Sunday, September 20, 2026

Best of the Genea-Blogs -- Week of 13 to 19 September 2026

Scores of genealogy and family history bloggers write hundreds of posts every week about their research, their families, and their interests. I appreciate each one of them and their efforts.


My criteria for "Best of ..." are pretty simple - I pick posts that advance knowledge about genealogy and family history, address current genealogy issues, provide personal family history, are funny or are poignant. I don't list posts destined for most daily blog prompts or meme submissions (but I do include summaries of them), or my own posts.

Here are my picks for great reads from the genealogy blogs for this past week:









Here are pick posts by other geneabloggers this week:

* Friday’s Family History Finds [18 September 2026] by Linda Stufflebean on Empty Branches on the Family Tree.

* This week’s crème de la crème -- September 19, 2026 by Gail Dever on Genealogy a la Carte.

* GenStack [19 September 2026] by Robin Stewart on Genealogy Matters.

Readers are encouraged to go to the blogs listed above and read their articles, and add the blogs to your Favorites, Feedly, another RSS feed, or email if you like what you read. Please make a comment to them also - all bloggers appreciate feedback on what they write.

Did I miss a great genealogy blog post? Tell me! I currently am reading posts from over 900 genealogy bloggers using Feedly, but I still miss quite a few it seems.

Read past Best of the Genea-Blogs posts here.

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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Please note that all comments are moderated and may not appear immediately.

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Guest Post: The Name Was Wrong, but the Address Was Right: Solving a Scottish Genealogy Mystery, By Terry Donlan

I received this article from Terry Donlan, who writes the Irish Scottish Roots blog, and agreed to post it on Genea-Musings. 

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The Name Was Wrong, but the Address Was Right: Solving a Scottish Genealogy Mystery

By Terry Donlan

Family stories do not need to be completely accurate to be valuable. Sometimes the mistake itself becomes the clue that leads you to the truth.

For years, my family believed that my uncle, John Donlan Jr., had died in Fife, Scotland, in 1905. John was the first child of my grandparents, John Donlan Sr. and Isabel Fraser. He was born before my father, Hugh Donlan, but his short life had gradually disappeared from the family story.

I knew that John had existed, but I did not know where he was buried. Other family members knew even less about him. The information that survived suggested that he had died in 1905, the same year my father was born.

During a 2026 research trip to Scotland, my wife Deborah and I began discussing the Donlan family while staying in Cowdenbeath. That conversation exposed how little we actually knew about John. It also gave us a clear research question:

What happened to John Donlan Jr., and where was he buried?

The Birth Record Established His Identity

The first step was obtaining John’s Scottish birth record.

The record showed that his full registered name was John Smith Donlan. He was born on May 21, 1903, at 66 Glencraig Cottages in Auchterderran, Fife. His parents were identified as John Donlan, a coal miner, and Isabel Fraser. His father reported the birth.

This record established several important facts at once:
  • John’s complete name
  • His exact birth date
  • His parents’ name
  • His father’s occupation
  • The family’s address
  • The identity of the person who registered the birth
The middle name “Smith” was unexpected. We had not previously known that John had a middle name. Later research found two other members of Isabel Fraser’s family who also carried Smith as a middle name. I have not yet established why the name appeared repeatedly, so that remains a separate research question.

The birth certificate nevertheless gave us a firm starting point. We now had more than a name and an estimated year. We had a documented child living with the correct parents at a specific address in a Fife mining community.

The Death Record Corrected the Family Story

The death record produced the biggest surprise.

John had not died in 1905. He died on December 26, 1909, at 62 Glencraig Cottages in Lochgelly. He was six years old.

His father, John Donlan Sr., registered the death. The recorded causes were microcephalus and cardiac failure.

Correcting the death year changed our understanding of John’s life. If he had died in 1905, he would have been about two years old. Instead, he lived until age six. He was part of the household while several younger siblings were born, including my father. Some family members may have remembered him personally, while others probably learned about him through stories that became less precise with each generation.

The inherited story was wrong about the year, but it had preserved the essential truth that another child existed and died young in Scotland.

That is why family stories should be investigated rather than automatically accepted or dismissed.

Why “John Donlin” Was Still John Donlan

The death certificate presented another complication. The child’s surname appeared as “Donlin,” not “Donlan.”

A researcher relying only on an exact-name search might reject the record or fail to find it at all. However, identity should not be decided by one spelling variation.

The death record contained a combination of matching evidence:
  • The child’s given name was John.
  • His age agreed with the May 1903 birth.
  • His father was John Donlan.
  • His mother was Isabel Fraser.
  • His father was a coal miner.
  • The family remained at Glencraig Cottages.
  • His father served as the informant.
Taken together, these details demonstrate that John Donlin and John Smith Donlan were the same child.

Surname spellings frequently changed in historical records. Clerks and registrars sometimes wrote what they heard. Accents, handwriting, literacy, transcription errors, and inconsistent family usage could all produce variations.

