From Research Notes to Hero Image:
How I Used NotebookLM to Create a Biographical Infographic
What if your ancestor’s life story could be told not just in words but in a single, stunning visual that carried the emotional weight of everything you had discovered?
That’s exactly what happened when I worked with Maria Diddams, a Hampshire woman born in 1804 in the rural Test Valley village of Longparish. Her story wasn’t dramatic in the headline sense. No famous relatives. No scandalous headlines. Just a quiet life of loss, love, labour, and legacy – the kind of story that sits in census returns and burial registers, waiting for someone to connect the dots.
I had the research. I had the narrative sketch notes. What I didn’t have was a way to bring it all together visually – until I put my Prompt Cowboy workflow to work inside NotebookLM.
Here’s exactly how I did it
Why Infographics for Family History?
Before we get into the steps, let me make the case.
A well-crafted biographical infographic does something a written narrative can’t: it gives your reader the whole arc of a life in one glance. Birth, milestones, marriage, children, death — structured, sequenced, and visually grounded in the era. For family historians sharing work with relatives, presenting research to a historical society, or building content for an academy or blog, a hero image like this is worth a thousand words.
And with AI, it’s now genuinely achievable — without a graphic design degree.
The Maria Diddams Infographic: The Result
This is the infographic I created for Maria Diddams. It tells her life story across three phases — Foundations and Family (1804–1836); Matrimony and Motherhood (1837–1852); and Final Days and Legacy (1853–1886) — with a central vertical timeline, botanical motifs, a census snapshot table, and era-appropriate vignettes. The colour palette of dusty rose, sage green, aged ivory, and soft gold was chosen deliberately to reflect Maria’s world: rural, feminine, rooted in the English countryside.
Now let me show you how it came together.
The Five-Step Workflow
Step 1: Upload Your Sources to NotebookLM
Everything starts with your research. Before you touch a prompt, gather your primary sources and upload them to a dedicated NotebookLM notebook:
Census returns (in Maria’s case, 1841, 1851, and post-death 1861 entries)
Baptism, marriage, and burial register entries
Parish records and local history notes
Any narrative sketch notes or biographical summaries you’ve already drafted
Maps or place descriptions, if available
NotebookLM becomes your research companion — it holds the evidence and can be queried at any stage of the process.
Tip: Name your notebook clearly—”Maria Diddams — Hampshire Research”—so you can return to it when you expand the project.
Step 2: Use NotebookLM Conversation to generate biographical milestones.
With your sources uploaded, open the NotebookLM chat panel and prompt it to extract and organise the key life milestones into structured phases.
A prompt like this works well:
“Based on the uploaded sources, identify the key biographical milestones in Maria Diddams’ life. Organise them into three or four life phases with dates, locations, and a brief description of each milestone. Flag any gaps or uncertainties in the record.”
NotebookLM will draw directly from your documents, grounding every milestone in evidence. This is the crucial step — you are using AI to structure what you already know, not to invent what you don’t.
The output becomes your infographic content brief: a clean, verified list of the milestones your visual will carry.
Tip: Add the response to the Notes and then add it to Sources by selecting the Convert to Source option, located within the three dots.
Step 3: Request the infographic using your prompt cowboy template.
Now you’re ready to build your image prompt. This is where the Prompt Cowboy library comes in. If you do not yet have a Prompt Cowboy Library for your prompts, you can create one at PromptCowboy.ai – a free AI tool that keeps on giving.
For Maria’s infographic, I used this prompt — which you can adapt for your own ancestor:
The Prompt:
Historical biography infographic, horizontal timeline layout for the life journey of Maria Diddams, photorealistic portrait style blended with clean infographic design, structured sections marking key life stages from birth to legacy, each stage accompanied by realistic icons and small illustrative vignettes relevant to life stages, feminine colour palette of dusty rose, sage green, aged ivory, and soft gold accents, delicate floral or botanical motifs framing each milestone, elegant serif typography for headers with clean sans-serif body text, deep weathered linen deep rose texture background, connected timeline running vertically through the centre with branching milestone markers, realistic depictions of era-appropriate objects, implements, locations, and symbols at each stage, professional editorial illustration quality, sharp detail throughout, balanced composition with clear visual hierarchy guiding the eye top to bottom, 16:9 horizontal format, 8K resolution, hyperdetailed.
