Heartland Genealogy

What Happened When I Gave NotebookLM Its Own Audio My recent experiments with Google NotebookLM and the records of Rachel Christy Ricketts took an unexpected turn. I had already given NotebookLM my narrative report for Rachel and used it to create an Audio Overview . As I described in my previous post, listening to that discussion helped call my attention to a problem with Rachel's birthplace. My narrative report said Indiana, while several records pointed toward Ohio. After reviewing the original evidence, I corrected the birthplace in my genealogy database. But then I became curious about something else. What would happen if I took the Audio Overview created by NotebookLM and fed it back into NotebookLM as a new source? I Just Wanted an Outline My original goal was actually quite simple: I wanted an outline of the Audio Overview . After experimenting with file formats, I uploaded the audio into a new NotebookLM notebook. NotebookLM processed the recording, but instead of produci...

NotebookLM Creates a Video What happens when you give an AI tool a genealogical narrative report and ask it to turn that information into a video? After creating my From Indiana to Kansas song and video about James Marshall Ricketts, I decided to try another experiment. This time, I uploaded James's narrative report to Google NotebookLM and asked its Studio to create a video. I actually created two versions. Explainer or Cinematic? For the first video, I selected the Explainer style. For the second, I tried Cinematic . I really liked the look and feel of the cinematic version. Unfortunately, it included an image of a nineteenth-century couple. Since those people were not James Ricketts and his wife, Rachel , I don't feel comfortable sharing that version as part of their family history. That's one of the challenges of using AI to tell our ancestors' stories. An image may look historically appropriate and make a beautiful video, but viewers could easily assume they are ...