After developing the AI-assisted ABC Biography of Elijah Pickrell McKnew (1836-1912) and Jane (Whittle) McKnew (1847-1921) Family of San Francisco, California, I wondered how they had experienced and survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
I asked Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to write a story about the McKnbeww family's experiences:
The Day the Earth Shook: The McKnew Family Story
April 18, 1906 - 5:12 AM
The house at 4131 19th Street near Castro was still dark when the world began to end.
It started with a low rumble, like distant thunder, but coming from below. Seventy-year-old Elijah McKnew stirred in his bed, confused. Then the shaking began.
"Elijah!" Jane cried out, reaching for her husband in the darkness.
But there was no time for words. The earthquake hit with savage force, and suddenly the entire house was bucking and heaving like a wild animal. The noise was deafening—the groaning of wood, the shattering of glass, the crash of furniture toppling, the thunder of the earth itself tearing apart beneath them.
In her room down the hall, eighteen-year-old Belle Alberta screamed. Edna Catherine, twenty-two, grabbed her younger sisters May Jane (twenty) and Gladys Hazel (thirteen) and pulled them toward the doorway. Their brother Leland Joseph, sixteen, stumbled from his room, disoriented and terrified.
"Get outside!" Elijah shouted, though his voice could barely be heard over the chaos. "Everyone out! Now!"
The family stumbled through the violently shaking house, holding onto walls and each other, dodging falling plaster and pictures crashing from walls. A kerosene lamp fell and shattered, its oil spreading across the floor—mercifully, it didn't ignite. The chandelier in the dining room swung wildly, then crashed to the floor with an explosive sound.
Jane grabbed Gladys's hand and pulled her toward the front door. The floor rolled beneath their feet like ocean waves. Gladys fell to her knees, and her mother hauled her back up with a strength born of pure terror.
"Mama!" Belle cried out behind them.
"Keep moving!" Jane commanded. "Don't stop!"
They burst through the front door and into the street just as the violent shaking began to subside. All around them, their neighbors were doing the same—flooding into 19th Street in their nightclothes, children crying, men shouting, women praying.
The shaking lasted forty-five to sixty seconds, though it felt like an eternity. When it finally stopped, an eerie silence fell over the street, broken only by the sound of people crying and calling out to loved ones, and the distant crash of buildings still collapsing.
Elijah stood in the street in his nightshirt, his arms around Jane, both of them trembling. He counted: Belle, Edna, May, Leland, Gladys—all five children still at home were safe. Thank God. Their older children—Allethia, Alfred, Henry, Alice, Lilly, George—lived elsewhere in the city. Were they safe? There was no way to know.
"Look," Leland said quietly, pointing east.
Smoke was rising from the direction of downtown. Not just one plume—many. Within minutes, they could see the orange glow of fire against the dawn sky.
The Fire Begins
By 6:00 AM, the full horror of the situation became clear. The house was damaged but standing—cracks ran through the walls, the chimney had partially collapsed, windows were shattered, and the interior was in chaos. But it was intact. Many of their neighbors weren't so lucky. Down the street, the Johnsons' house had partially collapsed. Other buildings leaned at crazy angles.
But the immediate danger wasn't from the earthquake anymore. It was from the fire.
"Pa, look," Leland said, pointing toward the growing clouds of smoke. "It's spreading."
Elijah had fought in no wars, but he had the instincts of a survivor. "We need to evacuate the house. Bring out what we can."
"Surely the fire won't come this far," Jane said, but her voice was uncertain.
"Maybe not," Elijah replied. "But if it does, we'll lose everything. Better to be ready."
The family spent the next hours in organized chaos. The aftershocks kept coming—terrifying jolts that sent them running back into the street, hearts pounding. But between the shocks, they worked.
Saving What They Could
They started with the essentials. Leland and Elijah carried out the heavy cast-iron stove—backbreaking work, but the stove represented survival. If they lost everything else, at least they could cook.
"The photograph albums!" Jane insisted. "And the family Bible!"
