About this site
My name is Mark Malott. My family was born and raised in Norwood, Ohio. I began a career in Information Technology in 1995, and in October 1997 I first registered Malott.net. I have used this domain and my personal email address for nearly 29 years.
A few years before going into IT, I, like many people, loved America Online. It was there that I first found the wonderful site produced by Bill Marlatt. Before AOL shut down its member web sites, Bill gave me permission to reproduce it on Malott.net; you can still see it as William Marlatt’s Original AOL Site. Not only did Bill inspire a new generation of genealogy sleuths, but all these years later I am happy to see that Bill is still out there, leading wonderful discussions with a community of modern researchers of the legacy of Gedeon!
This site has evolved over the years. Today, I am feeding all the data into AI, and I am amazed at the new insight and correlation this offers. If anyone would like to contribute new information, please contact me.
From the Texas Hill Country,
Mark Malott
How this site was built, and the role of AI
Family history has always been built on hard work: years of research, reading, letter writing, and sometimes travel to courthouses, churches and cemeteries to find a single date or name. I came to this work through Bill Marlatt’s site on AOL, and over the years I have come to believe that the heart of genealogy is generosity: the willingness of researchers and families to share what they have found with people they may never meet.
In its early years Malott.net did many of the things social platforms do today. It held my résumé, my own story, and a secure place to share family photos with relatives. Over time, though, I found that the real value of the site was the people who came to it while searching for their own family. Many of them wrote to me and sent records, photos and pieces of family knowledge. I never had a practical way to bring all of that information together in a meaningful way and in its proper context.
That is where artificial intelligence comes in.
The man behind the curtain. In The Wizard of Oz, the great and powerful wizard turns out to be an ordinary man working the controls behind a curtain. This site has a man behind the curtain too, and I want to be clear about it: Malott.net was not built by AI. It was built by a person who uses AI. Genealogy and family history are a passion for people, not machines. Every record on this site was chosen, read and weighed by a person, and every decision about what belongs here, what is proven and what is still in doubt, was made by a person. AI is a remarkable tool, but it takes people to assess it, question it and guide it.
A fresh, secure start. Rising hosting costs eventually took the site offline. Its last version ran on WordPress and had fallen badly out of date. When I had AI tools analyze it, they found it had been compromised, with spam advertising injected into its pages. So I used AI to rebuild Malott.net from scratch in plain HTML, with no databases, plug-ins or other software that could be hacked. Work that would have taken me weeks back when I worked on the web content side of IT was done in days.
Organizing and checking the record. Even more valuable is the way AI tools can cross-check documents and facts against one another. They can:
- read a census page, a ship’s ledger or a newspaper clipping
- compare it with everything else already known about a family
- point out where the records agree, where they conflict and where something is missing
What still amazes me is how well AI can integrate and correlate information. A census taker’s spelling, a date on a gravestone, an old soldier’s sworn account and a cousin’s family tree can all be laid side by side in minutes and checked against each other. We are now at the point where, when new information arrives, we can assess it, validate it against everything else we know, and be thorough about whether it is accurate. When the evidence is strong, I say so. When the records conflict, I say that too, and show both sides.
Several discoveries on this site came about this way:
- the Company’s ledger entry for Gideon Merlet’s passage money
- a mistaken year carved on a headstone
- the life story of a half-sister my father’s family knew of but never met
- the Revolutionary War pension file of Dory Malott, in which he tells, under oath and in his own words, of building huts at Valley Forge, and which settled a long-standing question about his birth date
- the proof that three famous Marlatts, among them the entomologist Charles Lester Marlatt, are documented cousins and not just namesakes
Just as often, the work turns up conflicts rather than answers: a widow who appears in a census two years after the date on her stone, or two records that cannot agree on a man’s birthday. Those questions are not hidden. They are written up in research notes on the people they concern, so that anyone who knows more can help settle them.
AI does not replace the researchers whose work fills these pages, and it makes mistakes of its own: it can misread old handwriting, confuse two people with the same name, or sound more certain than the evidence allows. That is exactly why there has to be a person in charge. I check every fact on this site against the source records. Conflicts and doubts are shown openly in research notes, not smoothed over. Images created with AI, such as the paintings of ships and scenes from the past, are always labeled as artistic creations, not historical pictures.
Used this way, I believe AI opens a remarkable opportunity. It can help families like ours organize what we already know, test it against the evidence, and keep expanding what we know about our ancestors. And it can carry forward the same spirit of sharing that Bill started on AOL all those years ago.
Would you like a site like this for your own family? I now help other families do the same: bringing together their trees, records, photos and stories into a family history website of their own. Read about putting your family history online.
Corrections and contributions
Genealogy is never finished. If you spot a mistake, or you have a photo, a document, or a story about someone here, please get in touch.
About the living
People who may still be alive do not appear on this site. Their names, dates, and places are withheld to protect their privacy. They show up only as a count, such as "2 living children, not shown."