I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to provide information about my ancestral family's life in 1903 in Chicago, Illnois. My great-grandparents Charles and Georgianna "Georgia" (Kemp) Auble married in 1898 and had a daughter, Emily, born in 1899. I posted ABC Biographies for Charles and Georgia in ABC Biography of #14 Charles Auble (1849-1916) of New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and California and ABC Biography of #15 Georgianna (Kemp) Auble (1868-1952) of Ontario, Illinois, and California.
I asked Anthropic Claude to create a description of the family life, work, education, community affairs and entertainment for the Charles Auble family in Chicago, Illinois in 1903, based on the biographies and social history. Claude created a longer story, which I am posting in two parts. Part 1 is in The Life of the Charles Auble (1849-1916) Family of Chicago in 1903 - Part 1 of 2.
Here is the Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 response (Part 2 of 2):
Emily turned four on a hot August day. The morning began with a pancake in the shape of an E, burned slightly on one side, and a doll's tea set from her mother. Charles gave her a small wooden paintbox he had made himself, with six little cakes of watercolor and a brush no bigger than a match.
"A real painter's kit," he said gravely. "For a real painter."
Emily held it in both hands and looked at it as if it were the Holy Grail.
"You can paint the fence," Charles told her. "With water. I'll show you."
And so the two of them sat on the back step in the summer sun, the medium tall bald man and the small girl, and he showed her how to hold the brush, how to load it without dripping, how to lay a line along the fence board and let it dry. She was solemn and very careful. The water darkened the gray wood in a wet stripe, then faded as the sun took it, and she looked up at him with amazement.
"It goes away."
"That's what water does."
"Can we make it stay?"
"With paint," said Charles. "That's the trick of it. That's the whole trade." He set his big hand over hers and guided the brush along the next board. "Paint is just a way of asking the world to remember something."
Georgia was watching from the kitchen window, a dishtowel in her hands. She said nothing. She thought: Remember this.
That afternoon Franklin came, Georgia's younger brother, grown tall and brash at twenty-three, with his hat pushed back and a paper sack of peppermints for his niece. He had been living with them a few years earlier and now boarded across the neighborhood, and he turned up whenever there was cake. He teased his sister, tousled Emily's hair, and listened with an expression of respectful skepticism to Charles's account of the best way to paint a window sash.
"You ought to come out to California," Franklin said, apropos of nothing, as he reached for a second slice. "That's where it's all going to be, mark me."
"California," said Charles. "What's in California?"
"Sunshine. Oranges. Houses that need painting."
"Houses need painting everywhere."
"Not in the sun," said Franklin. "In the sun, a man's bones don't ache."
Charles laughed and passed him the cake, and neither of them knew they had planted a seed.
Sundays by the LakeWhen the summer was at its height and the heat lay on the city like a wet blanket, the Aubles took the streetcar to Jackson Park.
It was an expedition, with a basket and a blanket and a parasol and a bottle of lemonade that sloshed, and with Emily in her best sailor dress, hopping from foot to foot at every stop. The park spread out along the lakeshore in a sprawl of lagoons and lawns and shade trees, with the old White City fairgrounds only a memory, ten years gone, and a few of the grand buildings still standing in ghostly majesty.
They spread their blanket under an elm near the water. Georgia unpacked sandwiches. Charles lay back with his hat over his eyes and pronounced himself the happiest man in Illinois. Emily ran in circles, chased a duck, lost the duck, and came back flushed and glowing to demand a sandwich and a nap and a boat ride, in that order.
They did get the boat ride. For a quarter, Charles rented a rowboat on the lagoon, and with Georgia in the stern and Emily in the bow clutching the sides, he rowed them out among the lily pads, the oars dipping and creaking, a band playing somewhere across the water. A breeze came up off the lake. A pair of swans moved off, offended.
"Look, Mama! Look, Papa!"
"I'm looking, darling."
"We're on the water!"
"So we are," said Charles, and rowed on, humming under his breath, and Georgia trailed her fingers in the lagoon and thought that if there was a better afternoon to be had, she had not been told about it.
On the streetcar home, Emily fell asleep against her father's arm, sunburned and sticky and smelling of lake water, and Charles didn't move for four stops, though his arm went numb.
Labor DayOn the first Monday of September, Chicago turned out to parade.
The streets were lined with people three deep. Bands blared, flags snapped, wagons bearing banners rolled by, and trade after trade marched past: the carpenters, the bricklayers, the teamsters, the printers, the plumbers, each with their regalia and their pride. The painters and decorators came in the middle of the line, three hundred men in their best suits and bowler hats, with the union's banner stretched on poles at the front and a dozen of the younger men walking behind with ceremonial brushes, bristles up, over their shoulders like rifles.
