Build Your Family Tree With AI (and Your Mum in the Room)

You're at the kitchen table, and your nan's tea is going cold. She is telling you her grandmother's maiden name and the village the family came from, and nobody has ever written either of them down. Your dad half-remembers an uncle who went to Canada. The only copy of all this is in their heads.

Family tree websites want a subscription and a weekend, but this wants an afternoon and a relative who likes to talk. The AI's part in this is small. The conversation is the point, and the tree is what you get to keep.

Before the afternoon

The AI has no file on your family, and it can't look you up. What the AI can do is ask better questions than you'd think to ask and hold fifty names and dates without dropping one. Later, it can name the archives worth searching. Only a record can tell you the truth about a particular person in 1890, and the records come later.

Choose the oldest relative who'll talk, and book the afternoon for this month. A tree can wait, but a person can't.

The afternoon itself

Sit beside them with the phone or laptop between you. Turn on voice mode if you have it, so you can talk to the AI out loud instead of typing.

We're building our family tree together. I'm here with my [mum / grandad]. Interview us one branch at a time, starting with the people we knew personally and working backwards. For each person, ask for their full name, any nicknames or maiden names, roughly when and where they were born, what they did for work, where they lived, and one story about them. "About 1950" or "before the war" is fine. Keep a running list and read it back to us when a branch is done. Don't guess at anything we haven't told you.

Of everything the AI asks, the story matters most. Dates get you a tree, and stories get you a family. A story is usually what jogs the next name loose, as in "oh, that was the year Aunt Vi came back from Jamaica."

Let them wander. Memory goes wrong in interesting ways. Two aunts merge into one, and the family story gets tidier each time it's told. The records will sort that out later, so today you're just collecting.

Before you leave, ask the AI to write everything out as a list and save that list somewhere safe. The list is already more than most families have.

That evening, the records

Turn web search on so the AI can look things up online, then ask for the next layer.

Using what we've told you, find me leads. Tell me which free, official records would have these people in them (census returns, birth, marriage and death indexes, parish registers, passenger lists, military records, probate). Tell me what years to search, and any spelling variations of our surnames to try. Where you can find an actual record online, link it and quote what it says. Mark clearly what's confirmed by a record and what's still our memory.

Then go and look, starting with the UK's free indexes, which are good. The GRO (the General Register Office) covers births, marriages and deaths. The National Archives has military and probate records, and FreeCEN and FreeBMD cover the census and civil registration.

Other countries have their own. At some point you find a great-grandfather's census entry in his own handwriting, with his job and his lodger, and that is the moment this becomes real.

Sometimes the AI will find a record and read it wrong, or find the wrong William Headlam entirely, because common names are a minefield. Open every record the AI quotes and read it yourself before anything goes on the tree.

The next visit

When you've confirmed what you can, ask for the picture.

Draw the family tree as a diagram from everything we've got. Show confirmed people in full and people we only know from memory in a lighter style or with a question mark. Under the tree, list the gaps. These are the people we have a name for but nothing else, and the one record that would fill each gap.

Claude will draw this as a diagram you can download, and ChatGPT can do something similar. Print the tree, take it back to your relative, and watch them find the mistakes. Usually the second conversation is better than the first.

Every afternoon after

The rest of the work is going through the list of gaps, one record at a time. Some lines go cold.

Records were lost, and people arrived with changed names and no paperwork. If your family came through slavery, migration or war, the trail may stop at a wall no AI can get past. The AI can still point you to the archives kept for that history, and some of them are remarkable.

Living relatives have privacy too, so keep the tree to people who've passed, or ask before you add anyone else.

The AI keeps the names in order. You keep the afternoon your nan spent saying them.