Due to server upgrades, my old blog at hibbitt.org.uk went offline and I have been implementing a new WordPress blog here at this hibbittbarnes.uk domain. I am pleased to announce that I have now reinstated all of the posts.
The rest of my site is still hosted at hibbitt.org.uk but some of the blog links there will be broken until I can fix them.
I recently posted about the Audio Overview feature in NotebookLM by Google. This time, I wanted to try something else. I created a new Notebook and imported an old digital audio recording (an mp3 file which I’d converted from an old dictaphone) of my dad and I talking about my Grandpa’s time working for the Post Office as a linesman and inspector. The conversation also included my dad speaking about his National Service in Germany. In the background my mum and husband were chatting away about other things.
The recording was just over an hour long and my aim was to see whether NotebookLM could transcribe the conversation. After a few minutes processing the file, I was presented with a summary of the content of the discussion and below this was a full transcript, all ready to copy and paste into a Word document.
Screenshot showing the three panes in NotebookLM with the summary in the centre (click to enlarge)
It did very well, considering people were talking over each other at different times. At the beginning, I could tell my dad and I were looking at photographs of items which had belonged to My Grandpa Hibbitt in the First World War. When I listen back to the audio, I notice we didn’t make a great deal of sense but AI did a faithful job, nonetheless. I will, however, need to make a few corrections here and there, particularly with place names. I will also want to clean up the text to improve its readability, not the fault of AI but how we were speaking.
At the bottom of the screen you can type questions to pull out different aspects of what the program can see in your source material. There are also some suggestions to help you get started. For instance, one of the questions was ‘When was Grandpa promoted?’ It’s important to note that NotebookLM is a closed system and doesn’t pull information from the internet at large but what it does do is highlight where in the transcript the information comes from. You can either click on a number beside the relevant point to see the original transcript in the left-hand ‘Sources’ pane or hover over the number to see a pop-up of the same.
NotebookLM showing highlighted text in the Audio Transcript (click to enlarge)
You can then click ‘Save the note’ and the summary from your question will appear in the right-hand ‘Studio’ pane and will be available the next time you view the notebook.
I haven’t yet tried adding several sources at once as the purpose of this particular project was to get a quick transcript. However, the program does have much more potential than this, such as organising your family history research or your finances or anything else you wish to make more sense of. It’s your own personal notebook, after all!
Don’t want to read? Click PLAY to hear an AI-generated audio discussion on this blog post’s key topics.
(The audio was produced by NotebookLM Deep Dive Conversation.)
For a while now, my dad has had a DNA match to another person at the level of 43 cMs and 3 segments, which is not an insignificant amount of DNA. They also match me and my son. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find the connection between our families.
Then finally, the grand-daughter of the other person recognised a mutual DNA match and crucially, which side of her family this match was on. This narrowed down where I needed to go looking in her tree.
The grandmother had a great-grandfather called Sydney Herbert Hall who they knew very little about. There was no mention on Sydney’s birth, baptism or marriage records of who his father might have been. Even his mother proved elusive, a Lucy Hall with no other details. Sydney (also spelt Sidney) was born in Cheetham, Manchester, on 4th May 1864 and my Dando family, including William Elbert and his father Joseph, also lived in the same area during that period.
A section of Sydney Herbert Hall’s birth certificate showing no father (click to enlarge)
As time went on, further people tested their DNA and the other DNA match now has a number of matches going back on the Dando line, adding more evidence for the connection to our family.
So what is the background to all of this?
When in 1879, William Elbert Dando tried to seek a divorce from my 2 x great-grandmother, Sarah Louisa Oliver, there was an interesting paragraph in the Times Newspaper…
“It appeared that in 1863 the petitioner [William Dando] had sought for an introduction to the respondent from having seen her portrait in a friend’s album and had at once proposed marriage to her. Her father, who was a large farmer near Doncaster, at first opposed any engagement, but soon withdrew his objections. At the end of three months, however, the engagement was broken off, and they do not appear to have met again for years.”
It’s interesting to note the date here. Sydney was probably conceived in August 1863. It’s possible the news got out and this may be why Sarah’s father initially objected to the engagement or perhaps it’s why the engagement was broken off. This is speculation of course.
There’s a twist though. Any scandal might have actually been concerning William’s father, Joseph Dando, the Younger. Could he have been Sydney’s father in view of him also living in Cheetham in the early 1860’s? He lost his fifth wife, Harriet, in March 1863 and was by then over 60 years old. Nevertheless, he married a 20 year old woman in 1866 in Belfast and had three children with her so he was obviously not behind the door. We don’t know how old Lucy Hall was but one presumes she was a fairly young woman at the time she had Sydney.
