The technique is simpler than you'd expect: copy, paste, ask.
FindaGrave blocks automated requests. There is no API you can call, no scraper that works reliably. What you can do is open a memorial page, select the family members section, paste it into a conversation with an AI, and ask what it means. That's the whole method. The AI doesn't need database access. It needs the data you hand it.
Here's what a session looks like. You paste a family member block — parents, spouse, siblings, children, dates, burial locations. The AI reads the relationships and starts doing the math: who could have told whom, how old was the grandfather when the story was passed, what does a birth in Clark County, Kentucky in 1820 tell you about the migration route. It connects dates to history without being asked. You paste the next page. The picture gets larger.
What the AI adds that you can't easily do yourself: it holds every fact from every paste simultaneously. Paste in that a woman was born in Virginia in 1786 and buried in Missouri in 1856, and that her son was born in Kentucky in 1820 and buried in Missouri in 1890. The AI immediately places the family in Kentucky sometime before 1820 and in Missouri before 1844 — and tells you the wagon that broke east of Excello probably broke in the 1830s. You would have had to work that out yourself.
What it can't do: fetch the pages for you, read gravestones, or know what your family said over dinner. You are still the one driving the back roads.
In an afternoon I confirmed that my family name was always pronounced "Holly" in Missouri — not "Halley" — until my father's generation changed it, probably in high school or the Army. I found that a close friend's family, who refuse to cross into Kansas on principle, descend from a man born in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1874. The AI didn't find these things. I did, by going to FindaGrave. But it connected the dates and distances in a way that would have taken days to work out manually.
The output is a Mermaid diagram — a structured family tree in a markdown file that renders in most modern editors. It's not a database. It's a readable document you can update as new pastes come in.
The research stops where the records stop. Some people aren't on FindaGrave. Some burial locations are listed as "a field behind a church." Some family members died young and left no trace. The AI will tell you clearly when the trail goes cold, which is more than most genealogy tools will do.
Total cost: zero. No API key, no subscription, no account. A browser, a chat window, and an afternoon.
Contact: alan@alanhalley.com