As we pause to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice while serving our country, consider learning more about those in our family.
After some thought, these are the resources I recommend to get you started or move you farther along on your research into WWI and WWII fallen service members. There are links to our blog posts with how-to’s for researching military members who fell in WWI and WWII. There is also a link to our post about an archived reference about America’s wars. With the link to the partially digitized WWII NARA record series for WWII deaths, think about how you might use the files even if the specific file you seek has not been digitized yet. Take what you learn from these resources as directions to dig deeper into more detailed sources.
Yes, many of the US Army personnel records were lost in the 1973 fire, BUT the original records that were used to construct them were not. WWI Death Files / WWII Individual Death Personnel Files (IDPF) are discussed in this post.
In addition to basing a story on WWII Morning Reports, this post describes what records were consulted that added to the story. The resources that were used are listed.
The NARA Catalog contains the IDPF files that have begun to be digitized. These files contain the records that were generated and correspondence about the dead WWII service member. In the case that your ancestor’s file has not been digitized, you might still choose to search these files.
You can search from the main catalog for “Individual Deceased Personnel Files” AND a name (or variations) in quotation marks for a mention of them in someone else’s file. If they died on a ship, you might find locate a file for those who died on the same ship and read the common information that would be in all their files, which should include the names of all the personnel involved
and insert an individual’s name or name of a ship, using search terms such as:
“Individual Deceased Personnel Files” AND “USS Helena”
For context search for those who died in the same location. For example a search from the NARA Catalog:
“Individual Deceased Personnel Files” AND “Greenland”
returned digitized files for individuals who died on USAT Dorchester. These files included details about the ship and its sinking. First person sworn statements from survivors are also included in this file.
BONUS!
Do not forget to search the Veterans Legacy Memorial to find those interred in veterans cemeteries in the US and abroad.
Recently I followed up on an Ancestor hint relating to a branch on my maternal line, which led me to interesting discoveries.
In my family tree, Maria, a seemingly abandoned Irish woman and her three children entered a workhouse in England. Fortunately, she and the children left it in a year. At least one of the children (my great-grandmother, Mary Ann) made her way to Providence, RI, where she married my great-grandfather. (I have previously blogged about finding an ancestor in a 19th century workhouse in https://aweekofgenealogy.com/found-ancestors-in-the-workhouse/).
A death certificate record was located in Providence, RI, for a woman whose data seemingly matched Maria’s. Standing alone it was certainly of interest, but no other records had been found to put her in that place and time. I admit to being somewhat skeptical. Knowing Irish naming patterns, causing the repetitive use of names within family units, I wondered if this might be a relation rather than Maria herself. Were these common names where she originally hailed from in Ireland? Or was it coincidental?
The Ancestry hint sent me to a family tree that contained a person with the same name of my great-great-grandmother along with her two sisters. The documentation for those two sisters was more detailed than that for my great-great-grandmother, suggesting the owner of the tree was not along the same line as I. I followed the suggested records and built out a detailed pictures of two women who had immigrated to the United States and came to call Providence, RI, their home.
I always look for the records that document facts in a person’s life, link people, and tell a story, and I found some. In my own family tree I added these two women without connecting them to Maria in the main tree When I found records on Ancestry, I attached them to these women, downloaded them, and copied the source information. I also took snipped screenshots of the relevant data and captured it in a timeline built in a Word document. So far, so good.
Margaret, the elder of these two sisters, had come to Providence and married before Ellen. Ellen arrived in 1880 and was shown in the census of that same year, living with married Margaret. (This suggested a chain migration.) Ellen worked in Providence and married several years later in 1889. Sadly, Ellen died in 1899 at age 38. At that time, she was already a widow, and she left behind two young daughters. Margaret died in 1904, leaving behind a husband and six children. My great-great-grandmother, Maria, died in 1902. The records for all three women that contained parents’ names were consistent:
Father, William Connaughton
Mother, Bridget
As I searched through the records Ancestry suggested, a standout was the Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. Old Stone Bank Records, 1844-1924 at https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/62959/. Both Margaret and Ellen had bank accounts, and along with other identifying information, there was common data:
Birthplace: Co. Roscommon
Margaret’s entry contained additional data:
Mother, Bridget Murphy
So, parents had the same names. If Maria was in fact their sister, I would then know the county where she was born, and the maiden name of her mother.
I looked at Maria’s death information again and noted the address where she had died. It was the house owned by Margaret and her husband. Evidence was mounting, but I was still wondering if she might have been a cousin or another relation.
