Course: 2027-01
Practical AI For Genealogists: Foundations and First Steps
Virtual via Zoom | 21-25 June 2027 | Registration opens 3 February, 2027, 1:00 pm ET
Faculty:
- Coordinator and Instructor: Mark Thompson
- Other Instructor: J. Stephen Little, Jr.
Tuition:
- Regular Price: $615
- NGS Member Price: $575
Description:
This course equips genealogists with practical, accessible AI skills they can use immediately and responsibly: prompting techniques, privacy-awareness, source-based AI research and summarization, writing assistance, and ethical practice. This course gives genealogists a safe, practical, nontechnical entry point into AI. It is built around real family-history tasks, clear guardrails, and repeated hands-on practice, so students leave with useful habits rather than vague enthusiasm. The virtual format makes the beginner course accessible to students who want guided first steps from home.
Level of Instruction:
Beginner AI user; intermediate genealogical skills. Students may be new to chatbots but should already be comfortable using computers and online genealogy resources.
Course Prerequisites:
There are no formal prerequisites. Students should have basic computer skills, access to online genealogy resources, and willingness to create or use accounts with one or more AI chatbots. Sample materials will be provided so students do not need to use sensitive family information, although students are encouraged to use their own family research projects responsibly throughout the course.
Special Course Requirements:
Students need a laptop or desktop computer capable of accessing the internet, online genealogy websites, and cloud-based AI services. A stable internet connection and Zoom access are necessary for a positive learning experience. A headset with a microphone is strongly recommended. There is no assigned homework, although optional exercises will be provided for those who want extra practice.
Recordings:
Sessions will be recorded and available through July 9, 2027.
NOTE: All times are listed in Eastern Time.
Live Sessions may be subject to schedule adjustments by your course coordinator.
| Day | Session | Time | Session Title | Description | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Course Welcome and Orientation: The Big Picture | Meet your classmates and get introduced to the course and the most important aspects of AI. You’ll leave with a clear, balanced picture of where AI can help family historians, where caution is critical, and why careful human judgment stays at the center of your research | Thompson | |
| 2 | Using AI Responsibly | What happens when you put information into a chatbot? Learn practical, plain-language rules for privacy, permission, and disclosure, including the settings that keep you in control and the habits that protect sensitive family information and the privacy of living relatives. | Little | ||
| 3 | Chatting with Your Chatbot: Prompt Basics | Learn the art of asking the right questions, in the right way, to get genealogy gold from your AI chatbot. You’ll practice giving useful context, refining answers through follow-up conversation, and using prompt patterns that turn vague requests into helpful answers for everyday genealogy tasks. | Thompson | ||
| 4 | Summarizing Family Records with AI | Do you have long documents, letters, or research notes you’ve never had time to fully digest? Learn how AI can summarize lengthy records, correspondence, and transcripts so you quickly see what matters, while checking every summary against the original source. | Little | ||
| 2 | 5 | Saved Prompts Made Easy | Stop retyping the same instructions every time you sit down with AI. Learn to save and reuse your prompts, and use project spaces to keep your instructions and materials together, so repeated genealogy tasks become quick, consistent, and easy. | Little | |
| 6 | Your First AI-Assisted Research Project | Imagine having a tireless research assistant to help you work through a research question. In this guided session, you’ll plan, run, and document a small AI-assisted research project, while you stay firmly in charge of the conclusions. | Thompson | ||
| 7 | Extracting Facts from Text | Names, dates, places, and relationships are often buried deep in wills, letters, and narrative records. Learn how AI can pull these facts and clues out of the text and into organized notes or tables that you can review, verify, and put to work in your research. | Little | ||
| 8 | AI-Enhanced Image Analysis | Your family photos and scanned records hold more information than meets the eye. Discover the practical uses and limits of AI for analyzing photographs, scanned documents, printed forms, and readable handwriting, from spotting clues that help date a photo to capturing the details on an old certificate. | Thompson | ||
| 3 | 9 | AI Tools at Major Genealogy Sites | The genealogy websites you use every day are adding AI features at a rapid pace. Cut through the hype with an honest comparison of these built-in tools, and learn where each one fits in a responsible personal research workflow. | Little | |
| 10 | AI-Enhanced Writing Tools | Discover how AI can act as your personal writing coach, whether you’re working in a chatbot or with the AI features built into Microsoft 365 and Google Docs. You’ll see how these tools can help you turn research notes into readable prose, fix grammar, and improve clarity. | Thompson | ||
| 11 | Research Documents with Gemini Notebook | Bring a whole collection of family documents together in one place and easily ask question after question of it. Learn how to use Gemini Notebook to gather, organize, and analyze multiple documents for your family history research, checking its answers against your original sources along the way. | Little | ||
| 12 | Staying Current in a Rapidly Changing AI World | AI tools change almost weekly, and keeping up can feel like a full-time job. Build a simple, sustainable routine for tracking new tools, model changes, and emerging risks, so you can stay current and confident without feeling overwhelmed. | Thompson | ||
| 4 | 13 | Use AI to Stay Organized | Consistent names, dates, places, and research logs make every part of your research easier, but keeping them that way takes time and practice. Learn how AI can help you standardize your information, keep your research logs up to date, and bring order to your files and folders, so you spend less time organizing and more time researching. | Thompson | |
| 14 | Manage Conflicting Evidence with AI | Conflicting dates, names, and places are a normal part of genealogy research, but they can be maddening to sort out. Learn to use tables and comparison prompts to spot discrepancies, organize conflicting evidence, and prepare clear questions for further research, while catching AI errors before they end up in your family tree. | Little | ||
| 15 | Transforming Texts: Changing How Texts Look and Sound | Old records can come in unfamiliar languages, archaic legal phrasing, or dense, hard-to-follow prose. Learn how AI can translate, simplify, reformat, and modernize difficult text while preserving its historical meaning. | Little | ||
| 16 | AI and Your Favourite Genealogy Programs | Your favourite genealogy programs each shine at different things, but moving your information between them has always been the hard part. Learn how AI can carry your information from one program to the next, turning a photo into a usable family tree, an ancestor’s profile into a timeline, or a list of places into a map, while you verify the results at every step. | Thompson | ||
| 5 | 17 | Creating Family History Multimedia with AI | Bring your family stories to life for relatives who may never read a research report. Learn to create engaging audio, images, slides, and short-video concepts for sharing your family history, with clear provenance and disclosure so that AI’s invented details never become family facts. | Little | |
| 18 | Discussion: Bringing It All Together | Reflect on the week with your instructors and classmates, and bring your remaining questions to an open discussion. You’ll leave with a practical plan for putting AI to work in your own genealogy research, along with a clear path for continuing to grow your skills. | Thompson | ||