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.
(AI NotebookLM infographic -- Life of the Charles Auble Family in Chcago in 1903)
Here is the Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 response (Part 1 of 2):
A Year on Union Avenue
The Auble Family in Chicago, 1903
March: Before the Light
Georgia Auble was always awake before the stove was. In the gray dark of a March morning in 1903, she lay still for a moment and listened to the house on Union Avenue settle around her: the tick of the cooling pipes, a wagon rattling somewhere toward Halsted, and the slow, whistling snore of her husband beside her.
Charles slept the way he did everything, wholeheartedly and with his mouth a little open. She had known him for years now and been married to him for nearly five, and she still could not decide whether the snoring was endearing or a reason to move into the kitchen. Most mornings she settled on endearing, since that was cheaper than a divorce.
She slid out from under the quilt, found her wrapper in the dark, and padded to the small room off the hall where Emily slept. Their daughter was three and a half, curled around a rag doll named Mrs. Pennyfeather, with one fist jammed under her chin. Georgia tucked the blanket up around her and stood a moment longer than she needed to.
Mine, she thought, still a little amazed. She had come down from Ontario with a satchel in 1889 to live with her sister’s family, with some hard opinions, and now she had a daughter and a husband and a kitchen of her own with a stove that usually worked.
By the time the coffee was boiling, Charles had appeared in the doorway in his undershirt and suspenders, hair standing up at the back of a head that was mostly bald on top, mustache flattened on one side.
"Something smells like heaven," he announced.
"It's burnt oatmeal," said Georgia.
"Then heaven is burnt oatmeal. I'm a simple man."
"You're a man who's late for work."
"I'm a union man," said Charles, sitting down to eat the oatmeal anyway, "and a union man is never late. He arrives when the work is ready for him."
"Tell that to Mr. Haskell."
"Mr. Haskell," said Charles, with dignity, "is a contractor, and contractors don't understand art."
Georgia put a cup of coffee in front of him and did not say what she thought of the word "art" applied to the trim of a two-flat on Calumet Avenue. She had learned that some arguments were simply not worth the coffee.
The Work
Charles took the streetcar north and east to the job, his lunch pail in one hand and his kit of brushes wrapped in a canvas roll under his arm. Spring was the season when the work came back. Through the winter he had done interiors where he could find them: parlors and hallways and kitchens, ceilings that needed whitening and walls that needed paper. As soon as the weather broke, the exteriors began, and the exteriors were where a painter earned his year.
The house on Calumet was a tall frame two-flat that had gone gray with soot and neglect. Chicago ate paint. The coal smoke and the lake wind and the winters scoured a house until it looked a decade older than it was, and every few years the owners came to the painter with the same wounded expression, as though the city had done this to them personally.
Charles liked a house like this. He liked the first morning, when the scaffold was up and the old paint was scraped back to bare, honest wood, and a man could see what he was dealing with. He liked mixing the paint himself, working the white lead and linseed oil together in the bucket and tinting it a little at a time with ochre and umber until it was the exact warm cream he wanted. He had learned that in Terre Haute as a young man, and he had never lost the pleasure of watching a color come right.
He did not always like the lead. Every painter knew somebody with "painter's colic," a man who'd gone gray and weak in the belly and the wrists, who couldn't hold a brush by forty. Charles washed his hands more carefully than he let on and kept his lunch away from the buckets, and when the other men joked about it, he joked back. It was the kind of risk you either laughed at or quit the trade.
"Auble!" That was Pat Flanagan, working the other end of the scaffold, a big red-faced Irishman with forearms like fence posts. "You've missed a spot."
"I never miss a spot."
"You missed a spot the size of a dinner plate."
"That," said Charles, "is an artistic pause."
Gus Lindgren, the Swede on the ladder below them, laughed so hard he nearly dropped his scraper. Gus was young and serious and unmarried, and he laughed like a man who didn't get the chance often enough. Charles liked him for it.
