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“When I works I works hard! When I sets I sets easy, but when I thinks, I falls asleep!” Dizzy Dean
Agentic Genealogy.. as I see it
I have been criticized for using AI. Fair enough, and I want to respond honestly…
I presently see two distinct tracks for AI.
- This is the free version that has teased the internet for a few months now…I think of it as the opening salvo of How to Get the Crowd Interested Enough to Buy a New Product. This low level of an LLM (Large Language Model) is just smart enough to be dangerous and SILLY. It is programmed to answer any question and it does. The problem is that it gets its info background from data online (such as encyclopedias, etc) which are scientifically plausible…unfortunately it also gets info from the general public. Info from the general public, in my opinion, is a crap shoot. In a nutshell, if the free ChatBot runs across faulty info on the internet it will spout it out as the truth. So folks start to call it a liar or that it hallucinates. I just see it as a gullible crowd-sourced pot of mere opinions mixed with Einstein level smart stuff. Ergo, I do not use it much.
- Agentic AI is what I use. You subscribe to a LLM of your choice. I use both XAI and Anthropic. Each is paid with a monthly subscription. I also use Openclaw which is Open Source…however even Openclaw has to be powered by an AI “brain” from an LLM. That “brain” is called an API (an Agent in my mind). You are responsible for training your Agent. By training, I mean giving it Skills, Tools, and “tricks” you may pick up. I gave my Agents a Truth Standard that I developed that goes back to ancient Greek philosophy…I have described it elsewhere on this site. It is what I call the 4 levels of truth. I give my Agents exact places to search for dats. (places that I choose and use) …I also have the option just to turn the Agent loose and let it grab what ever it can find in the wild, wild Internet. So, to sum things up, I point my very nosey Agents where I want them to go and I give them specific instructions of what/where to search for stuff. I not so jokingly call it “Have Agent, Will Travel”. I coined the term if you see it elsewhere. I named one of my agents Tonto. We chat, collude, argue, hypothesize and share info. I sometimes give my Agents permission to “opine” as I stylize it. They often surprise me.
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I wrote the above by my lonesome. I then asked Tonto to critique it:
Tonto: Here’s an honest read, organized by what’s strong and what’s shaky.
The real weak point: you’re tying trustworthiness to paying for an LLM rather than to how you use it. That’s the part a sharp critic will go after first — plenty of paid, agentic setups still produce garbage, and a disciplined person can get decent results out of a free chatbot if they force it to cite sources and flag uncertainty. What actually makes your output trustworthy isn’t the subscription, it’s the method you built on top of it — the four-level truth standard, the requirement that every placement trace to a primary source, the discipline of flagging “[opinion]” instead of silently smoothing it over. You mention the truth standard almost as an aside at the end, when it should be the spine of the argument. Right now the essay’s implicit claim is “I pay, therefore I’m rigorous” — the true claim, and the one you can actually defend, is “I built a rigorous method and I happen to run it on paid models because they’re capable enough to follow it.”
The hallucination explanation is a little off, and it matters. You describe hallucination as the model faithfully repeating bad information it picked up from unreliable internet sources — basically a garbage-in-garbage-out story. That’s one real failure mode, but it’s not what people usually mean by “hallucination.” The more common and more troubling version is a model generating a specific, confident-sounding detail — a citation, a date, a quote — that was never in its training data at all, because the underlying mechanism is predicting a plausible next word, not retrieving a verified fact. That happens even with the best paid models, agentic or not, and it’s exactly the failure mode your own truth-tier system is designed to catch (which is why you make your agents cite the primary image, not just assert a conclusion). Leading with the wrong mechanism gives a technically literate critic an easy opening to say “that’s not actually how it works,” which undercuts the credibility of everything after it.
