EP43: Ancestry's AI Stories, Model News, Scheduled Agents, Goodbye GPTs, AI Slowdown

This episode is sponsored by the Family History AI Show Academy

Beginning October 27, 2026, Mark and Steve are teaching Advanced Family History AI, the Level II course in their Family History AI series. The course is designed for genealogists with several months of experience using artificial intelligence tools who are ready to move beyond basic prompting to new tools and powerful techniques for researching and telling their family's story.

Register for Mark and Steve's classes at:

https://tixoom.app/fhaishow

DescriptionCo-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little report from the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference in Boston, where genetic genealogists were adopting artificial intelligence far faster than expected. They then look at Ancestry's AI Stories, which turn a single record into a narrated story about an ancestor, and why the record itself should remain the evidence.

The hosts explain why new models solving century-old math problems matter to family historians, as experienced genealogists begin bringing their hardest research problems to these tools, and what the planned retirement of custom GPTs means for researchers who rely on them for their saved prompts.

In the Tip of the Week, Mark sets up a scheduled agent that checks Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, Library and Archives Canada, and other repositories each week for newly released records in the places he researches, and compares how Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini handle the job.

In RapidFire, the hosts cover Claude's memory controls, which can keep one family's research from bleeding into another's, Apple's Gemini-powered Siri, and the calls to slow artificial intelligence development, ending with a reminder that genealogists can already do far more with today's tools than most realize.

TimestampsOpening00:06 Family History AI Show Academy: Advanced Family History AI Course

01:35 Trends from the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference: Adoption Goes Mainstream

05:46 Today's Headlines: A Preview of the Episode

In the News07:18 New Features at Ancestry: Document Transcription and AI Stories