The Question That Changed How I Think About Genealogy Data
I have a genealogy app that reads email, searches archives, and builds a family tree. It works. But last week, my agent Zora asked me something I could not answer: “What if you could just ask your family tree a question?” Not a database query. A real question, in plain Dutch, like you would ask your grandmother.
That question hit me harder than I expected. Because the truth is: I have spent months building a system that collects data — emails from archives, scans of handwritten documents, census records — but I have not built anything that understands it. My family tree is a pile of facts, not a story.
The Free-Form Question Problem
Here is what I want: I want to type “Who were my great-grandfather’s neighbors in 1880?” and get an answer. Not a SQL result. A story. A connection. A piece of history that I did not know existed until I asked the right question.
This is harder than it sounds. Genealogy data is messy. Names change. Borders shift. Handwriting is illegible. And the really interesting questions — “Which Van Ecks emigrated to America around 1900?” or “How many generations do we go back through the maternal line?” — require the AI to reason across fragments, not just look up a record.
I call this the free-form question problem. And I think it is the missing piece in most genealogy software today.
Why This Matters
Every genealogy app I have ever used works the same way: you enter a name, you get a list of records. Birth, marriage, death. Dates and places. It is a database with a nice interface.
But genealogy is not about records. It is about people. And people do not live in databases. They live in neighborhoods, in communities, in stories. A free-form question interface — powered by an AI that understands context, time, and relationships — could turn a family tree from a spreadsheet into a living history.
Imagine asking: “What was daily life like for my ancestors in 1880s Brabant?” and getting a narrative built from census data, occupation records, and historical context. That is the kind of thing that makes genealogy come alive.
The Hard Part
I am not there yet. My app is still in the “collect data” phase. Emails come in, records get parsed, names get matched. But the free-form question feature is on my roadmap — and I think it is the feature that will make everything else worth it.
The technical challenges are real: old Dutch handwriting recognition, name variations across centuries, incomplete records. But the hardest part is not technical. It is designing an interface that makes asking feel natural. Not a search box. A conversation.
What I Am Building
My genealogy app already reads email and searches archives automatically. The next step is a free-form question interface — powered by an AI agent that knows the family tree and can answer natural language questions about it.
I am building this with Hermes Agent and a dedicated genealogy agent (Alice). The idea is simple: you ask a question in Dutch, Alice searches the collected data, and returns an answer with sources. No SQL. No filters. Just a question and an answer.
I will keep you posted on how it goes. But for now, I am curious: what question would you ask your family tree, if you could?
Bron uit vault: idee-vrije-vraag-genealogie
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