Experiments!

This is only an experiment. 

I uploaded my research about my grandmother, Susan Kathleen Cunningham, to Gemini Workbook and asked it to make a documentary. I didn’t prompt it to focus on the ambivalence about citizenship that runs through the records, but it is there!
The video is fairly free of hallucination, although it misstates my great-grandmother's birth year and also that she was one of eight, when in fact, she was one of nine children. 

I do not love that there are no citations attached to the facts that generated these videos. The images are also very AI-creepy and remind me, yes, again, of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I have to say, though, that I find this an interesting way to look at a pile of documents. The added narrative context sometimes makes the material easier to see in a new way, even though the historical facts still need to be checked neutrally and in context. The Timelines contain the fuller source citations behind the research. Finally, I’m not entirely sure my grandmother would appreciate this.  However, as she herself often said, "The truth will always out." 

Rouses Point Station, New York
Historical image found via Google Images; original source and photographer unidentified.

After I watched the first video, I added more facts and context. This one makes me think of the TV show "Succession". I am fairly sure that my great-grandparents did not leave Ireland on a wave of upward mobility—it must have been a gamble. Further, I'm not sure that I'm sold on the idea that commercial traveler to stockbroker to insurance agent to university secretary sounds like successful mobility and stabilty.  And I really have to look into this Chelsea Hotel thing. Was it really bohemian in 1910?