Google NotebookLM Tutorial

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.         

Here’s the link:

https://sites.google.com/view/notebook-lm/login

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 new notebook 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.

Have You Tried Google’s NotebookLM Yet?

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:

https://sites.google.com/view/notebook-lm/login

If you are interested, I have put together a step-by-step tutorial that will get you started here: Google NotebookLM Tutorial.

Tracking the Rev. Fr. Thomas Kennedy

Previously I posted about getting up and running with FamilySearch Labs: Full-Text Search and how I learned about a new ancestor in Finding Amelia Small in FamilySearch Full-Text Search. Everyone is connected to relatives, no matter how isolated they appear to be. It may be that I located a lead to a collateral relative who might help to answer these questions about Amelia Matier Small’s mother:

1) Where was Mary Kennedy born?

2) Who were Mary Kennedy’s parents?

What I knew:

Amelia’s parents were William Matier and Mary Kennedy

How I knew those facts:

Amelia MATIER Small’s death certificate (New York City Municipal Archives D-Q-1946-0009408).

Amelia Small was referred to as Thomas Kennedy’s niece (from the Application for the Letters of Administration for Thomas Kennedy)

What I learned from this document:

JOSEPH N. MATIER, a nephew residing at 226 Bridge Street
FRANK A. MATIER, a nephew
CATHERINE P. MATIER, a niece
CASSANDRA L. APPLEGATE, a niece residing at Gravesend, L.I.
AMELIA SMALL, a niece residing at #364 Hart Street, Brooklyn.
BRIDGET MATIER, a widow of William F. Matier, who died at the County of Kings, on the 24th day of October 1901, residing at 694 Sackett Street, said Borough.
THOMAS MATIER, a grand nephew (son of William F. Matier deceased) residing at 694 Sackett Street, Brooklyn.
WILLIAM MATIER, a grand nephew (son of William F. Matier) residing at 694 Sackett Street, said Borough.

I sketched out a simple tree to combine data from the previous documents into my hypothesis:

Note: Other names and relationships have been omitted from this graphic. (Keeping an open mind, the possibility exists that Thomas Kennedy might be William Matier’s half-brother or adopted brother.)

After reviewing what I knew, I cast a net to find US documents about Thomas Kennedy.

Using Full-Text Search for William Kennedy in Brooklyn, Kings, New York yielded several results, but it can be difficult to connect someone with a common name to a family. One result was the Application of Thomas Kennedy to become a Citizen of the United States that contained the signature of William Matier attesting to his residency and character. William Matier is the name of Mary Kennedy’s husband, so finding this combination of names might suggest that Thomas Kennedy’s brother-in-law was vouching for him. This document is dated 21 June 1882, and there was an interesting notation at the top: “No Charge Clergyman.”

Since I had Thomas Kennedy’s place of death and date, I searched for him on Findagrave.com, but could not locate a record for him.

I turned to Ancestry.com to search for other documentation. Ancestry did suggest a Findagrave memorial. This one was for Rev. Thomas F. Kennedy, buried at the Abbey of Gethsemani Trappist Cemetery. The reason that my previous search did not work was that the first name had been listed as “Rev. Fr. Thomas” in the Findagrave memorial rather than “Thomas.” The name, death date and location of the tombstone matched what was known from the Application for Letters of Administration. From this it seems reasonable to conclude that Thomas F. Kennedy had been a priest. As it turns out, there are two memorials for this ancestor in the cemetery, with different pictures of the tombstone (Rev. Fr. Thomas Kennedy and T. Kennedy).

Photo courtesy of Robin Jordan

Another record that Ancestry.com offered in the search results was for a military tombstone for Thomas F. Kennedy in the U.S., Headstones Provided for Deceased Union Civil War Veterans, 1861-1904 database. This was an interesting development. The name, date and location of the burial matched what we knew about the Rev. Fr. Kennedy. We can now add that he had been a Bugler in Company A, 1st New York Infantry Regiment.

I followed Ancestry.com search results to entries in online obituary collection but none of them matched. (The Rootsweb Obituary Daily Times Index is now hosted on Ancestry.com.)