Joseph and William’s business partnership was dissolved by mutual consent in 1864 and, whilst we see Joseph in Ireland in 1866, William stayed on in Manchester until about 1871. It seems that no-one laid claim to being Sydney’s father. Was Lucy ignored, paid off or is it possible she never revealed her pregnancy to the Dando family? We just don’t know.
It’s not easy to judge the expected amount of shared DNA at this level to know whether the culprit was the father or the son. I wonder whether, in the future, any more information will come to the surface to give us a clearer understanding of the truth.
I’ve recently been following a few Facebook Groups related to genealogy and AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools. I’m a complete AI novice but someone in the group mentioned NotebookLM so I thought I’d take a look.
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking tool by Google Labs. You upload your own sources such as research notes, website addresses, etc. to the web interface and it helps you summarise, analyse, and interact with your own uploaded documents and content. Google say your personal data is never used to train NotebookLM.
I’m somewhat impulsive and haven’t read all of the documentation on how it works but I noticed a really cool feature called Audio Overview and wanted to get stuck right in. I chose one of my past blog posts, imported the URL into a new notebook and then chose the Deep Dive Conversation option under Audio Overview.
A few minutes after clicking on the Generate button I got a wav file which took the form of an AI-generated audio discussion between two AI hosts based on the blog post I gave it. You can, of course, upload a PDF or Google Docs file, use YouTube links, cut and paste text… and more, into the Upload box if you don’t have a blog.
I was completely blown away by the result. It wasn’t a transcript but a full-on conversation between two ‘people’. It sounded incredibly realistic, if but a tad cheesy, and had a laid-back casual feel of a podcast. The discussion expanded on the content I gave it and turned it into an impressive dialogue about the subject. Also, it didn’t get sidetracked with information sources from outside the details I fed it.
In practice, I tested the feature a few times before I was satisfied. This was partly due to my inexperience with the tool but I also found that I had to point out one or two things before it improved upon it. You can give it direction before generating a discussion by clicking the Customise button and adding information there. For instance, I told it my name and an approximate time limit for the file.
I didn’t come across any inaccuracies but there were one or two parts which I would have altered slightly, if I could have. This, unfortunately, is not possible to do at the time of writing – you’d need to regenerate a new discussion and see what you get the next time. Another preference of mine would have been to have a British accent for the characters but, again this isn’t currently available. Finally, I found that sometimes the speech goes a little fast in places and might be difficult to follow for those who are hard of hearing.
The audio file can then be downloaded or shared. After downloading to my PC, I chose to import the wav file into Audacity, which is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording software program. I then exported the file as an mp3 in order to reduce the file size before uploading to my blog. You don’t need to take this step if you’re happy with the wav format.
You need to be logged in to a Google account to take advantage of NotebookLM and there are limitations with the free version. In my experience I seemed to have three opportunities to create conversations before I was informed that I had to try again the next day. A workaround to this is to use another Google account if you have one and then you can create another Deep Dive Conversation in the second account. Nevertheless, if you’re adding lots of different sources to a particular notebook this might not be practical.
LISTEN
And now for the fun part. To listen to my first AI Deep Dive Conversation, go to my blog post entitled ‘A 1921 Census Proves Tricky In Locating Hibbitt Relatives’ and click the play button on the audio player. More examples can be found in the Audio Enhanced Posts category.
Also, don’t be shy, leave a comment to let me know what you make of it.
My Grandpa Hibbitt kept a boat at Frogmore Creek in the South Hams in Devon during the 1960’s. I’ve posted about this before – see this link.
On the 4th June 2025, my dad and I took a little day trip and went back to visit Frogmore, as well as driving by the cottage in East Allington where my grandparents lived after retirement. It was sad to see it looking quite so run down.
My Grandparents’ Cottage In East Allington, Devon (caught on my dashcam).
Their cottage is the one with the steps straight ahead and to the left of the half-built porch.
On the way home, we stopped off at Kingsbridge and dad had his first Costa Coffee!
(Click the images of Kinsbridge above to enlarge.)
The video below includes dashcam footage of when we arrived and left Frogmore, photographs I took on the day and also cine film and photographs from the 1960’s. My Granny Hibbitt probably took the cine films as she only shows up in one photograph. The cine films feature my parents, my Granny and Grandpa Geake, my brother and myself as children and Grandpa Hibbitt, of course.
This video can also be viewed on my YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqHZx42Mni4
and is available in my website gallery at
https://www.hibbitt.org.uk/gallery/videos/video-album/0044-frogmore-and-boat/
