I wondered if the FREE AI tools could provide me with a story about the effect of moving from Newark, New Jersey to Terre Haute, Indiana in 1864 on my great-grandfrather, Charles Auble (1849-1916).
My genealogical sketch for Charles Auble is 52 Ancestors Friday: #14 Charles Auble (1849-1916), based on my genealogical research.
1) My Prompt to free Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 was: "Please write a story about Charles Auble at age 15 leaving Newark, New Jerseyin 1864 and how it affected him."
2) The AI tool responded with this story (yes, it is historical fiction, but the way it might have been):
Charles Auble’s Last Day in Newark
The morning mist hung low over Newark's Fourth Ward on that September day in 1864, softening the edges of the brick buildings and cobblestone streets that fifteen-year-old Charles Auble had known his entire life. He stood at the front window of their house, watching the lamplighter make his final rounds, methodically extinguishing the gas lamps that had guided the night workers home. In a few hours, Charles would leave this view forever.
Behind him, the house hummed with the controlled chaos of a family preparing to depart. His mother, Sarah, directed the packing with the efficiency of a general commanding troops, her voice calm but firm as she supervised his older sisters, Frances and Mary. His father, David, had already left before dawn to finalize the sale of his boot and shoe business, a transaction that would fund their new life in the West—or what passed for the West in 1864. Indiana might as well have been California for how far it seemed from Newark.
"Charles," his mother called from the kitchen, "have you finished with your room? The wagon will be here by noon."
"Yes, Ma," he lied, not moving from the window. His room wasn't finished. His belongings sat in a sad pile on his bed—clothes, a few books, the carved wooden horse his grandfather had made when Charles was six. But he couldn't bring himself to pack them yet. Once they were in crates, once the door closed behind him for the last time, it would be real.
William, his older brother by four years, appeared at his shoulder. At nineteen, William seemed to Charles impossibly grown-up, already sporting the beginnings of a mustache and speaking with the authority of a man. The move to Terre Haute was William's idea, or at least he'd been the one to convince their father it was a sound decision. Better opportunities, he'd said. Growing city. Railroad connections. A chance to get in on the ground floor of something new.
"Saying goodbye?" William asked, following Charles's gaze out the window.
"I suppose," Charles said. "Seems silly. It's just a street."
"It's not silly," William said, and his voice was gentler than usual. "It's the only street you've ever known. When I was your age, I thought I'd live on this street forever, marry some girl from the neighborhood, take over Father's business someday." He paused. "Life has other plans sometimes."
Charles turned to look at his brother. "Do you ever wish... I mean, are you scared? About Indiana?"
William was quiet for a moment, considering. "Terrified," he finally admitted, and Charles was surprised by the honesty. "But that's how you know it matters. If it wasn't scary, it wouldn't be worth doing."
The door burst open and their youngest sister, eight-year-old Kate, rushed in, her face flushed with excitement. "Charles! Tommy Anderson is outside and says he wants to say goodbye! Can I tell him you'll come down?"
Tommy Anderson. Charles's best friend since they were both small enough to play marbles on the stoop. They'd attended school together, gotten into trouble together, shared dreams of becoming soldiers or explorers or railway engineers. Tommy wasn't going anywhere. His family had been in Newark for three generations and would probably be here for three more.
"Tell him I'll be down in a minute," Charles said.
Kate raced off, her boots clattering on the stairs. Sarah's voice called after her, "Katherine Auble, you stop that running this instant!" But there was no real anger in it. Even their mother's strict rules were relaxing in these final hours, as if the normal order of things had already begun to dissolve.
Charles climbed the narrow stairs to his room one last time. The space felt smaller than he remembered, or perhaps he'd grown larger. The wallpaper was faded where his shelf had hung, leaving a ghostly outline of the books that had lived there for years. He'd read every one of them at least twice—adventure stories mostly, tales of men striking out for new territories, facing danger with courage and ingenuity. He'd loved those stories. Now he was living one, and it felt nothing like the books.
He moved to the window and pushed it open, leaning out to catch the familiar sounds of his neighborhood. Mrs. O'Malley was hanging her washing in the yard next door, the same thing she did every Monday without fail. The whistle from the factory two streets over announced the change of shifts. A dog barked. Someone shouted in German from the shop on the corner.
All his life, Charles had taken these sounds for granted, never imagining they could be anything but permanent. Now he tried to memorize them, to fix them in his mind so perfectly that he could recall them whenever he needed to. But even as he concentrated, he felt them slipping away, becoming mere noise rather than the symphony of home.
"Charles?" His father's voice came from the doorway. "A word?"
David Auble looked tired. The past weeks of selling the business, arranging the move, saying his own goodbyes had aged him visibly. At forty-seven, he was starting over, and Charles could see the weight of that responsibility in the lines around his eyes.
