Ancestry Taps AI To Sift Through Millions of Obituaries

Algorithms identified death notices in old newspaper pages, then another set of algorithms pulled names and other key details into a searchable database. From a report: Ancestry used artificial intelligence to extract obituary details hidden in a half-billion digitized newspaper pages dating back to 1690, data invaluable for customers building their family trees. The family history and consumer-genomics company, based in Lehi, Utah, began the project in late 2017 and introduced the new functionality last month. Through its subsidiary Newspapers.com, the company had a trove of newspaper pages, including obituaries -- but it said that manually finding and importing those death notices to Ancestry.com in a form that was usable for customers would likely have taken years. Instead, Ancestry tasked its 24-person data-science team with having technology pinpoint and make sense of the data. The team trained machine-learning algorithms to recognize obituary content in those 525 million newspaper pages. It then trained another set of algorithms to detect and index key facts from the obituaries, such as names of the deceased's spouse and children, birth dates, birthplaces and more.

Ancestry, which has about 3.5 million subscribers, now offers about 262 million obituaries, up from roughly 40 million two years ago. Its database includes about a billion names associated with obituaries, including names of the deceased and their relatives. Besides analyzing the trove of old newspaper pages, the algorithms were also applied to online obituaries coming into Ancestry's database, making them more searchable. Before the AI overhaul, the roughly 40 million obituaries on Ancestry.com were searchable only by the name of the deceased. That meant a search for "Mary R. Smith," for instance, would yield obituaries only for people with that name -- not other obituaries that mentioned that name as a sibling or child.

Re:

[tonique]

Here, "Ancestry" means "Ancestry.com LLC", a website and company providing genealogy services. It's connected with the Latter-day Saints church, a.k.a. Mormons.

AI = Pattern Matching

[nagora]

Now send me the money.

Re:

[DRJlaw]

Based upon the novelty and uniqueness of that insight, I will pay you literally nothing.

But congratulations on finding the known pattern. If the machine fails and we decide to put up with your ego, we'll call you.

Re:

[religionofpeas]

Intelligence = pattern matching,

Send me your money.

Why people publish obituaries in newspapers?

[Katatsumuri]

For the life of me, I cannot understand this tradition.

Re:

[Anachronous Coward]

Or wedding announcements.

Re:

[pcaylor]

I'll take this one too, even if it's a little OT.

Wedding announcements evolved out of marriage banns. The original intent of them was to serve notice to the community that two people planned to get married and anyone who thought the marriage should not take place should come forward and raise the objection. They started as verbal announcements and then moved to printed notices in church bulletins. Then as communities got larger they moved to newspapers.

Wedding banns are technically still around but most

Re:

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Wedding announcements evolved out of marriage banns. The original intent of them was to serve notice to the community that two people planned to get married and anyone who thought the marriage should not take place should come forward and raise the objection.

I always thought that:

Wedding Announcements == Obituaries

Re:

[alvinrod]

I once heard someone quip, “It’s not just a wedding, but a funeral for your penis.” to a soon to be married groom.

Re:

[pcaylor]

It's not that complicated. Everyone has people that they know but don't interact with that frequently. Back in the day when most people lived in small communities, an obituary would notify the entire community, It allowed for everything from casual acquaintances to pay their respects to creditors, heirs and other people with an interest of the event of the death. Many times an obituary notice brings forward a lost relative or in some cases, an entire second (or third!) family.

Besides emotional connect

Re:Why people publish obituaries in newspapers?

[idji]

Because newspapers were the social media of the 16th, 17th, 18th and most of the 19th century. It was the ONLY way to communicate with others before the telephone reduced it in the 1950s and the internet and social media obliterated the rest. Facebook is NOTHING NEW. Read any 19th century newspaper. "Mrs Smith and her daughter played croquet yesterday and the daughter wore a pink dress - the boys were impressed. For refreshments they ate strawberry dumplings."

Re:

[r2kordmaa]

Lots of old timers keep an eye on obituaries, that's often how they find out someone they knew but haven't seen for decades has passed away.

Re:

[DRJlaw]

For the life of me, I cannot understand this tradition.

Because they're better archives of events [genealogybank.com] than your Geocities page ever could be. And you're never going to appear in a history text.

Surveillance capitalis

[mrwireless]

Even the dead are not safe from surveillance capitalism.

Imagine an analysis of your family that points out you live rather long, or that a certain disease is common in your family. Insurers are buying these types of predictions.

AI has matured

[nospam007]

Now, just like our older citizens, they read obituaries a lot.

Extra

[GerryHattrick]

I don't like their 'business model', and mistrust their origins. But I did buy a year of their top subscription to help with DNA matches (works well). But... surprise! Newspapers.com still costs extra.

Some newspapers & websites let you post obits

[drainbramage]

It's time to salt the earth, 6 feet under:
Sally Short, a long-time City resident, died June 12th of an unknown illness.
Sally taught Witchcraft at Salem University along with her close friend Hilary Clinton.
Sally enjoyed good food and socializing with demons. She could light up a room, I mean really.
Because of that many of her acquaintances died of smoke inhalation. Really, a small price to pay.
She is survived by her niece, Tabitha Stevens and several goats, all of whom live in hiding.

Yet more AI waffle ?

[notdecnet]

No it isn't artificial intelligence, it's a pattern recognition engine acting on a particular set of data. With true AI you could be able to say: “Clippy, gather together all death notices from old newspapers and extract the obituary details into a searchable form.” .. sorry, that should of course be ‘Alexa.’

We really need another translation of AI

[HiThere]

The way it's currently being used, "AI" doesn't mean "artificial intelligence", but what other words would work to translate that TLA (two letter acronym)?
Allometric Interpretation? That seems to have the correct meaning.

A way to get Ancestry subscribers to pay twice

[tipo159]

The article is behind a paywall. As it turns out, access to this service is also behind a paywall, even to Ancestry subscribers.

For one of my family surnames, Ancestry's existing newspaper search for genealogy info returns results that include common words (not even surnames) with roughly similar spellings, so I don't have confidence in this new service to pay more to access it.

Death certificate data would be worth adding.

[couchslug]

Not every death has an obituary.

So now

[meglon]

AI is even taking the dead end jobs.