About

Richard E. Rudd is an independent researcher based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Panama City, Panama.

His current research centers on two interconnected problems. The first is genealogical: tracing the English ancestry of Abigail (Ruck) Thomas of Boston through nine armigerous lines that converge in two Tudor gentry networks in the Kentish Weald. The second is methodological: developing a governance framework for AI-assisted research that treats multiple AI platforms not as interchangeable tools but as specialized roles in a verification architecture mapped to the Genealogical Proof Standard.

The genealogical work has produced findings across six publication-track articles targeting Archaeologia Cantiana, Continuity and Change, the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, The Coat of Arms, and the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. These include a generational correction to a Kent family pedigree that survived nearly two centuries of published scholarship, and a study of fiduciary networks as predictors of marriage alliance in Tudor Cranbrook that inverts the standard assumption about the relationship between trust and marriage in early modern communities.

The AI methodology work emerged from practical necessity. Over eighty research sessions demonstrated that no single AI platform — however capable — can reliably self-verify its own analytical output. The resulting methodology assigns platforms to specialized roles (analytical hub, adversarial auditor, cross-verifier), governs them through locked decisions and temporal rules, and documents errors as evidence of the system working, not failing. It was developed in genealogy because that is the researcher’s domain, but it is designed to be portable to any field with a published evidentiary standard.

Richard holds a doctorate in Clinical Counseling.

Contact: ruddrick at gmail.com