Charles marched in the third rank, between Pat Flanagan and an old German named Kessler who had been a decorator since before the fire. He had pressed his suit. He had polished his shoes. He had trimmed his mustache, and borrowed Georgia's small mirror to do it, and had stood a long moment looking at his own face and thinking, You're doing all right, Charlie.
Along the curb, Georgia held Emily up on her hip so she could see.
"There! There's Papa!"
Emily squealed and waved with both hands. And Charles, who was not a man given to breaking ranks, turned his head and looked straight at them, and lifted his brush in salute, and grinned so broadly his mustache nearly came off.
"Show-off," said Georgia, to no one, with enormous affection.
That evening there was a union picnic in a grove at the edge of the city: kegs and sausages and sack races and a tug-of-war between the painters and the plasterers that went on for twenty minutes and ended in a muddy draw. Emily rode on Gus Lindgren's shoulders and got a ribbon for something no one could remember. Charles, flushed with beer and companionship, told the story of the lady with the parrot to a ring of new apprentices who had never heard it, and who laughed in all the right places.
On the way home, in the dark, he sang an old Terre Haute song at the top of his lungs, off-key, and Georgia let him.
October: The ArgumentBy October the leaves were turning and the evenings had a snap to them. The exterior work was winding down, and Charles was already lining up interiors for the winter. The talk in Hennessy's was all about the first World Series ever played, the Boston Americans against the Pittsburgh Pirates, which Pat Flanagan insisted was a fraud and Gus Lindgren insisted was history.
"It's a sideshow," said Pat. "A league that's three years old, playing a league that's twenty-five."
"It's the future," said Gus.
"Five cents says Pittsburgh."
"Done."
"Five cents says Boston," said Charles, who had no opinion at all but liked to be agreeable, and who spent the next week following the scores in the paper with the avidity of a man who has bet a nickel and is therefore a scholar of the sport.
He won the nickel. Boston took the series, five games to three, and Charles, a gracious winner, bought a round, which cost considerably more than a nickel. When he came home that night, a little later than he'd promised and a little louder than he intended, Georgia was waiting in the kitchen with her arms folded.
This time it was not so mild.
"Charles."
"My dear."
"Do you know what time it is?"
"It's... the hour of the evening," he said, with an air of great wisdom.
"It is half past ten."
"The series was close—"
"I don't care about the series." Her voice was very quiet. "I'm not a woman who nags, Charles. But Emily had a fever this afternoon. I put cold cloths on her for three hours. And I wanted you home."
The humor drained out of his face.
"A fever? Is she—"
"She's asleep now. She's all right. Mrs. Doyle sat with her while I fetched the doctor's powders." She looked at him with an expression that was not anger so much as bone-deep tiredness. "I don't want to be the wife who counts your beers. But I want you to know I stood in this kitchen alone."
Charles sat down slowly. All the bluster had gone out of him. He looked, suddenly, every one of his fifty-three years, though he'd been telling the census man and everyone else he was thirty-nine.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm truly sorry, Georgia. I'd have come home."
"If you'd known. I know." She sat down across from him. "That's the whole trouble, isn't it? You'd always come home if you'd known. But a man has to think of it before."
He took her hand. His was rough and cracked from the turpentine, hers smaller and smoother and strong. He held it a long time.
"I'll try," he said, and then, because she looked at him, "I will. I'll try harder than I have."
"That's all I ask."
"It isn't," said Charles. "But it's kind of you to say so."
They went in together to look at Emily, who slept with her flushed cheek on her fist, her hair damp against her forehead. Charles stood over her bed for a long time. Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead with great gentleness, and straightened, and for once did not say a word.
HalloweenCharles turned fifty-four on the last day of October, though no one inside or outside the house would have known it.
"Thirty-nine," he said, at breakfast, to the room in general.
"Forty-nine," said Georgia, buttering toast.
"Thirty-nine and a half. A mature thirty-nine."
Emily, who was following all this with intense interest, said, "Papa, how old are you really?"
There was a pause.
"Old enough," said Charles, "to know better. And young enough to forget it."
That evening Georgia made a cake, which was not strictly a Halloween custom but a birthday one, and the three of them ate it by the kitchen stove while the neighborhood children went by outside in their masks and sheets, banging on pots and tapping at windows. Mrs. Doyle's oldest boy came dressed as a pirate, with a burnt-cork mustache and a wooden sword. Emily watched through the glass with wide eyes.