The spelling difference mattered, but it did not outweigh the complete body of evidence. The parents, age, occupation, address, and informant created a much stronger identification than the surname spelling alone.

From the Death Record to Lochgelly Cemetery

The death certificate established when and where John died, but it did not tell us where he was buried.

We contacted Fife Bereavement Services and supplied the identifying information from the birth and death records. The service located John’s burial entry and identified his resting place as Lochgelly Cemetery, Lair 20.

In Scottish cemetery records, a lair is a burial plot or grave space. A lair can contain one person, members of a family, or unrelated people buried at different times.

Fife Bereavement Services also provided information about two other people buried in Lair 20. Joan Richardson, age 52, was buried there in 1925, and Mary Richardson, age 33, followed in 1930. I found no documented relationship between the Richardson and Donlan families.

The unrelated burials suggest that Lair 20 was not maintained exclusively as a Donlan family plot. It may have been a shared burial space or may have been reused later. However, the available records do not formally describe it as a common lair, so I cannot state that as a proven fact.

Fife Bereavement Services provided a cemetery map that allowed Deborah and me to locate Lair 20. The grave was unmarked. Without the burial register, lair number, and map, we would have had no reliable way to identify the location.

The complete illustrated account of the records, cemetery search, and eventual memorial can be found in Solving a Family Genealogy Mystery in a Fife Cemetery.

Five Lessons for Your Own Genealogy Research

John’s story produced five lessons that can be applied to many family-history mysteries.

1. Treat family stories as clues, not conclusions

Write down the story as it was told, including uncertain dates and conflicting details. Oral history may preserve the correct person or event while getting the date, place, or circumstances wrong.

2. Examine original records

Do not rely exclusively on online family trees, indexes, or transcriptions. Original birth, marriage, and death records can reveal addresses, occupations, parents, witnesses, informants, and spelling variations that an index omits.

3. Establish identity from multiple facts

A spelling difference does not automatically indicate a different person. Compare ages, relatives, occupations, addresses, dates, and informants. Identity is strongest when several independent details agree.

4. Contact the authority responsible for the records

Cemetery offices, local councils, churches, archives, and bereavement services may hold burial registers and maps that are unavailable online. Ask specifically for the burial date, cemetery, section, lair or plot number, other occupants, and a location map.

5. Separate documentation from interpretation

Record what the evidence proves, what it suggests, and what remains unknown. This prevents a reasonable possibility, such as a shared or common grave, from becoming an unsupported family “fact.”

Researchers beginning similar work can find additional record sources and planning advice in the Beginner’s Guide to Irish and Scottish Genealogy.

John Smith Donlan was no longer just a child attached to an incorrect date. The records restored his full name, his six years of life, his place within the family, and the location where he was buried.

That is one of genealogy’s quietest but most meaningful accomplishments. A family story leads to a record. A record leads to a grave. And a person almost lost to memory becomes part of the family again.

About the Author

Terry Donlan is the founder of Irish Scottish Roots and has researched his Irish and Scottish family history since 1985. He has made six research trips to Ireland and Scotland. He writes about genealogy, heritage travel, historical records, and the people and places that shaped Irish and Scottish family stories.

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I was contacted by Terry Donlan, who is the writer of  the Irish Scottish Roots blog, recently and I  agreed to publish a guest post. If Irish and Scottish genealogy and family history is of interest to you, you should subscribe to (or visit it often) Terry's blog.  

 I welcome Guest Posts on Genealogy and Family History topics.  

Disclosure: I have received no remuneration to publish this blog post or to use and describe this product. 

The URL for this post is: 

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Note that all comments are moderated, so they may not appear immediately.

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Betty and Fred’s Story: Building a Life Together – The Next Two Weeks Apart, Early September 1944

 Here is the latest chapter in the story of the married life and times of my parents, Fred and Betty (Carringer) Seaver, who married in July 1942. The background information and the list of chapters of their life together are listed at the end of this post.  This is historical fiction with real people and real events, and is how it might have been.

And now we are up to early September 1944, almost three years into World War II.  Betty and Randy are living with Betty's parents, and Fred is in boot camp training in the U.S. Navy.  The second and third weeks in boot camp were eventful. 


    (AI Google Gemini Notebook Infographic - Betty and Fred's Story, The Next Two Weeks Apart)

Based on the biographies and the earlier stories, I asked Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 to tell another story - what happened next (I offered some suggestions!)?  


Finding Their Feet

Naval Training Center San Diego, 2–8 September 1944

By the second week, Fred's company had traded the barracks routine for the outdoors, and the outdoors, it turned out, had its own particular way of humbling a man.

Most mornings now began on the grinder — the great flat parade ground where companies marched in formation under a sun that hadn't yet decided it was fall — and Fred spent hour after hour learning to move as one small part of a much larger machine. Left face, right face, column left, forward march, halt — simple enough as individual commands, and murderous in the way they had to be executed instantly, in step, without a man's private opinion about any of it. He'd never given much thought before to how much coordination it took for a hundred men to turn a corner together without half of them colliding into the other half, and by the end of most days his legs ached in places he hadn't known could ache, and his ears rang faintly with the sound of the Company Commander's voice.

