Designing & Using an AI Tool
Is it possible to create an AI (artificial intelligence) tool to query our family tree like a database query? For example, find all those in my tree who served in WWI. For instance, who in my family tree immigrated?
These could be parsed as instant reports to use however!
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@William F. Thweatt If you use one of the desktop genealogy programs suggested in the Solutions Gallery, you can easily create such a report. I use Family Tree Maker, and there are several other options such as Legacy and RootsMagic.
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How would you determine that?
Taking the WWI request for example, what would AI (or a regular human being) look for, a certain source attached or maybe an entry for military service in other info? In either case, the biggest problem is the dependency on whether the profiles are correct: are the sources attached to the correct individual, or did somebody accidentally attach a record for a different person with the same name? Should somebody be included if there's a military service event in Other Info, but no source supporting it? How would you separate somebody who actually fought in the war from somebody who may have been enlisted at the time but was never deployed? Plus there's still a lot of profiles for veterans that don't have their service indicated.
Immigration falls into a similar problem: what data would it look for and how reliable is that information? I've found most profiles for early American colonists are abysmal. Most are speculative and unsourced. Problems like the wrong generation being marked as an immigrant, or a person being merged with whatever person the editor could find from the old country that had similar names and dates. If you limit it to only sourced, documented immigrants, there are still questions about which documents are acceptable. U.S. census reports sometimes included an immigration year, but I've seen years entered for U.S.-born spouses of immigrants. Naturalization documents would be good, but not all immigrants naturalized. Port records are useful, but don't distinguish between people immigrating and people returning from overseas visits.
tl;dr: This is either a much, much more difficult request than it initially seems, or it's easy but extremely unreliable.
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