This document discusses how major genealogy companies like FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage and FindMyPast are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the digitization and indexing of genealogical records. It provides examples of how each company is automating the extraction of data from sources like obituaries and newspapers. While automated indexing can scale to more records more quickly, it also introduces errors that users will need to correct. The document encourages users to continue indexing where needed, understand their role in improving automatically indexed records, and have patience as the capabilities of AI for genealogy continue advancing.

1. Artificial Intelligence and the Coming Revolution of Family History
Virtual Genealogical Association Webinar
November 16, 2019
Ben Baker – bakerb@familysearch.org
To view the presentation slides this handout accompanies, please go to:
https://www.slideshare.net/bakers84/artificial-intelligence-and-the-coming-revolution-of-family-history-presentation
Basics About the “Big 4”
• Good News
o FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage and FindMyPast (aka the “Big 4”) have each
published 5-10 billion indexed names of people from records
o All the “Big 4” utilize record hinting to help users source persons in their trees with
records. (Ex. Over 1B sources have been attached in FamilySearch Family Tree.)
o Hundreds of cameras worldwide continue to digitize millions of images per day
• Bad News
o Only a small fraction of historical records have been digitized
o Only a small fraction of the fraction of digitized images captured have been indexed
o Indexing isn’t keeping up with image digitization, especially in non-English languages
o For-profit genealogy companies are mostly using offshore indexing
o Only indexed records can be presented as record hints
Accelerating Records Publication
• All of the “Big 4” want to publish more records
• All of the “Big 4” are already using automated technologies to accelerate records publication
• Efforts are underway to provide abilities for homelands to better publish their own records
• More responsibility is moving to users to correct errors in records
Use of Automated Technologies by the “Big 4”
• FamilySearch - https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2333694
o Partnership with GenealogyBank to extract data from born-digital obituaries
o First run indexed 5M obituaries in 10 hours, saving about 150 man-years of indexing
o 23M obituaries auto-indexed as of Nov 2019, more likely coming
o Millions of historical newspaper death stories starting to be released
o Uses recent advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)
o Can produce even more information than indexing (Ex. In-law couple relationships)
• Ancestry – https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2019/10/28/powered-by-cutting-edge-
machine-learning-technology-ancestry-debuts-the-worlds-largest-searchable-online-obituary-
collection-providing-members-with-even-more-details-about-the-ancest/
• MyHeritage – https://medium.com/myheritage-engineering/face-recognition-and-ocr-
processing-of-300-million-records-from-us-yearbooks-a95d55c6ac58
• FindMyPast – https://abundantgenealogy.com/findmypast-announces-trial-of-revolutionary-
new-newspaper-search/

2. Basics of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence – Machines exhibiting human intelligence
o General AI – Still science fiction
o Narrow AI – Technologies that perform specific tasks as well or better than humans
• Machine Learning – A subset of AI. The practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn from it,
and then make a determination or prediction about something in the world
• Machine Learning is using computers so they can learn from data instead of writing rules (i.e.
code) to solve problems
• All of the “Big 4” have actually been using machine learning for a while
o Record hinting (person – record matching)
o Possible duplicates (person – person matching)
Necessary Technologies for Auto-Indexing
• Text Recognition
o Zoning/text tiling to separate into individual records
▪ Find record boundaries within/across image(s)
▪ Articles on a newspaper page
▪ Marriage records flowing across pages
▪ Pages of a probate record
o Segment text into lines
o Recognize typed and/or handwritten characters
o Use additional context to determine most likely words
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
o Named entity recognition (NER) – identify the names, dates, places, etc.
o Relation extraction – identify relationships between the names, dates & places
• Additional processing to get into format for publication, standardize data, etc.
• Notice the steps are similar to what a genealogist would do
Pros and Cons of Automated Technologies
• Pros
o Can produce records much more quickly than human indexing
o Can scale much larger than number of indexers
o Provides searchable/hintable records much sooner than they’d be otherwise available
o Is cheaper than paying for indexers and associated costs

3. o Can be used on records not well suited to human indexing
o Can extract more information than indexers may be able to
o Once trained, can be applied to languages with very few indexers
• Cons
o Sometimes doesn’t produce as good of results
o Requires more human judgment to properly attach as a source
o May require different methods of searching to find records
o Requires ability to correct errors in records
Beware of Automated Computer Indexing
“We all need to be aware that these types of errors will occur …
Even with the indexing errors, searching in digitized collections is much easier these days than it was
searching newsprint and/or microfilm of newspaper pages 20 years ago.
I greatly appreciate the efforts by companies like Ancestry.com …
I'm not complaining here - just making the point that we need to expect errors like this will be made,
and we need to be flexible in our searches if we don't get results when we use an exact name or date or
place.”
Randy Seaver, Blogger on GeneaMusings.com
https://www.geneamusings.com/2019/10/beware-of-automated-computer-indexing.html
FamilySearch Collections to Watch
The following collections on FamilySearch contain automatically indexed records:
• United States, GenealogyBank Obituaries, 1980-2014
More recent “born digital” obituaries, at least 23M done by a computer
• United States, GenealogyBank Historical Newspaper Obituaries, 1815-2011
Death stories taken from historical newspaper articles, hundreds of thousands published as of
Nov 2019, millions more coming
• New York, Wills and Deeds, ca. 1700s-2017
First foray into automatically indexing handwritten records
Many more coming for all 50 states eventually
User Corrections on FamilySearch
• Errors will be fixed fairly quickly by reporting via the Errors tab
• Ability to correct names available in many collections
• Ability to correct dates, places, relationships and more coming

4. What You Can Do
• Indexing is still valuable, especially in non-English languages
• Remember indexed data is the foundation for training machines to auto-index correctly
• Understand your role in correcting records that have been automatically indexed incorrectly
• Be patient as solutions continue to expand, perhaps on collections that don’t benefit your
research, remembering global users have much fewer records than many of us
• Pray for God’s help to bless these efforts
Bonus Tip – Image Search
Impatient and want to search images yourself? Try https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and
underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
Bill Gates