Do you ever get stuck on an ancestry problem where you have no one to ask about it or you feel uncomfortable always emailing your friend for help? Now, I could schedule a free 20-minute consultation, which I have done once. Sometimes, though, I just need to buckle down and work on whatever the problem is.
So, with all the hype about AI, I decided to try the AI called Copilot built into my Edge browser. I have used Copilot for quite a while for getting recipes for my garden veggies and other questions so, when I had my most recent Prussia problem, I figured ‘what do I have to lose?’ It’s not perfect, but asking AI the right questions can unlock your ancestry like it did for me.
Learning Curve
I was researching my Swiss lines when something made me jump from that branch to my maternal grandfather’s parents. Sometimes, I like to examine at my tree on Ancestry and just dabble a little as Ancestry and FamilySearch are always updating their records.
I must have found something on FamilySearch, as I was able to take my grandfather’s mother’s lines back several more generations where I even found out that my 2nd great-grandparents were third degree cousins. Third grade cousins were listed on their marriage record, and it is a religion calculation, called consanguinity or related by blood. From a chart, it means they are second cousins and share great-grandparents. My friends Olivier and Robert helped me understand this as I was freaking out that they were first cousins.
When I switch gears or countries, it seems at least with me that I have to go through a learning curve as my ancestors are not like several of my friends where they just concentrate in one or two countries. I, on the other hand, have at least five different countries. With them, some things are similar like parish records in Latin or German, but with my great-grandma that was born in Lochowice, Prussia, which is now in Poland, which some records could be in Polish. Not all the village names are spelled the same in Poland and as I kept working further back on my ancestors.
One problem I encountered was there were three possible Michael Kubinski’s’ that were born the right year as the marriage record and were from the same location district of Bromberg, Prussia. I wouldn’t have this problem if they listed their parents like on other marriage years I was looking at for this area.
The only way to figure out which Michael is mine is to work on each Michael and his family. It took me several weeks working each Michael. Some obstacles were not knowing where they were born or where the location was on a map, and I also didn’t understand some of the notations on the parish records. This is where AI or Co-pilot helped me and saved me a bunch of time.
Using AI
I have come to really like using AI(Artifical Intelligence) for everything. I need an easy eggplant recipe, and it gives me several recipes, or maybe I need to know the ratio of daikon radish seeds to sand to be able to evenly distribute the seed in my garden for a cover crop. Asking the right questions is the key and I even tell Copilot that is not right and tells me here it the right answer or something like that. I heard on the radio the other day that people are actually getting too attached to AI like a real person. I don’t know what it is called, but I don’t think of him as a person I just like that he can spit out the answer I am looking for to help me save time on searching the old way of Google.
I first needed to know about Colonie Canal B or 8 also spelled Kolonie Kanalie. So when searching I use the actual spelling I see in the record and with Bromberg as that is where the records were from. I hit the jackpot as AI gave me two answers that came from Wikipedia one telling me about the construction of the canal in Bromberg in 1772 and the other was about where all the workers lived. Where they lived is my jackpot as it listed them by Colonie Canal A, B, and C and where each were located. This helped a lot as now I knew the location of Colonie Canal B, but what did the 8 mean? Looking at a current map did not help. I asked for an old map of Bromberg showing the colonie canal a,b and c. Again he gave me what I needed and what is even better if you keep zooming in it goes to the present day map.
With the map I learned there were 10 locks and Colonie Canal B was near the 8th lock hence Colonie Canal 8. I like to know this as it should help me pinpoint which Michael is my 3rd great-grandfather. I can tell you it was not the one from Canal Colonie B, but following and looking at all the information I was able to be 99% sure where he came from based on location and records.
Another Great Feature
While volunteering at one of the many FamilySearch Centers around the world I was helping Robert with a German place listed on a Wisconsin naturalization record. We couldn’t make out the place and Robert did something that he put on Copilot. We first tried spelling what we saw to see if Copilot could find it with the letters we gave him. That wasn’t successful.
Then Robert took a snip of just the place out of the document, and I was amazed that Copilot was able to examine it. The downside was that Copilot couldn’t transcribe the location. Learning this trick has been very helpful as I have done this with some of the Prussia records. If you are like me that doesn’t notice things right away, while writing this article I noticed underneath the where it asks you to ask anything or type @ were Copilot symbols. If you hover over each symbol it informs you what they do.
I did a quick experiment and uploaded a full-page image of a document where there were several entries of birth records. One was my ancestor, Michael Kubinski. I asked Copilot to transcribe the whole document. Of course, it couldn’t. Next, I asked him to transcribe entry 54 which was Michael Kubinski. He couldn’t do that either. So, I narrowed what I was asking even further by giving him a snip or screenshot of just part of entry 54 and he translated the baby born Michael Kubinski. He told me the handwriting is quite old-fashioned, and if there are any specific words or phrases that are unclear, please let him know. Finally, I asked him for the parents’ names, and he gave the first names but wasn’t even close on the surnames.
Final Thoughts
To sum up Copilot’s transcribing capabilities, he can’t do whole documents with a lot of writing, and if a snip or screenshot he can transcribe some words, but most times he asks me for more information especially if I am working on a location and when I do, he can usually figure it out. Even with the not-so-great odds this is still a wonderful tool to have at your fingertips especially with all the old records that I just can’t fully figure out. Over time I am sure Copilot will be updated to be able to read all the old cursive writings, which is called OCR or Optical Character Recognition.
If you have an ancestry problem and need a little help, give AI a try. As far as which AI service to use, I will leave that up to you as I only know Copilot works fine for my needs. Remember, asking the right question is the key. You might be wondering if AI wrote this article.
…My answer, no. I have no doubt AI would do a good job or even a better job than me, but at the end of the day, this post came from me. If we all rely on AI, then our brain cells will die and in my old age we actually need to exercise our brains. I consider my difficult ancestry puzzles, running my own website my daily brain exercise. The AI website option is available on my website builder option, but with my website you get the real author.
