I’ve been doing genealogy research for a while now. I’m not an expert by any stretch, but I’ve put a lot of time into FamilySearch mapping out my dad’s side of the family. My grandfather was a Wade and my grandmother was a Webb, which is where my dad, Webb Wade, got his name. I’ve attached sources, read through records, and pieced together most of their stories in my own head.

The problem is that “in my own head” is about as far as a lot of it ever got. I’m sure there are inconsistencies sitting in that tree. A birth date that doesn’t match the census it’s attached to. A child born after a parent died. A death place that disagrees with every source on the record. And none of the stories are written down anywhere my nieces and nephews could actually read them.

So I’m starting a new project, and this time I’m doing it with Claude Code.

If you’ve done any genealogy, you know the research itself is the fun part. Finding the obituary. Spotting your great-great-grandmother in a census. Everything around that is tedium. Keeping a research log. Writing down every place you searched, including the ones that turned up nothing, so you don’t search them again next year. Tracking which people have a source for their birth, death, and marriage, and which don’t. Figuring out which census years someone should show up in and checking whether you actually found them. Keeping a to-do list of records you still need to go get.

Professional genealogists do all of that. Hobbyists like me mostly skip it. That’s exactly the part Claude Code is going to take over.

The plan is one project that holds everything. A tool called getmyancestors pulls my tree down from FamilySearch, and Claude Code loads it into a database it can query however it wants. From there it can run checks across the entire tree that I would never do by hand: impossible dates, duplicate people, the same town spelled six different ways, and the big one for me, people whose dates and places disagree with what most of their sources say.

It’s also going to do the research legwork. It knows the Wades came from New York and the Webbs from Alabama and Georgia, so it can work out which state censuses to look for, search free newspaper archives like the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and the state newspaper sites, and pull Find a Grave memorials. When it finds a record it thinks belongs to someone, it tells me how confident it is and why. Every search gets logged, dead ends included.

When it hits a wall, I’m the hands and feet. I’m building a small admin site I can pull up on my phone with a to-do list of the things only a person can do. Grab a record that’s behind a login. Run a Newspapers.com search and clip what I find. If I’m traveling, it can show me what’s nearby, like a cemetery plot I’ve been trying to confirm. And if the answer is sitting in a courthouse basement somewhere in Alabama, it can tell me which archive to contact, or put together a write-up I can hand to a professional genealogist.

The end result is a public website with a page for every person, their story written out, and every fact cited. My nieces and nephews will probably be the ones who use it most, but it’s built for anyone. Odds are some distant cousin will stumble on it someday.

None of this means I’m handing the family tree over to an AI. Claude Code doesn’t touch FamilySearch. It makes recommendations, and I make every correction myself. Part of that is about accuracy. Part of it is that I want to keep the story in my head. I never knew most of these people. Other than my dad, they were all gone by the time I was three. The records are all I have, and I want to actually know them, not just have them filed away.

So if something on the site is wrong, that’s on me. Claude Code can tell me it’s pretty sure two records are the same man, but I’m the one who decides.

I already used Claude Code to redesign brothersatthefront.com, the site with my family’s Civil War letters, and that was eye-opening. This project is a lot bigger. It’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to do for years and never would have, because the tedious part would have buried me long before I ever got to the fun part.

Living in this age with this technology is a dream. I get to do the parts I love, and the rest just gets done.