What if I told you that you could have a professor of genetic genealogy create a personalized video explaining exactly how your Ancestry DNA matches work.
This article will show you how to set this up using a free Google AI tool called NotebookLM. Unlike ChatGPT, which pulls from general information, NotebookLM only uses the specific documents you upload or link to.
Ancestry has published several white papers explaining how DNA matching works. Let’s be honest – these technical documents aren’t light reading. But if you upload them to NotebookLM, it becomes an expert on those papers.
And if you copy over details from your Ancestry DNA match list, you can ask it to reference your own matches when explaining the science.
Getting Started with NotebookLM
The first step is to go to NotebookLM. You just need a Google account for the free version.
Click the black “Create New” button on the top right of the page to create your first notebook.
The tool pops up a page right away to add sources. Let’s close this to get a short overview of the interface.
NotebookLM gives you a three-panel page. The left-hand panel will have your sources, these are uploaded PDFs, documents, and links to websites.
I don’t do much with the middle pane, which is basically the chat.
The right-hand pane is where you’ll do the interesting stuff after you’ve uploaded your sources. You’ll be creating an explainer video, and there’s a few other things you can do as well.
Uploading Your Sources
The first thing to do is give NotebookLM the sources you want it to use. The Ancestry white papers are available as PDFs on the Ancestry website.
Here is the link to their white paper on DNA matching. It’s 35 pages of quite dense scientific material:
https://www.ancestrycdn.com/support/us/2025/01/2025matchingwhitepaper.pdf
In the left pane of NotebookLM, click the “Add” button.
The image below highlights where you can add the link to the PDF.
I’ll give you one more link to a blog article that provides a lot of details about Ancestry DNA matching.
https://dataminingdna.com/how-to-use-ancestry-dna-matches-a-comprehensive-guide
Yes, it is written by me on my website. I can’t speak to how other writers feel about their work being used in NotebookLM for people’s personal use. All I can say is I have no problem.
Creating Your Personalized Video
Now we’re going to work in the right-hand pane. Don’t go and click the video overview straight away. That would give you a decent video, but it will be specific to precisely the material in the two sources. It won’t have anything about your own DNA matches.
Instead, we’ll customize the video by providing a prompt. Click the pencil icon in the Video Overview box to get a pop-up prompt.
This is the prompt window where you can give the AI instructions to steer the presentation.
Crafting the Perfect Prompt
Start the prompt as follows:
The presenter is a professor of genetic genealogy who is explaining the science behind DNA matching to a classroom of adult learners who are at the level of 8th grade science.
Here is some background. Eighth grade science is the year before high school. The students are about 14 years old.
However, the addition of “a classroom of adult learners” is to steer the content away from being aimed at early teens and toward adult learners with a medium level of scientific knowledge.
Margaret is a member of the class. She uploaded her DNA to Ancestry.com and showed the professor her DNA match list. The professor uses these three examples throughout the presentation.
In an earlier attempt, I tried giving the AI the entire first page of my matches. That was too much. It picked two matches to discuss, and they weren’t the ones I wanted. I’m going to give it three explicit matches I’ll copy from the Ancestry page.
Adding Your Specific DNA Match Examples
The first person is my highest match. Ancestry has determined that she is “First Cousin 1x Removed” and we share “433 centimorgans”.
I then like to give a more distant relative. This time I want somebody where Ancestry is showing two different relationships, for example: “Third Cousin or Half Second Cousin 1x Removed.”
Finally, I want to give a distant cousin, someone down at my lowest fourth cousin matches.
Here are my three matches, you should have a similar format.
- Mary Anne, “1st cousin 1x removed”, 433 cM
- Orla, “3rd cousin or half 2nd cousin 1x removed”, 95 cM
- James, “half 3rd cousin 1x removed or 3rd cousin 2x removed”, 8 cM
Finally, end the prompt with this sentence:
Please explain the methodology behind DNA matching, the significance of the different CM, and why some of the described cousin relationships are not exact.
Generating and Downloading Your Video
So that is the full prompt. You can now click the “Generate” button.
It pops up this message here: “It’s generating the video. This may take a while.” And it will take a while, it can take 20 or more minutes.
When the video has generated, your choices are to play it in the browser or you can download it.
If you do use the browser, the default display is a tiny little screen. But you can expand it to play in full screen.
Beyond Video: Audio Podcasts
Do you know what? When you’re learning, content doesn’t need a visual expression. The audio podcast from NotebookLM is even more impressive.
The custom prompt window is exactly the same. You can try pasting the same prompt into the audio generation.
