We delivered an AI Family Archivist for a Johns Island woman trying to clear the title on eleven acres her family has held since 1911 — one that reads handwritten records and probate files, builds the heirship chart nobody has ever drawn, finds the living heirs, and transcribes twenty-two hours of her great-uncle's cassette tapes along the way.

Her great-great-grandfather bought eleven acres off River Road on Johns Island in 1911, and nobody in the family can say for certain who owns it now. He died without a will. So did his son. So did two of his four grandchildren.

Each time, the land passed by default to every descendant at once, in undivided shares, and after a century the shares are small enough to be theoretical and numerous enough to be dangerous. This is heirs' property, and it is the most common way Black families in the Lowcountry have lost land they never sold. Any single heir, including one who has never seen the place, can force the whole tract to auction. She is a retired school administrator in her sixties, and for three years this was her second job.

A title attorney told her what she needed: the chain of descent, documented, from 1911 forward. Every marriage, every death, every child, every heir alive today with a current mailing address. She got nineteen names. She had a shoebox of funeral programs, a family Bible with four pages of births in three different hands, and a standing Tuesday appointment with the microfilm reader.

The AI Family Archivist started with the shoebox. She photographed everything with her phone — the Bible pages, ninety-seven funeral programs, a 1943 letter, three deeds, two probate citations, a church cemetery plot map drawn in pencil. It read the handwriting, including the cursive that had defeated her, and pulled out every name, date, relationship and place. Where a program said "preceded in death by," it treated that as a fact about the family tree and went looking for the record behind it.

Then it worked outward. Charleston County probate indexes. Recorded deeds and the plat book. Census enumerations from 1910 through 1950, where the household listings confirmed which children belonged to which marriage.

State death indexes. Obituaries in two newspapers. The membership and burial rolls of the Methodist church on Johns Island where four generations are buried. It reconciled the spellings — the surname appears six different ways across the records — and it showed its work, so that every line on the chart points at the document that supports it.

The chart it produced has sixty-three heirs. Forty-one of them are living, and it found current addresses for thirty-four, including a great-nephew in Baltimore and a cousin in Ohio whose branch of the family had been out of contact since 1968. It drafted the affidavits of heirship in the form the attorney asked for, assembled the exhibits in order, and wrote a plain-language summary of the chain for the relatives who will have to sign something they do not fully understand. It did one more thing she did not ask for.

She had twenty-two hours of cassette tape — her great-uncle, recorded in 1989, talking about the farm. It transcribed all of it, indexed every name and place he mentioned, and cross-referenced the transcript against the chart. He identified four people in photographs nobody had been able to name, and he described the location of a family cemetery on the property that does not appear on any survey. It keeps the file now rather than finishing it.

New heirs are born and old ones die, and an heirship chart is only true on the day it is drawn, so it watches the death and marriage indexes for the names on the chart and tells her when a branch changes. It holds the current contact list the family will need every time this comes up again, which under South Carolina's heirs' property act it will. Her nephew in Summerville can open the same chart she can. Her attorney's estimate for the title work came down by a little over half, because what arrived was an organized file rather than a shoebox.

Three years of her own work produced nineteen names. Five months of this produced sixty-three, with the paper behind each one. The 1,400 photographs are scanned, dated and named. The petition is filed.