The Whitman Family — and What to Make of It

A reading reflection on

THE WHITMAN FAMILY

— and what to make of it

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The family. It's hard not to dwell on the psycolocical issues. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. A basic Google search gives us the following.

The Family, Person by Person

Walter Sr., the father. There was evidence he was probably alcoholic — Whitman later attributed Eddy's condition to his father's drinking.

Jesse. Suffered a head injury, probably contracted syphilis from a woman he lived with (per Jeff's account), became violent enough that Walt had to commit him to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum in December 1864, where he died unvisited of a burst aneurysm and received a pauper's burial.

Andrew. Alcoholic like the father, died of tuberculosis compounded by drink.

Hannah. Emotionally volatile, and descended into chronic stomach illness and what Erkkila summarizes as "psychopathic behavior," and physically struck her mother.

Eddy. Described by those who knew him as severely retarded, crippled in one hand and leg, and racked by frequent violent seizures.

I Asked Claude to Go Deeper

With all that going on I had Claude to do a deep dive. I asked:

Is it possible, with all that going on, that he was touched in some way, mentally unsettled. What we would say today, on the spectrum.

Claude's Answer

So: touched, yes, almost certainly.

Unsettled in specific ways — enmeshed with his mother, evasive about his past, obsessive about his life's single work, blunted in conventional reciprocity, overflowing in sensory registration — also yes.

"On the spectrum" in the specific DSM-5 clinical sense — probably no, but autism traits in the broader phenotype sense are genuinely plausible and would sit comfortably alongside schizotypy, cyclothymia, and PTSD in a modern differential.

No historical figure this self-fashioned is going to give you a clean diagnosis across 130 years of distance.

What you can say with confidence is that the "perfect mother, genial bard" mythology he built around himself was a carefully constructed cover over a much more neurologically and psychiatrically complicated man — and that the cover is itself one of the most interesting data points we have.

There was more. His obsession with Phrenology and his never-ending reworking of Leaves of Grass. One source suggested this was evidence of OCD. Not a far stretch.

✦ A note: Claude (an AI assistant by Anthropic) helped with this post by correcting typos and punctuation and by adding visual formatting. All ideas and underlying prose are the author's own.

Walt Whitman's America — A Reading Reflection

A reading reflection on

WALT WHITMAN’S AMERICA

by David S. Reynolds

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I find the most interesting books on Audible, either heavily discounted or free. This book is no exception. Only 5 chapters in, it is obviously a deep dive into the United States of Walt Whitman's time. What follows are some interesting facts, some that inspired squirrels that take up much time.

Setting the Scene

Manhattan was sometimes referred to as “Mannahatta” (originally “Manahatin,” the hill island).

There was a fire in 1835 in New York. It went on for three days. The author uses it to discuss the infrastructure of the time and the difficulties with keeping such things under control.

He discusses sanitary conditions; there were regular cholera epidemics.

Whitman’s Early Career

At age eleven in June 1830, Whitman worked as an office boy for lawyers James B. Clarke and Edward Clarke, and by the summer of 1831 he was apprenticed to Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Long Island Patriot. Clements was involved in a scandal involving disinterring Elias Hicks's body to make a bust and was fired in November 1831. Whitman then trained under foreman printer William Hartshorne and later Erastus Worthington. In the summer of 1832, a cholera outbreak causing thirty-five deaths prompted his parents to move to West Hills, Long Island. From the fall of 1832 through May 12, 1835, Whitman worked for Alden Spooner at the Whig weekly Long-Island Star. During this same period, publishing technology evolved rapidly, with stereotyping introduced in 1814, the cylinder press in 1814 and 1847, and the steam press arriving in the 1830s.

The Southold Incident

This part of the book took a dark turn, and it's the kind of thing that sends me chasing squirrels. After his stint as a teacher in Woodbury, Whitman apparently made threats of violence against himself and talked about burning the schoolhouse down. That alone is a lot. Then his whereabouts between November 1840 and March 1841 go murky. He later claimed to have been in Whitestone (“white stone”), but the author turns to other sources to get to what really happened. The documentation tells a different story.

