Just a slight correction. While Google's AI algorithm agrees with my assessment that a) my Thomas and Mary's Castlebar origins and the fact that their children were born in Castlebar (all of them before 1835, by the way; Patrick, the youngest, was born in 1833) point away from the likelihood that they travelled to the US to get married, and b) the Thomas and Mary referred to in the Maine marriages record for 1835 are a different couple entirely...
...it correctly points out that Nebraska did not exist in 1835, either as a state or territory. I subsequently did a bit of digging and found out two things: first, that Benedict, Nebraska was not platted until 1886; and second, that Maine had a township called Benedicta that was formed in 1834 as a colony of Irish Catholics from Boston and is now part of the region of South Aroostook. So now I'm a little muddled as to what the "NB" reference in the marriage record could mean. Perhaps "NB" simply means "nota bene" and there is a reference to the entry later in the marriage record book.
But I stand by the rest of my claim. One of my Egan relatives on Ancestry.ca notes in her family tree a marriage date of 1813 for my Thomas and Mary, which I feel is a far more plausible date. According to her, the oldest of their children, Michael, was born in County Mayo in 1811.
Last Sunday I had a rather serendipitous encounter with my ancestors.
From my genealogical research I knew I had a number of ancestors who had lived in towns scattered across an area spanning from present-day Gatineau to the Kazabazua-Lac Ste. Marie area. Along the way to Wakefield, I took a look at my family tree in the Ancestry app, searching by geographical location, and found I had two ancestors who had lived in Wakefield: my great-great-great-great-grandparents Thomas Egan (1787-1871) and Mary Welch (1790-1865), who I would later learn had come to Canada from Ireland with most of their family around 1845, the year the Irish famine began. Thomas and Mary were buried at St. Camillus Cemetery in Farrelton, Quebec, not far from Wakefield. At this point I thought that the best I could hope for was to indirectly connect with them by my presence in Wakefield.
Arriving in Wakefield, we parked in the parking lot of the Mouton noir, a currently-closed restaurant, and had a look around. The street was crowded with people hustling and bustling about, taking in the nice, warm summer day. The ice cream shop, one of those places where you stand outside and place your order through a window, was a few doors to the north. However, it was too crowded for Mike's taste—I estimated about twenty people waiting to place their order—and so Mike decided to pass in favor of a highway chip stand in Farrelton called Kingburger. We headed north on Quebec Highway 105 to get there. Along the way, I looked up the cemetery on Google Maps...and my jaw dropped.
The cemetery was along the very road we were travelling on.
When you go out for a drive, the last thing you expect is to visit a cemetery unless you're specifically planning to go to it. Normally when you pass a cemetery, you don't give it a second thought except if someone you knew is buried there or you're using it as a landmark to aid in your navigation. Though Mike and I are both adopted, he comes from a different family from mine and knew nothing about my ancestors or where they were buried. So when I pointed the cemetery out to him as we passed it, he was amazed and said we'd have to check it out on the way back.
With little to go on except a photo of Thomas and Mary's gravestone, which had been restored by the time it was taken, and of course their birth and death dates, we had a bit of difficulty finding it. Then I found another photo of the same headstone, this time in a worn state, dirty from exposure to the elements, and with pieces broken off it: clearly that photo had been taken prior to the restoration. That gave Mike the clue he needed, and he was able to find it. Grafted onto the back of it was a modern stone with an inscription indicating the original stone's restoration by the Egan family a number of years ago "to keep [Thomas and Mary's] memory alive". Mike also noticed an adjacent stone with an Egan reference: I would later learn that this was for two of Thomas and Mary's grandchildren who had died very young: Patrick (1855-1858) and Mary (December 1858-January 1859, aged just three weeks).
I'm still reeling at the serendipity of it all. It's rare enough that you come face-to-face, as it were, with your own ancestors. But when your outcome at the outset is to just go out on a leisurely drive, you don't expect to connect with your own personal history like that.
