I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for my fourth great-grandparents Thomas Dill and Hannah Horton in ABC Biography of the Thomas Dill (1755-1839) and Hannah Horton (1761-1796) Family of Massachusetts, based on my genealogical research over 38 years.
I wondered what Thomas Dill might have said in a life memoir told to his grandchildren in 1838.
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic for Thomas Dill's life memoir)
1) I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to create a memoir told by Thomas Dill about his life in 1838. The prompt was: "Please write a life memoir for Thomas Dill based on the attached biography, as she might tell to his grandchildren in 1838."
2) The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:
The Life and Times of Thomas Dill
As Told to His Grandchildren
Eastham, Massachusetts, 1838
Come here, children, and sit with your old grandfather a spell. My bones are weary and these eyes don't see as sharp as they once did, but my memory -- well, that's as clear as a Cape Cod morning. You ask me what it was like when I was young? Let me tell you, it was a different world entirely. I was born back when this land belonged to King George, and I've lived to see it become something altogether new. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.
I was born here in Eastham, way back in 1755 -- the exact date is lost to time, as such things often were back then. I was the youngest of eight children, the seventh son of Thomas Dill and Mehitable Brown. My mother, God rest her soul, died when I was but a small boy, about three years old. I don't remember her face, though I've tried many times. My father followed her to the grave when I was about six. So I was orphaned young, you see.
I was raised by my mother’s sister and her family here in Eastham and over in Wellfleet. Life was hard on the Cape in those days. The soil is sandy, as you know, and doesn't take kindly to farming. We grew what we could -- corn, turnips, some wheat -- but mostly we relied on the sea. Fish, clams, oysters. The ocean gave and the ocean took away, as the saying goes. Many's the widow left when a nor'easter came up sudden-like.
I learned early to work with my hands. By the time I was ten or twelve, I could mend a net, dig for clams at low tide, and help with the salt works. Those were the days when you worked from can-see to can't-see, as we used to say -- from when you could first see in the morning until you couldn't see at night. There was no schooling to speak of, not for the likes of us. A boy learned by doing, and if he didn't learn quick, he didn't eat.
When I was coming into manhood -- maybe eighteen, nineteen years old -- things started getting troublesome with the Crown. We'd hear talk in town about taxes and tea parties up in Boston. The King's ships would harass our fishing boats, impress our men into the Royal Navy. There was a meanness in the air, a feeling that something had to give.
Then came the spring of 1775. Word reached us that blood had been spilled at Lexington and Concord. British regulars had marched out from Boston and the militia had stood against them. The war had begun, though we didn't call it that yet. We thought it might blow over, that the King would see reason. We were wrong about that.
By the turn of the new year, 1776, it was clear this was no small disagreement. The Continental Congress was raising an army. Captain Naylor Hatch -- I knew him well, a Wellfleet man -- was recruiting for a company to join Colonel Bond's regiment. I signed my mark on the first day of January, 1776. I was about twenty years old, still just a boy really, though I thought myself a man.
We marched north that winter. Lord, but it was cold! We went up through Massachusetts, into New York, and then into Canada. The idea was to take Quebec and bring Canada into our rebellion against the King. General Montgomery and Benedict Arnold -- yes, that Arnold, before he turned traitor -- had already tried to take Quebec City on New Year's Eve, just before I enlisted. They'd failed, and Montgomery was killed. But the Congress wanted to try again.
We marched for weeks. My feet were wrapped in rags by the time we reached Chambly. We had nothing to eat but salt pork and hard bread, and precious little of that. When we finally arrived on the 12th of May, 1776, everything was already going to pieces. The smallpox was in the camp -- that was the real enemy, children. You've all been vaccinated, thank Providence, but in my day, the smallpox killed more men than musket balls ever did.
I saw men I'd marched with fall sick and die in their tents, covered in pustules, burning with fever. Some went blind. Others went mad. We tried to keep ourselves separate from the sick, but in close quarters, it was impossible. I caught a mild case -- you can still see the pockmarks on my arms if you look close -- but I was lucky. Many weren't.
By the time British reinforcements sailed up the St. Lawrence in May and June, our army was a shadow of itself. Sick, starving, demoralized. The order came to retreat. We fell back through Montreal, down the Richelieu River, running like whipped dogs. The British and their Indian allies nipped at our heels the whole way. It was a shameful thing, that retreat, but there was no choice in it.
We made it to Lake Champlain by early summer. That's where we dug in -- at Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, across the lake from each other. The command thought the British would come down the lake and invade New York, and they were right about that, though not until the following year.
I spent the rest of that summer and fall in the Lakes, as we called that country. We built fortifications, stood guard, drilled when we had the energy. But mostly we just tried to stay alive. The food was poor, the shelters were rough, and disease still stalked the camps. On the 31st of August, Colonel Bond himself took sick and died. Good man, he was. We buried him at Mount Independence with what honors we could manage.
By the end of December, my year was nearly up. I'd signed on for twelve months, and I'd served every day of it. I was mustered out on the first of January, 1777, and I walked home to Cape Cod. It took me near two weeks in the dead of winter, sleeping in barns when I could find them, in the snow when I couldn't. When I finally saw the ocean again, I wept like a child.
But I wasn't done with the war yet. Maybe it was patriotism, maybe it was just that I needed the pay, but when Captain Salew came looking for hands for his brig, the Sophia Defiance, I signed on. This was different work -- we were hauling flour from Virginia up to Boston for the Continental Army. Not glorious, but necessary. An army marches on its stomach, as they say.
We made several runs between January and August of 1777. The British had warships patrolling the coast, so we had to be clever about it. We'd sail at night when we could, hug the shore, duck into coves when a sail appeared on the horizon. Once we had to throw half our cargo overboard to outrun a British frigate. The captain was hopping mad about that, but better to lose the flour than the ship and our lives.