Edna and Belle brought out stacks of photographs, including the precious ones from their wedding, from the children's births, from their years in Tuolumne County. These couldn't be replaced. May Jane grabbed the family Bible where all their births and marriages were recorded.
They carried out chairs, tables, bedding, clothes, dishes, food from the pantry. The street began to look like an outdoor market, with families' entire lives spread out on the pavement. Mattresses, furniture, trunks, birdcages, even pianos—neighbors helped each other carry out their possessions, creating corridors through the accumulated goods.
Young Gladys was assigned to watch their pile of belongings while the others made trip after trip. She sat on a trunk, still in her nightgown with a coat thrown over it, watching the smoke grow thicker in the distance.
A neighbor, Mrs. Chen, came over with her own children. "The fire's jumped Market Street," she said quietly to Jane. "It's burning toward us."
Waiting and Watching
By afternoon, the smoke had turned day into twilight. Ash fell from the sky like grey snow. The family set up their stove right there on 19th Street and Jane made coffee and heated soup. It felt surreal—cooking dinner in the middle of the street while their city burned.
More family members started arriving. Alfred found them around 2:00 PM, having walked from his home on Lloyd Street, worried sick about his parents. Henry and his family, who lived next door, were on the street also. Edna’s beau, Paul Schaffner, came to check on her and said the Schaffner house on Castro Street was damaged but still standing.
"Have you seen George?" Jane asked anxiously. "Or Allethia? Alice? Lilly?"
"George is safe—I saw him near City Hall," Henry reported. "It's completely destroyed, Mama. Just ruins."
As the afternoon wore on, the fire drew closer. They could hear it now—a low roar like a distant waterfall, punctuated by explosions as gas mains ignited. The heat was palpable even from blocks away.
Soldiers and police were everywhere, trying to maintain order. They came through the neighborhood warning people to be ready to evacuate further if necessary. Some were dynamiting buildings to create firebreaks, and each explosion made everyone jump.
"It's only one block away," Edna said quietly, watching the flames leap into the sky to the north of them.
Elijah stood with his sons, watching the inferno. He'd worked for forty years to build this life, to own this home free and clear. And now it might all burn.
"If it goes, it goes," he said quietly. "We're alive. That's what matters."
But Jane wept quietly, thinking of all the things still inside—her mother's wedding ring from England and Australia, the children's baby clothes she'd saved, letters from relatives long dead.
The Long Night
They spent the night on the street. The family huddled together on mattresses and blankets, taking turns sleeping while others kept watch. The sky glowed orange, and the air was thick with smoke and ash. Around them, thousands of other families did the same. Some sang hymns. Others prayed. A few men played cards by lamplight, needing something—anything—to distract from the horror.
Gladys couldn't sleep. She kept thinking about her school, her friends, her teacher Miss Patterson. Were they safe? Was the school building still standing?
"Try to rest, sweetheart," Jane whispered, stroking her youngest daughter's hair. But how could anyone rest with their city burning?
By midnight, they could see the flames clearly—a wall of fire consuming everything in its path. It had reached within one block of their home. One single block.
Elijah, Henry, and Leland wet down the house with buckets of water from the street pump, hoping desperately that it might help if embers landed on their roof. Their neighbors did the same. Everyone worked together, passing buckets in lines, calling out warnings when new fires sparked nearby.
The Miracle
Dawn of April 19th brought exhaustion and disbelief. The fire had stopped. Somehow, impossibly, it had stopped just one block north of 19th Street. Their house still stood.
"How?" Belle whispered.
"The wind changed," a firefighter told them. "And we got the firebreak to hold on Mission Street. You folks are lucky. Real lucky."
Lucky. Elijah looked at the devastation just blocks away—nothing but smoking ruins, entire neighborhoods simply gone. And then he looked at his house, damaged but standing, his family safe, his neighbors' homes intact.
"Yes," he said quietly. "We're lucky."
