Using AI to Answer the Big Three: What, Where, and Why of Ancestor Locations
Diana Elder, AG, AGL
Content
About this webinar
This presentation demonstrates how you can utilize artificial intelligence tools to enhance the traditional locality research framework, which involves investigating "What is Happening," "Where is it Happening," and "Why is it Happening" in your ancestors' communities. You'll learn practical applications such as timeline analysis, identifying migration patterns, summarizing historical content, and organizing jurisdictional information using Custom GPTs and effective prompting techniques.
About the speaker
Key points and insights
Genealogists often face complex challenges when trying to pin down historical places and jurisdictions, but modern technology offers powerful ways to streamline this process. In this presentation, expert genealogist Diana Elder demonstrates how to integrate artificial intelligence into locality research to resolve brick walls and better understand ancestor lives. By focusing on three core questions—what happened, where it happened, and why it happened—researchers can systematically explore geographical contexts and boundary changes. Through a detailed case study tracking non-citizen white settlers in Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma statehood, the session illustrates how AI can process complex timelines, uncover historical jurisdictions, and assist in constructing comprehensive locality guides.
- Timeline Analysis and Discrepancy Flagging: AI acts as a collaborative coworker to reorder dates, extract geographic movements from family trees, and automatically highlight conflicting locations or missing historical jurisdictions across records.
- Jurisdictional Mapping and Resource Discovery: Using specialized tools like AI agents, researchers can seamlessly search library catalogs, map shifting county boundaries, locate contemporary gazetteers, and identify obscure historical newspapers that contextualize ancestor movements.
- Efficient Synthesizing with Human Verification: While AI drastically reduces the time needed to gather background context and summarize lengthy county histories, genealogists must remain the "human in the loop" to verify every link and fact to prevent reliance on plausible hallucinations.
To fully master these techniques and see step-by-step demonstrations of prompt engineering, map analysis, and custom AI tools, consider viewing the complete webinar online. Exploring the detailed syllabus offers access to comprehensive templates, prompt examples, and foundational locality guides that will significantly elevate your own research workflow.
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Comments (88)
Elder's presentation is the best one I've seen on using AI not just learning about AI, but specifically using it for specific records.
She gave some ideas that I will follow up on.
Excellent talk and great syllabus.
Very informative
Loaded with valuable and highly relevant information! The slide deck was well-done and very helpful.
Excellent. Very helpful.
An excellent webinar thank you Diana. Diana explains her information very plainly which makes it so easy to understand. Since using AI is certainly not easy to learn her expertise is so welcome.
An excellent presenter - sets objectives, organized, tells her own research story. Compares AI to traditional. Backs up her info. w evidence. Very clear. I'm a skeptic, but showed me what I need to know about using AI for genealogy research.