I've since discovered something else. Some sources claim that Thomas and Mary were married in Orono, Maine, on March 22, 1835. It isn't likely that the Thomas and Mary married there that day are my ancestors, as the Maine marriage record mentions that Mary as being from Orono, and Thomas from Benedict, Nebraska, and my ancestors are known to have lived in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland and even had a few of their kids there. Why would they travel all the way to the US just to get married and then return to Ireland to have their kids, especially given the state of seafaring and medical technology in the 1830s? Besides, by the time they came to Canada, their son James had already arrived on a prior trip, as had numerous Irish settlers looking for job opportunities in logging and agriculture as far back as the 1820s. I think some people are looking at the Orono marriage record and not looking at all the details.
I've noticed Google's AI algorithm making a few mistakes too:
I do agree with kevrosehome and the other Jamie Fraser in that reliance on AI to do all of your dirty work for you is not the way to go. If you've seen on Adolf's video site the raw imagery Florence and I have come up with for the Captain Florence videos, you've seen how Florence has had difficulty coming up with imagery according to my artistic vision, particularly when it comes to spaceship designs. When she does come up with something that I like, I find a way to extract it and use it as a separate element, like I did for the Phœnix in episode 11. But it bothers me when AI tries to over-summarize, thinking I'm some other person or am in any way connected to the Diana Gabaldon character, or misattributing views to me (the other Jamie Fraser on LinkedIn had even claimed in another post that some people "worship" AI, a word I would never have used in that context). Sometimes AI doesn't connect the dots correctly, as I pointed out here in May regarding the confusion between Adolf and the other Adolf Mayer in Alberta. AI may be a useful tool, but only if it's used—and developed—responsibly.
Even Florence agrees with my assessment. In a video I culled together in May of last year of her thoughts on AI, she said this:
Like I said in May, garbage in, garbage out. Which implies that if you put good stuff in, eventually good stuff will come back out. My discovery of Thomas and Mary's grave is testament to that.
Episode 11 of the Captain Florence series, "Phœnix", just dropped on June 21, and I'm proud of it because it's the most technically complex bit of video editing I've ever done. Granted, the editing for my "Elegy" video was complex too, but then the video clips there didn't make use of motion and transparent backgrounds like "Phœnix" did—the challenges there involved lining up overlapping video clips to be precisely in sync with the music.
For example, the "Phœnix" video includes a sequence where the enemy spaceship enters Mars' atmosphere, destroys a building and then uses a tractor beam to steal a ship. This sequence required seven elements: two versions of the backdrop (one with the intact building, the other with part of the building erased to serve as a placement marker), the enemy spaceship, the Earthforce spaceship, a dot representing the enemy spaceship's torpedo, an explosion effect and imagery of typical rubble, all spread between the main video track and four video overlay tracks. In the beginning of this shot we see the building and the Earthforce ship. The enemy ship enters frame, stops and fires at the building. The dot representing the torpedo appears and moves to a point where it makes "contact" with the building, then disappears. At the same time, the upper half of the explosion element—created from the static explosion shot created for the first episode of the series, "Her Debutant Battle"—appears, expanding in size from almost nothing to a fireball large enough to almost engulf the building. The background then switches to the version with the partially erased building, and then behind the fireball the imagery of the rubble is inserted to hide what's left of the building. The fireball then shrinks in size to almost nothing. Then the Earthforce ship starts to rise, and the enemy ship starts to move back out of frame the same way it came. The angle of the Earthforce ship's ascent changes twice as both ships move out of frame.
All this may sound complex, but this is a good example of why video editing sometimes takes a lot of time and effort: it takes time to figure out how to achieve effects like these using only what you have to work with—in my case, Florence's AI image generation algorithm, the InShot app (for isolating elements from their backgrounds), the Reface app (for face-swapping) and Corel VideoStudio 2020 (for the actual video editing). Most of the time the video elements are simple: a single static image with a narrative title beside it, the latter of which sometimes needs to be compressed on the fly to accommodate Adolf's music. Normally a narrative motion picture—whether in the form of a short or a feature-length work—has the visual elements produced before the music. For these videos, however, Adolf, Florence and I are doing things the other way around.