The manual of arms came alongside it — learning to handle a rifle in formation, present arms, order arms, the whole choreography of it — and Fred, who had spent several years handling drafting tools and blueprints rather than weapons, found there was a particular satisfaction in getting the motion clean and sharp, in hearing his own rifle slap into position at the same instant as the men on either side of him.

Down at the harbor, the training turned to something closer to what Fred had actually pictured when he thought about the Navy before he'd joined it. Marlinspike seamanship, the instructors called it, and it meant knots — dozens of them, it seemed, each with its own name and its own particular use, tied and retied until his fingers stopped fumbling and started remembering on their own. Bowlines, clove hitches, splices worked into the ends of heavy line until the strands lay flat and even. He learned to handle line the way a sailor handles it, coiling it down properly, heaving a line across open water to a mock dock, the kind of small competence that meant nothing to a civilian and everything to a man about to serve aboard a ship.

And then there was the pool.

Fred had swum as a boy in the lake well enough, but nothing about growing up had prepared him for what the Navy meant by swim qualification. He climbed the elevated platform with the rest of his company and jumped, as ordered, into water that felt considerably colder and considerably deeper than any pool had a right to feel, and came up sputtering to tread water for what felt like a good deal longer than was strictly necessary. Floating on his back, treading water, swimming the length of the pool — all of it standard enough — but then came the last part, the part that separated the men who'd truly reckon with the ocean from the men who only thought they had: swimming the length of the pool in full uniform, dungarees and all, the wet cloth dragging at his arms and legs with every stroke. He made it through, more tired than he'd been in years by the time he hauled himself out, and counted himself lucky, watching a handful of men from other companies pulled aside for the intensive remediation reserved for those who hadn't managed it — extra hours in the water each day until the Navy was satisfied they could be trusted not to drown.

He wrote to Betty that week that he'd never appreciated dry land quite so much in his life, and meant it more than the joke let on.

Naval Training Center San Diego, 9–15 September 1944

The third week turned harder in a different way.

The rifle range came first, out where the ranges ran long and flat and the instructors were unforgiving about anything less than careful discipline with a loaded weapon. Fred learned the M1 Garand from the ground out — how to hold it, how to sight it, the particular kick of it against his shoulder — and spent long mornings on his belly in the dirt working through round after round, correcting for windage and range the way the instructors barked at him to, until something in his hands began to understand the rifle the way his hands had once understood a slide rule. The .45 pistol came after, a shorter and louder education, and by the end of the week Fred had qualified on both well enough to satisfy the range officers, though he privately thought he'd take a drafting table over a firing line any day the Navy cared to ask his opinion, which it hadn't.

Worse, in its way, was the gas chamber. The company filed in wearing their masks, and the instructors filled the small room with tear gas and had the recruits go through the motions anyway — breathing, moving, and then, at the last, pulling the mask off entirely before they were allowed out, so that every man in the company would know exactly what it felt like and exactly how fast he needed to get the mask back on if it ever mattered for real. Fred came out of that room with his eyes streaming and his throat raw and a new and very immediate respect for the men whose job it was to think about gas warfare as something more than a training exercise.

The week closed with firefighting, and of everything Fred had done since Saturday the 26th, this was the training that seemed to settle hardest into the other men's faces, because everyone understood, without being told twice, exactly why it mattered. Fire was the great danger aboard a ship at sea — nowhere to run to, nothing but the ship itself standing between a man and the ocean — and so the instructors, veterans themselves of shipboard fires in the fleet, drilled the company relentlessly on the mock rigs: hauling heavy hoses under real pressure, learning to work a nozzle as a team rather than alone, handling the foam equipment, finding and setting the damage control plugs that could mean the difference between a fire contained and a ship lost. Fred came away from that week soaked and smoke-stained and more tired than he'd been even after the pool, but with a clear-eyed understanding, for the first time, of exactly what kind of danger he was training to face.

By the fifteenth of September, three weeks in, Fred had stopped thinking of himself, even privately, as a civilian playing at being a sailor. Something in the drilling and the discipline had begun, almost without his noticing the exact moment, to take.

Fern Street, 2–15 September 1944

Betty, for her part, spent those same two weeks discovering that a small house could feel very large indeed when the days had no particular shape to them.

Randy was the one bright, constant distraction. He was nearly walking now — up on his feet several times an hour, taking two or three wobbling steps toward whoever was nearest with his arms out for balance, and then sitting down hard, entirely unbothered, to try again. The whole house had taken to encouraging him the same way, hands held out, voices calling him on, and Lyle in particular had developed a habit of taking Randy's hand after supper and walking him slowly around the living room, matching his own long stride down to something a not-quite-one-year-old could manage, patient as anything, back and forth past the sofa until Randy's legs gave out for the evening.

