I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for my 2nd great-grandfather David Jackson "D.J." Carringer in ABC Biography of #24 David Jackson "D.J." Carringer (1828-1902) of Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado and California, based on my genealogical research over 38 years.
I wondered what D.J. Carringer might have told his grandosn Lyle in a life memoir in late 1901.
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic for D.J. Carringer's life memoir)
1) I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 to "Please write a life memoir for David Jackson Carringer based on the attached biography, as he might tell his gradson Lyle in late 1901."
2) The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:
A Life Remembered -- David Jackson “D.J.” Carringer (1828 – 1902)
As he might have told it to his grandson, Lyle Lawrence Carringer, on Brooklyn Heights, San Diego — Autumn 1901
On the Porch at Brooklyn Heights
Come sit by me a spell, Lyle. Your grandmother Rebecca is resting, and my old knees don't care much for the porch steps anymore, so we'll just stay right here in the shade and I'll tell you some things, so that when you're a grown man you'll know where you came from.
I'm an old man now — seventy-two this year — and your grandmother and I only just had our fiftieth wedding anniversary, right here in this house, with half of Brooklyn Heights coming by to shake my hand and leave us gold coins in a little dish.
But I wasn't always an old man on a porch in San Diego. I started out about as far from the ocean as a boy can get.
A Pennsylvania Boyhood
I was born the fourth of November, 1828, in Mercer County, Pennsylvania — Sandy Creek township, if you want the exact spot. Your great-grandfather Henry Carringer was a farmer there, a good one too, with land worth two thousand dollars, which was no small thing in those days.
I was the second child born to Henry and Sarah, and the first boy, so there was some fuss made over me, I'm told, though I don't remember it myself. By the time I was grown there were ten of us Carringer children filling that farmhouse — Eliza, George, Cornelius, Mary, Sarah, Henry, Loisa, Matilda, and Harvey, besides myself. And my grandmother Mary lived with us too, born in Maryland, an old woman even then. You can imagine the noise at supper.
Now, my brothers took to farming, same as our father. But I had different notions. By the time I was one-and-twenty I'd learned carpentry — how to true a beam, set a joint, raise a frame so it wouldn't sag. That trade carried me a long way, Lyle, longer than I ever expected.
I lost my mother in April of 1848. Sarah, her name was, and they buried her at Kelso Farm Cemetery, not far from home. I was not yet twenty. It teaches a young man something, to bury his mother that early.
Rebecca
Three years later, on the sixteenth of October, 1851, I married your grandmother — Rebecca Spangler, daughter of Daniel and Elizabeth Spangler, another good Mercer County family. Reverend McAdams performed the ceremony. It's written down in the family Bible in my father's hand, plain as day: ‘D.J. Carringer, Miss Rebeccah Spangler, Mercer Co. Pa. 1851 AD.’ Fifty years this October, Lyle. Fifty years, and she is still the finest thing that ever happened to me.
Your father, Henry Austin, came along on the twenty-eighth of November, 1853 — our second boy. Our first, Harvey, was born the year before, in May of 1852. Harvey never did marry, you know. He's stayed close to your grandmother and me his whole life, right through Iowa and Colorado and now here. A good, steady brother to your father, and a good son to us.
Westward to Iowa
Pennsylvania got crowded with Carringers, and land was dear, so before your father was five years old, we packed up and went west to Iowa — my widowed father Henry came too, and some of my brothers and sisters besides. That's how it was in those years, Lyle. Whole families went together, chasing better ground.
We settled in Columbus City, in Louisa County, and I went back to carpentry for a spell. Your Aunt Effie was born there in November of 1858 — your father's little sister. I don't suppose you remember hearing of her; she died before you were born. I'll tell you about that in a moment, but let me finish the Iowa story first.
I tried my hand at farming too. Bought forty acres in 1862 — paid three hundred dollars for the northwest corner of a section — and sold it two years later for three hundred twenty. A small profit, but a profit. Then we moved on to Jackson township in Washington County, and I gave up the hammer and saw for the plow.
