I spent last weekend doing genealogy research with Claude, and I have to say — it is really, really good at this. Better than I expected by a mile. It’ll take a pile of half-matching records, tell you which John Smith is actually yours, which one can’t be, and what document would settle it. I built a Skill out of what I learned; reply or DM me and I’ll send it over.
But the genealogy is only the first half of the story. Somewhere in the middle of all that searching I fell into something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
So, in looking for my wife’s ancestors, I learned that in 1935 the Irish government set up a commission to preserve the wisdom of the Irish people. Not the history exactly — the wisdom. The cures and the sayings and the weather signs and the stories, all the ordinary stuff that lives in people’s heads and vanishes when they do. Between emigration and the English language and the general drift of technology in the early 20th century, it was fading.
If we were doing that today we’d hire folklorists and send them out with recorders.
In their unique brand of Irish ingenuity, they sent it into the schools instead, and asked the children to go home and interview their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and write down whatever they were told.
Nearly three quarters of a million pages came back. Much of it in Irish. All of it in the children’s own handwriting.
When Claude turned up a book that had this collection, I started clicking through the scanned pages. I found the years and the schools lined up almost exactly with my wife’s grandparents’ generation in rural County Kerry. Her grandmother would have been twelve the year the entries were written. Twelve, possibly at a kitchen table somewhere with a pencil, taking down what somebody told her.
But flipping through scans of handwritten Irish was … suboptimal.
So I asked Claude to build a site — pull the pages from the two national schools in the parish, run the Irish through translation, index it by topic, put the original and the English side by side so you can read across. Then Claude went into Chrome, and set up a Firebase project, wired the whole thing up and deployed it. Before Claude, this would’ve been nearly impossible for me. Instead it took an afternoon.
It’s here if you want a look: https://wisdom-of-glenmore.web.app/
In there you’ll find such timeless classics as: How to make tweed starting from a sheep and three wild plants. Thirty-four names for cows, including one that’s magical. How to read tomorrow’s rain off the side of a mountain. And of course, a whole lot of stories about fairies.
None of it is grand, which is exactly why it’s worth having. It’s the texture of how people actually lived, the layer nobody bothers writing down because everyone in the room already knows it.
I’m confident somewhere in these entries is the handwriting — or the wisdom — of my children’s ancestors. And maybe yours!
Zooming out, two things have my mind spinning.
The first is just the afternoon of it. Claude tracked down ancestors, validated connections, found this collection, translated the Irish, indexed it, and built a site my family (and now anyone else) can browse.
The second is harder to shake. In 1935 a handful of Irish civil servants had the foresight to gather all this up and preserve it for generations they’d never meet. Ninety years later I fed it to a model so it could be handed forward again. Sort of a passing of the torch, from Éire to AI, preserving a special sort of humans-to-humans, context window for us and for whoever comes next.
And then it gets a bit more meta, and a it more personal.
Pre-training models isn’t about explaining. Nobody sits a model down and teaches it the world. You show it an enormous pile of ordinary, unedited material and it picks up the shape of it — the patterns, the defaults, what tends to follow what. Whatever explaining you do afterward sits on top.
Which, if I’m honest, is more or less how my kids are learning from me. It’s less about talks and explaining, as it is about ten thousand unremarkable things they watch me do when I’m not trying to teach anything at all. That’s how their model is trained.
And I know roughly what’s in that pile. And maybe its time I’m a bit more intentional about that.
Which is why I like to do this genealogy research. And its a big part of why I’m building Saalo, though I didn’t get there through any of this. I went looking for my wife’s family and found the same problem waiting for me, a century earlier, and much better documented. The children of 1937 had something to write down because the adults were right there — visible, doing the work in the open, close enough to be interviewed.
And that’s the bit that got me. Those kids were assigned to take notes. But most kids are taking notice already. They learn through osmosis.
In a way the kids are the models, and we’re training them — handing over the context, helping them make sense of it. And in another way we’re each the human in the loop on our own model, constantly grading our own behavior, adjusting, trial and error. As parents… a whole lot of error. We never really leave that mode.
So: go find your context. Pass it down. Ireland’s are free at dúchas.ie, and in the site above. If your people came from somewhere else, odds are decent something like them exists and Claude can help find it and breath fresh life into.
And then maybe close the laptop, put the phone down for a bit. Because your actions, your presence, your intention is what the next generation model is being trained on.
What models do we want to build?
Interesting article on combining old and new :) (I aim for digital detox but use AI for various things - just try to make it meaningful.)