Ancestry is excited to expand its storytelling capabilities with AI through its newest feature, AI Stories. AI Stories brings family history to life in an innovative and immersive way, allowing you to explore and understand your family stories in a whole new way by transforming a single static historical record into a narrated audio story, weaving details from the record with other historical context to create an immersive and more personal connection to the past.

AI Stories takes a historical record, like a draft card, and brings it to life, highlighting key details —employment history, physical attributes, and next of kin —that are often easy to overlook. AI Stories pairs these details with what was happening across the country at the time or with how specific moments shaped an entire generation, giving you more than just facts. With AI Stories, you can uncover a genuine, personal story that helps you connect with the past in a deeper, more meaningful way.

You can discover AI Stories within your Ancestry profile in a few ways:

Exploring a Record Through a Person on your Tree

1. Open your family tree and select an ancestor you’d like to learn more about.
2. Click on a record that’s already attached to that ancestor’s profile.
3. Choose “Record Summary” to see the details, and AncestryAI will automatically generate a story based on the record.

Discovering a New Record Through Hints

1. While building your family tree, you’ll see hint leaves suggesting possible records for your ancestors.
2. When you find a record you want to keep, accept the hint from the banner.
3. After accepting, click Ask AncestryAI in the notification ‘Read between the lines with AncestryAI’.

       4. AncestryAI will then turn the record into a story you can listen to and share.

Bringing your own memories to life

1. Upload your own family documents or letters to Ancestry via the Memories tab or in the gallery of your ancestor.
2. Once uploaded, click Ask AncestryAI to hear the story generated about your piece of content.

There are currently over 940 million records available for audio narration with the AI Stories feature, with plans to continuously add more records and collections. AI Stories is currently available in six languages —English, Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian —for users around the world. You can have it narrated, read it in text format, and download the file to share with family members.

For over a decade, Ancestry has been at the forefront of applying AI and machine learning to genealogy with an advanced ecosystem that can transform billions of records into personal stories faster and more accurately than ever before.

AI Stories is currently in beta.