"I know this is hard for you," David said, sitting on the edge of Charles's bed. "It's hard for all of us. Your mother cried herself to sleep last night, though she'd never admit it."
Charles said nothing, turning away from the window to face his father.
"But I need you to understand something," David continued. "I'm not doing this lightly. The shoe business here... it's changing. The big manufacturers are taking over, making everything cheaper, faster. A man with a small shop can't compete anymore. In five years, maybe less, I'd be out of business anyway."
"I know, Pa," Charles said. "William explained."
"William's a smart boy," David said. "But he doesn't know everything. The truth is, I'm doing this for you children as much as for the business. Here in Newark, everything is already decided. The same families run everything, the same names on the same shops, generation after generation. You'd grow up in my shadow, and when I'm gone, you'd live in William's shadow. But in Terre Haute..." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "In Terre Haute, you can be whoever you want to be. You can make your own name."
Charles absorbed this, understanding for perhaps the first time that this move wasn't just about his father's business or William's ambitions. It was about possibility. About futures that hadn't yet been written.
"What if I don't know who I want to be?" Charles asked quietly.
David smiled, a real smile that reached his eyes. "Then you'll have time to figure it out. That's the gift of a fresh start, son. Nobody in Terre Haute knows you're the boy who fell in the creek behind the school, or who once ate so much pie at the church social he was sick for two days."
"You remember that?" Charles felt his face flush.
"I remember everything," David said, standing and placing a hand on Charles's shoulder. "And I'll remember Newark. We all will. But we'll make new memories too. Better ones, I hope." He paused at the door. "Tommy Anderson is still waiting outside. You should go see him. And Charles? Pack your things. The wagon really will be here at noon."
The stoop where Charles and Tommy had spent countless afternoons sat in the shadow of the house, worn smooth by years of boots and play. Tommy was sitting there now, tossing pebbles at a crack in the street with methodical precision. He was tall for fifteen, already showing signs of the man he'd become—broad-shouldered and strong-jawed. He looked up when Charles emerged.
"Thought you might not come down," Tommy said.
"I almost didn't," Charles admitted, sitting beside his friend. "Didn't know what to say."
"Yeah. Me neither."
They sat in silence for a while, watching the street. A cart rumbled past, the driver calling out his prices for vegetables. Mrs. Chen from three doors down hurried by with a basket of groceries, nodding at the boys. Everything was so utterly normal that Charles felt a surge of anger. How could the world just continue as if nothing was changing?
"You'll write?" Tommy finally asked.
"Of course. Every week, probably."
"You'll forget," Tommy said, but not meanly. "You'll get to Indiana and meet new people and have new adventures, and Newark will seem small and far away."
"No," Charles protested. "I won't forget. You're my best friend."
Tommy looked at him, and there was something adult in his expression, something that saw farther than Charles could. "We're fifteen, Charlie. By the time we're twenty, we'll be different people. You'll be different, I'll be different. That's just how it works."
"That's not true," Charles said, but even as he said it, he wondered. Would he be different? Would Terre Haute change him into someone who didn't remember these streets, this friendship, this life?
"My Pa says your Pa is brave," Tommy offered. "Says it takes guts to start over like that."
"My Pa says we didn't have a choice."
"Maybe both things are true," Tommy suggested. "Maybe brave is doing what you have to do even when you're scared."
They talked for another hour, about nothing and everything. Tommy told him about Mary Sullivan, the girl in their class he'd been sweet on but never had the courage to approach. Charles confessed he'd always hated learning Latin but pretended to like it because Tommy was so good at it. They made elaborate plans to visit each other—Tommy would come to Indiana in the summer, Charles would return to Newark at Christmas—plans they both knew, on some level, would never happen.
When the wagon finally arrived, pulled by two sturdy horses and driven by a gruff man named McCreedy whom David had hired for the job, the reality of departure could no longer be avoided. The family's belongings were loaded with surprising speed—furniture, crates, trunks, the accumulation of a lifetime that somehow fit into one wagon.
Sarah gathered the children for a final moment inside the empty house. Their footsteps echoed on the bare floors. "Say goodbye to the house," she instructed. "Thank it for sheltering us all these years."
Kate immediately burst into tears. Little Anna, only four years old, joined in sympathetically without really understanding why. Even Frances, usually so composed, had tears running down her cheeks. William kept his face carefully neutral, but his jaw was tight.
Charles moved through the rooms one last time. The parlor where they'd gathered for family prayers every evening. The kitchen where his mother had taught him to roll pastry dough. The dining room where they'd celebrated every birthday, every holiday, every small triumph. The stairs he'd climbed thousands of times, his hand wearing a smooth spot on the banister rail.
