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...:
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.
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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.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."
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