I did search the newspaper databases to which I had access for Thomas Kennedy in Brooklyn, New York, and in Kentucky, but there was no clear success. It could be my search terms, or the collections of newspapers. There was a mention of a Thomas Kennedy in Brooklyn being ordained at St. Bonaventure, so I kept track of that entry as a potential clue.

Of course I opened up a document and saved the images, citations and notes as I went through these searches. Of course it slows us down when we want to click through and follow each lead, but there is nothing more frustrating that wondering how or where we located a record. Stop, document and save!

I also reflected on how one document found through FamilySearch Lab’s Full-Text Search could launch a whole new avenue of research for me to follow.

The next thread to pull on is what can be found in Thomas Kennedy’s Civil War records. This will be covered in a future blog post.

Finding Amelia Small in FamilySearch Full-Text Search

Researching an Irish family in New York City can have its challenges. Some surnames were very common, and traditional naming patterns often resulted in many individuals with the same names across different branches of the same family group. The passenger lists of the mid- to late-1800s contain little identifying data. It can be difficult to trace these ancestors back to their place of origin in Ireland. With these challenges, one strategy to unravel the stories is searching for family units rather than individuals. The other strategy is to use collateral research.

Of course, I have searched through the unindexed probate and land records available on FamilySearch, but the indexes built into those records will only show the name the name of the main subject. The text of these documents may contain other names and events, and the Full-Text Search helps you find them!

I have been entering the names of these mysterious ancestors into the Full-Text Search and recently had a success connecting one ancestor to another relative who came to the US. This might open an opportunity to do collateral research. You can view a previous blog post describing how to use this tool at FamilySearch Labs: Full-Text Search.

I began at https://www.familysearch.org/labs, and entered the name my ancestor Amelia Small in the search box. Since this search focuses on pattern matching, remember to search for a woman’s birth name and married name. As a reminder, Full-Text Search works better by entering the person’s name between quotation marks into the Keyword field (rather than the Name field).

One of the results was intriguing. My ancestor Amelia Small’s name appears in a probate record, and the address is where she resided.  

Clicking on the record collection name at the top of the result opened a new tab with the record and the full transcript. The search terms were highlighted.

ChatGPT offered a better formatted transcription of the text:

…kin of the deceased, adopted child or children, as far as they are known to your Petitioner or can be ascertained by him with due diligence, are as follows:

JOSEPH N. MATIER, a nephew residing at 226 Bridge Street
FRANK A. MATIER, a nephew
CATHERINE P. MATIER, a niece
CASSANDRA L. APPLEGATE, a niece residing at Gravesend, L.I.
AMELIA SMALL, a niece residing at #364 Hart Street, Brooklyn.
BRIDGET MATIER, a widow of William F. Matier, who died at the County of Kings, on the 24th day of October 1901, residing at 694 Sackett Street, said Borough.
THOMAS MATIER, a grand nephew (son of William F. Matier deceased) residing at 694 Sackett Street, Brooklyn.
WILLIAM MATIER, a grand nephew (son of William F. Matier) residing at 694 Sackett Street, said Borough.

Amelia Small was an heir! I recognized her siblings from the family structure, and from the address listed for her. A list of heirs can be valuable, and in this case, it provided siblings’ addresses, women’s married names, and even a sibling’s death date.

Amelia was the niece of the subject of this document. I followed the back arrow to see the first page of the Application for Letters of Administration for the deceased, Thomas Kennedy, who had died intestate (without a will).

From Amelia’s death certificate I knew the names of her parents, William Matier and Mary Kennedy, both born in Ireland. Some pieces were falling into place. This suggests that Thomas Kennedy was Amelia’s mother’s brother.

There was some other information on that first page.

Thomas Kennedy had died at the Abbe[y] of Gethsemany [sic], Nelson County, Kentucky, on the 25th day of September 1901. This raised questions of whether he was a monk, a priest, or a visitor at the Abbey of Gethsemani is a Trappist Monastery located in Trappist, Nelson County, Kentucky.

While this document contained the explicit information (given by his nephew) that Thomas Kennedy had no wife or children, there might be other avenues to trace his life and connections.

There will be more in this blog to share what more was learned about Thomas Kennedy, and how it was learned.

FamilySearch Labs: Full-Text Search

If you don’t already have a free account for FamilySearch, you need one!

