Projectkin Live: This week—“ABC” Ancestor Bios with Randy Seaver

Thank you so much for joining us today. So many of your names flew by faster than I could follow, but I know I saw you, Jennifer Jones from tomorrow morning in Australia, and Jane Chapman in New Zealand. Meanwhile, this afternoon across Canada and the US, we watched as Bill Moore, Lisa Maguire, Linda Teather, Kathy Stone Emily Gravelle, Kyla Bayang, Dan our Genealogy Assistant, and gosh Paula Collins, B Toni and so many more chimed in. 😊 Truly, it was lovely to see so many friendly, welcoming profiles. I love using these sessions to give you a preview of the week ahead. I’m afraid that I was so excited about my special guest today, Randy Seaver, (and constrained by a voice-swallowing cold) that I neglected to mention the TWO (count ’em 2!) special Mission: Genealogy roundtable sessions scheduled this week. More on that below! First, here’s a quick link to registration for Randy’s event on Thursday: Randy Seaver is an old pro at helping others in genealogy and family history storytelling. You may recognize him from his GeneaMusings.com site on Blogger that includes an archive that goes back to 2006. Since 2014, he’s been an active participant on DearMYRTLE’s remarkable bimonthly Live program hosted on YouTube, Mondays with Myrt. I’m afraid I neglected to mention that her next session is on… Monday! 9 AM PT and 12 PM noon across the Americas. In today’s session, Randy provided a preview of what he’ll be discussing and demonstrating on Thursday, as well as a compelling discussion of how AI-based storytelling can fit in the larger scheme of genealogy research and the larger challenge of getting our family excited about our stories. He shared a remarkable list of examples of the storytelling forms that AI can help you with, including Poetry, Lyrics, Films, Children’s Books, and more.Randy offered a handy breakdown of which AI platforms provide which kinds of online research (ChatGPT, Grok, CoPilot, Perplexity, and Gemini, but not Claude, for example). I love the simple, straightforward explanation he offered for each platform and how we might use them to leverage profiles already accessible today, and the context for this kind of writing. Part of what makes Randy’s work so compelling is the openness of it to welcome the work of so many others. This is so important right now as we’re all learning how to make the best use of these, too. Randy cited many others we might know from RootsTech, Facebook, YouTube, or right here on Substack like Denyse Allen, Carole McCulloch, and Thomas McEntee. Hang on, are there others you think might appreciate this? Just share the post!Also This WeekCircling back to my sister publication at Mission: Genealogy: Did you know that I started it with my remarkable GenStack friend Robin Stewart? We could see just what a delightful place Substack had become for family historians and genealogists and we knew that we needed a clubhouse. I was first thinking about a place to get pointers on using the platform (last week’s Office Hours.) It was Robin who realized we’d also benefit from roundtables to just talk about our work. That’s what’s coming at our two events this week: At Atlantic- and Pacific-friendly on Tuesday and Wednesday. Joining me for these programs are two special co-hosts: Bill Moore and Jane Chapman, who bring the real genealogy chops to the effort. See details and registration links at: MissionGenealogy.org/events. You can learn more about the publication-based community itself, of course, at (you guessed it,) Mission: Genealogy.Did someone forward this post? Let’s get you your own free subscription, eh? Drop your email here and you’re in. Unsubscribe anytime.An Insider Tip:By the way, did you know that the Substack app is a terrific place to sit back and read, watch, or listen to Projectkin — any your entire reading queue of materials. Did you know that an increasingly higher percentage of views of our work are generated from the app? I therefore conclude that, as publishers, we have an incentive to encourage our readers to use the app. I know Substack gets more data about us when we use the app, but I wondered why I should use it. I found this a convincing argument. 😉 Get full access to Projectkin at projectkin.substack.com/subscribe