The three of them worked together most of that season, as they had the year before, and the work went the way good work does when the men are matched: quickly, with a lot of talk, and with a clean line at the end of it. By the time the afternoon whistle blew, the south side of the house had gone from soot-gray to a soft butter yellow, with white trim crisp as a collar. Charles stood in the street looking up at it, his hands on his hips.
"Beautiful," said Pat, grudgingly.
"It's a fine house," Charles agreed. "Somebody ought to live in it."
The Union
On the second Thursday of every month, the painters' local met in a rented hall above a hardware store, a long room with a stove at one end, a flag at the other, and about eighty folding chairs that never quite lined up. Charles went to every meeting he could. He had belonged to the union since he'd come to Chicago in 1888, and the card in his wallet, with its stamped dues and its worn corners, was the thing he would have rescued from a fire after his family.
He wasn't a speaker. He sat toward the back, near the stove, and listened to the business: the scale, the apprentices, the nonunion shop out on the West Side that was undercutting the contractors and "must be dealt with." The walking delegate, a dry sharp man named Orcutt, reported on which jobs he'd checked and which bosses had tried to slip in men without cards.
"Brothers," Orcutt said that evening, "I'll tell you plainly. There's a lot of talk in this city about the open shop. The employers want to break us, one trade at a time. The only answer is that we stand together."
A murmur went through the hall. Charles found he was nodding with the rest.
He thought about the old men he'd known in Terre Haute, who'd had no union to speak of, and who'd been laid off in the winter with no recourse and let go at sixty with nothing. A man who painted houses for forty years and went home to a rented room with a bad back, that was the future the union existed to prevent. He wouldn't have said it so grandly out loud. But he felt it, every month, in that room with the crooked chairs.
Afterward, as the men filed out into the cold, Orcutt stopped him at the door.
"Auble. You'll march in September?"
"Labor Day? Wouldn't miss it."
"Good man. We'll want the painters out in force."
The Saloon
Charles's other fellowship met on Saturday afternoons, after the pay envelope and before supper, and it was held at Hennessy's.
Hennessy's was a narrow corner saloon with a long mahogany bar, a brass rail, a floor strewn with sawdust, and a free lunch laid out on the counter: pickled eggs, sliced sausage, rye bread, a crock of mustard that could strip varnish. A nickel bought a glass of beer. The regulars knew each other's trades and troubles and who owed whom, and the bartender, a barrel of a man with a part in the exact middle of his hair, called everyone "friend" and remembered what each one drank.
"There he is," said Pat, as Charles came in out of the wind. "The Michelangelo of Calumet Avenue."
"He's too modest," said Gus.
"He is not," said Pat.
Charles took the stool between them, accepted a glass, and sighed with great contentment. This was the hour of the week he liked best: the work behind him, the pay in his pocket, a plate of sausage in front of him, and men around him who thought he was a good fellow. At Hennessy's he was never the old bald painter who snored. He was Charlie Auble, a fixture and a wit, a man who knew a story for every occasion.
"Tell the one about the lady with the parrot," said Gus.
"I told that last week."
"Tell it again."
So he did, with all the voices, and by the end the whole bar was laughing, and someone had put another glass in front of him without being asked. Then the talk turned to baseball, as it always did that season, and to whether the White Sox would ever amount to anything on the South Side, and then to who in the room had been to the new grounds, and whether Cap Anson's old Cubs could ever have beaten the Pittsburgh team, and by the time he looked up at the clock over the bar, it was nearly seven.
Seven. Supper had been at six.
"I've got to go," Charles said, standing too quickly.
"One more," said Pat.
"I can't. The wife—"
"The wife will keep."
"The wife," said Charles, with feeling, "has a temper, and it's Canadian, which means it's cold."
They laughed at that, and he laughed too, and went out into the night with his cap pulled down and the wind snapping at his coat, and the whole way home on the streetcar he composed what he was going to say.
