STOP DUCT-TAPING YOUR ANCESTRY TREE!!! AI can help you, I'll show you how

I waver between anger and despair when looking at other people's scantily-sourced Ancestry.com trees. I probably should not look at trees that appear in hints because I find it about as gloomy as watching the news. I think some genealogy newbies see a source and just click it without even looking at it; like it's a matching game. Until it isn't. Like, HELLO BOLT DESCENDANTS - Elizabeth's last name is NOT "Brownlie" - check the records! That's a 120 year piece of duct-tape you are using to say that Elizabeth WEAVER who was born in 1722 was having a baby in 1840's Scotland! Grrrr....

Zach Weaver Simple Search hits

It is now my goal that when I die, I will have the most well-sourced Ancestry tree the world has ever seen. FamilySearch and AI are going to help me achieve that goal and I am going to show you how. 

Currently, I am in a rabbit hole I call "Westmoreland Weaver World" - the Westmoreland in Virginia and thank you God they never had a courthouse fire!!! That's three for three counties - Westmoreland, Fauquier, and Laurens, South Carolina. And thank you ancestors for living your lives in non-burned counties!!! And thank you LDS Church for filming the records of these non-burned counties which are free to access from the comfort of my home. (Thank you period for all filming, I am very grateful.)

Soooo, I have written before about FamilySearch Full Text Search and FamilySearch Simple Search which has now been incorporated into the Full Text search page - YAY! But let me show you why you need to use BOTH searches for sources. Our case study will focus on Elizabeth Weaver Bolt's brother, Zach. Not entirely sure what his name was as he appears as "Zachariah", "Zacharias", and his neighbor and Declaration of Independence signer, Richard Henry Lee refers to him as "Zachary Weaver". *Sigh* Ok, so yes, I did do a Full Text Search with all those name variations, but for some reason, it missed some records he was in until I pasted his FamilySearch ID number into Simple Search. Weirdly, the documents returned were not already attached to him, but the AI knew to return those.

Caveat - and I hate to say it out loud, but FamilySearch's transcriptions can be pretty garbled. And unfortunately as of this writing, they no longer allow you to edit and correct the mistakes. Oftentimes, I will use their "Summarize the document" link to see if I can use that to add to the comments section when attaching a document to a profile; sometimes it's a hit and sometimes it's a miss. Because I am in the Weaver World rabbit hole, I have been uploading the documents to Claude's Fable 5 AI and it transcribes and summarizes what in tarnation they were talking about three hundred years ago! I do follow the Coalition of Responsible AI in Genealogy's Disclosure principle to cite AI use and before I paste in something I will write: "Summary by Claude Fable 5 AI", for example. I download a JPG of the image from FamilySearch and then upload it to Ancestry's "Facts" by clicking "Add" on the Facts page. I then list it as a "Legal Document" and under "Description", I copy and paste in the FamilySearch source info which can be found by clicking the "Information" link on the document in FamilySearch.

As of today, my FamilySearch contribution score for 2026 is 373. Feel free to race me!