It was fascinating to apply new technology to an old problem. I learned more about the problematic 1891 census of Victoria, found an alternative census I didn't know existed, and was able to tabulate some information about the men, women, and children of Chinese ancestry in the Victoria area.
Category: Genealogy and AI
Use AI to improve your newspaper searching
In genealogy there are a hundred ways to spend money and we all need to be judicious about what subscriptions we need. Now that I'm paying for ChatGPT, I've been finding ways to incorporate it into my daily genealogical processes. For today's blog, I couldn't wait to share my newspaper search tricks with you, to come up with better ways to research.
Revamping Family Recipes with AI
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.
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.
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.