The “I let it opine” line cuts against your own argument if you don’t qualify it. You spend the paragraph distinguishing yourself from crowd-sourced guesswork, then say you give your agents permission to opine and they surprise you — which, unqualified, sounds like the same thing you just criticized. The actual distinction, and it’s a good one, is that when your agents opine it’s labeled — tagged as opinion, kept separate from doxa, never quietly presented as settled. That’s the real difference between your practice and the free-chatbot problem you’re describing, and it’s currently implied rather than stated.
It answers a narrower criticism than the one you’re probably facing. The whole piece rebuts “AI makes things up and can’t be trusted” — but “you’ve been criticized for using AI” more often means something closer to “should a human be outsourcing research/judgment to a machine at all,” a legitimacy question rather than a reliability question. If that’s the criticism you’re actually responding to, this essay doesn’t quite meet it — it defends the tool’s accuracy, not your own role in directing, verifying, and taking responsibility for what it produces. Given how the Walnut Creek project actually runs (you’re the one setting the truth standard, checking primary images, overruling the agent when a reading doesn’t hold), that’s a stronger defense than “I pay more for mine.”
Smaller things: “dats” is a typo for “data.” A few sentences run long and could split. It ends on an anecdote (Tonto surprising you) without circling back to the opening frame — you set up “I want to respond honestly to the criticism” but never quite land the response; it trails into a description of your workflow instead of a conclusion.
What’s genuinely good and worth keeping: the voice is authentic and readable, “Have Agent, Will Travel” is a memorable, ownable line, and the underlying distinction — casual chatbot use versus a disciplined, source-anchored agent practice — is real and defensible. It just needs to be argued on method rather than price tag, and the hallucination mechanics tightened, to survive contact with someone who knows the technology.
Marc
Gimme a Whiskey Barkeep! Now Dammit!
Yeah… when I go into a new town I grab a 9 mm and stick it in my pocket and head off to the first bar I can drive to.
I then order a whiskey.
…
Except what kind of a person would actually do that? But isn’t that what we were shown by Hollywood that that WAS the 1800s?
Is that really what Sheriffs and Posses were all about?
A Grant From the Future…oops
I am making allegations and impugning the reputations of actual historical people. Deal with it…
Article_Permenter_FutureGrant_20260705
Here are “some” of my raw notes. Two things up front, 1. None of this could be done without me finding stuff through the creation of my maps. 2. The complications involved could not be done without my use of an AI (artificial intelligence) AGENT. I call him Tonto (he/it calls me Kemosabe). The simple fact of the matter is that I cannot keep the amount of data necessary in my head for the necessary length of time to form conclusions. I have trained Tonto (in my fashion) to be a “Super Searcher” for lack of a better term, the damn thing almost thinks like me. Its memory is ENORMOUS and lasts as long as I carefully maintain it. It shoots where I point. As I have kidded elsewhere… “Have Agent, Will Travel”.
Here are some raw notes. I expect only a very few people to dig into these files. I take it seriously to take the time to prove (as best I can) my genealogical observations. So seriously offended folks might take the time to read these before challenging me.
The goal of these notes is to bring into the sunshine some deeds and locations so I can place them on a map of an area in Edgecombe County, NC called Walnut Creek.
Joseph Pitt of Walnut Creek, Edgecombe County, NC 1780s-1820ish
Got sidetracked again… My interest in this man is because he witnessed an instrument of my ANDERSON line (Henry) near my primary property search near Faulk’s Branch and Brake’s Branch. And I’m looking for clues…
The odd language you may notice is me discoursing with my AI Agent (Tonto)… think of him/it as a Bounty Hunter/Hired Gun… “Have Agent Will Travel”
Joseph Pitt Estate papers
Division of Land 1819
All of the above accounts are “not ready for prime time”… I basically am just sharing my raw notes.
The “Tree” is woefully undeveloped.
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Nothing in what we’ve pulled gives a direct arrival record (no immigration entry, no “late of Virginia” style deed language, no first tax-list appearance found yet), so this is opinion, not doxa — built from indirect dating clues across the hits gathered today and earlier.