The record points to an incident in Southold during the winter of 1840–1841. According to the allegations, Whitman was publicly denounced by Reverend Ralph Smith in January of 1841. A mob reportedly tarred and feathered him at the home of Dr. Ira Corwin after finding him hiding under straw ticks. He was rescued by the housekeeper, Selina Danes, and it took him over a month to recover. The schoolhouse where he had taught, Locust Grove No. 9, was renamed “the Sodom School,” which is about as loud a signal as a town can send.

Of course I had to have gemini deep dive into the incident.

He called Whitman a sodomite by name, from the pulpit.

He named the family Whitman was boarding with (generally rendered as the George Wells household) and pointed out that there was a young boy in that household who attended the Locust Grove school.

He referred to the Locust Grove No. 9 schoolhouse itself as "a Sodom" — the epithet that stuck and gave the building its later local name, "the Sodom School," which it carried into the early twentieth century.

The evidence for the Southold incident isn't a single smoking-gun document; whether the charge was true, exaggerated, politically motivated, or mythologized after the fact is the part that's still unsettled. On top of that, there is a seven-month gap in Whitman's literary output between November 28, 1840, and June 22, 1841, which lines up suspiciously well with a man lying low and healing. In my opinion, the silence says as much as the testimony does.

His Father

The author talks about his father, a complex individual that comes across as an entrepreneurial spirit. He tried his hand at his own version of flipping property, custom-designed building techniques (hand-laid floors, walls, roofs) which became outmoded by the 1820s shift toward prefabricated parts and specialized contractors. He would buy property, parcel it out, then build dwellings on the lots and sell them. He had little success with the model.

His Family

His family life was complicated. Walt Whitman himself was probably on the spectrum, although the author does not state that conclusion that I remember. 

Mother Louisa Van Velsor is described by Whitman as idealized, though historical records suggest idiosyncratic behavior. Siblings are listed with specific conditions: Jesse (insanity), Hannah (neurosis), Andrew (alcoholism), and Edward (retarded/crippled). With all that going on, it's possible and probable, in my opinion, that he was touched in some way. 

Whitman’s reaction to family instability is described as a turn toward surrogate parenting roles and poetic reinvention of parental figures.

So much more. And it's only five chapters worth.

✦ A note: Claude (an AI assistant by Anthropic) helped with this post by correcting typos and punctuation and by adding visual formatting. All ideas and underlying prose are the author's own.

Transcendentalist Reading

In the middle of the first on this list. Before that, I finished the other two.

📚 What I've Been Reading

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
by David S. Reynolds

The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography
by John Matteson

Emerson: The Mind on Fire
by Robert D. Richardson

🐿️ Chasing Squirrels

All three have set me chasing many squirrels. It's best to list the topics:

• The Farm
• The New York fire around the middle of the 1830s
• A group called the Loafers
• Typesetting and printing in the early 1800s
• The transcendentalist movement — then and now

🤖 A Research Companion

AI is incredibly useful when one sets out chasing squirrels. What follows are some of the queries prompted by what I have been listening to:

Controversy surrounding James Gordon Bennett and Walt Whitman
Antagonism between Walt Whitman and Mike Walsh
Margaret Fuller published review after hearing Chopin play
Amos Bronson Alcott quote concerning God and man
Frederic Henry Hedge works read Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are a few notebooks I started at NotebookLM:

• Navigating the Post-Work Society
• Transcendentalism

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✒️ Margaret Fuller in Europe

Margaret Fuller lived for many years in Europe, sending letters back to the New York Tribune with her assessment of things that caught her fancy. She is considered the first female foreign correspondent. Her life there must have been dreary indeed. Working for little pay, she counted on help from friends and colleagues.

She also met a man; they had relations and conceived a child. That situation had to be kept a secret. Through illness and political unrest she survived it all, only to have her and her family's lives snuffed out attempting to move to the US. An inexperienced crew on the boat that gave them passage drove it onto a sand bar in a storm, and they were swept away in the confusion.

