Transcription and Abstraction of Original Records

Transcription and Abstraction of Original Records

Saturday, January 24, 2026

1 - 2:30 PM, PST

Presented by Roger Prince

Live online via Zoom

NEW! CGS members who log into the CGS Website can find Zoom, handout and survey links directly on the website (no registration required). Find out more here.

Non-members should register from this page for $5.

With the explosion of AI tools, access to many more old handwritten documents has opened up. AI has made it easier to find the documents of interest to you, but it still does not generate clean transcriptions. And attempts to use AI to abstract documents can still lead to some strange results. We will cover traditional best practices for hand transcribing old documents and of abstracting those documents. AI does not yet meet the accuracy and completeness standards of transcription. But we will discuss how to use AI to generate a rough first transcription that can save you time and can act as a second set of ‘eyes’ to give you a different take on those hard to read words. We'll briefly cover AI transcription tools available in Ancestry and FamilySearch and the stand alone apps Transkribus and ChatGPT. All these tools are evolving rapidly so any detailed description would quickly be out of date.

The event will take place via Zoom. If you join, please sign in early to make sure you are able to see the program. We will send you instructions the night before, and a reminder shortly before the event, which will give you access. Our remote classes now have live closed captioning. When registering, use an email address you will be checking. Please note all times are Pacific Time.

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This event is presented live. Some events may be recorded for CGS use.

See you online!

Roger Prince PhD is a geological oceanographer and geophysicist by training. After an initial stint as an academic, oceanographic researcher, he worked in the oil industry for more than 20 years, most of that for Chevron in the Bay Area. Roger became interested in family history in 1989 when he asked his parents who all the ancestors in the unlabeled pictures were. He has published two papers in the NEHGS Register on the English origins of two of his early Salem Massachusetts ancestors and an article on his German immigrant ancestor to NYC in the Nugget. He is the current President of CGS.

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