I just found out I have family still living in Poland (Iām Jewish and I thought that most of my family had left) and Iām so happy to just find out about that and all the interesting things Iāve come across when working with family members to compile this tree
I found a secret half brother for my mother on this website. you can make a family tree without ever talking to any of your family members. i pay for the subscription cuz I love looking at the census records⦠deciphering that old script, perfect experience for an Ellis Island descendent who likes to use a laptop interface
The caveat is that the Mormons own and operate it and from what Iāve heard they will use your data to retroactively āconvertā your dead ancestors to Mormonism? LMFAO umm Iām not sure how it works I havenāt looked into it much because itās not a huge concern for me but yeah if thatās something that you care about⦠it is a great site with tons of records and sources and if anyone else in your family line has done research on your ancestors on there you can pull that into your own tree (check and verify that itās correct of course). WikiTree is also free but I havenāt used it much. A lot of library systems will actually give you free access to the version of Ancestry designed specifically for libraries so you could try that or honestly even visit your local branch and ask them what they suggest. Findagrave is a cool website too and you can find a lot of information that way. You could also possibly contact historical societies in areas where your family members are from? I know for my ancestors there are also a lot of weird Geocities style sites where people would publish all of their research findings so even just googling names and locations in quotation marks could help (with dates if you have them). Iām not sure how relevant any of this information is for research outside of the United States but hopefully it's helpful š£
tracing that family tree back as far as possible is exciting and insightful af.
Iāve spent a couple of hours looking over photos, reading stories, and crying over people that I will never meet but played a part in inventing me lol
Thereās been multiple reports of AI taking up lots of energy to generate things and we donāt need more energy being wasted to produce a soulless, computer generated piece of AI art (Idk how others feel about AI art but whenever I look at it I feel sick and my heart sinks because it just feels so empty) so thatās one thing. Another issue is all these horrific deepfake scandals, to an incident that happened to at least 1 girl at the high school I went to (Iām not gonna say their names or anything because theyāve already been through so much shit) to South Koreaās recent crackdown on deepfake p0rn which revealed just how rampant it was throughout the country (and I just know shit like this is happening worldwide itās not just their country). Thereās also social media manipulation, biases in AI (only 100/7,000 of this worldās languages being used in chatbot training which only contributes further to languages being endangered), the very real threat of AI to be used to create more inequality, etc. While it looks like generative AI is flopping in some areas now (thank god) Iām still very concerned about it