Every year in genealogy brings its own challenges and discoveries, but 2025 was special. It made me reevaluate my work, taught me to adapt to new circumstances, and at the same time reminded me why I do this work at all – because it interests and engages me. I love that the result of my work is personally meaningful to someone. And what actually happened this year? If I had to say it in one word – I think I can safely say it was dramatic! The biggest events were concentrated

Just a week ago, during a lecture for family history researchers in Valmiermuiža, I said that I was impatiently waiting for the moment when artificial intelligence would finally be able to read handwritten texts. Until now, my experiments with different AI models for reading Latvian genealogical documents had been rather unsuccessful. But then Gemini 3 Pro arrived! The model was released exactly on November 18 , and it immediately caused a wave of excitement. Of course, new d

You are no doubt familiar with the problem—you come across an interesting article in a historical newspaper, but it’s not only printed in...

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that I often mention writing a book. Yes, step by step, I am documenting the results of a...