This article was first published on 6 April in the Mensa member newsletter, My Mensa Weekly.
Who am I? Where did I come from? What were my ancestors like? These are just some of the burning questions we all ask when leafing through our family trees.
Not only does exploring our genealogical legacy connect us to the stories, people and places that have made us who we are today, it deepens our knowledge of our roots to share with future generations.
Thanks to online family history platforms like Findmypast, uncovering the characters and secrets central to our lineage is easier than ever before. In fact, Findmypast’s latest project with the British Library sees the company step up its mission to help others explore their ancestry.
Here, we look at how this partnership is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to help even more people to investigate their bloodline.
Read all about it
With more than 14 billion digitised records, and exclusive access to some of the world’s most renowned historical databases, Findmypast’s technology allows intrepid investigators to connect to their relatives, both past and present, and visualise their family story.
Recently, Findmypast have made nearly 400,000 historical newspaper pages freely available online to the public as part of the British Library’s £9.2 million Living with Machines project.
Sourced from the British Library’s extensive collection of historical newspapers, these newly available digitised pages join over 63 million pages available on the British Newspaper Archive – a platform jointly managed by the British Library and Findmypast.
“We’re delighted to make this major collection of digitised newspapers free to the public. They offer so much rich detail about the events that affected our ancestors’ lives,” says Findmypast’s head of content publishing, Mary McKee.
“Thanks to our long-standing partnership with the British Library, more people might uncover their own history right there in black and white. After all, behind every news story is a family story.”
Technology from the ages
The five-year Living with Machines project, launched in 2019, aims to deepen understanding of how technology has altered British lives and culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries while providing a rich resource for researchers, academics, and curious minds.
“Working with Findmypast and partners including the Alan Turing Institute, the University of Cambridge, the University of East Anglia, the University of Exeter, Queen Mary University of London and King’s College London has shown the benefits of inter-disciplinary research in developing new methods for understanding the past,” says Mia Ridge, a digital curator at the British Library.”
But just how is the project monitoring the ever-changing public sentiment toward technology over this period? AI technology has been developed for Living with Machines to conduct linguistic and sentiment analysis on the newspaper transcriptions, examine how machines were written about, and how the relationship between humans and machines has shifted and changed over time.
Mechanised language, statistics around industrial accidents, and key information such as date and place were extracted from newspaper articles by software, with researchers aiming to output digital models to showcase the results. Together with the creation of new computational research models, this enables researchers to gain deeper insights into our evolving relationship with technology.
Milestone moments in history
The Living with Machines project focuses on a period of social and political upheaval when mechanisation changed the world forever. The newspapers that have been newly added to the British Newspaper Archive cover a period between 1847-1920 across 67 national, regional, and local titles.
This collection includes unique periodicals that offer a view of events as they happened, such as the Cotton Factory Times – an early trade union movement newspaper published from 1885 until the early 20th century.
Drawing on famous cotton trade unionists, including Thomas Ashton, Thomas Birtwistle and James Mawdsley, the newspaper’s first edition offered itself as a voice of those workers involved in the cotton trade, a “battle-ground upon which the social questions of the operatives, and the questions affecting their labour, may be debated and settled”.
Technology has brought irrevocable change over the centuries, and it has also empowered humanity’s eternal pursuit of knowledge. Those involved in Living with Machines aim to provide a vivid picture of our cultural, social and built heritage as well as increase understanding of how AI provides opportunities for data-led research in the future – including genealogy.
- Some family connections can come as a surprise. See some of the most shocking revelations from Who Do you Think You Are here
