AI Program Director, NGS

Steve Little

Steve Little is the AI Program Director for the National Genealogical Society and co-host of The Family History AI Show podcast with Mark Thompson. He publishes Vibe Genealogy on Substack, co-founded the Family History AI Show Academy, and is a founding member of the Coalition for Responsible AI in Genealogy. Steve has lifelong passions for language, technology, and genealogy. He completed graduate-level courses in applied linguistics, specializing in natural language processing and computational linguistics, two pillars of today's large language models of AI; his first career was spent in and around libraries (law, local, university, and state archives) building information systems. He bridges how AI actually works and how genealogists actually research. A genealogist for more than 30 years, Steve traces his deep roots to one Appalachian county, where, by 1820, all 32 of his 3rd-great-grandparents had settled—many even earlier than that. In fact, 60 of his most recent ancestors were born, lived, and died there, in Ashe County, North Carolina; he still lives less than 50 miles from where his earliest American ancestor arrived as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia. His passion lies in AI & genetic genealogy: with a keen interest in endogamy, pedigree collapse, deciphering multiple relationships, and an insatiable curiosity to explore beneficial uses and current limits of artificial intelligence in genealogy. He has taught at RootsTech, NGS, GRIP, SLIG, and Legacy Family Tree Webinars, and develops AI tools for genealogists, including the Genealogical Research Assistant. Beyond genealogy, Steve wears many hats: he's a husband and a dad, a Methodist pastor, and a Virginian. His hobbies span from bird watching and sky gazing; to chess and film. Additionally, he's an avid reader, writer, photographer, and regex script hacker.