Rev. Fr. Kennedy and AI
It has been a while since there has been a blog post. In that time, I have been working on my newest presentation, Mining Morning Reports for Genealogical Gold. You can read a review here: https://aweekofgenealogy.com/comments
In addition to getting ready for other presentations, I have also been experimenting with the NARA Catalog API to get an alternate way of searching the catalog.
I did spend some time with AI offerings in my research into the Rev. Fr. Thomas J. Kennedy.
First, I uploaded the sketch that I have of him from the newspaper to ChatGPT and prompted it to: Change this line drawing into a picture
A few liberties were taken by the built-in DALL·E image generation system when creating this image. In the sketch it does appear that he is probably wearing a cassock of the time, but the details of buttons and the notch in the collar are not evident in the sketch.
I may need to try this process again with a stricter prompt to rein in ChatGPT’s creative vision.
I looked up his eye color recorded in a Civil War roster and asked in a follow-on prompt asked: can the image be changed so that his eyes are more grey
The resulting image looked less like the sketch.
Since the Rev. Fr. Kennedy was dying at the time of the column in the Brooklyn Eagle, it finally occurred to me that there must have been a photo of him that was used as the basis of this sketch. I have not located one yet. This image also looks like that of a younger man. My focus has been on the data, but it seems I may need to be searching for the original photo of him. Does the original photo still exist? (Although the Archivist at the Diocesan Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn was very helpful, they did not have a deceased priest personnel file for him at in their archives because he had died in Kentucky and not in Brooklyn.)
Using the original sketch, I did a Google Image search at https://images.google.com, adding the search terms: Kennedy Brooklyn
Naturally, our blog posts showed up, and data about the life of the Rev Fr. Thomas J. Kennedy extracted from the blog posts appeared in the AI summary. Many of the photos that were returned in the results were of men religious of all different faiths.
The “Dive Deeper in AI Mode” button that appeared at the end of the AI Summary made me curious, so I clicked on it. Gemini let me know the number of sites it was searching, and informed me about two sites: our blog and the New York Times. There was an article from the NY Times dated Oct. 5, 1901: “Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying.”
Our county library has a subscription to the ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which includes the New York Times, so I logged in and searched for the article using these search terms:
Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying 1901
There were three results, two of which were ads from the 1970s.
The New York Times article was succinct and did not offer more information than the article in the Brooklyn Eagle. It was actually published several days after his death in Kentucky. It mentioned that he retired about a year ago, and that his ill health for the reason for his pension. He was in Kentucky, at a Trappist Monastery. He was well-known in the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) circles.
Of course I downloaded a pdf file with the article, a pdf file with the whole newspaper page, and a (brief) citation in Chicago style: “Rev. T.J. Kennedy Said to be Dying.” 1901., Oct 05 New York Times (1857-1922), 9. https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/rev-t-j-kennedy-said-be-dying/docview/96159883/se-2. (Further reproduction of New York Times articles is prohibited without permission.)
There is certainly more to do to fill in this ancestor’s story, but the use of the AI tools ChatGPT and Gemini inspired both my creativity and my next steps in the research.