But the city they knew was gone. Over the next days, as they ventured out to assess the damage, the full scope of the catastrophe became clear. Downtown was destroyed. Chinatown was ashes. Nob Hill's mansions were ruins. The beautiful City Hall with its grand dome had collapsed into rubble.
Young Leland walked with his father to Market Street and stood staring at the devastation. Everything was gone—just block after block of smoking ruins, brick chimneys standing like lonely sentinels among the destruction.
"How do we come back from this?" Leland asked.
Elijah put his hand on his son's shoulder. "The same way we've always done everything. One day at a time. We work. We rebuild. We endure."
The Photograph
A few days later, when things had calmed enough, a photographer came through the neighborhood documenting the survivors. The McKnew family gathered in front of their house with their belongings still spread out on the street.
"Stand there," the photographer directed them. "Yes, just like that."
They stood together—Elijah and Jane, their children, their stove and furniture arranged around them, the house number "4131" clearly visible above the door behind them. They looked tired, shell-shocked, but they were together. They had survived.
The photograph would become a treasured family heirloom. Decades later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would look at it and marvel. "That's great-grandfather and great-grandmother McKnew," they would say. "They survived the great earthquake."
Rebuilding
In the weeks that followed, the family moved back into their damaged house and began repairs. Elijah, now seventy, worked alongside his sons to fix the chimney, patch the walls, replace broken windows. Jane and her daughters cleaned, scrubbed away the soot and dust, and slowly restored order to their home.
The city around them buzzed with activity. Refugees camped in parks. Relief supplies poured in from around the country. Temporary buildings sprang up. And slowly, incredibly, San Francisco began to rebuild.
At dinner one night, several weeks after the earthquake, much of the extended family gathered around their repaired dining table—now back inside the house instead of on the street.
"I heard today that they're planning to rebuild City Hall even bigger than before," George reported.
"Good," Elijah said. "This city has always been resilient. It survived the gold rush, it'll survive this."
Jane looked around at her family—her husband of forty years, their five children at home, and the older children and grandchildren who had come by to check on them. She thought of their journey together, from the mining camps of Tuolumne County to this moment.
"We lost things," she said quietly. "But we didn't lose what matters most. We didn't lose each other."
Gladys reached over and squeezed her mother's hand.
Outside, the sounds of hammering and sawing filled the air. All over the Castro district, all over San Francisco, people were rebuilding. The city would rise again from the ashes, more beautiful than before.
And at 4131 19th Street, the McKnew family—who had crossed oceans and continents, who had survived the goldfields and raised eleven children, who had endured loss and hardship and now earthquake and fire—they endured.
They always had.
Epilogue: Six Years Later
In 1912, when Elijah died peacefully at age seventy-six, his obituary noted that he had been a "devoted father" who had lived in San Francisco for thirty-six years. It didn't mention that six of those years had been spent watching the city rise from ruins, that he had helped rebuild not just his own home but his neighbors' as well, that he had lived long enough to see San Francisco more beautiful and vibrant than ever before.
But his family remembered. They remembered the night in the street, the fear and the courage, the way their father had stood strong when everything was falling apart.
And they remembered that photograph—all of them together, survivors, their house still standing, the number 4131 visible above the door. A monument not to destruction, but to resilience. Not to what was lost, but to what endured.
The McKnew family had survived the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
And they would never forget it.
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3) The Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is below.
4) The Google NotebookLM Infographic is:
5) I have no easy way to double-check these responses from Claude. I don't have many book resources for these subjects and this locality, but there are published books available for this time period and general location. The families mentioned are my wife's ancestral families and I have significant information about their lives from the available records, but know nothing about their daily lives. My wife, Linda, knew her grandmother Edna (McKnew) Leland very well, but I don't know if Edna ever told the story of surviving the earthquake. Linda's brother, Paul, found the sepia photograph (colorized above) in the trash can when the family was emptying Edna's home after she died in 1974.
6) After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit the McKnew family in San Francisco and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and eyewitness accounts.
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