Helping Researchers Use the Nemaha County Historical Society Website
Do you ever vent in a Facebook group? Recently, I came across a post in the Genealogy Chit Chat group where someone shared their frustration about researchers relying solely on online sources. The author pointed out a good reason for this: not everyone lives close enough to access the resources that aren’t available online.
While I completely understand and agree with that perspective, I have a slightly different vent. As a volunteer with the Nemaha County Historical Society, I often feel frustrated that many researchers overlook the resources we do have available online. Thanks to partnerships with local libraries, FamilySearch, and a digitization project in collaboration with Nemaha Central Schools, there’s now a wealth of Nemaha County material accessible to anyone willing to dig into our website.
To make it easier for researchers to understand what’s available and how to use the site, I decided to create a video tutorial. Here’s how I did it:
- Compiled all of the website’s pages into a PDF
- Uploaded the PDF to Google Notebook LM, an AI tool I first learned about from Randy Seaver
- Asked Notebook LM to generate an audio overview explaining how to navigate the site
- Used Canva to pair that audio with screenshots from the website, creating a step-by-step video guide
- Uploaded the finished video to YouTube so it’s easily accessible for researchers everywhere
The goal of this project is simple: to help genealogists and local history enthusiasts make the most of the rich resources already online.
I completely agree with you. Some researchers don’t look beyond the Big Four genealogy websites for information. A couple of years ago I did a presentation for the group I run at the library titled “Beyond the Big Four” – they were amazed at how much information was available, much of it free, at other websites, many of them volunteer run.
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