About 8 or 9 years ago, I was using ancestry.com to do some research on my family ancestry. Much of my ancestral roots are from the US and Europe (particularly England, Ireland, and Germany), and that information is fairly easy to find. However, one of my grandparents was from Russia, and there isn't much information about that side of my family. I've heard Russia tends to keep a lot of records locked up, so there isn't much information about that stuff available. On ancestry.com, I only found bits & pieces of information going back to my grandparent traveling to the US and his parents - and most of that was stuff I already knew about.

Recently, I had an idea to use Google NotebookLM to try to do some research about the Russian side of my family history. One piece of information I'd heard was that the spelling of my last name had been changed at some point, and I knew the original spelling. I told Google NotebookLM to search for family information with both spellings of my last name, and it came up with some stuff I didn't know about. If true, the Russian side of my family apparently had a sizeable family estate in Ukraine (maybe near the border of Russia and Ukraine) and someone who was probably related to my great-grandfather was a linguist and professor and lived at that estate. Interesting stuff, though still not much more than I had been able to find out on ancestry.com..

As a side note, I've been finding Google NotebookLM to be a fairly useful research tool and have been using it more and more often. It lets you add a bunch of sources, in the form of documents, photos, web site URLs, etc., and it analyzes it all and has a chat bot that lets you ask questions about the source material so you can find information faster than manually looking through all the sources yourself. It also has some cool features such as generating an audio podast with 2 'people' discussing the source material, generating slides for a presentation, etc..
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