About

Hi! I'm Konstantin (Kostya) Popov, a programmer, a game-development manager and an amateur genealogist. Together with my partners, I make mobile games at a small studio.

I got into genealogy in 2025 and started the way most people do: genealogy forums, a records request to an archive, and then the parish registers of the Russian Empire, the books of births, marriages and deaths kept by Orthodox churches. Pretty quickly I realized I had one advantage: I know how to automate the boring parts.

So besides digging through archives, I built myself a set of tools: scripts for analyzing GEDCOM files, prompts for reading old handwriting with AI, automations for downloading documents, and AI workflows for making sense of everything I dig up.

Why this blog

The genealogy community is full of historians, local history buffs, retirees and passionate hobbyists, and not all of them are comfortable with code or AI. The most useful thing I can do is share what I build in a way that anyone can use.

Here I write about:

• the tools I use and how to set them up;
• how to use AI for genealogy, even if you're not a programmer;
• finds from my own research, mostly around Lyuga-Kaksi, my ancestral village in the former Vyatka Governorate of Russia;
• tips and tricks that aren't obvious.

My sources are Russian (parish registers, revision lists, wartime databases), but the approach of letting an AI agent take over the tedious part can be adapted to records from other countries too.

Things you can try

• Family Atlas: your family tree in several kinds of charts, plus analytics and shareable facts, right in your browser. Your GEDCOM file never leaves your device.
• A GEDCOM analysis skill for Claude Code and other AI agents. It flags anomalies in pre-1917 Russian Orthodox records: weddings during church fasts, possible premarital pregnancies, epidemics and more.
• An app for transcribing parish registers, built in Google AI Studio.
• A prompt for building a website about your village, and a recipe for finding its WWII soldiers in Soviet military records.
• Experiments with new models: analyzing revision lists and transcribing old handwriting with Astra.

Get in touch

Write to me at hello@vibe-genealogy.com to ask a question, share a find, or just say hi. My code lives on GitHub. And if my tools save you some time, you can support the project on Ko-fi.