I Used AI to Trace My Family Back Nearly 200 Years. You Probably Can Too.

I knew almost nothing about genealogy when I started this.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in New Jersey looking at an Italian birth record from 1855 on my phone and realizing it had just given me the name of another generation of my family.

That is what surprised me most about this project.

AI has made it possible to do family research that I would have had no idea how to do a few years ago.

My family had a head start. In 1998, one of my cousins built a Cirillo family tree that reached back to Rocco Cirillo and Anna Rosa Lucchetti in Salandra, a small mountain town in southern Italy.

That Rocco was my great-great-grandfather. We knew roughly when he lived, but his birth had never been verified with an original record.

Before him, the tree stopped.

So I decided to see what I could find.

I started with Rocco’s son Domenico, my great-grandfather, who was born in Salandra in 1880.

Italy has digitized a huge number of its historical civil records, but I had no idea how to navigate them. I didn’t know what archive to use, how the registers were organized or how to read handwritten Italian from the 1800s.

That is where ChatGPT became useful.

I’d have the old register open on my phone and send screenshots.

Does this say Cirillo?

What does this handwriting mean?

What year should I search next?

Am I looking at the right person?

I found Domenico’s original birth record. It said his father Rocco was about 25 years old.

That pointed me toward 1855.

Then I found him.

Rocco Cirillo. Act No. 115. Salandra, 1855.

For the first time, we had his actual birth record.

It named his father as Domenico Cirillo.

Then there was a small phrase next to Domenico’s name that I couldn’t read:

figlio di fu Rocco

Son of the late Rocco.

Those few handwritten words gave us another generation.

That older Rocco, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, was probably born in the late 1700s or very early 1800s.

We haven’t found his own record yet. But now we know his name, his son, his town and roughly where to look.

A family tree that once stopped in the 1800s now gives us a real path into the 1700s.

And I did most of this on my phone.

(I was also hoping somewhere along the way we might discover a forgotten Cirillo fortune. So far, no such luck.)

The records point much more toward contadini, people who worked the land.

Finding the actual documents made me more curious about who these people were.

Rocco was born in 1855, before Italy was a unified country. Salandra was still part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Two years later, a major earthquake struck Basilicata and damaged the town.

Once you know where and when someone lived, you can start asking much more interesting questions.

What was Salandra like?

What did a farming family eat?

What did childhood look like?

What was happening around them?

That is where AI gets fun again. You can take a name and a date from an old document and start building a picture of the world that person lived in.

The names themselves turned out to be pretty interesting too.

Rocco. Domenico. Rocco. Domenico.

Eventually Domenico became Dominick in America.

I’m Dominick.

My son, born in 2022, is Dominick too. (Apparently nobody in this family was especially interested in coming up with new names.)

What my cousin and I want to build from this

My cousin and I had already talked about digitizing our family tree.

Doing this research made us think about something bigger.

More like a family-owned digital archive.

The original records would stay at the center of it, along with photos, stories, audio, video, translations, locations and the sources behind what we know.

Then AI could help with the work around them.

An AI agent could help figure out what record to search for next, work through archives, translate old documents and identify gaps in the family history.

It could also help turn what we find into things people actually want to keep.

Take Rocco’s 1855 birth record. We would preserve the original scan exactly as it is, but we could also create an annotated version that points out his name, his parents and the phrase that led us to another generation.

Or create an illustrated companion piece that tells the story of the record and the world around it, something you could print for a family book, frame or give as a gift.

The original record stays preserved. The AI helps make it easier for the rest of the family to understand and enjoy.

For us, the next research question is already clear.

Who was the older Rocco?

We know his son was Domenico. We know the family was in Salandra. We know he had died by 1855.

An agent that understood the family archive could use those facts to help identify which marriage, death or other record is most likely to tell us more.

Most people probably have names, stories, old photographs or some half-finished family tree sitting somewhere.

A few years ago, I would have had no idea how to turn that into real research.

Now the barrier is much lower.

You don’t need to know how an Italian civil archive works, how to read 19th-century handwriting or where to start looking. AI can help you figure that out as you go.

If you’ve ever wondered who came before the names you already know, there is probably more out there than you realize.