Preserve the obituary. Contribute the record.
Far West Legacy is an open-source AI tool that extracts structured genealogical data from obituaries and contributes records to the FamilySearch Family Tree.
What it does
Obituaries are some of the richest free-text genealogical sources in existence — full of names, dates, places, and family relationships that would otherwise take hours to transcribe. Far West Legacy reads an obituary, extracts the structured data inside it, lets you review and correct what it found, then contributes the person, family relationships, and original obituary text directly to the FamilySearch Family Tree as a permanent memorial.
Every record is reviewed by a human before any write to the Family Tree. Duplicate checking runs before every write. The obituary itself becomes a Story Memory attached to the person — preserved for future generations.
How it works
- Provide Paste the obituary text, supply a URL, or upload a photograph of a clipping.
- Extract Claude reads the text and returns structured data — names, dates, places, relationships.
- Review Inspect every field, correct anything wrong, add what's missing. You stay in control.
- Contribute Write the person, family, memories, and source citation to FamilySearch — with duplicate checks.
Who it's for
- Family historians working through stacks of obituaries from a parent or grandparent's papers
- FamilySearch contributors who want to scale beyond one record at a time
- Local libraries, historical societies, and county archives digitizing newspaper collections
- Genealogists curating records for a specific surname, place, or community
Status
Try it & contribute
Far West Legacy is free, open-source, and uses a Bring-Your-Own-Key model — you supply your own Anthropic API key for AI processing. There is no subscription, no telemetry, and no commercial component.