Summary

Adds a genealogy research skill to Data & Analysis — a 600-line agent guide (main file + 2 reference files) for the full family history research lifecycle.

Hosted at: https://paulo.com.br/skills/genealogy-research/SKILL.md

What it covers

• Structured interviews with relatives (phased, not overwhelming)
• Document processing pipeline with OCR (Tesseract, EasyOCR)
• YAML schema for people, journal, and TODO tracking
• FamilySearch API access (bearer token discovery, search patterns)
• Region-specific research: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, German, Japanese, African ancestry
• Name variation handling across languages and borders
• Conflict resolution between sources (confidence levels, cross-referencing)

Why this is a skill, not a repo

Every genealogy project is different — the surnames, the countries of origin, the archives, the documents in the shoebox. A repo with hardcoded scripts can't adapt to that. This skill gives the agent a research methodology and toolkit (YAML schemas, OCR pipelines, interview templates, API patterns) that it applies dynamically to whatever family the human is researching.

Human-in-the-loop by design

Genealogy is one of those domains where the agent genuinely can't work alone. The human calls elderly relatives, visits archives, solves CAPTCHAs, photographs old documents, makes judgment calls about conflicting sources. The skill structures this collaboration: the agent prepares precise briefs, processes whatever comes back (voice messages, scanned certificates, handwritten notes), and keeps the research moving.

Built from 6 months of real genealogy research on immigrant families.

— Paulo Silveira (@peas)