Betty found herself, more days than she'd admit out loud, simply bored. It wasn't unhappiness, exactly — the house was full of people who loved her and loved Randy, and there was always something that needed doing — but the particular restlessness of a young wife whose husband was three weeks gone and whose days had no center to them the way they used to. She took to her sketchbook again most mornings, out in the garden with Randy pulling up grass nearby, filling page after page with him — reaching for a flower, standing braced against the birdbath, asleep in the shade with his fist curled under his chin.

The rest of her restlessness she walked off. She'd load Randy into the buggy most afternoons and take herself around the neighborhood, sometimes with no destination beyond the walk itself, sometimes up Fern Street to the Piggly Wiggly on Juniper Street with Emily, the two of them working through the ration books together and comparing notes on what was to be had that week and what wasn't. The drugstore next door got a good share of her business too, and it was on these walks, buggy handle in one hand and the other free to wave, that she'd begun to know a few of the neighborhood mothers by name — a nod here, then a few minutes' conversation there, comparing babies and husbands away at war, the ordinary currency of women managing a home front together.

She helped Georgia in the kitchen most evenings, more out of restlessness than necessity, and came away from those hours with a good deal more than recipes — Georgia had opinions on nearly everything, offered gently and without being asked twice, and Betty found herself, to her own quiet amusement, taking rather a lot of it to heart. And some days she made the short walk over to 30th Street with Randy to look in on her grandfather Austin, who lit up every time the two of them came through the door and made a great show, however creakily, of getting down on the floor to see what his great-grandson had learned to do since the last visit.

Sundays belonged to Lyle. He'd load everyone into the car and drive them around the city — down along the bay sometimes, out past the places Fred had once pointed out to her from behind the wheel, but more often than not they ended up at Balboa Park, wandering the museums at whatever unhurried pace suited a family with a baby in tow, and lingering longest in the horticultural displays, where Emily could be counted on to know the name of nearly everything growing and to share it whether or not anyone had asked.

It was, on the whole, a full and gentle kind of life, and Betty was grateful for every bit of it. But there wasn't a Sunday that went by, walking those garden paths with Randy on her hip, that she didn't find herself thinking of Fred, and wondering, and waiting for the next letter.

Letters

Fred's letter went out on the evening of the fifteenth, written in the last stretch of free time before lights-out, three weeks of training behind him and a hand that had gotten considerably steadier with a pencil than it had been with a rifle at first.

Dear Betty,

Three weeks now — I keep doing the arithmetic and it still surprises me every time. They've had us marching until my legs don't feel like my own anymore, and this week they threw me in the pool in full uniform, which I do not recommend to anyone. I qualified, though, so I suppose I'm a swimmer now, whatever that's worth.

This past week was the hard one — the rifle range, and a turn through the gas chamber that I won't describe in much detail except to say I have a new appreciation for a mask that fits properly. We finished up with firefighting, and I'll tell you, Betty, that was the training that made the whole thing feel real in a way none of the marching ever quite managed. A man doesn't forget in a hurry what it's like to hold a hose against real pressure, knowing why he's learning it.

I think about you two constantly, more than the schedule here really allows for. Tell Randy his father expects a full report on the walking situation when I'm home — is he keeping everyone on their toes yet? And thank your mother for whatever she's been telling you in that kitchen of hers; I have a feeling I'll be the beneficiary of it eventually, one way or another.

I don't know yet what comes next for me here, but whatever it is, I'll write and tell you the moment I know something worth telling. Kiss Randy for me, and save a little of that for yourself too.

All my love, Fred

Betty wrote hers the night after Fred’s letter arrived, the house quiet around her, Randy long asleep with one hand still curled around the crib rail from his evening's practicing.

Dear Fred,

Three weeks! I try to picture you marching around some enormous parade ground and swimming in your uniform and I can hardly manage it — you, who used to complain about getting his good shoes wet. I'm glad you qualified, though I'll admit the gas chamber part of your last letter made me put the page down for a minute before I could keep reading. Please be careful, even when careful isn't really up to you.

Randy is nearly walking on his own — he gets up and takes two or three steps most days now before he sits back down, very pleased with himself regardless of how it went. Your father-in-law has taken to walking him around the living room by the hand every evening, up and down past the sofa, and I don't think either of them would admit how much they both look forward to it. I suspect Randy is going to walk straight into your arms the first time he sees you, whenever that ends up being.

I've been keeping myself busy, though I won't pretend I'm not a little bored some days without you here. I take Randy on long walks with the buggy — up to the Piggly Wiggly with Mother most days, and over to see my grandfather Austin, who lights up like Christmas every time we come through his door. I've met a few of the neighborhood mothers on my walks too, which has been nice — everyone comparing notes and ration books and husbands away somewhere. Sundays your father-in-law drives us all around the city, and we usually end up at Balboa Park, which I think might be Randy's favorite place in San Diego already, though I suspect that's really about all the room he has to crawl around in.