The Kitchen Table
Georgia was sitting at the kitchen table when he came in. The lamp was lit. A plate with a cloth over it sat at his place. Emily was already asleep.
She didn't say anything at first. Charles stood in the doorway holding his cap, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
"Your supper's dry," she said finally.
"I'm sorry."
"I know you are."
"I lost track of the time."
"You always do." She wasn't shouting. Georgia almost never shouted. That was the difficulty with her: she said exactly what she meant, in a level voice, and then let it sit there. "Charles, I don't mind you having your friends. I know what the work is, and I know a man wants an hour with other men. But I held a plate for two hours while Emily asked where her father was."
That landed harder than he'd expected. He sat down, heavily.
"What did you tell her?"
"That you were working late."
"I was. In a manner of speaking."
"In a manner of speaking," said Georgia, and the corner of her mouth moved, which was dangerous, because she was not supposed to be smiling.
"I'll do better," said Charles.
"You said that in January."
"I meant it in January."
"I know you did." She reached across the table and lifted the cloth off his plate, and the smell of cold pork chop and gravy rose between them. "That's what I can't decide about you, Charles Auble. Whether you're a liar or just very sincere in the moment."
"Both," he said. "Possibly both."
And she laughed, a short surprised laugh she tried to swallow, and he knew he had been forgiven, at least for tonight. He ate the cold chop and said it was the best he'd had, and she told him not to be ridiculous, and the lamp burned down a little.
Later, after she'd gone to bed, he sat for a while longer at the table with a stub of pencil and the back of an envelope. He wasn't a poet, whatever he'd once let her believe. But he had written verses for her when they were courting, because it had seemed the right thing to do, and she had kept every one in the lid of her sewing box. He wrote four lines now, crossed out two, wrote two more, and left the envelope propped against the sugar bowl where she'd find it in the morning.
What it said was not very good. She read it twice anyway, standing at the stove, and then tucked it into the sewing box with the others.
The Wife and the Neighbors
Union Avenue was a block of narrow frame houses and a few brick two-flats, a neighborhood of working families: Irish and German and Swedish and a few Poles, with a Bohemian baker around the corner and an Italian fruit vendor who came through with his cart on Wednesdays. Georgia knew most of them by now. She was the Canadian one, the one with the funny way of saying "about," and she had stopped minding it.
Her closest friend on the block was Mrs. Bridget Doyle, who lived two doors down and had five children and an opinion on everything. The two women hung their wash on adjoining lines and talked across the fence, or traded the loan of an iron for the loan of a rolling pin, or sat on the front step in the long summer evenings while the children chased fireflies through the yards.
"Your Charles is a good man," Bridget said once, in the vague tone of a woman who is about to say something less nice. "But he's a talker."
"He's a talker," Georgia agreed.
"Mine's a drinker."
"Mine's both."
They looked at each other and began to laugh, helplessly, and sat there on the step with their aprons over their knees, two women who had made peace with the men they'd chosen.
On Sundays, they went to church: the Methodist Episcopal church two streets over, a plain brick building with a bell that sounded slightly cracked. Georgia had been raised Methodist in Ontario, and the hymns still came to her whole, in her mother's voice. Charles came along, scrubbed and pressed, and sat in the pew with Emily on his knee, singing a half-beat behind everyone else and with great conviction. He did not claim to understand theology. But he liked the sermons when they were short, the singing when it was loud, and the potluck suppers best of all.
The Ladies' Aid raised money for a new roof that year. Georgia baked pies and pinned a hem and sat on the committee for the autumn bazaar. Charles, to his own surprise, found himself volunteered to paint the church's sign. He gave it two coats of white, a lettered border in a deep green, and a small gold cross at the top. When it was done, the minister stood on the steps and said it was the handsomest sign in the district, and Charles, who had painted a hundred parlors without anyone thanking him, went red to the tips of his ears.
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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.
Part 2 will be published next week.
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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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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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