🎭 Notes on Whitman & Emerson

Walt Whitman was against slavery, but early on he was also anti-abolition. He was probably gay; the author of the book points out many passages in his writing that he supposes were inspired by alleged attraction toward the opposite sex.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably in love with Margearet Fuller, but there's no direct evidence it was pursued by either. They most probably were not intimate.

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Some of the squirrels I will continue to chase.
Others will be let loose when I move on to other books.

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✦ A note: Claude (an AI assistant by Anthropic) helped with this post by correcting typos and punctuation and by adding visual formatting. All ideas and underlying prose are the author's own.

A Journal

Last year my brother Tom described a project started in high school. It was a school project, the teacher had the students keep a journal. Since then Tom has kept his up, off and on, with gaps lasting months to years. We had been discussing AI stuff, and I was describing the handwriting capabilities of the models. I had discovered how good things were while doing research on ancestry.com. He wondered aloud what AI could do with the thousands of pages he'd written over the years. I grew up in near poverty, so my compulsion for saving things is obsessive at times. The thought of an organized workflow to archive his journal appealed to me on so many levels. I told him it could be done, but I didn't know the effort involved. Wouldn't know until I got a gander at the books themselves.

That was last year. Recently I brought it up again. He said he didn't have time to devote to such a project. I told him I would do it all. I wanted to test transcription on my local LLM machine.

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Digitizing Decades: Bringing Tom's Journal into the Digital Age

Tom has kept a journal since high school. Off and on over the decades, with some stretches of months, and at least one gap close to ten years. Still, more pages than most people ever put down.

The first step was scanning. For most of the notebooks I used a picture scanner. The two bound books — notebooks 7 and 9 — were a different story. The binding made it impossible to lay them flat, so I photographed each page with my phone. That introduced a new problem: the pictures needed to be cropped down to just the page. Partly for looks, but also because the transcription AI does much better with a clean image.

For the cropping I used the Google Photos app on a Samsung tablet. There's an edit feature that lets you drag the four corners freely to match the edges of the page — fitting the frame to whatever angle or shape the photo came out. Painstaking, corner by corner, page by page. But it works. The two bound books were done out of order, which is just how things went. As of this writing the transcription model is still working through them.

For the other notebooks, the picture scanner produced JPEGs that I collected into PDFs, one per notebook. I worked through them in no particular order: notebooks I, IIA, IIB, V, the green bound book, and eventually the two bound books. The big spiral notebook was the last one standing when I left for a Vegas trip. By that point scanning had become routine.

Early on I scanned two pages at a time, side by side. That turned out to be a problem — the transcription had a harder time sorting out two pages in one image. I adjusted as I went, and the later notebooks came out cleaner.

Getting the text out of the images took some experimenting. I tried Google's picture scanner app first, then Google Docs, Gemini, Claude — testing different tools to see what gave the best results. Eventually I set up a workflow on my local machine using a vision model built for reading handwriting. I had Claude write a Python script that processes a whole folder of images, sends them through the AI one by one, and saves everything to a single text file. Hands-free. I refined the script as I went — smoother file handling, better organization. For the two-page scans I updated the prompt to tell the AI to read left page first, then right, with a clear separator between them.

The transcriptions aren't perfect. Handwriting never makes it easy. But they're better than you'd expect — good enough to work with, and cleanable where needed. Everything has been uploaded to Google Docs so Tom can get into it whenever he's ready.

One thing that turned up along the way: poetry scattered through the pages. Looks like all of it is original. I mentioned pulling it out separately, but haven't gone further than that.

A friend, Steve Mays, got interested in the project. He's done something similar and brought up Samuel Pepys — the 17th century diarist who kept a journal for nearly ten years, over a million words. Hard not to think about that in the context of what Tom has.

For the AI processing of the content itself, the prompt I've been working with asks the model to approach it like an archivist — preserve the feeling behind the words, not just the words, and shape it into something readable, something a younger family member could connect with. That's the direction, anyway.

The whole thing has some weight to it. I'm going through treatments right now, and the week after my last session — which got postponed once when my counts were too low — is when I planned to get into it more. Felt like the right time to have something like this put together.

