BRATTLEBORO-The meeting of the Windham County Genealogy Interest Group will focus on "Using an AI Assistant for Genealogy & Do You Know About Elephind? The Free Newspaper Search Portal," Saturday, Dec. 13, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., via Zoom and in person at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St. In case of inclement weather, it will be Zoom only.
"NotebookLM can be a powerful tool for genealogy research by acting as a personalized AI assistant that organizes, analyzes, and synthesizes information from specific family history sources," wrote organizers in a news release, saying researchers can upload all materials (Google Docs, PDFs of records, transcripts, research logs, historical newspaper clippings, web links to historical context, etc.) into a notebook dedicated to a person or family line.
Using this program, one can instantly create summaries of long or complex documents, like probate files, land deeds, or lengthy family histories, saving time and giving a quick overview. The AI can analyze the sources to pull out key themes, facts, and names, and help make connections and relationships between different documents that might not be immediately obvious.
"Ask specific questions about the sources, and the AI will answer based only on the documents that it has been provided and will cite the exact source passages."
In October, the software company Veridian released the 2.0 version of Elephind, a front end portal for searching more than 30 million newspaper pages using collections from universities, libraries, historical societies, cultural institutions, and other repositories of indexed newspapers.
The free service does not hold collections of newspapers but provides an index to search all 3,404 newspaper titles held in more than 50 newspaper collections, such as the New York State Historic newspaper collection (616 titles, 7 million pages); the California Digital Newspaper Collection (66 titles, 4.9 million pages); and the Virginia Chronicle (916 titles, 5,684,984 pages).
The meeting is free. Register at bit.ly/WCGIG2025. A Zoom link will be sent before the meeting.
This Town and Village item was submitted to The Commons.