The technology

These do the most: read handwriting, translate, summarize, brainstorm, and write. If you only pick one thing from this whole page, pick one of these.

• Claude · claude.ai · the writer's pick, with the most natural-sounding prose for stories and biographies. Free to start.
• ChatGPT · chatgpt.com · great for planning, checklists, and brainstorming your next steps. Free to start.
• Google Gemini · gemini.google.com · best at getting documents and audio into text (transcription). Free tier; handy if you already use Google.
• Perplexity · perplexity.ai · a research-flavored assistant that cites its sources. Free version available.

Honest advice: start free, and upgrade only one of these (around $20/month) if and when you hit a real limit. You never need all of them paid at once.

• FamilySearch Full-Text Search · familysearch.org · AI reads unindexed handwriting and can surface your ancestor as, say, a witness on someone else's record. Free with a FamilySearch account.
• DeepL · deepl.com · the best free translator for European languages (German, Polish, Dutch, French, Italian). Free for limited length.
• Google Translate (camera) · point your phone at a printed foreign record. Great on print; treat handwriting results as a rough draft. Free.
• Transkribus · transkribus.org · a specialized tool for bulk handwriting (whole journals). Powerful, but a real learning curve and only 50 free credits a month. Not a quick point-and-click. For a few pages, a chat assistant is easier.

Best habit: transcribe first in the original language, then translate. Don't translate straight from a photo.

• A chat assistant (for dating & identifying) · ask "what era is this?", "what's this uniform/medal?" Now better than any dedicated photo-dating app, and free.
• Google Gemini · repairs tears and stains from a plain-English request, with a free daily allowance. The simplest of the lot, because there is no interface to learn: you just ask.
• Hotpot.ai · hotpot.ai · a couple of free restores a day, no sign-up. Scroll down the home page to "AI Editing." The tools are not at the top, and the first screen looks like something else entirely.
• Upscale.media · sharpens and enlarges a blurry scan, free and with no watermark. Tested September 2026: it served the entire site in Portuguese. Look for the language selector before you assume it is broken, and think twice before sending a room full of beginners there.
• Magic Hour · magichour.ai · the colorized result is good and you get three a day free, but the site is a crowded suite of video and image tools and the colorizer is genuinely hard to find. Fine if you enjoy poking at software. Not the one to hand a beginner.
• Palette.fm · not a free tool. One trial credit, then paid. The colorize quality is the best here, so it is worth knowing about, but do not send anyone there expecting free.
• MyHeritage · the easy one-stop. Enhance, Repair, Colorize, Restore Colors, Animate (the old Deep Nostalgia, now with several animation styles) are free to use with a free account, within limits. Scribe AI is the stingy one: reports put it at about two images on a free account before it wants a Complete or Omni subscription. If you already subscribe it is unlimited, which is why a subscriber can use it for months and never meet a paywall that a class attendee hits on their third document. Live Memory is the paid one: it needs a subscription. PhotoDater, a free date estimate, still exists but runs on the Photos page instead of appearing in the tool row, which is why it is easy to conclude it was retired. Records and trees still need a subscription.
• Reimagine · phone app only · search your app store for "Reimagine: Scan & Enhance Pics", from MyHeritage, and sign in with your MyHeritage account. Photograph a whole album page and it finds, straightens, and saves each photo separately, which is the fastest way to get a shoebox onto a computer. It carries the same tools as the website except Live Memory. There is no web version, and re-imagine.app is an unrelated company selling AI room design.

Free, lesser-known places that go well beyond the usual record sites:

• Chronicling America · loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america · over 20 million free historic newspaper pages from the Library of Congress. Find a clipping, then paste it into a chat assistant to clean up the faded print and summarize it.
• David Rumsey "Text on Maps" · davidrumsey.com · a computer read the words printed on tens of thousands of historic maps, so you can search a surname or place and find it lettered right on the map. Free, and genuinely surprising.
• OldMapsOnline · oldmapsonline.org · type a place and slide a historic map over today's map to see where great-grandma's farm actually was. Free.
• FamilySearch Places · familysearch.org · when a town changed names or counties, this shows the old names and which county or country governed it in a given year, which tells you where the records are actually kept. Free.
• Trove · trove.nla.gov.au · ~27 million free newspaper pages, best if you have Australian or British-colonial roots.

The big idea most classes skip: your DNA matches become understandable once you cluster them into family branches.

• DNA Painter: Shared cM tool & "What Are the Odds?" (WATO) · dnapainter.com · type in a shared-DNA number and see the likely relationships. Genuinely free and beginner-friendly, and the best on-ramp.
• AutoClusters · now built into the big sites (MyHeritage, GEDmatch, Ancestry ProTools). Groups your matches into color-coded family lines. The concept is gold; every good version now costs a little.
• AncestryDNA ethnicity update · if you tested with Ancestry years ago, look again this fall. A free update rolling out from late September 2026 doubles the number of regions. Nothing to buy or retest.

• Gemini Notebook · notebook.google.com · the podcast gets the attention, but the useful part for genealogy is that it answers only from sources you upload and links to the exact line it used. Load a county history, a probate packet and your own notes, then ask "every mention of the Hansen family, with citations." It will also draw a mind map and write a briefing you can hand a cousin. Google renamed this from "NotebookLM" in July 2026. Same tool, same notebooks. The free tier gives you a few audio overviews a day.
• Buzz · github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz · turns an old recording (a cassette you have copied to the computer, a voicemail, a home video) into a written transcript on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no weekly limit. It runs OpenAI's free Whisper speech engine behind a simple window: open the audio file, wait, save the text. For Windows, Mac and Linux. Free and open source. Download it only from that GitHub page; other download sites repackage free programs. The easier route is still to upload the recording to Gemini or ChatGPT, which also label who is speaking. Buzz is for the recordings you would rather keep private. Either way, paste the transcript into Gemini Notebook above and ask it questions.

Two free, credible podcasts to follow if you want to keep up: The Family History AI Show and Ancestors and Algorithms.

The big sites are racing to add AI. Promising, but try the free allowance before you pay, and verify anything labeled "beta":

• Ancestry Photo Insights · analyzes a photo or document in your gallery and suggests a date, a place, and a description, with its reasoning shown. Requires a paid Ancestry membership. Genuinely good at dating from visual clues (clothing, printing method, photo process) and at separating a document's content date from its publication date. Two cautions from testing it on my own gallery: some "findings" are simply your own tree data read back to you, so watch for reasoning that cites the metadata rather than the image. And the same item run twice gave two different answers, the second of which excluded a date already sourced on the record. Treat every panel as a lead, and never click Save over a sourced fact. Free assistants make a good control test: see Test a tool before you trust it.
• MyHeritage Scribe AI · reads, translates, and explains a document, gravestone, or old photo, and estimates when it was taken. Free for a limited number of images, then a subscription. Before it will run it makes you agree that your upload is processed by MyHeritage and by Google, and that you will not upload photos of living people without their permission. Read that box rather than clicking past it; it is the clearest statement on any of these sites of what "free" actually costs.
• Goldie May · goldiemay.com · a free Chrome extension that keeps an automatic research log; the ancestor timeline is free for a few people a month, and the AI features are a paid add-on ($15/month and up).
• MyHeritage GAIA · a chat assistant tied to your own family tree, announced in March 2026 but not yet released. Ancestry's equivalents (Ideas and the beta AI Stories) need a membership.
• Custom genealogy GPTs · e.g. "Genealogy Eyes" (point your camera at a headstone). Domain-tuned and powerful, and now free to use with a signed-in ChatGPT account, within the free plan's limits.