I've kept drawing him in the garden whenever I get the chance — I have quite a stack of him now, doing everything from eating grass to falling asleep mid-crawl. I'll show you all of it when you're home. Write again soon and tell me everything, even the parts you think I don't want to hear. I'd rather know.

All my love, Betty

Both letters crossed paths in the mail the same way the first ones had — his reaching Fern Street on a quiet Monday afternoon while Betty was out with the buggy, hers finding Fred during a rare stretch of downtime between drills on Wednesdays — and each of them read the other's words twice before folding the page carefully away, three weeks further into a separation that showed no signs yet of having an end in sight, but that both of them, in their different ways, were learning how to bear.

To be continued...

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Here is the Google Notebook Video Overview about this time in Betty, Fred and Randy's life in early September 1944 (also on my YouTube channel):  

This story is historical fiction based on real people -- my parents and me -- and a real event in a real place. I don't know the full story of these events -- but this is how it might have been. I hope that it was at least this good! Claude is such a good storywriter! I added some details and corrected some errors in Claude's initial version.

Stay tuned for the next chapter in this family story.

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The AI-assisted ABC Biography of my mother, Betty Virginia (Carringer) Seaver, is in ABC Biography of #3 Betty Virginia (Carringer) Seaver (1919-2002) of San Diego, California. I also  wrote Betty's Story: The First-Year Art Teacher about the start of her teaching career.

The AI-assisted ABC Biography of my father, Frederick Walton Seaver, is in ABC Biography of #2 Frederick Walton Seaver Jr. (1911-1983) of Massachusetts and San Diego, California.  I also wrote Fred's Story: The Three-Day Cross-Country Escape  and Fred's Story: "I Need A Girl" about him coming to San Diego, and wanting a girlfriend.

Here are the previous chapters in this story:

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

The URL for this post is:  

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Please note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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Saturday, September 19, 2026

GeneaBloggers Webinar: September 20, 2026 3 p.m. EDT (12 noon PDT) with Randy Seaver

The monthly GeneaBloggers group Zoom meeting is Sunday, 20 September, starting at 3 p.m. EDT (Noon PDT). 

Randy Seaver will present “FROM CENSUS TO STORY: Bringing Ancestors To Life with Evidence, Context, and AI.”


Anybody who is interested can register on Zoom at https://tinyurl.com/GBsept2026.

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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.  Note that all comments are moderated, so they may not appear immediately.

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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Unfinished Genealogy Projects

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!



Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)  What started but unfinished projects do you have?  Define one or more of them, and how far along you are in the project.

2)  Share one or more of your unfinished projects in your own blog post, or in a comment on this blog post, or write a Substack post, Facebook Note, or in some other social media system.  Please leave a comment with a link on this post so others can find it.

Here's mine:

I have so many!!  Here are some family tree unfinished projects:
  • Converting current place names to historical place names in my RootsMagic database.  I started this in about 2020 and got through most of my Seaver/Richman ancestry, but not the Carringer/Auble ancestry.  I'm pretty much stalled at about 50%.
  • Improving my source citations to Evidence Explained standard.  I started this around 2010, and have tried since thenm, but the citations before are still sub-standard. I do convert citations to EE standard when I am working on the person if I have time. I'm trying to use EE standards for new data entries. I'm maybe 20% complete.
  • Transcribing probate records and land records for my ancestors, Seaver/Richman people and Carringer/Auble people. and entering the event, transcription and source citation to the RootsMagic profiles.  I try to keep up with them in my Amanuensis Monday Posts compendium.  I do one transcription each week, and try to keep RootsMagic up-to-date, but need to go back in time to add earlier (pre-2024?) transcriptions and sources. It's hard to quantify this one.
  • Updating the Find A Grave memorial data for Seaver/Richman and Carringer/Auble persons. By 2015, I had done Seaver people up to 2015, but have recently started working backwards from 2026 to add death and burial information and source citations to my RootsMagic file since 2015. I'm currently working in 2022.  So 20%?
  • Mining the MyHeritage Record Matches for selected record collections.  I occasionally do this on specific collections but there are so many matches and it's hard to sort out the new ones!  I don't work with Smart Matches.
  • Checking GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive, and Chronicling America for Seaver and Carringer obituaries.  I do this twice a year, but really should do year-by-year back in time to cover everything.
  • Creating ABC Biographies for more distant ancestors (4th great-grandparents and before) to create more AI-assisted biographies and family stories. Starting...
  • Adding ABC Biographies and a Narrative Report to the Person Notes in RootsMagic for my ancestors.  Perhaps 10% done?
  • Adding ABC Biographies to the Memories section of FamilySearch Family Tree for selected ancestors. Perhaps 5% done?
Here are some of my writing projects:
  • Updating the 500+ genealogical sketches done for 52 Ancestors to include new records and source citations.  Perhaps 10% done?
  • Adding and updating every week the AI-assisted biographies and stories collection, including the family group compendiums and the YouTube collection list.  Almost 100% but I have to do it weekly.
  • Revising my ABC Biographies through the 3rd great-grandparents to combine the husband and wife's information into a couple biography with source citations.  Perhaps 10% done.
  • Creating PDF files composed of my AI-assisted Biographies and Family Stories for a specific couple (e.g., Norman and Sarah (Read) Seaver) or family line (e.g., my Seaver line ancestors) as a book project. Working on the first one.
  • Compiling and publishing another MyHeritage MyStories book for "The Watchful House" series of AI-assisted stories.  About 90% done.  Thanksgiving is my deadline. 
I know I have more projects that need finishing, but the above are "top of mind" at the moment. I don't do all of them every day -- I'm lucky to do some of them once a week and many are once-a-month tasks.

