Introduction: The AI at the Family Reunion
Picture it: you're three cups of coffee deep into a rainy Saturday morning. You’ve got your tree-building software open, a stack of century-old obituaries beside you, and a newly-discovered third cousin from Milwaukee pestering you on Facebook about a shared great-grandfather named Giuseppe. Suddenly, you hear about this magical tool called ChatGPT that can answer all your genealogy questions faster than you can say “GEDmatch.” Naturally, your curiosity kicks in.
As a professional genealogist with two decades of chasing dead people and a mild addiction to microfilm readers, let me help unpack this. I’ll walk you through the promises, pitfalls, and personality quirks of ChatGPT when it comes to genealogical research. Is it a powerful assistant? An unreliable narrator? Your new research BFF? Let's find out.
Part 1: The Case For Trusting ChatGPT
1. Speed and Accessibility One of the top perks of using ChatGPT is speed. Ask a question like, “When did Ireland adopt civil registration of births?” and you’ll get a coherent, accurate answer in about two seconds. Compare that to the fifteen minutes it might take to find the same information buried in your bookmarks, a blog post, or a hard-to-read government archive site from 2003.
It’s not just fast—it’s conversational. You can ask follow-up questions without rephrasing or clicking through five pages. You can say, “Okay, so what about marriage records?” and the bot doesn’t get snippy or send you back to the homepage. In a time-consuming hobby like genealogy, this efficiency is pure gold.
2. Great for Learning the Basics ChatGPT is especially helpful for beginners, or for genealogists venturing into a new geographic area or unfamiliar time period. Don’t know how Polish surnames evolved? Curious about what “removed” means in “first cousin twice removed”? Want a rundown on why Ellis Island records aren’t quite what they seem? ChatGPT gives solid, well-summarized answers that are often surprisingly thorough.
And let’s face it, we’ve all asked some “duh” questions that we’re too embarrassed to post in the forums. ChatGPT has no judgment. Zero. Ask away, blush-free.
3. It Connects the Dots (Sometimes Creatively, But Still...) Genealogy is about building bridges—between documents, people, and sometimes wild family legends. ChatGPT is decent at helping you see patterns or connections, especially if you're brainstorming theories. For example, you can describe a family timeline and say, “Does this make sense?” and it’ll walk through it logically.
It's a bit like having a very eager intern who doesn’t mind talking through scenarios endlessly—just don’t expect it to catch every mistake (more on that later).
4. A Fantastic Writing Assistant Let’s say you’ve uncovered a fascinating ancestor who survived the Halifax Explosion, raised twelve kids, and lived to 102. You want to write a mini-biography for your family newsletter. ChatGPT can help you polish your prose, suggest formats, even help with period-appropriate phrasing or jokes.
In fact, I’ve used ChatGPT to help draft emails to archives, create friendly but firm letters to distant cousins who won’t share their DNA results, and even write genealogy-themed poems for family reunions. (Yes, I’m that genealogist.)
5. Multilingual Support Researching ancestors from Ukraine? Mexico? Quebec? ChatGPT has robust language translation features. It won’t replace a human translator, especially for very old handwriting or nuanced legal documents, but it can absolutely help with modern translations, basic comprehension, or even coaching you through what “née” means in French church records.
For those of us who took high school Latin and then forgot everything except “Et tu, Brute?”—this is a game-changer.
Part 2: The Case Against Trusting ChatGPT
Okay, time to pump the brakes. As delightful and responsive as ChatGPT is, it’s not a genealogical crystal ball. Let’s be real about what it can’t do—or at least what it shouldn’t be trusted to do without verification.
1. It Can Make Stuff Up (And Do It Convincingly) This is the biggest and most dangerous problem. ChatGPT, at its core, is a language model. It predicts what words should come next in a sentence based on its training. It does not think, reason, or fact-check like a human. So when you ask it, “Was Margaret O’Leary born in County Kerry in 1832?” it might confidently respond, “Yes, she was born in Tralee in April 1832.”
Sounds great, right? The problem is that it just made that up.
Unless it’s pulling from a verified database (which ChatGPT does not do), these “facts” are fabrications—plausible-sounding filler based on context. It’s like asking your dog who your 4x great-grandfather was, and the dog wagging his tail and barking out a name because he knows that’s what makes you happy.
So if ChatGPT gives you a date, a name, or a record location, verify it. Trust, but verify. Or better yet, just verify and skip the trusting.
2. No Access to Real-Time Databases or Subscription Archives ChatGPT doesn’t have access to Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, or any other premium genealogical databases. It can’t pull up your 2nd-great-grandfather’s census record or tell you what ship your Polish ancestors came over on.
What it can do is guide you on where to look, suggest search terms, or explain what certain documents are likely to contain. But if you’re expecting it to function like a search engine for vital records—you’re out of luck.
Also, it doesn’t browse the web in real time. Unless specifically designed with tools (and you’ve enabled them), it doesn’t pull fresh content. So if a website reorganized its collections last month, ChatGPT might not know. It’s like relying on a librarian who hasn’t read any new books since 2023.
