Genealogy encompasses all that life has to offer, and food is a big part of that journey. Food connects us to our roots viscerally, like a direct path to our memories. In this post I used AI to convert a fifty-year old recipe for muffins to modern day tastes and preferred baking methods. It's not perfect yet but with AI, it has the chance to get there.
Coffee Chat short – Stories, Records, and what they teach us: lessons from Chinese Canadian genealogy
Enjoy this free video short (25 mins) where I reflect on my latest three (four in practise) presentations given in British Columbia: Getting Started in Chinese Genealogy, 24 Feb 2026, Victoria Chinatown Museum, 2 pm and 7 pm. Finding the records for impossible genealogy – lessons learned from a Chinese Canadian genealogist – for genealogists… Continue reading Coffee Chat short – Stories, Records, and what they teach us: lessons from Chinese Canadian genealogy
Why LAC’s ATIP capacity matters for Canadian genealogy
As a genealogist, I celebrate every effort to make records more visible and more usable. The issue is not the records themselves, but access. More access means a deeper understanding of the stories that shape individuals, families, and communities. Over many months, my team and I have worked with the good people at LAC to improve understanding of, and access to, records that matter to our community. That work has produced real, methodical progress. We are already seeing better search functionality and greatly improved finding aids, and in some instances new finding aids were created through that collaborative effort. At the same time, I have heard firsthand about the pressures and challenges facing LAC staff. That is why I am dismayed by any suggestion that this progress may now be curtailed, shelved, or slowed in response to a government-wide call to reduce expenditures. Better finding aids are important, but if ATIP capacity is significantly reduced, the bottleneck does not disappear. It simply moves from finding the records to gaining access to them.
My Big Hairy Audacious Goal – creating an analytical framework with ChatGPT
Using artificial intelligence, I have created a work I never would have been able to do on my own. I have struggled to understand laws separately, such as the Chinese Immigration Act, 1885, the Revised Statutes of Canada, 1906, and the Chinese Immigration Act, 1923. My analytical framework is a synthesis of dozens of laws, from the British North America Act, 1867 to the repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1947. It’s not perfect, as a historically accurate work never can be, but it’s a foundation. It’s a process, a developing method, and a tool. Soon I might be able to use it to analyze cases.
Connecting in 2025 – a year in highlights
It's become a needed ritual. During the long, dark nights that are December in the Paris of the Prairies, I take time to reflect. I look at my blogs, the events from my calendar, the photos on my phone, and the stats on my site. I review the work I've done, and wonder how I can do better.
Me and ChatGPT, a story
I'm building a custom analytical framework in ChatGPT Plus (paid version, 5.2 as of December 2025) to help me understand Chinese Canadian records. Along the way, I've been blasted with one revelation after another. ChatGPT isn't like google. ChatGPT and other large language models are the T-Rex dinosaurs of computing: massively powerful but also with scary downsides. I want to use the big, powerful beast and I don't want to get eaten, and I think the slower we are to get on board, the harder it will be. I've learned in a short time how to set it up, what it does with private data, what keywords are important, how to create my first ChatGPT-generated prompts, and a few limits of the model. In the meantime, I am agog at what I've got so far, and this is only the beginning.
Held on the west coast: the history of Albert Head and William Head Quarantine Stations (1884-1958)
In this post, I looked at the iterations of Canada's western quarantine stations, where medical inspectors inspected incoming immigrants to Canada for disease. As a genealogist, I want to fill in the bare bones of facts with ideas about what life was like, and this post was by turns enlightening and horrifying.
How to decipher the secret codes to quickly find microfilmed vital records for B.C.
Despite pulling birth, marriage, and death records (BMDs) back in 2018, I'd forgotten this trick for reading registration codes.
Key Takeaways from the 2025 East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference
Every conference and institute I attend is memorable for different reasons. With the in person events, it's about the networks, people, and travel. And now with the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference, where I'll be madly applying new techniques and taking notes until they close the site and lock me out.
How to Access Chinese Case Files at LAC (2025)
The process for finding Chinese Case Files at Library and Archives Canada has changed considerably since I first wrote about the finding aids in 2020. Some individual Chinese Case file information is now findable through Collection Search. Use Advanced Search for searching by numbers.