Gemini checks a great-grandfather family history

Randy Seaver tests Gemini Deep Research on John Nicholas Brocke, his wife’s great-grandfather, whose family he already knows from his own research. He requests a family history covering parents, spouse, children and grandchildren, giving himself a basis for judging the output.

Gemini creates a research plan and a report drawing on public genealogy pages and Seaver’s blog posts. Seaver also generates an eight-minute-and-forty-nine-second audio overview. The concrete result is a written family-history sketch and an audio derivative, not discovery of an independently verified complete family tree.

His critique is useful: the search reaches publicly searchable text, but does not inspect deeper profile levels or query genealogy record databases. The plan also omits several potentially relevant record types, including church, migration, military, land and probate sources. It discusses conflicting information without resolving it.

Seaver knows that additional writing of his own would change the material available to a future run. That makes the report partly a reflection of accessible online coverage, not a substitute for checking original records. The useful pattern is testing on a known relative, comparing the research plan with missing record categories and retaining conflicts as questions for further work. The shared prompt is reproduced only as a short excerpt; the extensive generated family narrative is not copied here.

Prompt
Original prompt

Source: Blog · Randy Seaver