I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for the family of my wife's great-grandparents Herman and Mary Ann (Paul) Schaffner in ABC Biography of Herman Schaffner (1851-1921) and Mary Ann Paul (1854-1908) Family of San Francisco, California, based on my genealogical research over 38 years.
I wondered what Herman Schaffner might have told his grandchildren in a life memoir in 1921.
1) I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to "Please write a life memoir for Herman Schaffner based on the attached biography, as he might tell his grandchildren in early 1921."
2) The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:
The Memoir of Herman Schaffner
As told in his own words, San Francisco, 1921
New York Beginnings
I was born in November of 1851, in the city of New York, the only child my mother Susanna ever gave my father. I do not remember her face. She was gone before I had memories enough to keep, taken from us sometime around my third year, and so my earliest recollections are not of a mother's arms but of my father Friedrich's hands—rough hands, a workingman's hands, holding mine as we walked the crowded streets of that great teeming city.
My father was no stranger to starting over. He had come from Germany seeking his fortune in America, and when he lost Susanna, he did what practical men of his generation did: he found another wife to help raise his motherless boy. Martha Matilda came into our lives when I was perhaps four years old, an Irishwoman with a steady hand and, in time, five children of her own to add to our family. I do not recall resenting her. A boy of four does not much care where kindness comes from, only that it comes.
Westward to California
It was Martha who was beside my father when we made the great decision of our lives—to leave New York behind entirely and join the multitudes streaming toward California. I was not yet five years old when we arrived in San Francisco, and so in truth, California is the only home I have ever known. New York remains to me a place of vague impressions—crowded streets, my mother's absence, the rocking of a ship or train I cannot now distinguish in memory.
We became citizens of this country in November of 1856, shortly after our arrival, my father standing before whatever official such matters required, declaring his allegiance, securing for all of us a stake in this new land. I was too young to understand the gravity of it then. Now, looking back across seven decades, I understand it was perhaps the most important day of my young life—the day my family planted itself permanently in American soil.
San Francisco in those years was no proper city as we would understand the word today. It was raw, energetic, still finding its shape after the chaos of the Gold Rush years. But it was growing, and we grew with it. My half-siblings arrived one after another—Matilda, then Frederick, then Louis, then Charles, then little Nellie—until our house was full of the noise and chaos that only a large family can produce. I was the eldest, and though we did not share a mother, I felt the weight and privilege of that position.
A Young Man's Trade
I came of age watching San Francisco transform itself. I was eighteen when the great railroad was completed, linking us at last to the rest of the nation—I remember the celebrations, the sense that our isolated city by the bay had suddenly been tethered to the wider world.
I apprenticed myself to the printing trade, learning the careful, exacting work of the bookbinder. There is a particular satisfaction in that craft—taking loose pages, raw and unprotected, and giving them structure, permanence, a spine to stand upon. I did not know it then, but the discipline I learned binding books would serve me well in later years, when precision and record-keeping became my life's true calling.
These were not easy years for my family. In January of 1875, my stepmother Martha died in Oakland, leaving my father a widower for the second time. He married again within the year—to a woman named Dora—though they had no children together. By then I was a grown man of nearly twenty-five, and my own life was about to take its decisive turn.
Marriage and Family
I married Mary Ann Paul before the year 1876 had run its course. She was a woman of quiet strength, the eldest daughter of a large family herself, with roots in Massachusetts and a childhood spent crossing half the continent—Massachusetts to Chicago, Chicago to San Francisco—before our paths finally converged in this city we both called home.
We began our married life in a household full of her family—her widowed mother Maria, her siblings, all of us together at a house on Acheson Street. Our first son, Paul Frederick, was born there in August of 1879, a babe of nine months when the census man came to our door and found three generations under one roof. I was working still as a bookbinder then, building toward something, though I did not yet know what.
Two more sons followed. Herman Jr. arrived in June of 1881, and then, after some years, our youngest, Frederick, in March of 1889. Three boys to carry the Schaffner name forward into a new century I would not live to see in full.
V. The Knights of Pythias
It was in the work of brotherhood that I found my true vocation. I came to San Francisco's chapter of the Knights of Pythias and discovered there a calling that would occupy the better part of my adult life. I was elected Grand Keeper of Records and Seals for the entire Domain of California, a position I would hold with pride for thirty-five years.
There is something in record-keeping that suits my temperament—perhaps it traces back to those early years binding books, learning that information properly preserved becomes a kind of permanence, a defense against the forgetting that time inflicts on all things. I rose further still, becoming Past Grand Chancellor, and even achieved the curious honor of Past Imperial Prince of the Dramatic Order of Knights of Khorasan—a side degree known for its theatrical ritual, which I confess I rather enjoyed, having always harbored some small flair for ceremony and pageant.
