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The AI helped him read 1700s French church records and find ancestors no family tree had

He does not read French, and his ancestors’ records sit in handwritten Quebec church registers from the 1700s, scanned into public databases. Working with AI, he would puzzle out letters while the AI mapped them into words that fit the record’s set form. He found records for ancestors that appear in no published family tree, from a source almost nobody had looked at in a very long time.

How it works

  1. Open the scanned registers
  2. Work through the handwriting letter by letter with AI
  3. The AI fits readings into the record’s standard wording
  4. Identify ancestors
  5. Records found that no tree lists

Why it’s worth knowing

The ink bleeds, the priests wrote badly, and the records are formulaic: that mix is exactly where a patient reading partner pays off.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on reddit.com. See the original ↗

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