Creating a Genealogy Word Cloud: Visualizing Your Family Tree

If you’d like to see a visual demonstration, you can watch my YouTube demo HERE.

I belong to a Facebook group called Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and recently, someone posted (see note below) about using a GEDCOM file and creating a surname word cloud. I thought it sounded interesting, so I decided to try it with ChatGPT 4o. ChatGPT 4o is the paid version of Chat, but there is also a free version.

First, I went to my Ancestry account and downloaded a GEDCOM file. You can do that by going to your “tree view.” On the left-hand side is a toolbar with “tree settings.” Click tree settings, and on that page is “Manage Your Tree” and “Export tree”. Click that and you’ll start the process. Once the file is ready you can download to your computer.

Now you’re ready. Go to ChatGPT and attach the file to the chat. As I mentioned, I have the ChatGPT 4o, which I pay $20 monthly. Just to let you know, I decided to try this for a month to see if I found it helpful, and I have been paying for it ever since. I use it almost daily.

But back to our chat box. Once you’ve attached the file, all you need is the prompt. Usually, I try to follow the steps that I learned in the course I took at GRIP called AI for Genealogy given by Steven Little, where he suggests; (note his terms and my explanation of what I believe they means). Steve I know you sometimes read my blog so tell me if I’m incorrect in my understanding.

Role: what role is the chat supposed to be. Such as “you are an expert……”

Goal: what you want to achieve

Text: the main body of the prompt or the question that you are asking

Task: The task specifies what the response should focus on or what action is required

Flask(format): The flask is the format for the response. This could be a list, a step-by-step guide, an explanation, or any other specified format.

In this example, I just gave this simple prompt. (sorry Steve)

Using this Gedcom file can you create a word cloud for me of the surnames in the file.

In a matter of seconds, I got this result.

and you might have seen this one in my video

I did go back and ask it to create it with other colors.. Which it seemed to have some difficulty with. After a few discussion back and forth.. It did give me a list of surnames which could be helpful and I’ll explore that further. Ultimately I started again (seems like sometimes that’s just what you have to do) and I asked it to create the word cloud in the shape of a circle and this is what it gave me.

I hope you laugh as hard as I did.

I guess I’ll stick with my original word cloud and perhaps I should have followed Steve’s steps. If you have better results I’d love to hear about it.

I hope you’ll watch my YouTube demo and give it a thumbs up. If you haven’t subscribed to my channel, I’d appreciate it.

NOTE: The gentleman who suggested the word cloud was Andrew Redfern from Australia.Thanks, Andrew, for the idea.

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