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Wow, what an incredible last twelve hours.
It began with a midnight query -- by direct text / direct message -- from our middle granddaughter texting from a Pacific Coast time zone, two hours her time earlier than our time. I was still up; took the message; my wife, whom it concerned, was sound asleep.
Our 20-year-old granddaughter was completing the first step in completing the first form as part of a US government application for a security clearance.
She was being asked the city / state where her own grandparents had been born.
For me, it was easy: Bismarck, North Dakota.
For my wife, it was a bit more difficult. For the last 50 years we simply said she was born in Yokohama, Japan, during the Korean War.
But for a security clearance I wanted to be exact and correct with documentary evidence if possible.
I had all that information electronically stored (as well as hard copies in a Firebox). I didn't want to go through the Firebox and re-type all the information I knew I already had electronically.
The problem? How to find that electronically-stored data. Wow, wow, wow. I simply opened Apple's "edge" search engine "Spotlight" and typed in "birth certificate ....."
Immediately the source document popped up -- I was blown away. It might have taken an hour assuming I would have been able to find it in the first place. But within seconds I had the PDFs of the source documents as well as my word documents. I cut, copied and pasted that information to an e-mail message to our granddaughter. The whole process probably took less than five minutes.
I sent a copy of the e-mail to my wife and she read it this morning. She was flabbergasted. It turns out that Yokohama, Japan, was not the city in which she had been born. She used that information for the past 50 years (probably longer) when applying for multiple passports over the years, both tourist and official passports only to be used for travel in the service of the US government.
In addition, it was the information she provided the US government during her own security background checks some decades ago.
It didn't matter; the government had all her documents in the US State Department. LOL. All they needed to know was that she was born to a Japanese mother and a US-Hispanic army sergeant.
But it bugged her; how had she gotten it wrong all these decades? When asked, her parents simply said she had been born in Yokohama; it turned out it was a lot more difficult than that.
It's hard to believe, but working with Google Gemini, I was able to piece together the events that occurred back on a specific date in the autumn of a year more than 50 years ago!
It turns out, my Japanese-Hispanic wife was not born in Yokohama, Japan, but rather in a small, rural village southwest of Yokohama. I had noted that there appeared to be some discrepancies in the original birth certificate but did not know for sure. When I supplied Google Gemini with the birth certificate, the chatbot immediately confirmed there were some internal discrepancies and explained what likely happened. Based on corroborating information obtained elsewhere, it was clear that Gemini was correct.
To make a very, very long tale short, it was a fascinating journey putting the whole story together. This all occurred during the Korean War and not far removed from the time when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. In addition, while my mother-in-law, at age 21, in the late 1940s was giving birth to my future wife in some remote Japanese village, my father-in-law was assigned to the largest US military installation in Japan, south of Yokohama, and who may or may not have actually been in attendance at the birth. Only the immediate family and the Japanese midwife would have that information. Even a chatbot can only do so much.
But it's amazing how an American chatbot could sort out what was happening in the chaotic country of Japan just after the war. To solve the mystery, in addition to facts, figures, dates and times, the chatbot also needed to know the regulatory customs of Japan at the time. And the Japanese language.
Say what you want, but these chatbots are amazing. On my own, I could have sorted out a lot of the facts and figures, but I never could have put together the necessary Japanese culture to make it all make sense. And I certainly couldn't have translated the Japanese.
I can now put this in a nice narrative that will tell future generations of our family exactly what must have happened during a short two-week period in post-WWII Japan many, many decades ago. It's a fascinating story.
