After months of using AI as a research partner, I’ve learned what works—and what doesn’t. Whether you’re transcribing 18th-century deeds or analyzing complex family relationships, these five tips will help you get the most from AI while maintaining professional standards.
1. Start with a Clear Template or Format
AI excels at consistency, but only if you give it a model to follow. Before asking AI to abstract documents, create a standard format you want every abstract to include:
- Grantor and grantee information
- Consideration
- Date and recording information
- Property descriptions and boundaries
- Witnesses and their marks/signatures
- Chain of title references
- Source analysis (original/derivative/authored source; who provided what information—primary/secondary/undetermined information; direct/indirect/negative evidence for the research question)
Upload an example of your ideal abstract format, then ask the AI to follow it exactly. This ensures every document gets the same thorough treatment—even at 10 PM when you’re tired.
Pro tip: Save your template instructions in a document and upload it to a Project, then use individual Chats for different deeds, wills, or other documents within that project.
2. Verify Everything—Especially Relationships
AI is excellent at extracting information, but it can get relationships backwards. I once had AI tell me Jean and Alexander Williamson were Martha Kerr’s children when it should have identified them as Mary Kerr’s children—even with multiple documents uploaded.
Always double-check:
- Family relationships (parent-child, sibling connections)
- Generational structures
- Pronoun references (“his heirs” vs “her heirs”)
- Legal relationships (executor, guardian, attorney-in-fact)
Think of AI as a meticulous but occasionally confused research assistant. It will never tire or skip steps, but you must verify its analysis against source documents.
3. Use AI as a Brainstorming Partner
One of AI’s unexpected strengths is asking questions that spark breakthroughs. When something feels “off” in your research, explain the problem to the AI. Sometimes articulating the issue—or answering the AI’s questions—reveals the solution.
Effective brainstorming prompts:
- “Here are three deeds about the same property. What patterns do you notice?”
- “This doesn’t make sense to me because… What am I missing?”
- “How might these people be related based on this evidence?”
The AI may get the answer wrong, but the questions it asks can redirect your thinking in productive ways.
4. Upload Context Progressively
As you gather documents, upload them to your AI conversation incrementally. This lets the AI build understanding across sources and identify patterns you might miss when reviewing documents days apart.
For complex projects:
- Start with the key document (will, probate, land patent)
- Add related deeds chronologically
- Include maps, census records, or other contextual sources
- Ask AI to summarize what’s known so far before adding new documents
This approach mimics working with a colleague who’s following your research along in real time.
5. Disclose Your AI Use Appropriately
Professional integrity matters. When AI contributes to your work:
- For professional reports: Note AI was used for transcription or abstraction, with emphasis on your role in verification and analysis.
- For blog posts or articles: Be transparent about collaboration. I include a disclosure explaining what AI helped with and what required my expertise.
- For client work: As professional genealogists, we always disclose AI use in our work.
The key principle: AI is a tool that amplifies your expertise, not a replacement for it. Your professional judgment, verification, and analysis remain essential.
The Partnership Approach
AI won’t solve your genealogical problems—but it will handle tedious tasks with perfect consistency, freeing you to focus on what requires human expertise: recognizing patterns, understanding historical and legal context, correlating evidence, and constructing well-reasoned conclusions.
I’ve shared a detailed case study of this approach on Family Locket, showing how AI helped me work through a three-generation puzzle in Pennsylvania land records. The partnership works because AI maintains the details while humans provide the analysis and reasoning that meet genealogical standards.
Can you think of ways to use AI in genealogy?
This post is adapted from one of my professional genealogical research reports. The blog draft was prepared with AI assistance from Claude (Anthropic) and reviewed and approved by me prior to publication.