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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of records, photos, and audio files in your genealogy collection?
You’re not alone. Many of us are drowning in a sea of family treasures, unsure how to organize them or make them accessible to others. And while AI tools for genealogists exist to help, they often leave us juggling multiple platforms, struggling with accuracy, or worse, losing metadata in the shuffle. Enter Kindex—the ultimate all-in-one online archive for genealogists.
A Suite of AI Tools for Genealogy That Everyone Needs All in One Place - watch to learn more.
The Struggle Every Genealogist Faces
Genealogists face a constant battle: how to preserve and organize their records without spending hours transcribing, tagging, and sharing. Let’s be real. Have you ever uploaded a batch of photos, only to realize later that the metadata—names, dates, locations—is gone?
Or maybe you’ve tried a transcription service for a handwritten diary, but it didn’t quite understand Aunt Clara’s cursive. Add to that the challenge of sharing materials with family—Dropbox links or endless Google Docs folders aren’t exactly intuitive. The result? Hours wasted, incomplete records, and a lot of frustration.
Here’s the kicker: you could spend days manually indexing, transcribing, and organizing, only to end up with something that’s hard to search or share. And even with the best AI tools out there, you’re left stitching together solutions. Transkribus handles handwriting, Rev transcribes audio, and Google Drive stores your files—but none of these platforms talk to each other.
Plus, the idea of paying for each tool separately?
Yikes!
You need a solution that simplifies everything and saves you time—because you’d rather connect with your heritage than wrangle data.
AI Tool for Genealogy Archive Management is a RootsTech Innovator
Since winning the RootsTech 2017 Innovators Showdown’s People’s Choice Award, Kindex has become the game-changer genealogists have been waiting for.
What is Kindex?
Kindex is an archive platform that helps over 2,000 genealogists, historians, and researchers organize and make archival materials, such as old family records, letters, government documents, census data, and other historical records searchable.
Kindex allows users to index documents so their archives are shareable and searchable. (Don’t worry; you can also set your privacy levels so that you can share the deceased ancestors’ materials and privatized living persons or working projects.)
With a user-friendly interface, you can enlist the help of relatives to contribute to and transcribe your family’s preserved documents.
Overall, Kindex improves efficiency in genealogy by making archival documents searchable and easier to navigate. This speeds up the research process and saves time and effort when uncovering family histories. While this is all well and good, until recently, you and your family members had to do all the hard work of transcribing and indexing your archive.
Kindex's Amazing Suite of Genealogy AI Tools You Have to Try
This year, Kindex transformed its services to leverage AI to make your life so much easier. The following amazing new features builds on the company’s innovative streak:
Auto Handwriting Transcription Magic
Whether it’s typed text, handwritten notes, or audio files, Kindex’s AI modules do the heavy lifting.
For handwritten documents, Kindex uses handwriting recognition to extract text directly from your images—no more manual typing! I processed a 60-page journal in 30 seconds!
In the screenshot above, notice on the left that you see a Civil War Pension document. On the right, you can see the transcribed text. You can easily compare the AI generated transcription with the original handwriting.
While the transcription isn’t perfect, especially if the handwriting is tricky, it gets you most of the way there. All you have to do is make a few corrections.
Time saved?
Hours! (Trust me. I transcribed Civil War Pension records and I know the time savings!)
Audio Transcriptions in Moments!
Do you have audio files of family interviews or memories?
First, count yourself luck.
Second, digitize them if you haven't already.
Third, use Kindex. Kindex transcribes audio files and creates searchable text.
I was impressed by how Kindex was not only quick but also incredibly accurate when transcribing soft voices or conversations with multiple speakers. You'll have to watch the video linked above to see what I mean.
As someone who is hearing impaired, I found the audio transcription tool particularly helpful. It effectively captured the most challenging parts of conversations that I often struggle with. For that reason alone, I truly appreciate the audio transcription tool by Kindex.
Not only does Kindex rapidly generate a transcription, but it also adds timestamps every 20 seconds. You can adjust or hide the timestamps and download the transcription when you’re done. No need to send files to expensive services like Rev or Temi—Kindex handles it for you, right here.”
Give Your Photos Their Stories
A fun feature of Kindex is the ability to generate descriptive text for images. This can help you give your photos their stories.
Kindex will analyze your photos and generate a detailed description of what’s in them. For example, if you upload a photo of your grandparents at a backyard barbecue in the 1950s.
Kindex describes the image: ‘Five adults and three children are gathered around a picnic table. A barbecue grill is visible in the background.’
From there, you can add names, relationships, and addition context. Then, Kindex will make all of this information searchable.
Automatic Archive Indexing
Now, this next tool may take a little while to understand, but once you do (like I did), you'll love it.
As you upload files, Kindex uses AI to automatically sort and tag your files by people, places, and proper events (i.e., Chicago Fire). Want to see all your great-grandfather’s farming records? Just search “farming,” and boom—it’s all there.
In the Archive index, if you discover some misspelled names, you can access the files with the errors, make a change, and update the index automatically. (However, you might have to clear out your browser cache to see the changes take effect.)
Kindex also lets you take your documents and sources by subject in the meta description. This is helpful when a source doesn't specifically state the topic. For instance, let's say you have letters from when your ancestor was at Boot Camp. However, this ancestor never specified they were at Boot Camp, so Kindex doesn't take the letters from that event. So, you can add "Boot Camp" to the subject field in the file's meta data tool. Then the Subject Archive will link to all resources you tag in this fashion.
Why Kindex?
In full transparency, I was given a free year of the archive service, but I paid for the transcription tools that Kindex offers. I did this to give you an honest review of the AI tools.
My honest review is these tools are impressively accurate, and the automatic search features following the transcription are top-notch.
I have 15 journals from 25-30 years ago. I need to downsize and preserve them before our move in 3 years. I did not want to spend days transcribing these books. Within seconds and for about $0.25 per page, I had an incredibly accurate text file of my high school and early college years.
After the transcription, which took less than 5 minutes, I leveraged the archive index to find the corrections I needed to make to the AI-generated text. I needed to make only a few changes, which blew my mind.
I can now utilize the tips I shared in the blog post 7 Ideas for Preserving Old Diaries for Family History to preserve these journals. I've also enjoyed revisiting the past to discover some patterns and blessings I had not noticed before or had forgotten.
I also believe Kindex is amazing for genealogists for the following reasons:
All-in-One Convenience: Instead of hopping between multiple platforms, Kindex integrates transcription, organization, and storage into one seamless experience.
Tailored for Genealogists: Unlike general-purpose tools like Dropbox or Google Docs, Kindex is built for heritage work. From its FamilySearch integration to features like subject tagging and entity extraction, every tool is designed with your needs in mind.
Flexible Pricing: Yes, auto-transcription has a cost—starting at a minimum of $5 (so ensure you select at least 20 items to get the most out of that fee). However, the real value comes when you process larger batches, saving both time and money compared to piecemeal solutions. And the archive pricing? It’s an investment in preserving your family’s legacy.
Unique Features: AI-generated descriptions for images and automatic subject tagging are features you won’t find combined in other tools. These are designed to save you hours of work.
Try Out the Amazing AI Tools Kindex Offers for Genealogists
So, are you ready to stop juggling tools and start preserving your family’s story with ease? Kindex offers everything you need to transcribe, organize, and share your heritage—all in one place. Head to kindexblog.org to learn more and start your archive today.
Because your family history deserves more than just good intentions. It deserves Kindex.
