How Rooted History Works

We use a team of specialized AI agents working together to transform your FamilySearch data into accurate, compelling family stories.

Our six-pass system reflects a philosophy: slow down, travel back in time, and see your ancestors in their world—not ours.

Two Systems, One Goal

Rooted History has two powerful systems: one for generating biographies and another for investigating your family tree. Both use multiple AI passes to ensure accuracy and quality.

Biography Generation

A 6-pass pipeline that extracts data, crafts narratives, and fact-checks everything before delivery.

6 AI passes • Database prep • Fact verification • Copy editing • Up to 8 thematic lenses (5 standard, 3 conditional)

Investigations

Ask any question in plain English and get historically-contextualized answers about your ancestors.

Content validation • Query planning • Narrative synthesis

The Biography Generation Team

Three specialized AI roles work across six passes, each bringing unique expertise to create accurate, compelling family narratives.

PASSES 1-3

The Researcher

Data Aggregation & Contextual Enrichment

Works across three passes to prepare your ancestor's data:

  • Pass 1 (Database Prep): Queries 9 PostgreSQL tables to build a complete structured dataset—facts, relationships, timeline, and quality assessment.
  • Pass 2 (Content Extraction): For ~30-40% of ancestors with life sketches or obituaries, AI extracts additional details like personality traits, unknown relatives, and career specifics.
  • Pass 3 (Historical Context): Generates 150-250 words of era-specific context about what life was like in that place and time. Heavily cached to reduce costs.
PASSES 4 & 6

The Biographer

Narrative Composition

Creates two types of narratives:

  • Pass 4 (Main Biography): Writes a comprehensive biographical narrative that scales from 1,200 to 3,400 words based on available data. Verified facts appear in bold, with historical context woven throughout. Standard ancestors get ~2,000 words; rich data with unique circumstances can reach 2,750+ words.
  • Pass 6 (Lenses): After the biography is validated by The Editor, generates 5-8 thematic lenses in parallel—focused perspectives on daily life, technology, politics, faith, education, and (when applicable) work, migration, and military service.
PASSES 5A & 5B

The Editor

Fact Verification & Copy Editing

Works in two phases:

  • Pass 5A (Fact Checker): Validates every fact against source data. Corrects dates, places, names, and relationships. Ensures all claims match your FamilySearch records and historical context before delivery.
  • Pass 5B (Copy Editor): Polishes grammar, flow, and style without changing any facts. Improves readability while preserving all historical claims and verified information.

The Investigations Team

When you ask a question about your family tree, three specialized agents work together to understand your question, find the answer, and explain it with historical context.

The Sentinel

Content Moderation

Validates all requests for safety and appropriateness. Ensures questions are about genealogical research and prevents misuse. Guards against attempts to access inappropriate data.

The Archivist

Query Planning

Translates your natural language question into precise database queries. Understands genealogical concepts like generations, relationships, and family structures to find exactly what you're looking for.

The Historian

Narrative Synthesis

Takes the raw query results and transforms them into a narrative answer. Adds historical context, explains significance, and helps you understand what the data means for your family history.

Why Multiple Passes?

Accuracy Over Speed

A single AI pass could generate a biography quickly, but it would risk "hallucinations"—invented facts that sound plausible but aren't true. Our six-pass system catches these errors before they reach you. Each pass has a specific job, and no single pass tries to do everything.

Specialization

Different AI models excel at different tasks. We use fast, precise models for data extraction and fact-checking, and our most capable model for creative writing. Each agent does what it does best.

Clear Distinction

Verified facts from your FamilySearch data appear in bold, making it easy to distinguish sourced information from historical context. You always know what's verified.

Quality Assurance

Every biography is verified before delivery. Our Editor validates facts against your source data and polishes the prose, catching errors before they reach you.

See It In Action

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