Genealogy and AI: my first kick at the can.

A few years ago, all the talk in the family history world was about DNA. But over the last year, a new topic has taken over genealogy blogs and publications: artificial intelligence or AI. I’ve seen a few webinars and read several articles on the use of AI in genealogy, but just as I had avoided doing DNA for a couple of years, I had too much else on my mind to embrace AI.

That is until… I was working on a project on given names for my genealogy research group. As I investigated one given name, questions came up. When I put the name into Google looking for information and history, I had lots of hits. However, most 'histories' were very short and provided no real context. It was at that point I decided to turn to AI. I opened the free version of ChatGPT in my browser (I don’t have the app or a paid subscription). 

I wrote this query (called a 'prompt' in the AI world), “Please write a 500-word history of the given name Kathleen.” What ChatGPT spit out was a comprehensive history. One of the things that stood out to me was that it said Kathleen did not become really popular in the English-speaking world until the 1900s.

As with most genealogy research, the answer to one question invariably leads to at least one new question. I looked at my tree and sure enough, while there were Kathleens in the 1900s, there were none in my tree prior to that. There were, instead, several Catherines. Hmmm, I thought. I guess the first Kathleen was a carry forward of the name Catherine. 

I did another ChatGPT prompt, “Please write a 500-word history of the given name Catherine.” Again, I received a comprehensive history of the name. At this point I noticed that there seemed to be more useful information to me in that essay than in the one on Kathleen. So I compared the two histories. For Catherine, the history was completely focused on the name in Ireland, England and Scotland. That’s when I realized that in the history for Kathleen, three of the seven paragraphs were on the USA. I didn’t care about the use of the name in the USA. I was only interested in Ireland and the UK. While I have no idea why ChatGPT wrote each name history differently (one focusing on USA and the other not), I knew enough to realize that I could refocus my first request. 

I wrote a new prompt, “Please write a 500-word history of the given name Kathleen focusing on Ireland and the UK making no reference to the USA.” The new results included political and religious context for my regions of interest, which made it much more useful for my purpose. Aha, I thought. I’m getting the hang of ChatGPT. I need to be more specific, and not only do I need to describe what I want, but I also need to describe what I don't want.

I now understood that the name Kathleen became popular in the 20th century because of a resurgence of interest in Irish culture. But I wondered about the relationship between the names Kathleen and my earlier ancestors named Catherine. Was there really a connection? So I wrote a new query, “Please write a 500-word essay on the relationship between the given names Kathleen and Catherine focusing on Ireland and the UK and ignoring the USA."

Those results were excellent. It had taken four tries but between all the essays, I was able to come up with my own theory about my name in my family history, and here it is. 

The English completed their takeover of Ireland in the early 1600s, ending Gaelic rule. Eventually Catholicism was banned and Anglican Protestantism became the state religion. Anything Gaelic or obviously related to the Roman Catholic religion was forbidden. Gaelic names, such as Caitlin, popular during the Medieval period, went out of favour. But the name Catherine was used in several countries by both Catholics and Anglicans. Catherine was also connected to the name Caitlin as both are believed to have come from the same Greek origin. Also, Catherine was the name of a very prominent Roman Catholic saint: Catherine of Alexandria. 

Therefore, by naming a child Catherine, the Irish could surreptitiously assert their Gaelic roots and their Catholic religion without offending the English. But as the Irish independence movement took hold at the beginning of the 20th century, everything related to pre-English Ireland, including names, grew in popularity. I believe that Kathleen is a continuation of Catherine and that Catherine is a continuation of Caitlin.

Would I have come to this same conclusion without the help of AI? Probably, but it likely would have taken a lot more time to get there. But this is just one small example of what AI can do for genealogy research. There are so many more. I feel as if I need a whole lifetime to explore the possibilities.