Outside, the neighbors had gathered—not a formal farewell party, but a spontaneous collection of familiar faces. Mr. Patterson from the grocery. The Kowalski family from across the street. Old Mrs. Henderson who'd lived in the neighborhood longer than anyone could remember. They called out wishes for safe travel and good fortune, the kind of hollow pleasantries people offer when they don't know what else to say.
Tommy stood apart from the crowd, hands in his pockets. When Charles approached him for the final goodbye, Tommy thrust out his hand for a formal handshake, man to man.
"Good luck, Charles Auble," he said.
"Good luck, Tommy Anderson."
They shook hands, both squeezing harder than necessary, as if that could somehow preserve the friendship. Then Tommy turned and walked away, not looking back. Charles watched him go, understanding instinctively that Tommy was right—they would write for a while, the letters would grow less frequent, and eventually they would stop altogether. They would become stories they told other people: "I had a friend once, back in Newark..." or "My best friend from when I was a boy..."
"Charles!" his father called. "Time to go!"
He climbed onto the wagon beside William. His mother sat up front with the driver, holding Anna in her lap. Kate and Frances were in the back with the trunks, already wrapped in shawls against the September chill. The driver made a clicking sound, and the horses began to move.
Charles watched his street roll by—the stoop, the corner store, the church where he'd been baptized, the school where he'd learned to read. Mrs. O'Malley's washing still hung on the line. The dog was still barking. The factory whistle blew again.
As they turned the corner and the Fourth Ward disappeared from view, Charles felt something shift inside him. It wasn't quite grief and not quite excitement, but something in between—a strange, hollow feeling of doors closing and opening simultaneously.
"You all right?" William asked quietly.
Charles nodded, not trusting his voice.
"It gets easier," William said. "The not knowing what comes next. After a while, it starts to feel like freedom instead of fear."
The wagon rolled on through Newark, past the city center, toward the train station where they would board the cars for the first leg of their journey west. Charles kept his eyes forward now, resisting the urge to look back. What was done was done. Newark was behind him, and somewhere ahead—across miles of countryside he'd never seen, in a city whose streets he couldn't yet imagine—his new life was waiting.
By tonight, he would sleep in a different bed, in a different state. By next week, the details of these streets would begin to blur. By next month, he would know new streets, new friends, new routines. And years from now—though he couldn't know it yet—he would leave Terre Haute for Chicago, and Chicago for San Diego, always moving, always seeking, never quite settling, as if that day in Newark had set something restless loose inside him that would never be satisfied with staying in one place.
But for now, on this wagon, on this September afternoon in 1864, Charles Auble was simply a fifteen-year-old boy leaving home for the first time, carrying with him everything he'd been and everyone he'd known, not yet understanding that you can never really go back, that home becomes a memory the moment you leave it, and that the boy he was would slowly be replaced by the man he would become—a painter, a husband, a father, a union member, a westward traveler following the same restless path that had started on this day, on this wagon, leaving Newark behind.
The city fell away. Fields opened up on either side of the road. And Charles Auble, who had never been more than twenty miles from his birthplace, began the journey that would define the rest of his life.
Years later, when Charles was an old man living in San Diego, he would sometimes think of that last day in Newark. The details had faded—he could no longer remember exactly what Tommy had been wearing, or which neighbors had come to say goodbye, or whether it had been cloudy or clear. But he remembered the feeling: that strange mixture of loss and possibility, fear and excitement, endings and beginnings. And he understood, finally, that leaving Newark hadn't been an ending at all. It had been the first chapter of a story that would take him places he couldn't have imagined, make him into someone he couldn't have predicted, and give him a life richer and stranger than any of the adventure books he'd read as a boy on that vanished street in that distant city.
But he never forgot Tommy Anderson. And sometimes, in quiet moments, he wondered what had become of his friend, whether Tommy had stayed in Newark as he'd planned, whether he'd married Mary Sullivan, whether he'd taken over his father's business. Charles never wrote to find out. Some memories, he'd learned, were better preserved as they were—perfect and unchanging, like a photograph that never yellows with age, capturing not what was, but what felt true.
The wagon had moved forward, and Charles had moved with it, and that was all the story there was.
Note: This is a work of historical fiction. While based on the documented life of Charles Auble (1849-1916), who moved with his family from Newark, New Jersey to Terre Haute, Indiana around 1864, the specific details, dialogue, thoughts, and events in this story are imagined.
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3) Here is the Video Overview of this post by Google NotebookLM.
4) This is historical fiction based on the facts that are available for the David and Sarah (Knapp) Auble family and Charles Auble's life. It is historical fiction based on social history and society norms at the time and place, so it is likely realistic. Charles Auble became a home pinter and decorator. It might have happened this way.
5) I had to tell this story -it's a Turning Point. Each ancestor faces challenges in their life, and telling stories about them helps our descendants understand their parents lives and their own lives.
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