Exploring Google NotebookLM for Genealogy: An AI-Powered Research and Storytelling Assistant

Exploring Google NotebookLM for Genealogy: An AI-Powered Research and Storytelling Assistant

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and genealogy, few tools have excited me recently as much as Google NotebookLM (short for “Language Model”). Designed as a powerful, AI-enhanced note-taking and research assistant, this tool is not only versatile but genuinely fun to use. Over the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity to test out its features, run multiple experiments, and explore its potential for genealogy, client work, family history storytelling, blogging, and even podcast creation.

Here’s a look at what I discovered—and why this tool may quickly become one of your favorite digital companions in genealogical research.

What Is Google NotebookLM?

Google NotebookLM is an AI-powered notebook environment designed to help users understand, organize, and interact with their sources. It works by uploading or linking to your research materials—whether that be documents, PDFs, blog posts, URLs, or a combination of these. The AI then enables you to generate summaries, timelines, FAQs, study guides, audio overviews, and even creative outputs like presentation drafts or mind maps.

You can think of it as your personal research assistant that reads, processes, and reflects back insights from the content you give it.

How I Tested Google NotebookLM for Genealogy

To evaluate its effectiveness for genealogical research, I created four notebooks focusing on different kinds of sources:
1. Using URLs as Sources

• Two notebooks featured the main pages from my genealogy website, including my homepage, About page, and speaking engagement pages.
• NotebookLM indexed these pages and allowed me to generate briefings, summaries, and even potential speaking topics drawn from my own content.

2. Blog-Based Notebook from a PDF

• I converted a recent blog post into PDF format, by saving it as a PDF directly from the URL page, and uploaded it into NotebookLM.
• From that single source, I generated an outline, FAQ, summary, and audio commentary—which I later repurposed into a podcast, which you can listen to below!

Google NotebookLM Blog Commentary Example

3. Ancestor Profile & Research Summary PDFs

• I uploaded multiple PDFs from an Ancestry family unit, including individual ancestor profiles, facts/timeline pages, research notes, and sources, by printing out their ancestor profile pages and saving as PDFs.
• The tool allowed me to ask specific questions about the ancestor’s life, extract important events into a timeline and Mind Maps, and summarize (and listen to) my findings into a clean narrative format—ideal for family history storytelling or client summaries.  

Google NotebookLM Ancestor Research Example

Google NotebookLM Ancestor (Samuel Steinman) Research Mind Map Example 1

Google NotebookLM Ancestor (Samuel Steinman) Research Mind Map Example 1-2

Google NotebookLM Ancestor (Samuel Steinman) Research Mind Map Example 1-3

Google NotebookLM Ancestor (Samuel Steinman) Research Mind Map Example 1-4

4. Expanded Family Unit Research

• I began with a single ancestor, above, but then added his wife and children’s PDFs. The connections between them helped reveal new research leads, relationships, and gaps in documentation—effectively supporting descendancy research. (Sorry have put it up on YouTube yet.)

What Can You Do With It?

Here are some of my favorite features—and how I think genealogists can benefit from each:
✅ Generate Summaries
Instantly turn long-form blog posts, research notes, or PDFs into a short and clean summary—perfect for client reports or family history write-ups.
✅ Create Study Guides
This feature is ideal for genealogical lectures or self-paced learning. Upload materials related to a topic—say, U.S. Census research—and NotebookLM can produce a study guide with key concepts, takeaways, and learning objectives.
✅ Timelines
Upload an ancestor profile, then generate a timeline of life events, residence changes, or historical context. Great for visualizing migration paths or summarizing a person’s life for storytelling.
✅ Briefing Documents
Useful for prepping for presentations, consultations, or writing, these documents highlight the most important content in your source and synthesize it for quick reference.
✅ Mind Maps
Visually organize related people, events, or themes in your research. Helpful for identifying clusters of activity, neighborhood patterns, or overlapping timelines.
✅ Source Guide Summaries & Discussions
Let the AI pull out key topics, themes, and facts from a group of sources and engage with it like a thought partner—perfect for refining your analysis.
✅ Audio Overviews
By far one of the most exciting features: NotebookLM can generate an audio summary of your notebook, reading out insights and highlights across your sources. You can download these as .wav files.

Pro Tip: I took these audio clips and ran them through Adobe Podcast AI, which allowed me to polish them into high-quality MP3 podcast episodes. I even turned them into audigram videos (animated captioned transcripts) and posted them on YouTube using custom background images. This is a game-changer for genealogists looking to share research in accessible, engaging formats.

How Genealogists Can Use NotebookLM

The possibilities are vast, but here are a few practical ideas for everyday family historians and professionals:

• Organize family unit profiles and research notes
• Generate presentations from blog posts or research
• Create audio content or narrated ancestor stories
• Develop research reports, summaries, and briefs
• Discover research gaps or leads through AI queries
• Turn PDF document dumps into organized insights
• Create study materials for beginning genealogists
• Visualize timelines or neighborhood clustering
• Quickly generate FAQs or speaking points for webinars

NotebookLM: The Specs

As of now, the date of this post (free version):

• You can create up to 100 notebooks
• Each notebook can hold up to 50 sources
• Each source can contain up to 500,000 words
• Daily limits include 50 AI queries per day and 3 audio generations per day

Final Thoughts: A Research Assistant in Your Pocket

Google NotebookLM is still evolving, but its current feature set already offers an incredible amount of support for genealogical professionals, researchers, and bloggers. Whether you’re compiling research, creating content, or just trying to organize your thoughts and findings, this AI tool acts like a personalized assistant—one that reads your sources, listens to your needs, and responds with meaningful output.

If you're looking to experiment with AI and haven’t yet tried NotebookLM, I highly recommend giving it a test drive. You may be surprised at how much it can enrich your research, storytelling, and creative process.

Have you tried Google NotebookLM yet? What features are you most excited about—or curious to try? Let me know in the comments, and stay tuned for a follow-up post where I’ll share some real examples from my test notebooks, blog-to-podcast experiments, and ancestor research timelines!

​​​More AI and Genealogy Resources

Learn about more AI in Genealogy and other family history and genealogy resources under the AI in Genealogy and  Genealogy Resources category and on my dedicated Genealogy Resources page.