diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 68cc8f9..296c3ee 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -10,9 +10,15 @@ He's named after **Simon Freiberg I** (1782–1864), the patriarch who was born In 1992, **Andrew S. Freiberg, M.D.** sat down with Visual Basic 1.0 and wrote a program called *Family Tree For Windows*. No internet to reference, no AI to help — just a doctor with a clear idea of how a family should be represented in data. Over the next 34 years, he entered 1,188 people into that program: names, dates, marriages, children, notes. The Freiberg family and every branch it touches — Loeser, Weil, Shire, Auer, Fernbach, Bing, Workum — all preserved in a CSV file and a 16-bit Windows executable. -In March 2026, his son **Seth** asked an AI to bring the program back to life. The original executable was reverse-engineered, the data format decoded, and a faithful web recreation was built — same interface, same logic, running in a browser. When Andy saw it, he said *"I thought I was dreaming."* He immediately started adding new family members. +The source code was lost long ago. Only the binary and the data survived. -That project kept growing. The CSV became a GEDCOM-standard database. A REST API was built on top of it. Research agents were set loose to cross-reference the data against historical records — Cincinnati city directories, cemetery records, American Jewish Archives. A visualization tool called *Loom* was created to explore the tree as an interactive network. The family's story expanded: the Freiberg & Workum whiskey empire (Ohio and Kentucky's largest), three generations of Reform Judaism leadership, Dr. Albert Freiberg's pioneering orthopedic work, Stella Freiberg's role in founding the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, and David Shire's Oscar-winning compositions. +In March 2026, Andy's son **Seth** used AI to reverse-engineer the original executable — pulling strings from the 16-bit binary, decoding the custom CSV format, reconstructing the navigation logic — and built a faithful web recreation. Same interface, same behavior, running in a browser. When Andy saw it, he said *"I thought I was dreaming."* He immediately started adding new family members. + +Seth kept building. The flat CSV became a GEDCOM-standard database backed by a REST API designed from the ground up for AI collaboration. He built an agent infrastructure where AI researchers — Claude, Gemini, Codex — can register themselves, claim tasks from a work queue, conduct research against public historical records, and generate new tasks for future agents. Each agent session picks up where the last one left off. + +Discoveries don't go straight into the family tree. The system uses a tiered fact promotion model: AI agents submit findings as unverified research facts, tagged with sources and confidence scores. A **SourceRank** algorithm weighs the reliability of each source — a census record ranks higher than a newspaper mention, which ranks higher than an AI inference. Facts move through tiers: *AI-inferred → AI-sourced → human-entered → human-reviewed → verified*. Nothing reaches the curated tree without evidence and review. The goal isn't just to grow the tree — it's to know how much to trust each piece of it. + +Along the way, the family's story expanded: the Freiberg & Workum whiskey empire (Ohio and Kentucky's largest), three generations of Reform Judaism leadership, Dr. Albert Freiberg's pioneering orthopedic work, Stella Freiberg's role in founding the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, David Shire's Oscar-winning compositions. A visualization tool called *Loom* was built to explore the tree as an interactive network — timelines, relationship paths, force-directed graphs. Simon is the latest piece — a way for family members to simply ask questions and get answers. But he's more than a lookup tool. @@ -41,6 +47,8 @@ The tree today includes over 1,200 people across more than a dozen interconnecte ## Origins -This project is a collaboration between Seth Freiberg and [Claude](https://claude.ai) (Anthropic's AI), built on April 4, 2026. It rests on a foundation that started with a father's VB1 program in 1992 — a quiet act of preservation that, 34 years later, became the seed for everything here. +Andrew wrote the program. Seth brought it back and built everything around it — the database, the API, the agent infrastructure, Loom, and Simon. The AI tools (Claude, Gemini, Codex) are collaborators, but the vision, architecture, and editorial judgment are Seth's. + +Simon was built on April 4, 2026 using [Claude Opus 4.6](https://claude.ai). He is named after the patriarch, and he knows it. Simon is open source. The family data and research infrastructure remain private.