Contacting the owner of the tree was a good idea, but had I tried before? I checked the messages on Ancestry and viewed the messages exchanged 2019. (I could have consulted my correspondence log, but this was more convenient. I admit to being on a fishing expedition rather than focused on answering a research question.)
Based on that previous correspondence, I doubled checked DNA matches. By my calculations, we were fourth cousins, once removed. Yes, this contact did know more about Margaret and Ellen than Maria.
At this point, circumstantial evidence was being built, but I wanted one record to connect Maria with one of her sisters. Searching for Maria, or her daughter Mary Ann, in the Old Stone Bank records and the 1900 US Census in Providence (and Rhode Island) was not fruitful.
It was time to move laterally to check other indexes and other databases. I decided to search on FamilySearch for records that would be helpful in connecting Maria to these two women.
I decided to jump in and use FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search to find those records that might have mentioned Maria, even if the record was not about her. Full-Text Search has moved out of the FamilySearch Labs and can be selected from the Search Menu.
FamilySearch Search Menu Options, courtesy of FamilySearch
As a reminder, the best way to search for a person is to enter their name within quotation marks in the Keywords field.
FamilySearch Full Text Search Box, courtesy of FamilySearch
Carefully reviewing results…there was result contained a death record I had not yet seen.
The same address was in the record, namely the home owned by her sister and brother-in-law. The parents’ names were there (without her mother’s maiden name).
Return of a Death Maria Henry, courtesy of FamilySearch
In this record there was data that was not included in the register:
Name of Informant and Relationship to Deceased: Thos. Kelly Brotherinlaw
Thomas was Margaret’s husband! He and Margaret owned that house. Since he was Maria’s brother-in-law, that made Margaret her sister. (None of her late husband’s people were identified in the proximity.) FamilySearch Full-Text Search for the win!
That was the definite piece of data I needed to call my brother and tell him that we had roots in County Roscommon, and that our great-great-great-grandmother’s name maiden name was Murphy. (Even though he lives in time zones behind mine, it was so late that I waited until the next morning to make the call.) It was also a good reminder:
Always look for all the records related to an event, focusing on the ones made closest to the event.
The details in Returns of death were recorded by a physician. The data on them was used to make an entry in the register. Death indexes and death certificates draw data from the ledger.
Generated by ChatGPT, 2026.
Engineers are known for being belt-and-suspenders people. Being that way meant that in addition to downloading the records, saving sources, and extracting the information into my timeline document, I added the record to my tree (my part of the one family tree) on FamilySearch.
That is where the middle-of-the-night surprise occurred.
A brother to Maria, Margaret and Ellen is shown in that tree! Back to the drawing board to see if the records prove out James Joseph Connaughton’s relationship to these sisters. (The first record I looked at was his Intention to Marry in Providence in 1883, with his parents: William Connaughton & Bridget Murphy.)
But right now it is time to connect Margaret and Ellen to their sister and parents in my family tree on Ancestry.
This is it! You have decided to give Google’s NotebookLM a try!
Maybe you want step-by-step instructions, or just want to look over the process before diving in. Either way, this tutorial stands ready to help.
What will you do in this Notebook? One suggestion is to upload a group of documents related to a subject or ancestor. These are documents that you want to understand better or analyze. Don’t overthink it. You just need to have an idea of your subject, because once you begin to use the Notebook more ideas will probably come to you.
In this tutorial, we’ll get started with a brand new NotebookLM, add documents to it, then based on those documents generate an Audio Overview, an Infographic, a Slide Deck and a Video Overview.
NOTE: For this tutorial, keep in mind that Google may change how it looks or add/remove specific functionality and labels at any time, but the basic ideas will remain.
When you have decided the topic for your Notepad, it’s time to get going and create it.
In my example I will add only a few documents: the homestead patents and pages from the tract books for Charles F. Gilroy.
Login to your Google account here. If you are already logged into Google in the same browser, you may go directly to this page:
You’re in!
Select Create newnotebook to start.
After you have created a new notebook, a window pops up asking you to add media. (This is the same window that will open when you select + Add sources)
As of this writing the Notebook supports: Google Docs, Slides, PDFs, text files, web URLs, YouTube transcripts, and audio files. When you enter a link a YouTube video, only the transcript will be used and the video has to be public.
For best results, enter documents with text in them. There is no guarantee that images will be transcribed properly.
From this window you can drag and drop the files you want to add to your Notebook.
When adding to this Notebook, I have to admit that I did not follow the text-is-best rule. That means I will need to verify the transcription that the Notebook is using was done correctly. I added Land Patents and Tract Book images. (The Tract Book images had been located by FamilySearch Full-Text Search!)
