Avtar Singh, who grew up in Canada believing the woman raising him was his mother, discovered as an adult that he had been born to his father’s first wife and left with his grandparents in India. Decades later, after conventional searches had failed, he turned to ChatGPT and was reunited with previously unknown family members, including a half-sister, Nicci Dhamu. Their story illustrates how AI can help organise fragmented family-history clues, though the eventual discovery depended on human records and connections.

Avtar was sent alone from Amritsar to Halifax aged nine in 1968, unable to speak English, to join his father, stepmother and younger brother. He later learned only that his birth mother was called Savinder, had family links to Africa and may have lived in the UK, while relatives kept further details secret. Nicci had separately grown up aware that her mother had given away a son before she was born, leaving both siblings with unanswered questions for much of their lives.