Mortdecai
4.9 KiB
Simon
Simon is the Freiberg family's AI historian — a conversational interface to a genealogical database of over 1,200 people spanning three centuries, from 18th-century Palatinate Germany to present-day America.
He's named after Simon Freiberg I (1782–1864), the patriarch who was born Sedrel Moses in Steinbach am Donnersberg and adopted the surname Freiberg during the Napoleonic decrees. Ask Simon who he is, and he'll tell you about the man, not the chatbot.
Live at: simon.sethpc.xyz
Background
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.
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.
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.
How He Works
Simon runs on Gemma 4 (26B), Google's open-weight language model, hosted locally. When you ask a question, he searches the family database, looks up relationships, pulls life events and dates, and composes a response. All of this happens on private infrastructure — no data leaves the family's network.
He has two modes:
Historian — the default. Ask about anyone in the tree and Simon looks them up. Direct, factual, no filler. He knows the difference between what the records say and what's uncertain.
Interview — when a family member identifies themselves, Simon offers to switch into interview mode. In this mode, he becomes an oral history collector. He asks follow-up questions, prompts your memory using what's in the database, and captures everything. These conversations are logged so they can be reviewed and — where corroborated — added to the family record. Living family members are the richest source we have.
The Family
The Freibergs arrived in Cincinnati in the 1840s from the Palatinate region of what is now southwestern Germany. What followed is a distinctly American story:
- Simon Freiberg I and his wife Minnie Grunwald had twelve children. Their sons built a whiskey empire — eleven distillery companies operating across Ohio and Kentucky before Prohibition.
- Judah (Julius) Freiberg became one of Cincinnati's most prominent citizens: president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, trustee of Hebrew Union College, and a leader of Congregation Bene Israel, one of the oldest Jewish congregations west of the Alleghenies.
- J. Walter Freiberg succeeded his father at the helm of UAHC and became a major philanthropist, helping shape Reform Judaism in America during the early 20th century.
- Dr. Albert Freiberg was a pioneering orthopedic surgeon at the University of Cincinnati — Freiberg Disease (infraction of the second metatarsal) bears his name.
- Stella Freiberg was a founding leader of the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods and a pillar of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
- David Shire, connected through the Scheuer/Shire branch, won an Academy Award for the song "It Goes Like It Goes" from the film Norma Rae.
The tree today includes over 1,200 people across more than a dozen interconnected families.
Origins
This project is a collaboration between Seth Freiberg and Claude (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.
Simon is open source. The family data and research infrastructure remain private.