Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again -
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:
1) Learning about how to pursue genealogy and family history is a lifetime task. Once you've mastered one record type (census, church, certificates, probate, directories, immigration, etc), or one skill (family tree software program, record transcription, source citations, DNA matches, AI prompting, etc.), a new record, or skill, presents itself. With the constant advances in technology and knowledge, doing genealogy and family history well requires constant learning to do something new.
2) This week's challenge is to tell us a new genealogy-related skill that you have, or are working on, developing. Tell us about your progress. Are you having fun?
3) Share your latest genealogy-related skill and results in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky or other social media post. Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.
Here's mine:
Last year's new skills were using FamilySearch Full-Text Search to help my ongoing research and also using Artificial Intelligence tools to help me with my genealogy research and family history story-telling.
In the last two months, I've made an effort to learn how to make family history videos and put them on my long-ignored YouTube channel. The challenge is creating the content, and not the actual task of putting it on YouTube.
I have all of these stories about my own life, along with notes and reports about the lives of my ancestors, and now I have AI-assisted biographies, poems, songs, podcasts and stories about the lives of some of my ancestors.
How can I put them in an audio and/or video format that my brothers, children, cousins and grandchildren might be interested in? Can I create them using my own voice so that they can learn, and recall, the stories of their ancestors?
I tried making a Zoom video discussing the life of Isaac Seaver (1823-1901) along with reading a poem and playing the song about his life. That was just OK in my humble opinion - my public speaking limitations (hesitations, mutterings, etc.) without a script are painfully obvious, and the song music disappeared - you can watch the result in my video Isaac Seaver 1823 - 1901 Biography. My judgment was that I wasn't ready for YouTube primetime.
Using the artificial intelligence tool Google NotebookLM, I know that I can create an Audio Overview (like a podcast) of one of my blog posts (say a genealogical sketch, or a story of my own life), and just recently NotebookLM created a Video Overview feature. I love these features because they tell "my story" in a concise and interesting way. How can I turn them into a video on my YouTube channel?
Following Marcia Philbrick's suggestions, I started making videos of the AI-assisted songs (about 4 minutes) and podcasts (usually 10 to 20 minutes) using the Canva.com free tools. Each video uses a short biographical summary slide of the selected ancestor as the image (created on Canva) and attaches the AI-assisted song (from Suno.com) or the AI-assisted podcast (from NotebookLM) to the slide. I save the videos and can upload them to YouTube with an appropriate title and descriptive text. Here is one of the Canva-created song videos in Rebecca Hill Rich 1788 1862 AI-assisted Song on my YouTube channel:
On the songs, the music comes through on YouTube and the audio is better!
Here is a Canva-created podcast video in John Richman (1788 1867) AI-assisted Podcast on my YouTube channel:
The recently added Google NotebookLM Video Overview can be downloaded and uploaded directly to YouTube. Here is one of the Video Overview for an ancestor biography in Daniel Spangler (1781-1851) of Pennsylvania - A Life in Documents on my Youube channel:
Is all of that "good enough?" I don't think so, and I will continue looking for something better that can use my own voice (e.g., perhaps an avatar voice that sounds like me and can read text that I've written - don't laugh, it can be done, I did it with EmulateMe 20 months ago. I want to tie the biography, poem, song, podcast and stories of a family together. The avatar reading feature exists, but there is a recurring fee to use it. Suggestions are welcome!!
What's next? Well, I still want to write eBooks to document my research, perhaps using the AI-assisted biographies, poems, songs, podcasts and stories for one ancestor, or for a string of ancestors (say, my Seaver line from Robert Seaver in 1608 to Randall Seaver in 1943). Maybe next year! Again, suggestions are welcome!!
Am I having genealogy fun? YES. And I'm learning much more about my ancestors and social history in this process as I take a deeper dive into the lives of my ancestors.
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Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver
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