3. Limited Contextual Judgment Let’s say you give ChatGPT a family mystery: two people with the same name born the same year in the same town. One dies young; one moves to Chicago. You ask, “Which one is my ancestor?”
ChatGPT might offer a logical-sounding explanation, but it has no access to the documents, no understanding of handwriting quirks, and no intuition for family naming patterns, neighborhood proximity, or cultural traditions.
It lacks the genealogical spidey sense—that gut feeling many experienced researchers develop after years of crawling through cemeteries and interpreting misspelled names on ship manifests.
4. Bias Toward English-Language and U.S.-Centric Content ChatGPT is strongest with English-language sources and U.S./UK records. If you’re researching indigenous ancestry, African lineages disrupted by slavery, or ancestors from regions with sparse digital records (parts of Asia, Africa, or South America), it may fall short—or feed you oversimplified summaries.
Also, nuance gets lost. Ask about Irish records and it might say, “Start with church records.” Good idea in theory, but it might not warn you that many of those records were destroyed in 1922 or that parish boundaries don’t always match civil boundaries.
So take the advice as a starting point—but do your own homework, especially for less-covered regions and cultures.
5. No Original Thought or Creativity (Beyond Wordplay) If you ask, “Why did my great-grandmother list a different father on her marriage certificate?” ChatGPT might suggest reasonable explanations—illegitimacy, adoption, stepfather, clerical error.
But what it can’t do is intuit emotional nuance or give culturally specific insights unless those are already well-documented. It doesn’t know your family. It hasn’t read the ten letters in your grandmother’s attic. It can’t say, “Well, remember how she ran away from home at 15?” because it doesn’t know that.
In other words, it can mimic creative thinking—but it can’t replace the investigative intuition of a human researcher who knows how to sniff around the edges of a story.
Part 3: How to Use ChatGPT Wisely in Your Genealogical Toolkit
Now that we’ve established the good, the bad, and the occasionally weird, let’s talk about best practices. Here’s how I, as a working genealogist, use ChatGPT:
✅ Use It For: Learning the basics (What is a FAN club? How do Swedish patronymics work?)
Brainstorming research strategies (Where else might I find birth info if civil records are missing?)
Writing help (Family stories, blog posts, bios, or summary reports)
Cultural or historical context (What was life like in Ohio in 1870? What did German immigrants typically do for work in Milwaukee?)
Translations and transcriptions (at a basic level)
Drafting polite messages to DNA matches
Developing research questions or hypotheses
❌ Don’t Rely on It For: Citations or source references (It often fakes these)
Exact dates, names, or records
Original analysis of documents
Emotional nuance or family gossip decoding
Legally sensitive questions (inheritance laws, Native American enrollment, etc.)
Part 4: A Real-Life Use Case (The Good, the Bad, and the Hilarious)
Let me give you an example from my own practice.
A client came to me convinced their ancestor was one of the “Orphan Train” children. They’d heard the story through family lore, but had no dates. We asked ChatGPT to summarize what the Orphan Train movement was, when it happened, and where the records were.
The answer was solid: a brief history, estimated dates (1854–1929), main locations (NYC, Midwest), and repository info (National Orphan Train Complex, state archives).
Excellent starting point.
But then we got greedy and asked: “Was John Henry Wainscott one of them?”
ChatGPT responded, confidently, “Yes, John Henry Wainscott was placed on an Orphan Train to Kansas in 1885.” Complete fiction.
We double-checked every database. Nada. Turns out, John Henry was born to two married parents in Missouri and never left the state. The story came from a confused retelling of a different child who lived in the same town with a similar name.
Lesson? ChatGPT helped guide our search. But it also created a false trail. Had we trusted it without verification, we would’ve added fiction to the family tree—and worse, missed the real story.
Conclusion: So, Can You Trust ChatGPT for Genealogy?
Here’s the short answer: you can trust ChatGPT to be a very helpful assistant—not a primary source.
Treat it like your well-meaning research buddy who’s quick with Wikipedia links, never gets tired, and occasionally lies without meaning to. Use it to save time, clarify ideas, generate content, and broaden your thinking. But always—always—verify what it says.
In this line of work, where a single wrong generation can send your whole tree veering off into someone else’s forest, we owe it to ourselves (and our ancestors) to tread carefully.
So pull up a chair, let ChatGPT pour you a virtual cup of coffee, and chat away. Just don’t let it write the whole family history without double-checking the footnotes.
Happy hunting—and may your brick walls crumble like stale gingerbread.
About the Author:
Karen Anderson has been researching family histories for over 20 years, specializing in New England ancestors, immigrant communities, and helping people figure out what “cousin once removed” actually means. When not deciphering 19th-century chicken scratch or writing snarky marginalia in census notes, they enjoy black coffee, road trips to tiny cemeteries, and debating the best genealogy software like it’s a sport.
