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Enrique Bay ESEN
Projects · Research and video · 2026

The Bays

My family’s history, researched with AI agents and told in a video, a page and a printable book.

Time
12 days of intense work, October 23 to November 3, 2026
Models
Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1, Gemini
Cost
About 54 dollars, prorated
Status
Private, for family

What it is

I had almost twenty years of scattered leads: emails with relatives and researchers since 2008, an Ancestry tree, photos of a family Bible and a tree I drew by hand. I had never sat down to pull it together.

In twelve days I did it with AI. The result is a tree of more than 150 people where every fact has a source and a score, a narrated video, a page and a printable PDF. The page belongs to the family and is shared only with them, so here I tell the method.

How it was made

  1. Gather what was scattered

    Claude searched my email for what each person had sent me and filed it, with dates and origins, in an Obsidian vault.

    Gmail · Ancestry · Obsidian

  2. A plan with rules

    Before searching anything I wrote a ten-phase plan and an evidence standard. Every fact gets a source and a score from 0 to 100. A chain is only as good as its weakest link.

    Claude

  3. One night without me

    A single prompt so Claude could work all night without asking me anything. It ran four agents in parallel, one per branch, and left me a report in the morning.

    Claude · Chrome · FamilySearch

  4. A reviewer who saw nothing

    Another agent, with no access to the search, reviewed the whole chain and made 73 corrections. A quality review found 47 more problems.

    Claude

  5. I approve every change

    Nothing goes into the tree until I see it in a table: what changes, before, after and which source backs it.

    Obsidian · Ancestry

  6. Write to real people

    County clerks, museums and libraries. Claude drafts, I send. Several wrote back and offered to search their archives.

    Gmail

  7. Something the family will read

    Paper-cut illustrations, animated clips, narration in Spanish and English, a page and a PDF with each person’s name on it.

    Gemini · Flow · ElevenLabs · Vercel

Models and tools

Claude
Research, parallel agents, verification and the page. Opus 5.5 in the sessions and Fable 5.1 on the overnight run
Gemini
Paper-cut illustrations and image editing
Google Flow
Animated clips
ElevenLabs
Narration in Spanish and English
Higgsfield
Animation support, 54 credits
Ancestry and FamilySearch
Records and the tree
Obsidian
The archive: profiles, sources and contradictions
Vercel
The page and the personalized PDF

The creative part

Real photos and generated images never mix. They live in separate folders with a visible label. For anything without a photo I chose paper-cut art: you can tell it is an illustration and nobody mistakes it for a portrait.

What I guarded most was not filling gaps with pretty guesses. There are more than 30 contradictions logged instead of hidden.

Time and cost

Time
12 days of intense work, October 23 to November 3, 2026
Claude
About 40 dollars: six days of heavy use of a monthly plan
ElevenLabs
About 5 dollars, close to 16,000 credits
Google AI Pro
About 4 dollars
Higgsfield
About 3 dollars, 54 credits
Vercel and ChatGPT
About 2 dollars
Ancestry and FamilySearch
No cost: free trial and free service
Total
About 54 dollars. That is this project’s share of my subscriptions, worked out from my receipts

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