Basically, I’m stuck, and really can’t do much more with my DNA test results.

For me, the Golden Age of DNA testing is over. I’ve basically gotten what little I can out of it.

What I really need are more records from Eastern Europe for my genealogy to progress. Some become available from time to time, so there is hope for me.

But I don’t see how DNA is going to help me much going forward.