On the left, I selected one of the sources, and viewed a description of the document containing key information from it that had been extracted.
The workspace that opens is called the Notebook, and it has three windows labeled: Sources, Chat, and Studio. The first two are self-explanatory.
The third window is the Studio Window, which is also called the Studio Panel.
There are two sections within the Studio Panel. One section is home to the buttons, called Action Tiles, where you ask the Notebook to generate complicated multimedia products. By selecting an Action Tile, the Notebook to generate audio or visual presentations, infographic, slide decks, reports, mind maps and more. At this point, several Tiles are labeled “Beta” which means they are almost ready to be full-fledged features but are still being evaluated. Do not let that dissuade you from trying them! Test them out for yourself.
The second section is the Generated Resource List. When you request a product, you will see it added to that list. The list is empty for a new Notebook. As you choose products, the list is populated with the generated media. Next to each resource in that appears in the list there is a 3 dot menu (snowman) where you can Rename, Download, Share or Delete a resource. When you rename a resource, that changes only the name and does not change any of the media’s content.
After uploading the documents, a name for the notebook was automatically generated.
I renamed the Notebook.
Audio Overview
First, I tried an Audio Overview based on the few documents I had uploaded. This action offers to “Generate an AI podcast based on your sources.”
Documentation for the Notebook had explained that it may take some time for the Audio Overview to be generated.
Within minutes, I was listening to audio in a podcast format of two people explaining and discussing the documents and their context in a pleasant conversation presentation. It was 19 minutes, 12 seconds in length.
A clip from this audio is here:
Infographic
Next, I decided to generate an Infographic based on the documents.
In the Generated Resource List at the bottom of the Studio Panel, there was a spinning circle to indicate that the infographic was being generated. When it was done, I could select it from the list.
I clicked on the Infographic in the list in the Studio window
and a Viewer opened up. I had options to share, download, collapse the Viewer and close the Viewer in the upper right hand corner.
After I closed the Viewer, I could click on the snowman (3 dot menu) and to be presented with options: Rename, Download, Share, Delete
This is one of the features that in BETA, but the infographic that was generated was interesting.
Slide Deck
An option is to generate a Slide Deck. At this time, this feature is in BETA.
I selected Slide Deck and waited while it was generated
When I clicked on the Slide Deck in the Resource List, a Viewer opened up where I could look at the slides, and interact with them.
I particularly liked this slide
NotebookLM Generated Slide
I also liked the option to download the slide deck as a PDF or a PowerPoint document.
Selecting “Revise” gives you the chance to interact and make change to the slide. The pending changes will be generated in a few minutes (or longer).
Video Overview
I selected the Video Overview Tile
and accepted the default selections, which included the longer Explainer format.
Generating that video took a long time. When I quizzed Gemini if I could find out how long it took to generate a product, I was told no, but that this task usually took from 5 to 30+ minutes.
At the end of that response, Gemini asked me if generating was taking a long time, and when I said yes, Gemini recommended that I refresh the webpage because the user interface had not updated. When I followed this recommendation, it appeared that the Video Overview generation had failed.
I deleted the Video Overview entry on the Generated Resource List, and tried again. This time I selected the option for a Brief Format.
The brief format video was generated within minutes, providing me with a video 1 minute and 50 seconds long.
When I clicked on the Video Overview in the Generated Resource List it opened a window within the Studio Panel. The video gave the context of the Homestead Act then dove into presenting data about the two homesteads’ and their patents.
An excerpt from the video:
An Experiment in the Chat Window
I have engineering experience in testing, which matches my style of pressing the buttons and trying the features. That made me want to see if I could get some general information in a Chat within the Notebook.
I asked in the Chat window of the Notebook: If I upload a Word document with newspaper clippings can you transcribe all of them?
This was answered literally, using only the data within the Notebook. (At that point, there was no Word document in the sources containing newspaper clippings.) So if you have a general question that is not based on the information loaded into the Notebook, or have a question about how NotebookLM works it would be better to ask it in Google so that Gemini can answer it.
Gemini told me that “…if the clippings are embedded as images (e.g., photos or scans of newspaper pages), NotebookLM may not automatically transcribe that visual information into searchable, readable text” reminding me that “NotebookLM is designed to work with machine-readable text. If your Word document contains photos of newspaper clippings, the AI may be unable to “read” or transcribe the text inside those images.”
Getting back to my Notebook
When you need to revisit your Notebook, or login on a different computer, you can choose it from your list of Recent notebooks.
