Create a Family History Book With Your Virtual Team

Just in time for your holiday gift-giving, here's an amazing new website. They make it easy to produce your own beautiful, professional family history book. Take it from this long-time copywriter. Using the Bindery at Infinite Library is like working with a team of professional:

• writers
• editors
• graphic artists
• typesetters
• proofreaders, and
• researchers.

The entire team has one goal in mind: To turn your work into a high-quality hardcover book. And it's crazy how much fun it is to do.

If you complete your project by November 30, you can have your printed book in hand by Christmas. Use this link to get a 20% discount: https://www.infinitelibrary.ai/family-history?aff=fyft

Full disclosure: When you get the discount, I may earn a commission.

This website makes you a professional family history book publisher. Say hello to your virtual team.

Let's talk about how Infinite Library works. Their team approached me and asked if I would give it a test run. They saw my article ("Create a Gorgeous, Custom Family Tree Chart in Minutes") about using AI platforms to create a family tree chart. In the article I explained how ChatGPT made up an entire family for my grandfather. And I told about my frustrating experience using Claude AI.

Infinite Library uses Claude in the most expert way imaginable. The results astonished me.

Get Your Materials Together

Years ago I put together my grandfather's life story (see "5 Steps to Writing Your Ancestor's Life Story"). This outline of his life, along with his family tree, became my first test of Infinite Library.

I also created a family history website for my relatives (see "How I Brought this Ambitious Genealogy Project to Life"). I wrote a narrative about one set of my great grandparents and their children. I included some history, document images, and photos. I thought this would make a good book.

Since this material exists only as web pages, I captured the eight pages as a PDF file. When I fed this to Infinite Library, it told me this was a scan and there is no readable text. But I had another trick up my sleeve.

There's a free website called PDF Swing that can turn your PDF file into an OCR PDF with real text. That means any text in the image becomes true, readable text you can select with your mouse. Then it's ready to feed into Infinite Library.

When I first tested PDF Swing at https://pdfswing.com/ocr-pdf, I uploaded a scan of a document from the DMV. The result was a PDF that had the same formatting and graphics, but every bit of text was real, not an image of text. This is how I turned my family history website into text, and then into a book.

Upload Materials to Infinite Library

Now that I had materials for two different books, I fed them to Infinite Library. You can watch as the system tells Claude what to do. The "editor" will ask you questions and may point out discrepancies.

I found this amazing. My grandfather's book mentions that my grandmother was born in 1899. But Claude saw that her grave marker says she was born in 1900. It read that from the photograph! Because the dates don't match, it asked me which was correct.

There's another photograph that I left unlabeled. It shows my grandparents on the front porch of their home. Claude calls it "the porch photograph" and asked me if it shows Adamo and Mary (my grandparents). I mean—how did it even know they're on a porch? It's a semi-close-up with a window behind them, but it isn't 100% obvious they're on a porch. Wow.

The "editor":

• found and fixed a few typos
• altered the layout to keep certain text close to the photos
• corrected a missing hyphen in Austro-Hungarian.

This is excellent work!

For my second book, I uploaded the OCR PDF I created from my website. The "editor" found a typo of mine and one other that must have come from the OCR process. My website includes a timeline report for each great grandparent. Infinite Library pointed out that the text mentions these as links on my website.

I gave the "editor" the two timeline files. I asked it to add them as Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 and reference them in the text. It did this, mentioning the proper page number in the text.

For Family Tree People Like Us

While I was working on these books, the Infinite Library team had some news for me. They added the capability for a user to upload a GEDCOM file. They were curious to learn what I would think of the result.

I used a GEDCOM of my direct ancestors, which has 422 people in it. (My full GEDCOM is a little over the 100 MB file-size limitation.) Note that all I did was drop the GEDCOM file onto the page. It wrote a complex and precise instruction for Claude to follow.

If you've looked at a GEDCOM file, you know it's a bit cryptic. But Infinite Library teased out all the good stuff. First it located my four grandparents. It chose to subtitle the book, "Four Family Lines, from Benevento to America". (You can edit anything you don't like.) It explained where each grandparent was born and who came to America. Then it created a chapter to explore each grandparent in detail.

I'm blown away by what it wrote. It's all accurate, but I can't imagine parsing all this richness from a GEDCOM file.

This book:

• draws a four-generation tree for each grandparent
• lists the ancestors of each grandparent by Ahnentafel number
• devotes a chapter to "Colle Sannita nel 1742", the book by Dr. Fabio Paolucci that provides many facts about my early ancestors (see "Imagine a Register of Your Entire Ancestral Hometown")
• lists all the sources used
• includes an index of names that covers eight pages with two columns.

My jaw dropped after seeing what Infinite Library did with a GEDCOM file.

A Couple of Tips

When you choose to create a new book on the website, you're given 4 choices under the heading Editor AI. I overlooked how they affect your cost. They are:

• Haiku, which requires the least amount of credits (around 55).
• Sonnet, which is "best all-around for real chapters" and typically uses up to 1,400 credits.
• Opus has a more advanced editor, and a better typesetter. It uses about 2,700 credits.
• Fable is the best at everything but can use about 6,800 credits.

When you sign up, you get 800 credits to play with. You can buy 2,000 credits for $12 US.

During my testing, I accidentally used up my allowance of credits because I tried Fable. Switching to Opus still gave me excellent results for fewer credits. Once I was out of credits, I realized I could make my own corrections (based on the editor's notes) for zero credits.

I haven't done anything about cover art yet. When I click the print icon at the top, I can see how much it would cost to have them print a hardcover version of my book. The price is quite reasonable. It'd be a great Christmas gift. They also let you sell the book on their website, if you like. For starters, you can download a PDF of your creation while you decide on your next step.

Either Claude AI got much better or the Bindery at Infinite Library is a genius at coaxing the best out of it. This has been an incredible experience, and I encourage you to check it out.

This Just In!

Now Infinite Library's life-story gift turns oral family stories into a book:

• Their AI interviews family members: one question at a time, typed or spoken.
• In their own words: each chapter is written from their answers, with nothing made up.
• Their hardcover book is printed and shipped when they’re done.

It costs $99. Your loved ones get it by email on the morning you choose, even Christmas morning. You can also add copies for the rest of the family. The interview takes a few sittings. In the US, the finished book must be ordered by November 30 for their hardcover to arrive before Christmas.