The AI Connector is an optional pluginPlugins are small programs that allow new features to be added without upgrading Family Historian itself; some plugins are written by Calico Pie and others are written by users. for ƒh8, from Calico PieCalico Pie Limited is a UK software house, and the publishers of Family Historian., that lets Claude or another compatible AI assistant work directly with your projectA Project is a Windows folder, created by Family Historian, which contains all your Family Tree information recorded in Family Historian. Normally located in the Documents\Family Historian Projects folder.. You ask questions or give instructions in plain English; the assistant turns them into short scripts that run through ƒh‘s own plugin interface, so it never edits the project file directly. Calico Pie’s instructions currently cover Claude Desktop on Windows only.

What It Can Do

Each session is either read-only or read-write, chosen before you start it.

• Read-only (the default): the assistant can look up, count, list and cross-reference anything in the project, including people, families, factsFacts are one of the key concepts at the heart of Family Historian; they are how you record the things that happened to, or described, each ancestor (Individual)., placesAccording to GEDCOM, a Place should hold "The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place…"  , relationships, citationsA link between a source and a fact, documenting Where within the source you find information being "cited" to support the fact/conclusion. and your own custom factUsers of Family Historian can customize fact definitions, or create their own fact definitions to more closely match they way they want to work. types. “Give me an overview of this project” is a good first question. It can also search the ƒh8 help.
• Read-write: it can also create, edit and delete records, facts, citations and notesFamily Historian version 6 and below supports two types of Notes: Local notes (associated with a single person, record, or fact); and Note Records (sometimes called Shared Notes), that can be linked to multiple records and/or facts. Version 7 introduced, so it can transcribe a certificate into a person’s record with a proper citation, for example, or work through inconsistent names with you.

Separately, you can ask it to write a standalone plugin, such as a report or a queryQuerying is a very powerful feature that allows you to specify and save criteria for identifying a set of records of a given record type., which it hands back for you to check and install yourself. Any line that uses something a live session is not allowed to do, such as reading or writing files, is marked -- FLAGGED. Read those lines before installing.

Staying in Control

• The assistant can only reach your project while a session is running. You start the session from the plugin in ƒh, and ƒh‘s main window is disabled until it stops.
• A session ends when you click Stop, or by itself after a set number of minutes with no activity (five by default).
• In a read-write session every change is logged in a Research Note in the project, so you can see what was changed and when. Changes can be undone when the session ends, and Ctrl-Z works as usual.
• Calico Pie strongly recommend a full project backup before letting the assistant make significant changes. So do we.

What You Need

An account with the AI service. For Claude a free account is enough to start with, though some features may need a paid plan. Anything the assistant reads from your project is sent to that service, so check its privacy terms. The part of the connector that runs on your PC only goes online when you ask it to fetch an updated copy of the ƒh8 help.

Setting It Up

There are two parts: an extension installed into Claude Desktop, and the AI Connector plugin, installed into ƒh8 in the usual way. The downloads and step-by-step instructions are on Calico Pie’s AI Connector page.

To use it, open your project, run the AI Connector plugin from Tools > Plugins, choose read-only or read-write and click Start. Then ask your questions in Claude Desktop. In the first message of a conversation it helps to tell Claude to use the Family Historian MCP, so that it works from your project rather than from general knowledge.

See also AI Connector in the ƒh help, and Using Plugins in Version 8.