Discovering 326 years of a family story

Jen Ray, the other Data Vandal, has a family history that existed as a thousand pages of genealogical research by Robert Phillip Upchurch, a retired dean who spent the last quarter-century of his life driving the back roads of Wake County, North Carolina.

We built an AI pipeline that processes those sources, which are never edited, and traces every fact into a Neo4j database. That data drives a script that generates the charts and the linear narrative telling the 326-year story of the Ray family. From 4,305 pages came 1,826 relationships and 860 images, and 28 enslaved people now have their stories told.

The site features some high-tech extras, such as a photogrammetric scan of the George Washington Ray house — built around 1875, and in the family for 139 years — that you walk around by scrolling, and a cemeteries page: 86 Rays in 17 burying grounds, documented from the ground up.