I learned seamanship on those voyages -- how to read the weather, how to handle a vessel in a storm, how to splice a line and reef a sail. Skills that served me well in later years. By August, though, I'd had my fill. I was tired, children. Bone-tired in a way only a young man who's been through a war can understand. I took my pay and came home to Eastham for good.
The war went on for years after that, but I wasn't part of it anymore. I set about making a life for myself. I worked odd jobs -- fishing, farm work, helping at the salt works. I saved what little I could. In 1782, when I was about twenty-seven, I married Hannah Horton. Oh, she was a lovely girl, your grandmother Hannah. Dark hair, bright eyes, and a laugh that could warm a room. Her father had died when she was young, like mine had, so we understood each other in that way.
We were married on the 18th of May, 1782, right here in Eastham. Started our life together in a little house -- more of a shack, really -- on a piece of land I'd managed to scrape together. Over the next thirteen years, Hannah gave me nine children. Nine! Ezekiel, Obadiah, Seth, Isaiah, Jabez, Elizabeth, James, Daniel, and little Asa. All of you are their children and grandchildren.
Those were hard years but happy ones. We worked the land as best we could. I had fields for corn, some cleared land, a brush lot for firewood, and salt meadow for grazing. We weren't rich -- far from it -- but we got by. The children helped as soon as they were able. Even little ones can pull weeds and gather eggs.
But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Hannah took sick sometime after Asa was born in 1795. The doctor couldn't tell me what ailed her, just that she was failing. She'd had nine babies in eleven years, and I think it just wore her body out. She died before the year 1797 came in. She was only thirty-five years old.
I was devastated, children. Here I was, about forty-one years old, with six or seven children still at home -- the youngest just a toddler. I didn't know how I'd manage. But you do what you must. A neighbor woman helped with the little ones, and the older boys pitched in more. Ezekiel especially -- he was only thirteen but acted twice his age.
In 1797, I married again. Ruth Linkhornew was her name. A good woman, practical and kind. She helped raise my children as if they were her own. We had about ten years together before she took sick and died. I married once more after that, to Susan Hatch, in 1813. She's been a good companion to me in my old age.
Over the years, I watched my children grow and scatter. Some stayed here on the Cape -- Ezekiel and Daniel both farmed in Eastham. But others left for Boston and beyond, looking for opportunities we didn't have here. Seth, Jabez, James, Elizabeth -- they all made their way in the wider world. I'm proud of every one of them.
Twenty years ago, in 1818, Congress passed a law giving pensions to old soldiers of the Revolution who were in need. I was sixty-two then, and my working days were mostly behind me. I swallowed my pride and applied. Had to go all the way to Boston to swear out an affidavit before a judge. I told him about my service -- the year in the Lakes, the eight months on the Sophia Defiance. I had to admit that I'd lost my discharge papers over the years -- forty-two years is a long time to keep track of a piece of paper when you're moving about and trying to keep a farm going.
They made me file more papers in 1820, prove I was truly destitute. That was a hard thing, children, to stand before the court and declare: 'No Real estate or personal estate; nor any family. I am old and unable to Labour.' But it was the truth. My children were grown and gone, I had no property to speak of, and I couldn't work anymore.
Finally, in 1833, the pension started coming through -- eight dollars a month. Now, I know that doesn't sound like much, but it's kept me fed and housed these last five years. The government hasn't always been good about paying on time, but they've been better than nothing.
You ask me what I think about when I look back over these eighty-three years? So many things. I think about my mother and father, who I barely knew. I think about my brothers -- all dead now, every one. I think about the war, and the boys who never came home from Canada. I think about Hannah, gone these forty years, and how much I loved her.
I think about how much the world has changed. When I was born, we were subjects of King George II. Now there's a Queen Victoria on the throne in England, and we don't care a whit because we're Americans, citizens of our own republic. When I was young, it took days to get a message from Boston. Now there are railroads and steamships. The world is getting smaller and faster.
But some things don't change. The ocean still crashes on the shore just like it did when I was a boy. The wind still howls in winter. Families still gather around the fire in the evening. Babies are still born, and old folks still die, and life goes on.
I don't know how much longer I have in this world. Could be a year, could be less. My body is failing me -- these old bones ache something fierce in the winter, and I can't walk like I used to. But my mind is still sharp, and I wanted to tell you these things while I still could.
Remember, children, that you come from hardy stock. Your ancestors fought for something they believed in, even though it was hard and scary. They worked the land and raised their families through good times and bad. They persevered. That's what we Dills do -- we persevere.
Take care of each other. Honor your parents and grandparents. Work hard, but remember that there's more to life than work. Love your families. Be kind to your neighbors. Stand up for what's right, even when it costs you something.
And when you're old like me, and your grandchildren ask you what it was like when you were young, you tell them. You tell them everything, the good and the bad, because that's how we keep the past alive. That's how we remember who we are and where we came from.
Now run along, children. This old man needs his rest. And remember -- I love every one of you, more than you'll know until you have grandchildren of your own.
-- Thomas Dill
Eastham, Massachusetts
Age 83 - 1838
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3) The Video Overview of Thomas Dill's memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is:
5) I edited the Claude memoir text to correct minor inconsistencies and errors. Every large language model (LLM) AI tool writes descriptive text much better than I can write. The AI tools are very perceptive, insightful and inspiring, creating engaging text in seconds, including local and national historical events and social history detail when requested.
6) This is historical fiction, based on my own genealogical research. It is what Thomas Dill might have told his grandchildren in 1838.
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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.
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