The next hybrid In-Person and Zoom 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,” on Saturday, December 13, 2025, from 10:30 AM to 12:30PM, Zoom and at Brooks Memorial Library. In case of inclement weather, it will be Zoom only, Free and open to all.
Please register at this linkhttps://bit.ly/WCGIG2025
A Zoom link will be sent before the meeting. For those people in the local vicinity, an in person meeting will also be conducted at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., Brattleboro, Vermont.
“Using an AI Assistant for Genealogy”
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. Upload all research 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.
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.
“Do You Know About Elephind? The Free Newspaper Search Portal”
The software company, Veridian, released in October the 2.0 version of Elephind, a front end portal for searching over 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 over 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). We will see the value of this tool in doing genealogical research.
For More Information:
Windham County Genealogy Interest Group
windhamcountygig@gmail.com
windhamcountygig@gmail.com