"Next year," said Charles, "we'll get you a costume."
"What'll I be?"
"A painter."
"Can painters be witches?"
"The best ones," said Charles, "have a bit of witch in them. Why do you think the paint changes color when you stir it?"
Emily considered this with deep gravity. Georgia, over her teacup, shook her head slowly and was very happy.
DecemberThe first snow came in the second week of December and did not stop for two days. Chicago went quiet under it, the way it did, the streetcars crawling and the coal wagons grinding and the smokestacks standing in the white air like exclamation marks.
Charles was working inside by then, on the parlor of a widow's house on Prairie Avenue, a high-ceilinged room with a fussy plaster rose in the middle of the ceiling and wallpaper he'd been hired to strip and replace. It was the kind of job he liked in winter: warm, slow, careful, with a stove going and a pot of tea on the sill and no wind to fight. He stood on a low scaffold and brushed paste onto the paper, hung it, smoothed it, matched the pattern. The widow, a Mrs. Aldrich, hovered in the doorway and told him it was very fine, and he told her it would be finer when it dried.
At night he came home through the drifts to a warm kitchen and a hot dinner and a small girl who ran at him from the hall with her arms out. Christmas came on a Friday. They had a modest tree in the front room, hung with paper chains Emily had made, and Georgia sewed a new flannel nightgown for her daughter, and Charles gave his wife a small cameo pin he'd bought on State Street on the strength of an advance on his wages and a prayer.
"It's too much," Georgia said.
"It's exactly the right amount," said Charles.
They stood in front of the tree in the lamplight, the three of them, and Emily, sleepy and sticky with candy, leaned against her father's leg.
And then it was the last week of the year, and the news came.
It came through the neighbors first, and then through the evening paper, in headlines so large the words seemed to shout. On the afternoon of the thirtieth of December, a matinee performance of a musical comedy had been playing at the Iroquois Theatre downtown, a brand-new house, hailed as fireproof, with a holiday crowd of women and children packed into it. A stage light had sparked and caught the scenery. Within minutes the fire had spread, the exits had jammed, and hundreds of people had died. The papers said more than six hundred. Most of them were women and children.
Georgia read it standing at the kitchen table, one hand pressed to her mouth.
"Oh, Charles."
He took the paper from her and read it, too, and said nothing. He folded it carefully and set it on the table. Then he went to the doorway of the small room off the hall, where Emily slept, and stood there looking at her for a long time.
She was on her side again, with Mrs. Pennyfeather clamped under one arm and her hair in her eyes.
They had talked, only weeks before, about taking her downtown to see a holiday show.
Georgia came and stood beside him. Neither of them spoke. After a while he reached out and took her hand, and she let him, and they stood in the dark hallway with the snow ticking against the glass and their whole world asleep in front of them.
"We ought to go to church Sunday," Georgia said at last, very quietly.
"We will."
"All of us."
"All of us."
There was a long silence.
"Georgia," said Charles.
"Yes?"
"I'll be home for supper. Saturdays. I mean it."
She turned and looked at him, and what she saw was not a promise, quite, or the end of an argument, but a man trying to hold something precious in his two large imperfect hands.
"I know you mean it," she said, and leaned her head against his shoulder.
Outside, the snow kept falling. In the city, the lamps burned late in a great many windows, and families sat close together, and the last night of the year came down over Chicago, as quiet and as heavy as a drift.
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Author's Note: This is a work of historical fiction. It is based on the documented lives of Charles Auble (1849-1916), his wife Georgianna "Georgia" (Kemp) Auble (1868-1952), and their daughter Emily (1899-1977), who lived in Chicago in 1903, with Charles working as a painter and decorator and belonging to the painters' union. The scenes, dialogue, friends, saloon, church, and neighbors are imagined. Charles's drinking companions and the places they gather are invented for this story, but the general conditions of the painting trade in Chicago are historical.
The Aubles would live in Chicago for several more years before moving to San Diego around 1911. Emily would grow up, as children do, and carry the memory of a fence-board painted with water, and the sun on a lagoon, and a man's large warm hand over hers. Some of that memory would be true. Some of it, as family memories are, would be made of love.
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The AI Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story (both parts) is below and on my YouTube channel:
This is historical fiction based on known events in the lives of my ancestors and general social history of the time, place, and occupations -- it might have been this way. Charles and Georgianna (Kemp) Auble are my great-grandparents, and I have significant information about their family from the available records, but I know little about their day-to-day lives.
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