Search a shoebox of old family letters for answers
Retiree Lawrence D. Weiss writes in Senior Voice that he loaded scans of decades-old family letters into Google's free NotebookLM to learn why his parents left New Jersey for California in 1946. The tool read the handwriting, summarized the letters, and even assembled a family story from them.
What they did
He had a shoebox of hundreds of letters from the 1930s to the 1950s, many of them his parents' wartime romance, which he felt uncomfortable reading himself. He set up a free NotebookLM account, uploaded a few dozen letters from 1945 and early 1946, and got ready to ask questions about the move.
How it went
He calls it easy to learn and "quite like magic." Before he had asked anything, NotebookLM produced a family-story narrative from the letters he'd loaded.
Worth knowing
AI can misread old handwriting and fill gaps with guesses. Check key names, dates, and quotes against the original letters, scan at good resolution, and keep the originals safe.
Try it yourself
Copy this into NotebookLM (or any AI assistant). Replace the parts in [brackets] with your own details.
These are scans of family letters from [years]. First, list each letter with its date, writer, and recipient as best you can read them, and mark anything you can't read as [unclear]. Then answer this question: [e.g., what reasons do the letters give for the family's move to California?]. For each point, quote the exact line and say which letter it's from so I can check it myself.
Source: Lawrence D. Weiss, Senior Voice (Alaska), May 1, 2026. Read the original →
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