The Letter

A Letter From the Past

Going through some papers in a constant effort to downsize, I came across a copy of a typewritten letter. It was written by one William Anthony Cracchiola, son of William Vito Cracchiola. William discovered in the early 2000s, through military records, that his father had three dependents—leading to his introduction of half siblings.

Unraveling the Family Tree with AI

After discovering William's letter, I used AI to extract key names, dates, locations, and relationships — identifying William Vito Cracchiola as the common father, Mary Christina Isabella as his second wife, and the three daughters (Marion, Eleanor, Charlene) from his first marriage. I cross-referenced these details with Ancestry.com and Find a Grave records to confirm birth/death dates, parental lineage (Benardo and Antonetta Isabella), and burial sites. Actually, I used Claude via the Chrome browser assistant to browse the various genealogy sites and extract even more facts about the family. Then, it directly created two missing WikiTree profiles: one for William Anthony Cracchiola and one for his mother, linking them to the existing profile of their father, William Vito.

The Future of Genealogy Research

Watching the extension work on its own is amazing to see. Knowing that at this time next year this will be commonplace compels me to consider how much more complete the genealogy tree will be.

I was an only child

Correspondence

Correspondence in the age of AI

A few weeks ago, I came across some correspondence addressed to my wife Kim from a friend of hers in North Carolina. The cards were sitting in a pile bound for the shredder, but before I disposed of them, I took pictures. 

I uploaded the photos to ChatGPT for text extraction. Because the cards were dated, it arranged them in chronological order — and then it summarized them.

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💬 A Note on This Process

What AI can do is always interesting, and amazing at times. I know Kim has more correspondence from Donna, but it's not a priority to find it. We are too busy living our best life.

I did ask ChatGPT to write a blog post about the process. It was much too wordy, but I've left it below for posterity.

📋 Narrative Summary

These cards form a short, chronological snapshot of Donna's life from mid-2023 through spring 2025 as she writes to Kim.

Work & Daily Life

Donna works in healthcare at West Point, often on overnight shifts. She prefers nights because......

Family & Personal Life

Family structure becomes increasingly central to Donna's life, especially with the t............................................daily logistics................

Overall Tone

Across all the letters, the tone remains steady and practical. The correspondence conveys resilience, humor, and a stable routine shaped by work, health management, and the arrival of a new generation in the family. What's notable is not any single detail, but the stability of the overall pattern. The writer does not drift dramatically in outlook or circumstance. Instead, the narrative shows continuity — adaptation without collapse, routine without stagnation.

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📝 From Handwritten Cards to Structured Insight: Turning Personal Correspondence into Usable Narrative

(Written by ChatGPT — kept for posterity, though admittedly a bit long-winded.)

There's something deceptively simple about a stack of handwritten cards. At first glance, they look like fragments — seasonal updates, casual notes, small talk. But when examined collectively, they form something far more valuable: a longitudinal record of a life in motion.

Step 1: Extraction

The process begins with extraction. Handwriting, especially informal cursive, is inconsistent. Dates may be abbreviated, sentences run together, and punctuation is optional at best. The goal at this stage is fidelity, not interpretation. Every word is captured as written, preserving tone, quirks, and ambiguity. This matters because small details — hesitations, repetition, phrasing — often carry meaning that gets lost in early summarization.

Step 2: Transcription & Organization

Once transcribed, the material shifts from image to text. That's the first major transformation. Text can be searched, reorganized, and compared across time. Patterns begin to emerge almost immediately. Recurring topics — health, work, family — become visible threads rather than isolated mentions.

Step 3: Normalization

The next phase is normalization. Dates are aligned. Events are sequenced. Inconsistent references ("this fall," "last May") are anchored to a timeline. This step converts anecdotal fragments into a coherent chronology. Without it, narrative distortion is almost guaranteed.

Step 4: Synthesis

Then comes synthesis. This is where the raw text is compressed into meaning — not just "what was said," but "what persists across time." Several stable themes emerge:

• A chronic health condition being actively managed but not defining daily function
• A consistent work environment, with deliberate choices about schedule and workload
• A family structure that becomes increasingly central, especially with the transition to grandparenthood
• A tone that remains pragmatic, even when describing uncertainty or physical limitation

What's notable is not any single detail, but the stability of the overall pattern. The writer does not drift dramatically in outlook or circumstance. Instead, the narrative shows continuity — adaptation without collapse, routine without stagnation.

