Artificial intelligence has already begun transforming how historical records get indexed and searched. Get ready for even bigger advancements in 2024! Handwritten text recognition and transcription powered by machine learning will unlock more obscured details in antique documents. Translation capabilities across languages are also improving dramatically. No more guessing what your immigrant ancestors’ ship manifests say if written in Italian or Russian!

Major sites like Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch are leveraging AI for record hinting and indexing at scale too. I anticipating searches getting smarter and pointing me to potential leads I would have missed through human indexing alone. What used to take combing page by page gets more efficient. I can’t wait to see how many new discoveries I make next year!

Staring at pedigree charts and family group sheets doesn’t exactly make relations “click” easily. One of my favorite tech trends is next-gen visualization tools that bring our complex networks to life. 

I’m most excited for wider access to immersive 3D mapping of ancestry trees and connections through VR and AR. Some sites like Relatives.io already create thrilling spatial family maps. By visually walking within my tree, I gain so much more context on distant cousins across generations and branches.

Apps like Timeline Creator by Ancestry allow stepping through ancestors’ lifespans on interactive timelines too. Picture scrolling a timeline bar and watching relatives appear by date ranges they were living side-by-side. Talk about putting family connections into perspective!