By 1870 I had a real farm going — four horses, three milk cows, nine hogs. We grew wheat and corn and oats and potatoes, made two hundred pounds of butter that year, and the whole operation was worth near seven hundred dollars. Harvey and your father worked right alongside me, and Effie went to school. It was hard work, Lyle, but it was good work, and we did it as a family.
But farming is a gamble, same as anything else, and the gamble didn't always pay. In the fall of 1872 I had to sell the farm — stock, tools, furniture, all of it — at public auction. That's a hard thing for a man to do, sell off everything he's built. But it wasn't the end of us. It was just time to move again.
Colorado — Joy and Sorrow
We went to Colorado in 1873, to a little mining town up in the mountains called Caribou, in Boulder County. Rough country, Lyle — thin air, hard winters, men digging silver out of the rock. But there was opportunity there too, and I even helped sign the petition that made Caribou into a proper incorporated town.
It was in Caribou that the worst thing in my life happened. Your Aunt Effie — our only daughter — died on the eighth of June, 1874. Fifteen years old, six months, and twelve days. I still remember the exact count, because a father does. The newspaper wrote some kind words about her, about a fair maiden gone to the Father's mansion. I bought her a plot in Columbia Cemetery down in Boulder, and your grandmother and I visited that grave more times than I can count.
I tell you this not to sadden you, Lyle, but because you should know you had an aunt, and that she was loved, and that losing a child is a thing a family carries the rest of its days. Your father lost a little sister. I lost my only daughter. Your parents lost your older brother, Devier David, at nine months. We went on living, because that's what you do, but we never forgot themher.
Boulder — Carpenter, then Orchardist
After Caribou we moved down to Boulder proper, and I picked up my carpenter's tools again — carpenter and joiner, the city directory called me. Your father learned the millwright trade alongside me there, same as I'd learned from watching tradesmen years before. Harvey clerked for a spell.
As I got older, the carpentry work got harder on these old bones, so I turned to growing fruit instead — orchards up and down those Colorado valleys. By the time I was fifty-six I was a fruit grower, and that's the trade I kept until we came out here to California.
California, and Finding Your Father
Your father came out to San Diego and made his own way — married your mother, Abbey, in 1887, out in Kansas, and settled here after. In 1898, your grandmother, your Uncle Harvey, and I followed him out. We were not young anymore, Lyle, but we wanted to be near our boy, and near you.
I had a cottage built that same year — cost me eight hundred dollars, and the newspaper even printed a little notice about the building permit. We built it close to your father's home, just up the street, on what folks now call 30th and Ivy. Close enough that I could watch you grow, which has been one of the great pleasures of my old age.
Fifty Years
This past October — the nineteenth — your grandmother and I marked fifty years married, right here in this house. Friends came from all over Brooklyn Heights. The newspaper called it an enjoyable affair for the aged couple, which made your grandmother laugh, being called aged. We are slower than we once were, Lyle, both of us, but we made it fifty years together, through Pennsylvania and Iowa and Colorado and now here at the edge of the country, looking out at the ocean neither of us had ever seen as young people.
What I Want You to Remember
I've told you about carpentry and farms and orchards, about Pennsylvania and Iowa and a mining town in the mountains, about a little sister you never met and a fiftieth anniversary you're too young yet to understand the weight of. Someday you'll be a man, Lyle, and I won't be here to tell you these things myself. So remember this instead:
A man can lose his mother young, lose a farm to hard times, lose a daughter to sickness, and still find his way to sit on a porch in California with his wife of fifty years and his grandson beside him. That's not luck, Lyle — that's family. That's showing up for one another, moving when you must, working with your hands whatever the trade, and holding onto the people you love as tight as you can, for as long as you have them.
You're a Carringer. Carpenters, farmers, fruit growers, all of us willing to start over in a new place when the old one gave out. Carry that with you.
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3) The Video Overview of David Jackson "D.J." Carringere's life memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is below and on my YouTube channel:
4) 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.
5) This is historical fiction, based on my own genealogical research and family records. It is what D.J. might have told his grandson Lyle in late 1901.
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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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