Where to take this prompt:
Open the ‘Studio’ in NotebookLM and select the pencil editing icon on the ‘Infographic’ tool. Choose visual style by clicking on the icon.
Select your preferred level of detail. Paste your prompt into the description box, and generate. Allow a few minutes for the process.
You may need one or two iterations to get the composition and colour balance exactly right — that’s normal and part of the creative process.
Step 4: Generate and Review
Once your image is generated, review it critically through a genealogist’s eye:
Are the milestone dates and locations accurate?
Do the vignette objects feel era-appropriate? (For an 1840s Hampshire shoemaker household, leather tools and modest rural interiors are right – a Victorian parlour with gaslight is not.)
Does the visual hierarchy guide the eye clearly from birth to legacy?
Is the colour palette doing emotional work — does it feel like your ancestor’s world?
If something is off, refine the prompt. Adding more specific detail — “a cobbler’s last and leather-working tools” or “a thatched village church in the Test Valley” — sharpens the result.
Step 5: Optional: Import into Canva for Text Overlays and Final Polish
The generated image is your foundation. Now bring it into Canva to adjust the text layer using the Magic Layers tool.
Title block with ancestor’s name and dates
Section headers for each life phase
Milestone text for each entry
Any data tables (Maria’s census snapshot table was added at this stage)
Your branding or watermark if sharing publicly
Canva’s text tools give you full control over typography, spacing, and legibility. Use a serif font for headers (Playfair Display or Cormorant Garamond work beautifully for Victorian-era subjects) and a clean sans-serif for body text.
Export at the highest resolution available for print or web use.
The Prompt Cowboy Principle
What makes this workflow powerful isn’t any single AI tool. It’s the structured handoff between them:
NotebookLM grounds the content in your evidence
The Prompt Cowboy template gives the image generator precise creative direction
NotebookLM Studio generates the image according to directions
Canva gives you editorial control over the final text layer
Each tool does what it does best. You stay in control of accuracy throughout.
Adapt It for Your Ancestor
The template below is yours to customise. Replace anything in square brackets with your own research detail:
Historical biography infographic: [horizontal] timeline layout for the life journey of [ANCESTOR NAME], photorealistic portrait style blended with clean infographic design, structured sections marking key life stages from birth to legacy, each stage accompanied by realistic icons and small illustrative vignettes relevant to [OCCUPATION / LIFE STAGES], [COLOUR PALETTE — e.g., masculine deep navy and aged gold / feminine dusty rose and sage green], [MOTIF — e.g., delicate floral/architectural/maritime], elegant serif typography for headers with clean sans-serif body text, [BACKGROUND TEXTURE — e.g., aged linen/parchment/stone], connected timeline running vertically through the centre with branching milestone markers, realistic depictions of era-appropriate objects, implements, locations, and symbols at each stage, professional editorial illustration quality, sharp detail throughout, 16:9 horizontal format, 8K resolution, hyperdetailed.
One Final Thought
Maria Diddams was buried in the Thruxton churchyard on 15 January 1853, aged 49. She weathered the deaths of three sisters and her mother before she was twenty. She built a home, raised daughters, and was – quietly – the anchor of a Hampshire shoemaking family. Her life was cut short after succumbing to scarlet fever, a disease rampant in that era.
She deserves to be seen. And now, she is. View her story here.
Your ancestor does too.
Next Steps
If you’d like to explore this workflow inside a structured course environment, the Essential Genealogy Academy features the AI Genealogy Starter Campus.
New modules covering NotebookLM, Canva, and Prompt Cowboy for family historians. Find out more at the AI Genealogy Starter Campus.
Masterclass
If you’d like to join a small group of enthusiastic NotebookLM Family Historians who have registered for this next Masterclass, hosted by the Thursday GenAI Club, then sign up for that event.