Save ten--Download Perplexity for Genealogy webinar Now and Expand Your Research

Our New Perplexity Presentation Released for immediate download

Take your research to a new level!

Ideas you can implement immediately.

Focus is on practical applications--not fancy fluff

order at $25 intro rate

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Perplexity for Genealogy--New and Improved

We have re-done our Perplexity for Genealogy presentation into a two-hour long session--complete with handout.

Our focus is on a practical, down-to-earth approach. You'll be able to play the video more than once and see research approaches that are easy-to-follow.

New examples, new families, new prompts, with a continued focus on practical, down-to-earth application of AI for genealogy—focused on Perplexity.

Perplexity is a combined search engine and research assistant that uses large language models to answers questions, summarize content, and create responses to queries. Thoughtful genealogists do not use AI to replace their brain—they use it to preform tasks more quickly than they can and with precise attention to detail.

Our presentation will use the free version of Perplexity. Order now. Introductory price is $25 (ends 16 October)--includes presentation and handout. Price will change to $35 after release.

Topics include:

What Perplexity is and responsible use of AI in general.
The importance of practicing first when you “know” the answer. This builds skills and helps you to see the limitations.
Using Perplexity to extract and organize data from a document.
Using Perplexity to summarize, analyze, and research plan from one document.
Using Perplexity to synthesize and summarize multiple documents into a genealogical narrative—the pros and the cons.
Using Perplexity to analyze your own writing.
Using Perplexity for image searching.
Using Perplexity to transcribe documents and records.
Using Perplexity to automatically create GedCom files from uploaded content including biographies, short family histories, and other records.
Working with your own uploaded content in Spaces—this makes Perplexity use specific files or websites in its analysis.
Creating effective AI prompts for Perplexity.

Media file and handouts included. Initial pre-order price of $25. If you ordered a previous Perplexity presentation, email me for a discount link to order for $15.

Full-Text Searching at FamilySearch--Revised

See How to Find More!

Immediate Download

practical suggestions

intro price of $30

$40 regular price

We're excited to offer this completely new and revised presentation on the full-text searching at FamilySearch. We've redesigned our presentation as this functionality continues to change. And...we're adding an extensive handout complete with forms to help you find more people.

Your purchase includes:

A two-hour presentation you can view as often as you want.

Extensive handout with charts and forms to help organize your searches. Charts and forms sent as separate files you can edit and customize and not as a locked PDF you have to re-create yourself as a new document.

What we will be doing:

Determining what is in Full-Text Search—what you can access at home and what you will have to be in a FamilySearch facility or affiliate to access.

Seeing How AI transcriptions are different—they aren’t like the transcriptions made by humans. That can change your approach.

Remembering that Full-Text means every word—approaches need to differ as we aren’t looking up a name in an index any more.

Determining who is in the record. We aren’t just searching for the main person like we did with traditional indexes. We’ll discuss how to determine who could be mentioned in a record.

Determining how to search. There are a variety of ways to search and filter results. We’ll see how each one works to help determine the best strategy.

Creating search strategies—how full-text search changes your approach and why just dumping terms in search boxes is not always effective.

Determing what you found. The interface does not make this clear. We will show you how to get beyond the confusion.

Problem-solving—what to do when you cannot find something you want.

Demonstrating practical new examples—completely new people and families from our previous presentations.

Order today for immediate download for only $30.

Overwhelmed by common names like Smith or Jones in your family tree? This presentation offers advanced strategies and techniques to help you effectively use FamilySearch's full-text search and find those elusive ancestors.

Full-Texting the Smiths and Jones:

Strategies for Common Names

Using FamilySearch’s Full-Text search is easier when the name is relatively uncommon. It’s more of a challenge when the last name is Smith, Jones, Brown, or something similarly common. In this presentation, we will look at approaches to maximize the chance you find that common-named person. No approach is full-proof and we will not be so brazen to guarantee success. No genealogist should ever do that.

What we will do is help give you some ideas and techniques to give you a better shot at finding your commonly named person. We can lead you through some examples and give you some ideas to modify to search for your own people. We will assume you’ve got an understanding of how full-text search works. This presentation will not cover the basics of using the full-text search functionality of FamilySearch (you can watch our first presentation for that—nearly two hours and an extensive handout).

The Smith-Jones presentation will cover:

Identifying all the key elements that distinguish your ancestor from others. Your ancestor is more than a name. Crafting as detailed an ancestral profile as possible facilitates the construction of effective searches and we will see how to elicit as many of those details as possible from records you already have.

Organizing a search strategy. Making certain all relevant search combinations have been searched is key to maximizing the chance you find your commonly named ancestor. We will see how to create your own forms and outlines to do just that.

Tracking Results to Problem-Solve. Searching for common names requires the researcher to be as methodological as possible to make certain all options have been considered. It is impossible to determine if all effective means of search were used if negative results tracking is not done.

The Name’s the Thing. Last names such as Bird, Lake, and Farmer have their own issues as well. We will see some approaches that can help locate these names.

Case Studies. We will look at sample case studies common-named persons.

Please note: We can’t guarantee success. What we can do is help to give you tools to increase your chances of success with common names.

This presentation (recorded media file) and handout will be available on 15 October 2025. Pre-orders are only $24. Regular price after that will be $40. There will be no live presentation. Downloads will be sent on 15 October 2025.

Presentation made by Michael John Neill. Michael has several decades of genealogical research experience, has coordinated research trips to a variety of genealogical facilities, and is a former community college mathematics instructor who writes Genealogy Tip of the Day and Casefile Clues.