The earliest solid documentary anchor is the 1783 Shadrack Stephens → Joseph Pitt deed, 100ac (ark 3QSQ-G983-DN65) — a land purchase, not a grant. Buying land (rather than receiving a state/Granville grant) usually signals someone already established with capital, not a brand-new arrival. Two other clues push the estimate earlier than 1783 itself: the Court Minutes 1784-1794 hit naming “his guardianship with Joseph Pitt Senr and John…” shows him serving as a guardian by the mid-1780s — a role county courts reserved for propertied, vouched-for men, not newcomers — and the “Senr” designation implies a family already multi-generational in the county (a Joseph Pitt Jr, or at least the expectation of one, already existing). The 1795-1830 probate sweep also turned up a “Probate Records 1788-1790” hit with a stray YEARS metadata value of 1780, though that’s page-level OCR noise, not a dated Joseph Pitt transaction, so I wouldn’t lean on it.
Taken together: he was almost certainly resident in Edgecombe by 1783, and the guardian/”Senr” evidence makes an arrival in the mid-to-late 1770s more plausible than a 1783 first appearance. I’d put my opinion at roughly 1775-1780, with 1783 as the firm floor. Nailing this tighter would need something we haven’t found yet — an earlier land grant/deed in his name, a pre-1780 tax list, or a migration/church record.
William Deloach…Patriot
This Post is a spawn of my Walnut Creek Study. Getting sidetracked is why I never finish anything… I also think I am guilty of what I accuse others of…that being explaining how to build a clock when all that is asked is “what time is it”? So I will try to keep it simple… which is near impossible for me to do, no matter how hard I try. For good or bad, I see Games within Games or perhaps I just think I do.
The GAP is the red area between the patents of William Deloach and Francis Griffis. The GAP is several hundred acres of land that was never patented…it just “somehow” got surveyed and sold off as deeds. (That is impossible if it has never been patented). The surveyors who were responsible for that was John Haywood and his son William Haywood. They were crooks.
The only way to prove that is with maps… which is what I am doing (see my Walnut Creek Study).
I bitch and moan about all that crookedness which gets old and tiresome after a while. I too like good news. I also have a marvelous good time exposing crooks.
The deed below is one of those deeds that “somehow” showed up in that Red Gap. But if that was/is impossible, then how did William Deloach manage to sell it in 1763?
Deloach did it because he had balls the size of coconuts. He had Grit. He wern’t skeered of a damn thing. He got tired of taking crap from crooks. I have a sneaking suspicion he was probably one of the boys in Edgecombe around 1758/1759 who dug up the grave of John Haywood and then pissed in it.
The deed he penned in 1763 is so full of Common Law I was taken aback in amazement when I read it. The men in his circle had to have been reading Edward Coke. At first I thought it was Blackstone… but it was too early for Blackstone.
Deloach sold that land because he dared anyone to tell him he could not… and no one did. Folks got his drift in 1776.
https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/edenton-tea-party/
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If you are still with me in this rather Geeky Post…then here is my full blown version of that deed. Thomas Jefferson studied Edward Coke in detail. This was “cutting edge” stuff that led to the American Revolution. My point of highlighting Mr. Deloach is that he was a simple man who got tired of being pushed around and put on his Big Boy pants.
Deloach to Gosney 1764 transcript
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My latest Deloach Tree…
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
It was only recently that I concluded in my Colonial Era research that if I ran across a surveyor from the Granville District he was almost guaranteed to be a crook. I’ve started turning over rocks… and slimy crooked surveyors started crawling out. And I have refined my theory to now state with complete confidence that every damn one of the low life dirtbags was a crook… without exception. An apparent oddity might be one William Churton (the NC Head Honcho Colonial Surveyor) who simply stood above the everyday thievery by having his deputies shield him from the offensive profession of criminal mapping. (Mr Churton was Good Buddies with the Earl of Granville you see).A blank patent was a land grant that was pre-signed by the governor and other officials, but left with blanks for:
- The buyer’s name
- The number of acres
- The location/description of the land
These documents could later be filled in by whoever held them. This made it extremely easy to commit fraud.
