Finish What You Started

Hi Reader!

Here's this week's Finish What You Started: one step toward finishing, one AI item worth your time, and what's on in Chronicle Makers.

Don't miss the gorilla

Read one record all the way through.

Open one record image you saved and never read to the end. Read every word, the column headings and the margins included. Start at the top left, go across and slowly read.

We miss what we aren't looking for. In Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris's 1999 "invisible gorilla" study, about half the people counting basketball passes never noticed a person in a gorilla suit walk through the middle of the scene. There just might be a gorilla on that unexamined record of yours.

A place for your research

Your AI tool can only work with what you give it.

A Research Brain is the project folder for one research project: your records, your brain dump and your Making Log, kept together where your AI tool can read them. Whatever you find in that record you slowly read above (did you find a gorilla?) this week belongs in it. AI + you reading the same documents = progress. Read: Research Brain, your research and your thinking in one folder →​

Inside Chronicle Makers for Members

Members: Join us for our two live calls this week. Maker Time features what happens when you ask Claude to write book from files. It's something! Then we'll discuss what's new in Skool and take your questions prior to the Sprint. Get local times and Zoom links inside Skool.​

Live with Denyse

This week two livestreams on YouTube on getting started with chronicle writing. Click the links to add to your calendar:

Chronicle Makers is where family historians finish their research and write it up. The doors are open. Join by October 26th to participate in our next 10 Day Chronicle Writing Sprint. Includes all our Sprints for 2027 and our special holiday writing courses.

Happy Chronicling!

—Denyse

P.S. Hit reply and tell me if you found a gorilla in your records that you'd never noticed before. I read every one.

P.P.S. My other newsletter is The AI Brief for Family Historians. That comes out on the 1st of each month. If you want to only get that one, just click here:

​Just send me the AI Brief once a month →​

Once a month: what changed in AI, sorted into what matters for family history and what you can skip.