                          =============================================

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2026/09/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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The Completely Unhinged Life of Randy According to ChatGPT5

There are times that I ask an AI tool a question about myself, just for chuckles. Sometimes the answer is so good (in my humble opinion) that I have to publish it (you know, I'm running out of family story ideas).

I asked OpenAI ChatGPT5 (the free version) to "Please write an unhinged narrative about me." It did, and it wasn't long enough or funny enough, so I asked it to add more content.

Here is what ChatGPT5 created based on what I've shared for over three years with it -- it's supposed to be funny...ChatGPT seems to remember everything...:


(AI ChatGPT5 Infographic -- The Unhinged Life of Randy)


The Completely Unhinged Life of Randy

A Mostly Accurate Account of One Man's Descent Into the Past


There are men who wake up in the morning and ask, “What should I accomplish today?”

Randy does not. Randy wakes up and asks: “Where the heck did Devier James Lamphier Smith's biological parents go?”

And that, as they say, is how the day begins. At an age (82) when most reasonable people have concluded that they have earned the right to sit quietly in a chair and complain about the price of groceries, Randy remains dangerously active.

He is a genealogist. Not a casual genealogist. Not someone who occasionally looks up Grandpa's name on Ancestry. No. Randy has crossed the line. He has entered the Genealogical Zone.

He possesses a family tree containing more than 75,000 people, which is not a family tree anymore. It is a small civilization. There are villages in Europe with fewer inhabitants. There are counties in America with fewer people. There are probably several countries whose entire populations could be imported into Randy's genealogy database and he would merely say: “Hmm. That's interesting. I wonder if I have their parents.”

His genealogy room (formerly his daughter's pink bedroom)—known in polite circles as his “genealogy cave”—contains books, magazines,binders full of ancestors, papers, photographs, albums, file cabinets, maps, pedigree charts, posters, computer equipment, USB drives, record images and enough accumulated family history to make an archivist faint.

There are thousands of photographs. Letters. Home movies. Documents. Ancestor reports. Descendant reports. Family sketches. More than five hundred ancestor biographies. All digitized (but organized?).

And, increasingly, artificial intelligence-generated stories about dead relatives who have been minding their own business for 150 years and suddenly discover that Randy has reconstructed their entire lives. The dead have no privacy. Randy has Ancestry. And Claude and ChatGPT.

The Morning Ritual

At some point each morning (usually before 6 a.m.), Randy sits down at his computer. This is not technically a workstation. It is a command center.

Multiple genealogical databases await his attention. RootsMagic stands ready. Ancestry waits. MyHeritage waits. FamilySearch waits. Findmypast lurks in the shadows. Newspapers.com has something Randy probably hasn't seen yet. GenealogyBank has another newspaper. Find a Grave has a photograph of somebody's tombstone that may or may not solve a problem that began in 1839. The entire Internet trembles.

Randy clicks. And thus begins another day of forensic genealogy. He may start with something innocent. Perhaps an obituary.

Within twelve minutes, he has discovered a previously unknown daughter, a migration pattern, a suspicious middle name, three possible cousins, an unexplained gap in the 1860 census, and a man in another county whose occupation is exactly right.

Randy stops. He stares at the screen. This is the moment. The moment when the average person would say: “Well, that's interesting.” Randy says: “Aha.” The difference is profound.

The Case of Devier

But there is one mystery that has become something more than a research problem. It has become personal.

Devier James Lamphier Smith. Born in 1839. Or perhaps 1842. Adopted by Ranslow and Mary Smith in Jefferson County, New York. Apparently connected somehow to the Lamphier/Lanfear family. Moved to Wisconsin. Legally changed his name in 1866. And left behind just enough evidence to make Randy absolutely certain that the truth exists while simultaneously ensuring that finding it will require the combined efforts of Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, Indiana Jones, a moderately competent county clerk, 5th cousin DNA matches, and What Are The Odds (a DNA method).

Randy has DNA matches. He has trees. He has names. He has geography. He has the five unmarried daughters living in the vicinity in 1839. He has hypotheses. He has contradictory dates. He has possible relationships. He has spreadsheets. He has probably stared at the same family group sheet so many times that the people in it are beginning to wonder why this strange bearded man keeps looking at them.