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🔍 What This Makes Possible

At this point, the material has moved from "letters" to "data." That opens up several additional possibilities.

1. Timeline Construction

Events can be plotted precisely: diagnosis points, job changes, family milestones. This is useful for both personal history and medical context. It also allows cross-referencing with external records if needed.

2. Health Trajectory Mapping

Mentions of symptoms, treatments, and perceived effectiveness can be tracked over time. This creates a subjective health record that complements clinical data — particularly valuable for conditions that are chronic or slowly evolving.

3. Emotional Baseline Analysis

Sentiment across letters reveals an emotional baseline. There's no dramatic oscillation. That consistency itself is a signal — suggesting resilience, or at least a stable cognitive framing of events.

4. Social Proximity & Support Structure

Physical proximity of family (living across the street) emerges as a key structural factor. It influences childcare, emotional tone, and daily logistics. This kind of detail is easy to overlook in isolated readings but becomes obvious in aggregate.

5. Narrative Reconstruction

Perhaps the most powerful outcome: the ability to reconstruct a life narrative that was never explicitly written as one. The cards were not intended to be a story — but together, they become one.

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💡 The Bigger Picture

This process highlights a broader point. Most people already generate rich longitudinal data about their lives — through emails, texts, cards, and notes. The limitation isn't data scarcity. It's lack of structure.

Once structured, even small, informal artifacts can support:

• Personal history reconstruction
• Medical context enrichment
• Family archive building
• AI-assisted memory systems
• Biographical writing

The key constraint is accuracy during the early stages. If transcription or sequencing is flawed, every downstream interpretation inherits that error. But when done carefully, the transformation is substantial.

A handwritten card is ephemeral. A structured narrative is durable. The gap between the two is not technological — it's methodological.

River Cruise with AI

Budapest to Prague: Planning Our First River Cruise with AI

I've spent the past two days using Comet, Claude, and Gemini to help plan a trip to Europe this coming August. I could not imagine doing it without AI help. It was over a year ago that Steve Mays said, more than once, it will only get better.

The Route

We have a river cruise booked with AMA Waterways this coming August. It starts in Budapest and ends in Prague. We decided to stay in Krakow for a few days prior to the trip because Kim wants to see Auschwitz.

Decisions, Decisions

I considered staying in Warsaw too, but after much deliberation, and heavy AI use, decided it wasn't the best use of resources. We have to consider the logistics of getting around in Poland, a foreign country. We want to avoid as many issues as possible. We have to consider carting around our luggage and maximizing our enjoyment, seeing as much as there is to see without being overwhelmed.

Getting There and Around

Planes, trains, and automobiles. It's a lot to consider, and much to consider in regard to issues that can come up. We will have to be wary of our safety, so we want to have our wits about us and still enjoy ourselves. That is hard to do if one is dealing with logistics day to day.

Why It All Works

Transportation that makes sense. Accommodations that are comfortable without breaking the bank. Weeding out the shit from the things that are worthwhile to visit. Experiencing good local food. The investigation is made so much easier with Google Maps and AI to check behind to make sure things don't interfere with other things.

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A Note from Claude

I helped with this post — and I'm happy to say so. The words, the trip, the decisions, and the excitement are entirely Steve's. What I contributed was polish: I corrected grammar, spelling, and punctuation, applied structure with headers, bolded key place names and tools for scannability, added a touch of italics for voice, chose a title that captures the journey, and styled the headings with color and alignment.

On the technical side, I worked directly inside the Blogger editor via its content iframe — reading and rewriting the post's HTML in place, targeting elements by reference, and dispatching input events so the editor registered every change. No copy-paste, no external tools. Just me, the DOM, and a bit of finesse.

