Genealogy Sunday – Telling A Lost Family Story

One of the lost family stories I found was on a trip to the Provincial Archives of Alberta. I looked at some research guides and discovered the “Returning Soldiers” file. I had several great-grandfathers who had served in WWI, so I checked for family surnames. Sure enough, I found the Middlebrough name.

When I requested the file, I found correspondence from my great-grandmother, Ellen Middlebrough, requesting that her husband be sent home because she and her children had been in a train accident. The file didn’t detail much on the accident, so I thought I’d check the Edmonton Journal. The event occurred in 1917, so I was sure it would have made the news, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The Edmonton Journal and The Edmonton Bulletin both had stories of the incident. Five people had been killed and forty-one injured on what was supposed to be an outing to the beach.

Edmonton Journal

Edmonton Journal Mon, Jul 30, 1917 ·Page 4

Edmonton Journal Mon, Jul 30, 1917 ·Page 1

The thing that surprised me the most was that this was a story I’d never heard before. Although after I found it, my Uncle Arnie said he’d known about it. But for me, it wasn’t a story that I’d ever heard from my mom or my grandparents.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m creating a book about my family’s story, and as I have time, I add the stories to this project. I’m making the book with FOREVER Artisan, which gives me the greatest flexibility because I can buy digital art, moving the pages where they suit me, and creating QR codes to videos and albums in my FOREVER account.

So with this story in mind, I turned to ChatGPT. In the prompt, I uploaded all the newspaper clippings I’d gathered from the two Edmonton newspapers. I then told my chatbot (Theo) that I wanted a story created using just the facts obtained from the newspaper articles attached and not to embellish it with unproven facts.

It took a few tries to get the details right, as I wanted the phrase “plunky Beverly mother” in the story. I then took the article to Google NotebookLM, uploaded my story, and requested an audio file. Which is like a podcast voice recording. I’ve used this tool a few times, and it does a pretty good job.

It was then that I decided to take it one step further and using a software called Wondershare, which I use all the time for my video creations, I added a graphic that I created in FOREVER Artisan, some photos of my grandfather and his sibling, and some of my great-grandmother, Ellen along with the output from Google NotebookLM and now I had a video to share with my family. I’ve uploaded this video to my YouTube channel, and if you watch and like it, I hope you give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. The one I uploaded has a short intro (just over a minute). and then it has the story. For my family, I’m just sharing the story.

I also added the film to my FOREVER Storage account. So now it’s in my genealogy album and will be preserved for my family for generations. The final step was to create a QR code to add to the page of my genealogy book.

This is what the page looks like in my book. I’ve used the blue box to cover some private information about family, but you get the idea. With the bio I created last week and this story this week, my grandfather’s life is becoming increasingly complete, and that’s the idea of “Genealogy Sunday.”

If you’d like to see the video, you can watch it on my YouTube channel HERE. There is a brief intro as to how I created it and then the story.

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