Why AI-Generated Family History Falls Flat
Genealogy sites are auto-writing family stories. But without your voice, those bland, fact-only versions will become the “official” ones. Here’s why it matters, and what you can do instead.
Major genealogy websites are automatically generating story-style summaries based on the facts in your family tree using details like locations, birth and death dates, and global historical events. These summaries are helpful for organizing information, but here’s the problem:
If you don’t tell your family’s story, these AI-made versions will become the official ones.
And they miss what truly brings family history to life.
These AI-generated stories feel empty and incomplete because they rely only on the website data—and completely miss your independent research and, most importantly, the meaning behind the facts.
Here’s what matters most and is missing:
Local Historical Context: What was life actually like in your ancestor’s town? What were the customs, the smells, the daily routines? When AI-generates this context, it is often wrong and filled with presentism (judging the past based on current standards).
Visual Imagery: What did their world look like? Were there tenements or farms? Streetcars or horse-drawn wagons? We connect emotionally through pictures—even if just described in words. Paintings, drawings, photographs, and maps all exist for us to use, but we have to select them. AI-generated ones are complete make-believe and we should use original work when possible.
Special Details: These come from local newspapers, archived letters, church bulletins, and family interviews. They’re where you find the real stories and delightful details that our family loves. Most of these items have not been digitized, and so we must transcribe them for our family history.
Without these elements, the story is technically correct but emotionally hollow. You get something like this:
The Dullness of Machine-Made Family History
William Brown was born in 1872 in Pennsylvania. He got married in 1895 and had three children. He worked as a laborer and lived in the same town until he died in 1938. During his lifetime, he experienced events like World War I and the Great Depression.
Technically? It checks out.
But emotionally? It’s boring.
Where’s the details of his home town? The experience of his work? The impact of war and the economy on the family? And then those odd stories we find, like the neighbor who kept chickens in her bathtub? Where’s the love and connection?
To solve for boring details, AI gets prompted to add details, and the result is something like this:
The Drama-Filled Family History Written by AI
William Brown entered the world in 1872, in the coal-dusted heart of Pennsylvania. He came of age in a country still stitching itself back together after the Civil War, and by 1895, he had found both steady work and the love of his life. Together, they raised three children under a roof built with calloused hands and quiet perseverance. A laborer by trade, William rarely left the town he called home—but through newspaper headlines, ration books, and whispered prayers, he lived the tremors of World War I and the crushing weight of the Great Depression. When he died in 1938, his story had never been written—but it was etched into the worn floorboards, the soot-stained walls, and the faces of the family he left behind.
This is definitely not boring.
And with all the metaphors, emotion, and visual imagery, what is fact and what is fiction is blurred. The solution to “boring” family history is not having AI fill-in the details for us.
Why AI Writing Falls Flat (And What Actually Works)
Most of the disappointing AI-generated stories come from what I call a single-pass prompt—when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, “Write a story about my ancestor” and drops in a few facts. The AI spits out something in a few seconds, and it rarely produces anything worth sharing.
AI needs more than just a sentence or two from us. AI needs direction, context, and iteration.
Real storytelling—whether done by a person or with the help of AI—takes drafts, curiosity, and feedback loops. Stories are built, refined with each pass through. It means making choices and highlighting what matters to the author (that’s you!).
That’s why Chronicle-making isn’t just writing with AI—it’s co-creating a meaningful story through conversation, conscious choices, and storytelling.
In the next post, I’ll share a behind-the-scenes look at the strategic AI prompts I used to write a book chapter. These prompts will help you take you genealogy facts, write your first draft (note the word first!), and develop your writing style. The first step to using these prompts is to build your outline, so the AI is working with the actual information that matters to you.
If you have an example of AI failing in writing family history, please add it in the comments. We could all use a good laugh!
More than a year ago I tried MyHeritage's “AI Biographer™" tool. In addition to my own comments my husband was quite forthright:
"MyHeritage’s sketch of the life and times of James Cudmore is a disgraceful fraud and an insult to the reader’s intelligence.
“Designed to mine scholarship and appropriate and re-shuffle commonplace opinion on historical matters, the AI squeezes out platitude upon platitude in turgid prose like a butcher making sausages, plop plop plop. The recipe is simple: find a plausible historical context for a person’s actions and announce, breathless with excitement at the discovery, that he had a place in it. In 1914 Joe Blow found himself caught up in one of the great historical upheavals of the twentieth century. He joined the Army. Mick O’Brien, short of spuds, emigrated to Australia in search of a better life, like countless others at the time.
“The scheme employs boiler-plated historical factoids as a cheap substitute for a careful survey of the period and Cudmore’s place in it, with no attempt made to weigh and consider the nature and causes of the historical trends to which he was exposed and to which he supposedly contributed.
“Take the first paragraph. Cudmore was born ‘into a period of colonial expansion’, says the sausage-machine. But wasn’t everyone born in this period born in it? How was Cudmore different? His birth came ‘just’—what does this imply?—three decades after South Australia was established as a British province. So what? And as for free settlement, that was the idea with the Swan River too, wasn’t it? How did James Cudmore’s arrival on the ‘Siren’ symbolise (what?) the influx of settlers seeking new opportunities. That is what new settlers do. They seek new opportunities. And how did his mother’s emigration from Scotland ‘represent’ the Scottish contribution and how and why should it be considered ‘significant’?
“In the next paragraph, the AI boiler-plates Cudmore into a large family, large because of high birth-rates don’t you know, and Jim finds himself farming, rather than developing a career in car manufacturing, say, or aeronautical engineering.
“Quite soon afterwards, James Kenneth, now too busy for a surname, is undergoing significant (?) social changes, forging national identity, creating economic progress, moving towards federation (which, we are told, united separate colonies under one government—well, it would, wouldn’t it?) and simultaneously raising four children.
“Then, after that, with wool a cornerstone, Australia transitioned from its vast roots, especially after WW1, and in Mosman Cudmore genteelly ‘passed away’.
“No doubt in his headlong rush through History James Cudmore came across a certain amount of fraudulent non-scholarship and bad prose. At least he was spared AI.”
You can read my full evaluation at
https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/myheritage-ai-review-part-2/
My preferred AI is Claude for my writing. Although ChatGPT is getting better, even ‘talking’ to you. I give it what I’ve already written, with grammatical errors included (my grammar sucks) but it’s getting my thoughts out of my head. It comes back with something way better than I could. It does take some tooing and froing when it uses words I’d never use. I’m getting better with my prompts. I ask the AI to use my conversational style of writing, check for grammar and clarity, keep to the facts I have given and not to add anything. I also have to be on the alert for USA vs UK/AU English spelling. I’ve asked it to use UK English, but it still misses some. I then refine the first/second and often third draft to get it how I want. Like with all writing, I can read something weeks later and wonder why I wrote it a certain way.