I’ve recently written two articles about using AI tools in my family history work. The first was a blog post about working through a handwritten inquest to reconstruct a likely sequence of events.[1] The second was an article for Generation magazine about developing a format for my family history book and reorganising my computer folders and files so they would mirror and support it.[2]
AI tools are useful for sorting data, structuring material and editing, but when I’ve played around with asking them to write for me, the result doesn’t sound like me. I’m happy to use AI to think through the material, but I still want to decide what matters and how the story should be told. Besides, writing the stories is one of the parts I enjoy most.
It is not easy to turn records into ancestor stories that are both accurate and readable. I’ve read books about writing and completed a few short story courses, but I am still learning. In her book on writing interesting stories, genealogist Carol Baxter noted: “If a window opened and we could spy on our ancestors, what would we see?”.[3] I don’t make things up, but I try to use my imagination, using techniques such as paying attention to sensory detail and showing rather than telling to help bring my ancestors’ stories to life.
Although I don’t have a lot of information for some of them, I hope to complete stories for about 40 couples across four family surnames. That’s a lot of stories.
Here’s a glimpse into how I go about it.
For every couple, I begin with a vital records summary at the top of the page. This gives me a quick reference, so the body of the story can read more like a narrative. I also add a small image: perhaps a photograph, map, place or other visual detail that helps locate them in the world.
The image above is a vital records summary graphic for William Frederick Franz and Margaret Jane Bleakley, compiled with AI assistance. The family photograph, ca. 1890, shows William and Margaret with three of their children. Image courtesy of City of Moreton Bay, reference number CLPC-P1295. The portrait of Margaret Jane Bleakley is from the author’s family collection.
I gather my source materials: birth, death, marriage and census records, maps and land documents. If I’m lucky, I have anecdotes, family stories, letters, diaries and photographs. Often, though, I only have the records. I then create a shared timeline for the couple, usually drawn from the individual timelines in my Ancestry.com family tree. I use an AI tool to combine the individual ones. I may later return to the records if questions arise, but this is a good start.
So, how do I make the shared timeline, sometimes with 50 items and sometimes with very few, read like a story?
I begin by grouping the timeline into broad phases that reflect the main periods in their lives, then I identify key turning points, such as immigration or surviving a war. When I worked through the timeline for my two times great grandparents, William Frederick Franz and Margaret Jane Bleakley, their timeline fell quite naturally into familiar life stages: beginnings, family background, marriage and children, community life, and later legacy.
Not every couple’s life turns out that way. Sometimes I begin with a later event, such as immigration, marriage or, for convict ancestors, a trial. In those cases, the earlier details can be woven in where they fit. I also look closely at what is missing. Gaps in records, late marriages, sudden changes in occupation or abrupt moves often point to an explanation. When I wondered why there was such an age discrepancy in the marriage entry for 41-year-old William Franz and 22-year-old Margaret Bleakley, I looked at the wider family to see what else was happening around that time.
William ran a “milk run”, most likely with his half-brother Maurice. This meant taking fresh cattle from Brisbane to the Gympie goldfields after the 1867 rush and bringing the dry cows back again. Maurice died suddenly at just thirty-three years of age, leaving a widow and six young children. Documents from the following decade show William was busy purchasing land and presumably managing his own farm, as well as the milk run at the same time. Although it is only speculation, the burden of all this may have delayed any thought of marriage.
Once I’ve identified which moments might become scenes, I think about how to write them. Where the material allows, I try to put the reader inside a moment rather than simply reporting that it happened. For example, when writing about William’s “milk run”, I wrote: “The family’s Upper Caboolture properties gave the men a place to spell the cattle, water the horses and rest the teams before the harder road to Gympie. It would have been a rugged journey with harnesses creaking, bullocks leaning into the shafts and the smell of leather, sweat and churned earth rising around the drays.”
Dates are more useful when they are anchored to human experience. I ask what was happening around that day in the family, the town, the district or the wider world. Newspapers, local histories, shipping maps and directories can bring life to bare facts and help explain why a particular event mattered. For example, instead of simply writing, “On 24 March 1895, Dora was baptised,” I might ask what the church looked like, how far the family travelled, whether the season mattered, and what baptism meant in that community. If the evidence supports it, the sentence can become more visual without becoming fictional: “Dora’s family carried her to the nearby church on the hill.”
Perspective matters too. A sentence such as “The First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour” may sound neutral, but it depends on where you are standing. To British officials it marked settlement; to the convicts it meant banishment; and to the Aboriginal people already living there, it meant an invasion of their country. In my family history stories, I try to notice whose viewpoint I am using and why.
Some records contain naturally dramatic material, especially court records, inquests and depositions. When real voices survive, I prefer to let them speak. Their formal phrases and direct testimony often give a story more lifelike than anything I could imagine.
I am still learning how to do this well, but a repeatable format makes the work less overwhelming. I begin with a vital records block, gather the evidence, build a shared timeline, look for phases and turning points, choose the scenes that matter, and use context to make them readable. That, for me, is the point: to turn records into stories my family will want to read.
[1] Yvonne Tunny, “Reading an Inquest with AI: The Death of Alfred Tinney,” GSQ Blog (blog), 22 June 2026, gsq-blogs.org.au.
[2] Yvonne Tunny, “Using AI in Genealogy: From Scattered Files to Clearer Stories,” Generation: Quarterly Journal of the Genealogical Society of Queensland Inc., Vol. 50, No. 1 (September 2026): 13.
[3] Baxter, Carol. 2016, Writing Interesting Family Histories, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.
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