FAN Club Method in Genealogy Research

The FAN Club method, which stands for Friends, Associates, and Neighbors, is a research strategy that treats the social network surrounding an ancestor as a source of evidence about that ancestor's origins, movements, and family connections. People in the past frequently migrated with or near the same community members, making their neighbors and associates important clues.

AI makes FAN Club research more practical by extracting and cross-referencing names from census records, deed books, and church registers at scale, helping researchers map the social community around an ancestor and identify which associates migrated together or shared family ties across multiple documents.