By 1900, we had moved to Castro Street, and I had left bookbinding behind entirely, devoting myself fully to my duties as Grand Secretary. My sons Paul and Herman Jr. had grown into fine young stenographers, working in San Francisco's offices, while young Freddie still sat at his school desk. We had built, Mary Ann and I, a solid and respectable home.
I vividly recall the Great Earthquake and fire that hit San Francisco on the morning of April 19, 1906. We were awakened by a sound like the world ending—not thunder, not any sound you could name, but a grinding, tearing roar from beneath the earth itself. The house bucked like a horse trying to throw its rider. Plaster fell from the walls. The chimney cracked. Windows shattered. We got the children outside—Paul, Herman and Frederick were all still at home, and we stood in Castro Street in our nightclothes with our neighbors, watching the smoke begin to rise from the direction of downtown.
Our home was south of the fires, and did not suffer any fire damage. We spent the night on the street huddled in our blankets. Over the next days, we ventured out to assess the damage, and 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.
My boys walked with me 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. We survived, fixed the house, and lived the rest of our lives remembering that day.
Loss
I must speak now of the hardest chapter of my life. In February of 1908, my beloved Mary Ann was taken from me. Twenty-five years we had shared—a quarter century of marriage, of raising our three sons together, of building a life in this city we both loved. Her death notice called her my "idolized wife," and I will not dispute the word. We carried her from our home on Castro Street to Woodlawn in Colma, traveling by electric funeral car, as was the custom by then—San Francisco having long since closed its gates to the dead, sending us all out to that quiet city of stone beyond the southern hills.
I do not know how to describe the years that followed except to say that a man learns to carry grief the way he carries everything else—one foot before the other, one day following the next. My sons were grown, beginning families of their own. My granddaughter Muriel was born into our household, a small bright light in difficult years. I continued my work for the Pythian order, finding in its rituals and responsibilities a structure to hold onto when so much else had fallen away.
VII. Two More Marriages
I did not remain alone forever. In 1912, on the leap day of February, I married Mary Jane McWhirter, hoping perhaps to recapture some of what I had lost. But fate is not always generous. Mary Jane died that same year, in December, scarcely ten months a bride. I buried a second wife before the year was finished.
Four years later, in 1916, I married a third time—to Fredericka Hartman, a native San Franciscan who brought companionship to my later years. I will not pretend these later marriages held the same depth as my years with Mary Ann, but a man does not wish to face his final years entirely alone, and Fredericka gave me that comfort.
A Life of Service Recalled
As I sit now in the autumn of my years—seventy years old, my hair white, my step slower than it once was—I find myself taking stock of a life that has spanned the entire transformation of San Francisco from rough frontier outpost to great American city. I arrived here a boy of not yet five; I remain here a man of seventy-one, having watched this place become something extraordinary, and having played whatever small part I could in its civic and fraternal life.
Thirty-five years I served the Knights of Pythias as keeper of its records and seals. I take some quiet pride in that span of service—longer than many marriages, longer than most careers. I am told men still speak my name at grand lodge sessions throughout the state, that I am known to brothers in lodges I have never visited. There is a kind of immortality in that, I think—not the immortality of poets or kings, but the more modest immortality of a man who did his duty faithfully, year upon year, and was trusted to do it well.
My three sons have built their own lives now. Paul manages the Valvoline Company's affairs in this city. Fred works as a teller at the Humboldt Savings Bank. Herman Jr. has followed his own path. They have given me grandchildren, carrying the Schaffner name into a century I increasingly understand will not be mine to see grow old.
Final Reflections
I think often of my mother Susanna, whom I never knew, and wonder what she would make of the life her infant son built so far from where she rests. I think of my father Friedrich, who had the courage to cross an ocean and then a continent, planting our family in soil that would prove fertile beyond his imagining. I think of Mary Ann, twenty-five years my wife, mother of my sons, whose loss I have never entirely ceased to feel.
I came to this city as a child too young to understand the journey he was making. I leave it now—for I feel my own time growing short—as an old man who understands, finally, that the journey was the point all along. Not the destination, not the records I kept or the offices I held, but the accumulated weight of years lived in service to family, to brotherhood, to a city that took in a fatherless—motherless—boy from New York and gave him a life worth the living.
San Francisco has been good to me. I hope, in whatever small way a man can hope such things, that I have been good to San Francisco in return.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Herman Schaffner died on December 8, 1921, in San Francisco, following an illness of some four months. He was laid to rest in Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, beside his first wife, Mary Ann. He was remembered by the Knights of Pythias as one of the most prominent members of the order in the United States, and by his obituary as a devoted father to his surviving sons, Paul, Herman and Fred.
3) The Video Overview of Herman Schaffner's life memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is:
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.
Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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