Bricks

Bricks is a genealogy assistant. You give it your family tree and point it at the ancestor you cannot get past — the brick wall — and it works out what records might exist for that person, where those records are actually kept, and what to try next. It writes you a plan in plain English, one step at a time.

What it does

• Reads a RootsMagic or Legacy Family Tree file directly, or the GEDCOM file that almost every other genealogy program can save.
• Builds a timeline of everything known about the person, and points out what is missing or contradicts itself.
• Works out which archives, registries and record sets covered that place at that time — anywhere in the world, not just North America.
• Gives you a numbered research plan: one record, one place, one repository per step, with the link to go and look, and what to do whether you find it or not.
• Keeps your family tree on your own computer. It is never uploaded anywhere.

How it uses AI

Bricks uses AI to do the reasoning a professional genealogist would do: read the timeline, work out what is missing, and propose where the answer is likely to be recorded. That is what makes it different from a search box.

AI also invents things — a record reference that sounds right, an archive that does not hold what it claims, a place mistaken for another with a similar name. Most of the work in Bricks has gone into narrowing that down:

• It is given the real answers up front. Curated tables of actual archives and their web addresses, which records survive for a place and from what year, which jurisdictions lost their records to fire, and how regional codes decode — so it is looking things up rather than recalling them.
• A second AI reviews the first. Every idea is peer-reviewed by a separate sceptical pass that downgrades or throws out what the evidence does not support, and says so in the report.
• Automatic checks run afterwards, every time. Fixed rules — not more AI — flag invented-looking manuscript citations, catch a region decoded wrongly, check every named repository against a list of ones known to exist, and spot research aimed at the wrong archive for that area.
• Every link is tested before the plan reaches you.
• It shows its uncertainty rather than hiding it: anything the checks are unsure about is marked in the report for you to confirm.

Get it

Get Bricks from the Microsoft Store

For Windows 10 and 11. It installs in a click, needs no administrator password, and keeps itself up to date from then on.

Getting started

1. Click the button above and install it from the Microsoft Store. It takes a few seconds.
2. Open Bricks and load your family tree. You can look around your tree straight away — no account needed for that part.
3. When you ask it to work on a brick wall for the first time, it asks for your name and email and sends you your own account code. Type that in once and you are set.

What it costs

You start free. A new account comes with 25 credits, which is about a dozen brick-wall analyses — enough to see whether it helps you before paying anything. No card is asked for. If you want more, there are two monthly plans:

Full pricing — what a credit is, what each kind of research costs, and what happens to credits you don't use.

A brick-wall analysis costs between 2 and 40 credits depending on how thoroughly you ask it to look, and the app always shows you the cost before you commit to it. Plans renew monthly and you can cancel any time; if you do, the credits you already have stay yours and your saved reports stay on your computer.

Questions

Email luc@mudcreeksoftware.com — a real person reads it.