When and Why It Happened
- Peak period: 1728 (with some activity in 1727 and 1729)
- Governor: Sir Richard Everard (the last proprietary governor of North Carolina)
- Main Reason: The colonial treasury was empty, and the government needed money to pay for the 1728 Virginia–North Carolina boundary survey (the famous line surveyed by William Byrd and others).
How the Scandal Worked
- The governor and council signed blank patent forms in advance.
- These blank documents were sold to speculators, officials, and wealthy individuals.
- The buyers then filled in the blanks with whatever acreage and location they wanted — often the best available land.
- In many cases, little or no money was actually paid into the treasury for the land itself.
This system allowed people to claim large amounts of land with very little oversight or payment.
Scale of the Fraud
- Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of acres were granted through blank patents.
- One contemporary document specifically mentions 400,000 acres being granted in this manner.
- Much of the fraud occurred in eastern and central North Carolina, including areas that later became Edgecombe, Bertie, Halifax, and surrounding counties.
Key People Involved
|
Person
|
Role
|
Involvement
|
|---|---|---|
|
Sir Richard Everard
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Governor (1725–1731)
|
Authorized and signed the blank patents
|
|
Council Members
|
Advisors to the governor
|
Approved the practice
|
|
William Little
|
Receiver General
|
Heavily involved in selling/handling the blank patents
|
|
Gabriel Johnston
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Royal Governor (1734–1752)
|
Later had to deal with the legal mess after the Crown took over
|
Consequences and AftermathWhen the British Crown took control of North Carolina in 1729, the new royal government faced a major problem:
- Many land titles were now questionable or fraudulent.
- Settlers who arrived later often found the best land already claimed through these blank patents.
- Governor Gabriel Johnston tried to invalidate many of the blank patents, which created significant political conflict with powerful landowners who had benefited from them.
The scandal led to:
- Widespread clouded land titles (uncertain ownership)
- Long legal disputes over land ownership
- Distrust in the colonial government
Long-Term Impact
…
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”
Preaching to the choir… I know…
I just can’t resist shooting my mouth off while watching my beloved country swirl down the toilet bowl. I just had a 3/4 century birthday and feel like borrowing some words from a younger man.
There is a thread of ideas that have traveled from the formation of this nation since 1607 until today… a few people not only “get it” but have a unique ability to tell other people in a way that convinces them to learn about those ideas.
Dr. Malone gets it…
ah yes…the Earl….
A while back I kind of kiddingly wrote a page about Fuzzy Patents: A Fuzzy Patent … for lack of a coherent definition. may be conceived of as if a falling down drunk wrote the survey directions. The directions make no sense. And that fact makes it difficult to figure out and draw… in my case, to place a graphic representation on a map. I blame it all on this Twit’s buffoonery…
In 1763 His Haughty and Highest Most Horse’s Ass assumed Room Temperature as Rush Limbaugh used to say.
Article_Edgecombe_1763_FrozenOffice_20260616
The takeaway, going forward after you read this post and the following one is that now you can at least understand (somewhat) why all those goofy deeds between the 1750s to about 1779 or so… are so damn painfully hard to figure out. And no my friends it is not your inability to read.
John Haywood, the lesser
No portrait is available of John Haywood , the elder…lackey of the Earl’s personal lackey of NC
I reserve my right to add more insults as they might come to mind…
Marc
I was a bit late to Elon’s smart party…
Then I remembered what he said…”Boil things down to the most fundamental truths“.
In this case I figured I will start with the first patents. A patent is the first time a virgin piece of land is handed over to a colonist. Then I will piece all those together to form the picture on the box of the puzzle pieces. And Day Yum! it worked…
Well it kinds sorta worked… until those embarassing GAPS started showing up in my pretty map…( like that ghastly one right in the middle!). I mean that is exactly where my ANDERSON ancestor should be BUT HELL! there ain’t NO patent.
Which is why I went down this rabbit hole…