Our special guest today, was an early pioneer in online collaboration in genealogy since the days of online bulletin boards. He has been blogging about Genealogy since 2006 at Genea-Musings on Blogger, and celebrating his 19th blogiversary in April 2025. Recently, Randy’s brought his considerable talents to the growing genealogy community on Substack as the (@geneaholic).
This is the April 2025 post on Genea-Musings that started this discussion: Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC).
Projectkin takes full advantage of the Substack platform that is offered to us for free. That allows us to provide community members with project recipes, programming, and vibrant conversations at no cost. Our patrons help support our operational expenses, ensuring that we can continue to offer these programs for free.
Stories are Hard: AI Can Help
As a platform, Substack is home to a diverse range of journalists, writers, and novelists. That’s wonderful for reading, but it can also be a little intimidating if you’re trying to write about your own family. Here at Projectkin, we’re all about encouraging families to get their stories told in any form that works. Today, our program focuses on ways to share these stories, even if you struggle with storytelling.
As a very special guest, Randy Seaver joins us today to share a process he has developed to streamline this workflow. The challenge, as he saw it, was to create…
“a ‘perfect’ genealogical sketch that would satisfy my family members' interest in meaningful stories with brevity, and this genealogist's desire for documenting sourced records with historical context.”
From the start, he felt that if he could readily create eBooks, audio, and video files from the research data he’d created, he could…
“create consistent ancestor and relative biographies that may interest my relatives and descendants.”
Like so many of us, he was focused on ways to interest his family and successive generations in the stories of their shared ancestors.
For many, the stories left behind by grandparents, great-grandparents, and other ancestors are hazy recollections supported by a few old photographs. As genealogists and family historians, we often try to gain a deeper understanding of our ancestors’ lives by anchoring these fragments to genealogical facts. A biographical sketch helps us organize these facts logically to gain a better understanding of the person and their motivations.
The Solution
Randy’s solution is an extraordinary example of what’s possible using a wide selection of the popular AI tools available today. As you’ll see in the recording, Randy is a master musician working the mighty Wurlitzer that is AI today. He shows us that once you move past AI as just a shiny new tool, you’re free to get creative and concentrate on the goal.
Recipe & Resources
In the spirit of “genearosity,” Randy has taken the time to pull details together to share exactly how he goes about this approach, the resources, prompts, and more. You’ll find them all in this nifty (and inspiring) PDF handout Randy prepared for today’s program:
During the presentation, Randy walked through the story of his great-grandfather, Thomas Richmond. To inspire you, Randy’s shared the audio links:
“Threads of a Lifetime” on suno.com/s/rgjDEHKKU9nWMsNI
Notebook LM’s AI-produced podcast episode, “The Deep Dive: Thomas Richmond: An Ancestral Biography” notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7accbff2-9847-4ff6-92ce-e94be7bf4f8e/audio?pli=1
So they’re also handy, Randy thought might find this list helpful as well:
Finally, there was such an interesting discussion in the Live Chat on Zoom during Randy’s program that I thought you might be interested in viewing it here as well.
This approach has the potential to help anyone get comfortable with AI as a tool. You’re more than welcome to share Randy’s project with friends and family on any platform:
When you have a moment, join the conversation in the comments and notes to follow.
I hope you enjoyed this program and the conversation with other members and participants. It’s an example of the kinds of programs we host here at Projectkin. The community is free and platform-independent.
Do you have questions about Projectkin and how it all works? Feel free to drop me a note either on the Substack platform in the link below or via email at Projectkin.org@gmail.com.
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