Current Limitations
According to Gemini, currently free accounts have limits of generating approximately 3 Audio/Video Overviews per day, and can only send 50 chat queries per day. The Free accounts are limited to 50 sources per notebook, and are limited to 100 notebooks. (Workaround for large projects: Try combining multiple, smaller documents into a single PDF or Google Doc before uploading.)
Google has a tutorial that provides good information in an overview, and it can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/notebook-lm/tutorial
Give this a try and explore the Tiles and Chat. Let me know how you do.
Trying out NotebookLM has been on my to-do list for months. I just did, and I was blown away by it. The accessibility of technologies that I knew existed but had so well not seen integrated was impressive. You can chat with the AI about what has been added to the Notebook, and you can generate products based on what the uploaded documents. The AI-generated media and responses in the Notebook are all based on the documents that you upload to it, which should reduce the opportunity for AI hallucinations. Keep in mind that the best idea is to enter documents with text; there is no guarantee that images will be transcribed properly.
I had already identified a couple of ancestors as test cases. One is all-time family favorite who was born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island, served in the Army during Spanish-American War, then settled on a homestead out in Oregon. He was a poet and a raconteur who loved to travel and was always involved in social movements.
Another ancestor is one of my brick walls. He is the only German immigrant in my tree (so far), and while I have clues about his origins in Germany, I cannot pin down his arrival to the United States or from whence he came. What I have learned about him is in the U.S., and begins when he was married to an Irish woman, after he had anglicized his name. From the time of his marriage, he never lived near other German immigrants. Very knowledgeable and generous researchers in Brooklyn, New York, and in Germany have helped me follow up on the very limited clues I have developed. The ability to pull together the material and look at it from different perspectives has the potential to help with this brick wall.
If you have not had a chance to try out NotebookLM, here is the link:
For researching a WWI or a WWII soldier, have you considered using the Rosters at NARA? They are located Series: Muster Rolls and Rosters, November 1, 1912–December 31, 1943 within Record Group 64. This blog post will show where to search for rosters, including how to use an online finding aid for finding WWII rosters that will make your task much easier.
The rosters are arranged in three subseries within Muster Rolls and Rosters, November 1, 1912–December 31, 1943:
Muster Rolls, November 1, 1912 – June 30, 1918 and Enlisted and Officer Rosters, July 1, 1918 – December 31, 1939,
Officer Rosters, 1920 – 1939,
Army and Army Air Force (Air Corp) Rosters, 1940 – 1943
On this page, you will find information about how to locate WWII rosters organized by:
Army enlisted service members
Army officers
Army Air Force (Air Corp) enlisted service members
Army Air Force (Air Corp) officers
Within those categories, the rosters are organized by type of reporting unit.
To use the finding aid, click on the plus sign to expand the link to locate the type of unit. There will be box numbers shown, but some entries will contain links to digitized rosters, or to a pdf that contains the National Archives Identifier (NAID) in NARA’s Catalog to use when locating the online rosters.
In this example, I am searching for the rosters for a soldier in Battery A of the 500th AAA Gun Battalion, so clicked on the plus sign next to “Chemical and Antiaircraft Artillery” to expand the section.
I licked on the link for “Antiaircraft Battalion – Boxes 246-348.”
The PDF file shows that the rosters are stored by increasing NAID numbers, by the number of the organization.The first page contains the column headers. (They are not repeated on subsequent pages.)
Scrolling down to the beginning of page 4 of the PDF, I find Btry C, 500th AAA Gn Bn, 1943. That means Roll Number 307 (2 of 3), which begins with Battery C of that Battalion has NAID Identifier 371744319.
Since the soldier is in Battery A, I will want to check the previous part of the roll, listed at the bottom of page 3 of the PDF, NAID 371744318, Roll Number 307 (1 of 3). I would expect that rosters for Battery A would be closer to the end of the Roll. (Remember to use the Chrome Browser to see the images in order, as Firefox has a documented bug of showing images in reverse order.)
There is a blank page between the months, so I began by checking the image after the blank pages in the image range of 800-900.
I recommend building a list or a table with the information for the organization, to keep track of links. (Note: Organization and Link appear in the same column for readability. In my Excel worksheet, they appear in separate columns.)
I would want to continue to go backwards chronologically to collect the rosters for the time the soldier I am researching was in the Battery.
Another option, as described in our blog post about locating WWII Morning Reports in PDF Files can also make the task easier. Search the NARA catalog for: 371745320, which is the NAID for the final part of the Roll Number 307, part 3 of 3.
From there, the PDF files containing groups of 125 images from the Roll can be downloaded. Images for Battery A can be found in the files Roll-0307_07.pdf and Roll-0307_08.pdf
