Tag Archive | AI

Working with the Norwegian Farmbooks and AI

Apr30

My past process to get a translation of what a Norwegian farm book says about my ancestors and their farm was somewhat laborious. First I made a good scan of the page, then I used a Norwegian OCR program to get the text extracted, and finally I asked google to translate that resulting text. Often the result sounded stilted and certain words did not translate correctly, like farm (“pa”) would be garden. Click here for my past post about that process. 

Today I tried Claude AI on a few not so great photos of pages from my copy of the Etne-soga farmbooks for a distant relative and wow, just wow. Not only was the process much easier, just upload a photo, but the translation was way better and more informative.

Here is an excerpt from my exchange with Claude AI:

Green text is added to this exchange with Claude AI

 

When you click the down arrow it even explains the Norwegian abbreviations! This is what it told me.

Notes:

“f.” = født (born), “d.” = død (died)
“bygsla” = leased/rented farmland (a common tenure arrangement in old Norway)
“lensmannen” = the local bailiff/sheriff
“rdlr.” = riksdaler, the currency of the time
“Lausøyret” = movable personal property/chattels
“leiglending” = a tenant farmer who leased land rather than owning it

The text cuts off at the bottom of page 573 — there is more to the entry on the following page.

I am amazed that Claude knew what the document was (a Norwegian genealogical record) and could give me information like that about common abbreviations and words. Previously Google translate had used “built” for “bygsla” as well as other slight inaccuracies.

This was all free! I would be happy to pay a small subscription fee for such a terrific service.

I have also used Claude AI for handwritten German records. Some it did well. Others it found harder but it always told me why, discussing that horrible medieval German script.

AI is bringing in a wonderful new era for us family history researchers.

Using AI for Genealogy by Steve Little

Feb26

One of the most unusual talks at the recent i4GG conference (videos coming soon) was the one about the use of AI for genealogy by Steve Little, the AI program director for the National Genealogical Society (NGS).  I learned that it was how you phrased your question that could lead to more accurate answers, e.g. “you are a professional genealogist … ” I found out that AI, particularly the paid versions, could extract text from documents, even handwritten ones and translate in context. Here is my favorite slide from that talk. Personally my first impression of ChatGPT had been that it was great at sounding good while making stuff up.

Slide from Steve Little’s talk, used by permission

Steve will be speaking at RootsTech at 8 am Thursday this week and will also be available at the NGS booth as per his post on FaceBook.

Amusingly, in my own talk about using bioancestry to solve unknown parentage cases, I had experimented with using AI generated images to illustrate a few of my points. For example, when I asked the deepAI image generator for a Hungarian violinist I got this image whose hands are imperfect, but it still adds pizzazz to the slide.

No sooner has my favorite DNA conference (i4GG) ended, than it is time to get ready for Rootstech! No I won’t be there in person this year, too much to do to prepare for our move to Connecticut. Hope everyone has a great time. I will attend virtually, so if you are logged in there, you can click here to see if you are related to me! As all my ancestors are fairly recent immigrants (earliest 1860s), I have only 434 relatives at Rootstech, the closest being a fifth cousin. Oh well.