How to Ask AI About Your Genealogy – James Tanner (14 Jun 2026)

This presentation, titled "How to Ask AI about your Genealogy" by James L. Tanner from the BYU Library Family History Center, provides a comprehensive guide on leveraging artificial intelligence for family history research. It emphasizes that maximizing the utility of AI tools like Google Gemini and NotebookLM depends entirely on effective prompt engineering, shifting from unstructured queries to highly structured, single-focus instructions. The slides outline a practical seven-step process for crafting robust prompts, which includes assigning professional personas, providing rich historical context, defining specific output formats, and utilizing "shot" prompting or chain-of-thought reasoning. Ultimately, the presentation concludes that because large language models operate on high-quality input, masterfully structured requests are essential to extract valuable, professional-grade genealogical data. Handout: https://familyhistory.lib.byu.edu/vir...