Originally Published: Vol 12, Num 1 (Spring 2024)
Reference Number: 121.001
Are we tired of AI-generated images yet? The picture on the front cover is deliberate since AI in many forms has captured attention recently in many fields including genealogy. In some ways it’s a solution looking for problems, but it’s fun to see all the different ways that it IS solving problems – already in genealogy it is being used for colorizing photographs of our ancestors and estimating when they were taken, transcribing census records and old handwritten documents, and a host of other uses that would have seemed science fiction even just a year ago.
But as far as examples of creativity and ingenuity are concerned, our Spring 2024 issue is much more a showcase of the human variety. Besides Whit Athey and Kathryn Johnston’s scientific look at recombination, this issue is otherwise entirely filled with case studies of approaches for solving genealogical puzzles using varied combinations of autosomal DNA, Y-DNA, and mtDNA. I hope these showcase not only the ingenuity of the authors, but also the many creative ways that we can approach these puzzles with DNA – there is in truth no single “right” way to combine DNA analysis with traditional genealogy and our methods need to adapt to the available evidence, both traditional and genetic, and to the testing pool that is available to us.
So while I am certainly excited about the prospects of AI-driven tools lending more and more support to our genetic genealogy efforts in future, I’m not particularly worried about them rising any time soon to the levels of creativity and ingenuity displayed in our regular JoGG articles!
On a more mundane note, I am also very happy to report that with the publication of this Spring 2024 issue of the JoGG, we have finally achieved a goal of mine for the journal to be quarterly! Two issues in two consecutive quarters isn’t really a trend of course, but hey, I’ll take it. But just so I’m not accused of idle bragging, you’ll have to help me keep up this trend – we have a few more articles in queue for another 2024 issue but we need more! What examples of creativity and ingenuity in genetic genealogy do YOU have that we can turn into an article for another issue?