This is what AI-assisted writing looks like when it works the way it should: the human brings the story, and I help it land. — Claude

Drug Company Hack

 

Choline-Rich Foods Missing From the Diabetes Breakthrough Story

A recent article titled "A Tiny Gut Molecule Could Transform Diabetes Treatment" describes how gut microbes convert dietary choline into trimethylamine (TMA), which then helps reduce inflammation and improve insulin sensitivity. The article notes that choline is a natural nutrient “found in several foods” but does not actually name any of these foods, leaving readers with no practical guidance on what to eat.

From Abstract Mechanism to Practical Eating

The core scientific finding is that when choline reaches the gut, microbes convert it into TMA, which can bind to IRAK4, dampen inflammation, and help restore normal blood sugar control in the context of a poor or high-fat diet. This is a genuinely important shift, because it ties a specific dietary nutrient and microbiome metabolite to metabolic protection, not just to risk. 

However, the article’s language stops at the biochemical mechanism and never crosses into concrete dietary examples, despite explicitly stating that choline is “present in several foods” or “found in common foods.” For anyone trying to act on this information, that omission matters as much as the science itself. It is blatantly obvious the article is not about helping people act on the information, it is a hack job to promote the agenda of drug companies looking for another way to get more out of the insurance companies with expensive drugs.

What the Article Doesn’t Say: Actual Choline-Rich Foods

Choline is not rare or exotic; it is widely distributed in everyday foods, with the richest sources coming from animal products. Major nutrition references list meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy as primary choline contributors in typical Western diets. 

• Eggs (especially yolks): One of the most concentrated and convenient choline sources, often highlighted in dietary surveys and nutrient databases. 
• Organ meats: Beef and chicken liver are among the highest choline foods measured, with very high milligram-per-serving values.
• Other meats and poultry: Beef, pork, chicken breast, and turkey provide substantial choline and are major contributors to intake in many populations. 
• Fish and seafood: Salmon, cod, other lean fish, and even caviar/fish roe supply meaningful choline while also adding omega-3 fats.
• Dairy products: Milk, yogurt, and other dairy foods contribute steady background choline through frequent consumption. 
• Cruciferous vegetables: Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage are notable plant sources that show up repeatedly in choline source lists. 
• Legumes and other plant sources: Beans, peas, lentils, soybeans, peanuts, potatoes, and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains supply smaller but important amounts, especially for people eating less animal food. 

Why Leaving Out the Food List Is a Problem

By not naming a single choline-rich food, the article forces motivated readers to do extra work just to translate “dietary choline” into a grocery list. That gap is especially striking because public health and nutrition references already provide clear examples and even rank choline sources by contribution to intake.

Readers are essentially told that a common nutrient in “several foods” might help protect against insulin resistance via the microbiome, but are not given any practical way to identify or prioritize those foods.  For people trying to modify diet as part of diabetes prevention or management, that is a missed opportunity.

There is also a significant economic angle to this omission. By focusing almost exclusively on the molecular mechanism—and hinting at future pharmaceutical applications or specialized supplements—the narrative prioritizes interventions that patients will eventually have to pay for. This framing sidelines the most immediate and cost-effective solution: dietary change. While developing new treatments is valuable, it should not obscure the fact that the 'breakthrough' molecule can be fueled right now by affordable, non-prescription foods available at any grocery store. Prioritizing patentable solutions over basic nutrition effectively gatekeeps a health benefit that could otherwise be accessible to everyone immediately.

Connecting the Science to the Plate

If the goal is to help the average person eat in a way that supports the beneficial TMA pathway described in the study, the logical next step is to highlight actual food choices. That does not require overselling choline as a miracle solution; it simply means placing the mechanistic finding in the context of realistic meals built from known choline sources.

Examples could include meals that combine animal and plant choline sources, such as eggs with cruciferous vegetables, fish with beans, or meat paired with potatoes and a side of broccoli. Even a short table of “higher-choline foods” in the original article would have made the research immediately more actionable for readers living with, or at risk for, type 2 diabetes. 

Until popular coverage starts naming the foods alongside the molecules, the burden stays on readers to bridge the gap between elegant biochemistry and everyday eating. Given how straightforward the choline food data already are, that is an easy fix that would make microbiome and metabolism research far more useful outside the lab. 

But of course, they do not want to fix that. Pharmacuticle companies do not make money encouraging patients to make dietary changes.