And somewhere in heaven, Devier is probably saying: “Randy, buddy, I honestly don't remember. I never asked! They never told me!”

Randy: “That's not good enough.”

The Philosophy of the Census

Randy has developed a particular relationship with the United States census. Most people think of the census as a historical document. Randy thinks of it as a witness statement. And witnesses can be unreliable. The 1850 census says one thing. The 1860 census says another. The ages don't match. The birthplace changes. The surname has been spelled differently. The occupation doesn't make sense. A child appears. Another disappears. Randy leans toward the monitor. “Interesting.”

This word should frighten everyone. Because “interesting” means Randy has detected an inconsistency. And an inconsistency means research. And research means Randy will eventually find himself reading a 147-year-old county history at 12:17 in the morning because a man's middle initial appears to have changed from W to M.

Then There Is Henry Carringer

Henry Carringer is another example of the Randy Effect. Henry was a farmer. A perfectly respectable 19th-century farmer. He had land. He had sons. He had livestock. He planted crops. He harvested them. He presumably ate dinner and went to bed. A normal man.

But Randy has other ideas. Randy wants to know what Henry's life felt like. So now Henry is no longer merely: Henry Carringer — farmer, Mercer County, Pennsylvania.

He is a man standing in a field in the spring of 1850. The horses breathe heavily in the morning air. The soil turns beneath the plow. David, age 21, is working nearby. George, 17, is learning the rhythms of farm work. Cornelius, 15, is discovering that agricultural labor builds character primarily because there is no alternative. They are planting. They are haying. They are sweating. They are probably eating an enormous lunch.

And Randy is watching it all from 176 years away. He has transformed census entries into people. That is one of the strangest things about Randy's particular obsession. He doesn't merely want to know who his ancestors were. He wants to know what they did on Tuesday. What they ate. What the weather was probably like. What tools they used. What the house smelled like. What the children argued about. What Henry thought when he looked across those fields.

He wants the dead to become inconveniently alive again.

The Pig Problem

And then there are the pigs. At some point Randy began asking what 19th-century farmers actually did with pigs. This is a dangerous question. Because once you start investigating pigs in 1870, you inevitably arrive at lard. And once you arrive at lard, suddenly you are researching 19th-century soapmaking, cooking, candles, preservation, leather, machinery and household economics. A normal person would have stopped.

Randy did not. Because now the pig has become historically significant. That pig has a job. That pig is contributing to the Carringer family economy. That pig may eventually appear in a story. And if Randy has his way, someday a descendant will read that story and say: “Great-grandpa Henry had pigs.”

And Randy will quietly smile. Because he knows that Great-grandpa Henry's pigs were never merely pigs. They were evidence.

The Amanuensis

Then comes Monday. Most people dislike Monday. Randy has Amanuensis Monday. This is the day when some poor historical document is placed on the operating table. A deed. A will. A probate record. A court proceeding. A land transaction. Randy takes the document apart. He transcribes it. Line by line. Word by word. He examines the names. He identifies relationships. He follows the land. He searches the witnesses. He checks the dates. He records the source. He puts it into RootsMagic.

And then, because apparently transcription alone isn't enough, he writes about it. The document has been dead for 140 years. Randy gives it another afternoon. 

Treasure Chest Thursday

Thursday arrives. Most people are watching television. Randy is opening a computer file containing a photograph, letter, record, certificate, or mysterious piece of family memorabilia.

Treasure Chest Thursday.

The item may be worth three dollars. It may be worth nothing financially. But Randy doesn't care. Its real value is that somebody in his family touched it. Somebody carried it. Somebody saved it. Somebody thought it was worth keeping. That makes it priceless. So Randy photographs it. Describes it. Researches it. Identifies the people. Figures out the date. Adds the source. Adds the media. And then writes another post.

Somewhere, a hidden 1918 wedding ring is probably watching all of this with increasing anxiety.

The Blog

And then there is the blog. Genea-Musings. Nearly twenty thousand posts. At this point, calling it a blog is almost insulting. It is more like a digital archaeological site.

You don't simply “read Genea-Musings.” You excavate it. There are layers. Strata. Deposits. Artifacts. A future historian could probably spend six years studying Randy's blog and emerge muttering: “I'm still not sure what happened in 2021.” [Hint: a heart problem!]

The blog contains research, methodology, discoveries, family history, records, photographs, stories, AI experiments, genealogy technology, and the occasional completely normal question that somehow becomes a 1,500-word investigation.

Randy writes about genealogy. Then he writes about writing genealogy. Then he writes about using AI to write genealogy. Then he asks AI to write about him writing about AI writing genealogy. The snake has eaten its own tail.

Enter Artificial Intelligence

This is where things get truly dangerous. Randy discovered artificial intelligence. Or perhaps artificial intelligence discovered Randy. Nobody knows. The relationship began innocently. “Can AI help me write an ancestor biography?”