You may have used the indexes that are a part of court and land records will only list the principal people in the records. That means that you would find your ancestors’ probate records or the land to which they were a grantor or grantee.

But what about the other names that are mentioned in these documents? You have probably seen a will that includes a list of individuals inheriting something from the deceased. These lists may be very helpful, as they may reveal the addresses of relatives, or show female ancestors under their married names.

To find those other names in unindexed records, try the Full-Text Search experiment at FamilySearch labs.

FamilySearch labs is where users can try and test new tools that are under development.

Go to https://www.familysearch.org/labs, and Sign In. There are several ways you can sign in, and if you do not already have an account, select CREATE A FREE ACCOUNT.

Once you are signed in, you will see the available experiments that users can try and offer feedback.

Scroll down until you see “Expand your search with Full Text.”

Select “Go To Experiment.”

The Full-Text Search page gives reasonable cautions given that this is not a fully released project. Among them are that the experiment may not always be available and that there may be errors.

My recommendation is to begin by using the search box.

The search seems to yield better results when the name between is entered as a keyword and put within quotation marks. You can leave the name field blank.

Since this search is done by matching patterns in the text, try different searches using women’s maiden names and married names.

Keywords: “Amelia Matier”

Keywords: “Amelia Small”

Be prepared to search using variations on place names, or different places where your ancestor may have lived.  

Keep in mind that records that were not created in Brooklyn may appear in the results. This means that Brooklyn appears in them.

For comparison, when I searching by putting her name in the Name field, there were 99,842 results. In the search results, you get the name of the record set and a preview of the parts of the record that match the search terms. Currently, the maximum number of lines appears to be four. This helps to see the context of how the search terms appear.

Clicking on MORE will give all the parts of the record that match. Clicking on the name of the record set (Steuben, New York, Marriage Records 1821-1923) opens a new tab where the record is accompanied by a transcript. The words from the search terms are highlighted in the document and the transcription.

Select “Summarize the document” for an AI-generated summary of the transcription. This may be helpful to assess the usefulness of the record, but I did not use it.

Use the Download arrow for options of what you would like to download. Choose if you want a PDF version with or without the highlights. You can also use the check boxes to include the Transcription and the Citation in the PDF document. The transcription and/or citation can also be downloaded without the image. (I downloaded multiple versions of the record including PDFs with and without highlights as well as JPG only.)

When you download the image, a pop-up box may appear offering the option to attach the record image to the Family Tree.

In another blog post I will show you one of the finds that I made, and the search that it commenced.

Give it a try and let me know what you find!

Researching Civilian Employees of the Federal Government

Researching Civilian Employees of the Federal Government

This blog post is intended to get you started on researching civilians who worked for the Federal Government. Civilian employment also includes records for those who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or Works Project Administration (WPA) employment.

NARA has an older publication that has information about their resources researching federal employees: https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/ref-info-papers/rip110.pdf

(To find other NARA informational publications, see our blog post: Finding Helpful NARA Publications)

Although this is one of the older publications, there is a section about civilian employees of the Federal Government beginning on page 30 of this document:

An important thing to know is that personnel records become archival 62 years after the person’s employment by the Federal Government has ended. This 62-year time is calculated on a rolling date. Before 62 years has elapsed, the records are non-archival.

Prior to 62 years after the end of a person’s employment as a civilian employee of the Federal Government, their Official Personnel Folders (OPF) can only be accessed by the employee or an authorized third-party requestor.  During that time, only limited information may be released to the general public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The National Personnel Records Center’s (NPRC) Federal Records Center Program maintains the Official Personnel Folders (OPF) of former Federal civilian employees whose employment ended after 1952.

A starting place to learn who can request records, and how to request them, would be the webpage for Official Personnel Folders (OPF), Federal (non-archival) Holdings and Access: https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/civilian-non-archival

Learn how to access archival Official Personnel Folders (more than 62 years after the civilian employment ended) from: https://www.archives.gov/st-louis/opf

Once you know the agency where the civilian employee worked, look for its current website. In some cases, the name of the agency or its organization within the government may have changed, so investigate the history of the organization. Look for information about projects in which your ancestor had been involved.

Good luck researching your civilian employees of the Federal Government, and let me know how you do!