Tools

Everything I've built for genealogy while writing this blog. Most of it is free or nearly free, and each tool has a post with the details. Missing something? Write to me.

Family Atlas

Open a GEDCOM file and see your family tree as a pedigree tree, a fan of ancestors, a timeline against the backdrop of history and more, with analytics and shareable fact cards. Everything runs in your browser.

For anyone with a family tree exported from Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Gramps or similar.

GEDCOM analysis skill

Finds in a family tree what would take weeks by hand: weddings during church fasts, possible premarital pregnancies, "replacement" names, clusters of deaths, mismatched patronymics and about twenty more checks, tuned to Russian Orthodox traditions before 1917.

For anyone with a GEDCOM tree and Claude Code or another AI assistant that understands skills.

Parish register transcription app in Google AI Studio

Transcribes up to ten pages of a Russian Empire parish register at a time with Gemini: births, marriages and deaths. A list of the parish villages and one page you transcribed by hand noticeably improve accuracy.

For anyone with a Google account working through Russian parish registers; free within Google's limits.

New angles for old photos

An app in Google AI Studio that shows an old photo from three new viewpoints: left, right and slightly above. Instead of an eerie "animated" face, the camera moves around the scene.

For anyone who wants a fresh look at family photos from the archive.

Every WWII soldier from one village

A prompt for Claude in Chrome or Claude Code: the agent goes through Pamyat Naroda, the Russian Ministry of Defense's WWII database, and builds a table with names, birth years, fates and links to the record cards. A couple of hours instead of a week.

For local historians and anyone compiling the soldiers of an ancestral village in the former USSR.

A local history website in 30 minutes

A prompt that has Claude Code or Cursor turn your materials into a finished website: the village's history, documents, a list of soldiers. Publish it on free hosting, no programmer needed.

For anyone who has collected material about an ancestral village and wants relatives to find it.

Analyzing revision lists with an AI agent

Not a program but a method: give revision lists transcribed into a table to a Claude Code or Codex agent. It finds marriages between households, epidemics, good years for births and other traces of village history.

For anyone with several revision lists for the same village.

A great-grandfather's farmstead in 3D

From a sketch drawn from memory and a description, Codex builds an interactive 3D model of a peasant farmstead, drawing on studies of Vyatka farmsteads and photos of carved window frames. It helps bring back memories when you talk with relatives.

For anyone whose family home no longer exists but is still remembered.