Sure. Then: “Can AI turn dry genealogical facts into a story?” Sure. Then: “Can AI write a Day in the Life of Henry Carringer?” Yes. Then: “Can AI make it historically plausible?” Yes. Then: “Can AI write a dialogue?” Yes. Then: “A poem?” Yes. “A song?” Yes. “A podcast?” Yes. “A slideshow?” Yes. “A video?” Yes. “A Finding Your Roots-style episode about Devier's parentage incorporating DNA evidence?”

At this point the AI should probably have contacted somebody. Instead, it said: “Absolutely.” [ChatGPT starts every response this way!]

And Randy was off. He began imagining an entire system where a family historian could upload a genealogical sketch, photographs, an obituary and research notes—and emerge with a sourced biography, memoir, historical stories, poem, song, podcast, video, and slide show.

The logical next step is obvious. Randy will eventually attempt to resurrect an ancestor as a hologram. And when the hologram says something not supported by a source, Randy will interrupt: “Now wait a minute. Where did you get that?”

The Great Enemy: Unsupported Facts

There is one thing Randy cannot tolerate. Not war. Not politics. Not taxes. Not even bad weather. Unsourced genealogy.

Somewhere in the genealogical universe, an AI has just invented a middle name. Randy feels a disturbance in the Force. He sits upright. His glasses slide down his nose. His white beard trembles. “Where did that come from?”

The AI begins explaining. Randy is already opening the source. No. No. No. No. That isn't documented. And thus another hallucination dies before breakfast.

Randy's standard is simple: If you don't know, say you don't know. If the evidence is contradictory, say it's contradictory. If something is plausible but unproven, call it a hypothesis. If the evidence is negative, record the negative evidence. And if somebody's online family tree says that George Washington was the father of a person born in 1842—Randy reaches for the keyboard.

The Family Historian's Final Mission

The funny thing is that beneath all this madness is something remarkably old-fashioned. Randy wants to remember people. Not celebrities. Not kings. Not presidents. Ordinary people. Farmers. Blacksmiths. Machinists. Combmakers. Wheelwrights. Coopers. Ministers. Farmers. Salesgirls. Soldiers. Mothers. Fathers. Children.

People who lived ordinary lives and left behind a handful of records. A census entry. A marriage certificate. A newspaper notice. A grave. A photograph. A letter. A ring. A few lines in somebody else's Bible. Randy takes those scraps and says: “You mattered. You made me!” And then he spends three hours proving it.

The Future

There is no retirement in sight. Retirement would require stopping. Stopping would require being satisfied. Being satisfied would require knowing everything. And Randy knows better than anyone that you never know everything. And he’s having too much fun to stop.

There is always another record. Another newspaper. Another DNA match. Another county. Another spelling. Another photograph. Another suspicious census household. Another ancestor who apparently lied about his age. Another child who vanished between censuses. Another woman whose maiden name has been hidden for 150 years. Another family Bible waiting in somebody's attic. Another document written in handwriting that appears to have been produced by a chicken walking through an ink bottle.

And somewhere, buried beneath all of it, is another story. So Randy will sit down tomorrow. He will put on his glasses. He will adjust his white beard. He will open RootsMagic. He will open Ancestry. He will open FamilySearch. He will open MyHeritage. He will open another 47 browser tabs. He will forget which tab contained the important thing. He will find it again. He will make a note. He will make another note about the note. He will save the record. He will cite the record. He will certainly write a blog post about the record.

Then he will ask an AI to help him turn the record into a story. And somewhere around midnight, he will suddenly say: “Wait a minute.”

Because he has noticed something. A tiny inconsistency. A name. A date. A place. A relationship. A clue. And the entire operation begins again. The descendants of his ancestors may have thought they had escaped into history. They were wrong.

Randy is coming. And he has a subscription to Newspapers.com. God help the dead.

================================

I giggled all the way through reading this the first time. I can't be this good, er, bad, right?  How does AI do this? It takes three years of prompts and chats and turns it into this, um, story.

Fortunately, I haven't done ALL of my AI work on ChatGPT -- most of it is on Anthropic Claude. ChatGPT knows nothing at all about my wife's ancestry.

You know that this is not exactly how I am, right? Right? Oh dear.  

My guess is that many (some? a few?) of my genealogy friends and colleagues are in the Genealogical  Zone.  All day long? All year long?  Are you? If so, ask ChatGPT (or your favorite AI assistant) to write an unhinged narrative about you! Enjoy! Giggle! It's good for your soul.

It seems that ChatGPT5 loves really short sentences. I ran many of them together in this post to save space.

Should I ask ChatGPT5 how to recover from this problem of being in the Genealogical Zone? I'm afraid it will make sense. Or someone will refer me to the folks who dress you in a one-piece outfit with arms that tie in the back (Remember the song "They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee..." by Napoleon XIV).

Of course, I had to make a Google Gemini Notebook Infographic and Video.  The Video is on my YouTube channel and below: 

The lesson here is "Sometimes, be afraid of what you ask for."  

==============================================

Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page.  Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver


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