How I Brought this Ambitious Genealogy Project to Life

Last week I wrote about a genealogy project we can all use to supply answers to our families' questions. I'm in touch with one group of cousins more than the others. So I decided that creating a "book of life" about our shared ancestors was the best place to start. We all call them Babanonno and Mamanonna—my maternal grandmother's parents.

A couple of weeks ago, for the first time, I saw what Google's NotebookLM can do to generate content. (Thanks, Liz!) I dropped the biography I wrote about my grandfather into a notebook. Then I let NotebookLM generate an infographic and a slide deck. The results were impressive, though not perfect.

With the right tools and your own collection of family tree documents, you can create a "book of life" to share with your relatives.

Getting Started

Here's what I did to create content about my great grandparents—Giovanni and Maria Rosa:

1. Created a new notebook in NotebookLM.
2. Searched my computer for all the saved document images belonging to the couple. I dropped several images into the notebook as sources. These include:
   • birth and marriage records
   • censuses
   • a ship manifest
   • a photograph of the ship they took to New York
   • a photo of their grave marker
3. Used Family Historian software to create a descendant chart and family group sheets. Then I added them to the notebook as sources.
4. Created a Timeline Report in Family Tree Maker for both Giovanni and Maria Rosa. Saved them as PDF files, and added them to the notebook's sources.
5. Asked NotebookLM the following in its chat window. "Based on the Timeline Reports, use these 10 sources to tell me about the lives of Giovanni and Maria Rosa."

This produced a narrative of their lives. Here's a little snippet of the narrative. I like how it pulled certain facts from my sources to generate this summary of his employment:

Giovanni's work history reflected a variety of roles to support his large family. He was a bartender and saloon store-keeper in the early 1900s, a building painter for many years, and the proprietor of a beer garden by 1940.

Trying More Options

When you click the Reports option in NotebookLM, you need to choose a format type or create a custom report. I chose Biographical Narrative which produced a report that included historical context. I copied the result to a Word document.

I clicked the Mind Map option, which looks wonderful, but the text got cut off when I tried to download it as an image. I thought if I clicked on Giovanni's birth date in the Mind Map I could attach his birth record. Instead, it generated a new narrative for me, focusing on his birth and key events in his life. It points out that Giovanni's grave marker has a different date than his birth record. It's off by 4 days.

Next I clicked his wife Maria Rosa's name in the Mind Map. This generated a narrative about her immediate family. I did the same for each of Giovanni and Maria Rosa's children and copied them all into the same Word document.

It's important to review everything before putting it in your final product. Be sure to remove anything that's wrong or not what you want to share. For instance, I'll make the historical context more brief.

Then I tried the Slide Deck option. The deck looks wonderful, other than obvious errors in a map of the Bronx, New York. I downloaded the result as a PowerPoint file then saved that as a PDF.

Finally, I generated an Infographic, asking it to use exact dates for everyone's birth, marriage, and death. I also asked it to include the document images I uploaded when appropriate. While it looks beautiful, it didn't use my images, it used only a few exact dates, and it made several typos.

I spent decades working in marketing communications. So I can use this infographic as a guide and create my own. I can use the images I want, the dates I want, and not have typos. But I haven't tackled that yet.

I happen to have my own website and a long work history of creating and maintaining websites. It makes sense for me to take these materials and create web pages to display it all. I'm not including birth dates for anyone living. And I'm preventing search engines from crawling and indexing the pages.

While I took all the text and images to create a series of web pages, you can use paper printouts or whatever computer software you find most comfortable.

I shared the website link with my family, and right away they discovered a few things they didn't know:

• One of our great aunts didn't marry in the church, but in the courthouse.
• Some of the original, Italian first names of our ancestors had been unknown to some cousins.
• My mom didn't know about her father's unusual job in the 1950 census. None of us did!

Who's Next?

These steps are easy to reproduce when it's time to focus on another branch of the family. This project can get your relatives more excited about your family tree work. I like the idea of having a self-serve website that lets the cousins find the answers to their questions. And I can use their feedback to make this, and future websites, more useful to all my cousins.

Next up I need to do my mom's paternal grandparents, and both sets of my dad's grandparents. I've got the template now, so I can crank these out. How about you?

Looking for some more genealogy projects? Type project in this blog's search box, or click this link.