AI for Family History: Documenting My Grandfather with NotebookLM

If you follow my friend Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog then you’ve seen some of the fantastic things he creates with AI when it comes to his genealogy. He was doing a bit of a demo on Mondays with Myrt, which he and I are panelists on, and I commented that I knew what I’ll be working on for the next day or so.

I’ve written about NotebookLM in a previous blog and done a YouTube video about how I used it to create a podcast about the 1917 Alberta Beach Train Wreck: A True Family Story.

So I got busy and worked on a few of the key people that I have genealogy for to see what it can do for my genealogy, and I was pretty impressed.

The first step after you go to NotebookLM is:

  • Create a new notebook
  • Upload a document. I found that PDFs worked well for this. I did this by going to an ancestor’s profile and copying and pasting the facts about their life into a Word document and then converting it to a PDF. For Ancestry, you can use LifeStory, and at MyHeritage, you can use the biography that is created from the details in the tree. Of course, it works better if you have a lot of information about that ancestor. Also, be sure to review what you’ve captured and make any corrections or additions you want included.

Upload screen

  • Once you upload, you will get a “chat” in the centre and choices of what you can do on the side. In the image below, you can see the options I chose: an infographic, a mind map, and a video. As I’m on a free plan, I am limited as to how many I can create each day. I’ve since added the flashcards.

Infographic

This is what the infographic looks like. (Right now, the ability to make infographics appears to be down, not sure why.)

Mindmap

Video

I’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, so if you click the photo below, you can watch it.

This was entirely created with the free version of NotebookLM. Tell me what you’ve created, I’d love to find out.

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