Built a Family Archive Site for Handwritten 1942-43 Basic Training Letters

Keith Weinberger Seattle · 1H AGO

I built a family archive website to host handwritten letters and photos from a relative's 1942/43 stint in basic training. I built everything through prompts, and it could help anyone with scanned family papers who wants them searchable and open to AI chat. 1. I designed the basic website in Google AI Studio. 2. I migrated the project to Replit for the build-out and hosting. 3. I used Firebase for PDF and photo storage, and a Firebase database for users and data indexing. 4. I built a PDF upload workflow that extracts text from the handwritten letters. 5. I chunk the PDFs for faster retrieval, since the files are large. 6. The workflow creates a search index and a vector database for AI chat. 7. I created server APIs to retrieve data and content, which avoids CORS issues. The result is a site where the letters and photos can be searched and queried through AI chat.