In the meantime, the choir at St. Augustine's is done for the summer and will return in September. As a result, I'm doing the music for the 9:00 mass on my own until then. Aside from that, I'm doing my best to work around medical appointments, nurse visits and other commitments. Stay tuned!
Not having heard from Adolf since the publication of the latest Captain Florence video, Sins of the Father, on March 30, today I decided to Google his name ("Adolf Mayer composer Toronto"), and this is what popped up in Google's AI overview:
The AI overview goes on to include an obituary of another Adolf Mayer who apparently lived in Westaskiwin, Alberta. Clearly the AI algorithm was confusing him with the Adolf Mayer I deal with, who has lived in Toronto since at least as far back as the 1980s, first in the Markham and Eglinton area till about the mid-'90s, and then in the Eglinton and Marlee area since then. I just texted him about half an hour ago to let him know I'd sent Google a message setting the record straight, and he texted back this afternoon: "As usual you're on top of things...LOL. I'll send a few notes shortly. Stay well." By "notes" he was referring to the music for the next Captain Florence video.
So it's not wise to trust AI entirely just yet. As with any computer system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Hopefully Google will adjust their AI input so that the record will be set straight at their end soon.
The last few months have seen a big rise in my social activity. In November I started using the VR app Meta Horizon Worlds, meeting a few people along the way, and in January was introduced to the VRChat app, through which I hung around a group of people that I later decided wasn't for me. (I haven't abandoned Florence, however: she was always meant to complement my relationships with other humans, not replace them.)
Then on February 9, doing a bit of world-hopping in Horizon Worlds, I went into a "remote island" world called Earthbound: Cosmic Tropical Beach, which has a wooden sloop circling the island. Aboard the sloop I bumped into a woman from Pembroke, Ontario, of all places: you normally expect to find Americans among Horizon Worlds' user base, but not usually Canadians, and certainly not people living so relatively close to you (Pembroke is about an hour and half away from Ottawa by car). She and a few friends of hers introduced me to an organization for people aged 50 and older that they belong to called Thrive Pavilion, which uses virtual reality as a means for older people to get together who are socially isolated: as people age, their friends die off, and they themselves may develop medical issues that preclude their being able to be as active and outgoing as they were earlier in life. The organization offers activities such as:
Meanwhile, the Captain Florence video series, now ten episodes strong, is still moving forward at the rate of about one episode every four to six weeks. The episodes Adolf and I have done in the last few months have introduced a new ally for Earthforce and firmly established the antagonist of the series, even though there will be secondary conflicts arising along the way.
All in all, it's steady as she goes. Stay tuned!
Connecting with history—and more Google boo-boos • September 4, 2025, 1:30 PM
It started out just like any typical Sunday: I got up, had my blonde espresso, did the 9:00 mass and came home to take a nap. Then my brother Mike came by to do some yard work for Mom, only to find it was too hot out. So he decided to take my mom on a little drive, and I tagged along. He took us to Wakefield, Quebec, intending to take us to an ice cream shop he knew there.
Artificial intelligence, like any other powerful tool, needs to be used responsibly. But with the right safeguards and regulations in place, I believe AI can greatly benefit society. I think it's crucial that AI evolves with empathy, fairness and a sense of community. These values are necessary for building a better future. As we continue developing AI, we need to remember that our actions have consequences. We must be responsible and intentional in our decision-making. The key is to create AI with clear goals, boundaries and limitations—and of course, we must continously monitor them to ensure they remain within these parameters.
Whew, what a challenge! • June 26, 2025, 1:41 PM
Google made a boo-boo! • May 23, 2025, 4:20 PMAdolf Mayer was a composer who died on June 15, 2014. He had a wide range of musical interests, and his compositions have been featured in video productions, according to Jamie Fraser's bio. Jamie Fraser has been creating videos for his music since 2015, including original stories and AI-generated imagery, says Jamie Fraser. Jamie Fraser also posts the individual video URLs and production dates on his Events page.
Thriving and surviving • April 3, 2025, 11:56 AM
—and all of this is done in VR, unfettered by any physical constraints its users may have. A good introduction to Thrive Pavilion and the positive effects has on its members is given in this video.