Is John Smith My Name?
What if the world’s most common name carried a secret?
Is John Smith My Name? is part detective story, part family road trip, and part experiment in how emerging AI can bring history to life. Civil engineer John Oliver Smith and storyteller Davar Ardalan set out to confirm his English or Irish roots — only to uncover a hidden German-American story stretching from the Shenandoah Valley to Württemberg, Germany.
At the center is CK, Catherine Kessler AI: both a Custom GPT archivist and a Voice AI persona powered by Amazon Polly. Built on transcripts, archives, and research, CK makes history interactive, letting listeners ask questions, hear ancestral voices, and explore German-American contributions in real time.
Relaunching ahead of John’s research trip to Germany, the podcast blends genealogy, archives, and cutting-edge AI into an immersive story that asks: What does it mean to truly know your name?
You can engage with CK, the AI companion to this podcast on ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68c1b698d690819186f512e0100547ae-ck
Is John Smith My Name?
Latest Episodes
EP4: Bloodlines and Algorithms
A family mystery deepens in this chapter of Is John Smith My Name as the search takes an unexpected turn. A short chapter in an ongoing audio series, it follows John Oliver Smith, his wife Davar Ardalan, and his son Michael as they tra...
EP3: The Schmidt Thread Revealed
The search comes full circle in Rockingham County, where church records link the family back to Johannes Albrecht Schmidt (1729–1798) of Württemberg, Germany. With CK’s voice woven into the narrative, the story expands from one family to millio...
EP2: Into Rockingham County
The Shenandoah Valley provides the breakthrough moment: in a minister’s record, John and Davar discover that Johann Schmidt married Catherine Kessler, confirming the family’s German origins. In this episode, CK appears as a Voice AI persona pow...
EP1: Hagerstown Beginnings
The journey begins in Hagerstown, Maryland, where John and Davar trace John H. Smith, born in 1788. At the Washington County Historical Society, land records, wills, and local history open a window into the world of early German settlers like J...
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