My 2nd great-grandmother Abigail A. "Abbey" (Vaux) Smith (1844-1931) had married Devier J. Smith in 1861 in Wisconsin and they had six children (but only four living) by 1883. Abbey's biography is in ABC Biography of #27 Abigail A. (Vaux) Smith (1844-1931) of New York, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and California based on my genealogical research.
I wondered what what Abbey's daily life was like in the summer of 1883. My prompt to Anthropic Claude was: "Please construct a story about the Day in the Life of Abbey (Vaux) Smith in 1883 in Concordia, Kansas, based on the attached biography."
(Google Gemini Notebook Infographic - A Day in the Life of Abbey Smith in 1883)
Here is the Claude Sonnet 5 story:
A Day in the Life of Abigail "Abbey" (Vaux) Smith — Concordia, Cloud County, Kansas, 1883
Before Dawn
Abbey woke, as she always did, before the light had properly come into the sky, roused by habit rather than any clock. She was thirty-eight now, and had risen at this hour in a half-dozen different houses across four states, so that the particular grain of the ceiling boards above her changed from year to year but the hour itself never did.
The house in Concordia was a frame house, plainer than she might have liked but sound enough, built in the two years since they'd come down from Shannon after the death of her parents. Devier was already gone from the bed — he kept early hours too, out to see to the stock before the heat of the day came on, Kansas summers being what they were even this early in the season.
She dressed in the gray half-light, pinned her hair back with the ease of long practice, and went down to wake the stove.
Morning
By the time the sky had gone properly pink over the flat line of the horizon, Abbey had the fire drawing well and a pot of coffee going, and Matie — seventeen now, and as much help in the kitchen as a grown woman — was down to help with the eggs and the biscuits. Della, at age twenty-one, came down not long after, already dressed with more care than the kitchen work strictly required, her hair done up neatly and a roll of music tucked under one arm.
"You've a pupil this morning?" Abbey asked, setting the biscuits to bake.
"The Whitfield girl, at nine. Her mother wants her ready to play something for the church social, though I confess the child has no more ear than that stovepipe." Della set the music down on the sideboard with care, the way she handled all of it, as though the pages themselves were fragile. "I told Mrs. Whitfield six weeks was not enough time to make a musician of anyone, but she was not to be discouraged."
"Six weeks was not enough time to make me a competent seamstress, and I have had considerably longer than six weeks at it," Abbey said. "Mothers are not always to be reasoned with on the subject of their daughters' accomplishments."
"No," Della agreed, with the particular dry humor that was hers alone among the children, "they are not."
Devier came in first, stamping the yard dust from his boots at the door, and David a few minutes behind him, and the five of them sat down to biscuits and coffee and a plate of eggs while the sun came up proper over the wheat stubble to the east. The table was fuller than it had been in some houses further back — Wisconsin, Iowa — and quieter than it might have been too, with the empty places where Agnes and Lutie would have sat had they lived, a small silence Abbey had long since learned to carry without speaking of it.
"That bay's not lame," Devier said, midway through his eggs, in the tone of a man settling an argument that had clearly been going since sunup. "Stepped on a stone is all. He'll walk it off by noon."
"He favored that leg the whole way back from the south pasture," David said. "I still think—"
"You think a great many things, David. Eat your breakfast."
Della caught Abbey's eye across the table, and the two of them shared the smallest flicker of amusement, the particular understanding of women who have sat through this exact argument, in one form or another, more times than could be counted.
Midmorning
Devier and David went back out to the stock once the plates were cleared. Della gathered her music and walked the half mile into town for the Whitfield girl's lesson, promising to stop after at the dry goods for thread Abbey wanted, and Abbey turned to the work of the day, which in Concordia in 1883 was much what it had been in Wisconsin and Iowa and every county in between, adjusted only for the particular demands of the season and the house.
There was bread to set, and washing — Monday's washing, still not properly caught up from the week before, on account of two days of wind that had made hanging anything out on the line an exercise in futility. She and Matie hauled water and got the boiler going in the yard, and by midmorning the two of them stood over the washtub with their sleeves pushed up, working shirts and Devier's heavy work trousers against the washboard while the sun climbed higher and the wind, mercifully light today, carried off the worst of the lye smell.
"Mrs. Fenwick says there's to be a social at the church, end of the month," Matie said, wringing a shirt with more strength than her slight frame suggested she owned. "Will you go, Mother?"
"If your father can be persuaded to put on a clean collar and sit still for two hours, I expect I might."
"He'll grumble the whole time."
"He grumbles about a great many things and does most of them anyway. It is one of his more reliable qualities." Abbey pinned a shirt to the line, squinting against the sun. "Has David said whether he means to go?"
"He said he would, if the Averill girl is to be there."
"Did he." Abbey said nothing further on the subject, though she filed it away with the quiet attention of a mother who had raised six children and buried two, and who had learned that the ones who lived required watching just as carefully, in their own way.
Midday
Della returned in good time for the noon meal, the thread purchased and tucked in her pocket, and reported that the Whitfield girl had, if nothing else, learned to strike the correct keys in something approximating the correct order.
"That is more than I expected of her a week ago," Abbey said. "You are patient with them, Della. I don't know that I would be."
"Someone must be patient with them, or Mrs. Whitfield will simply find another teacher to be impatient at instead, and then I've lost the fifty cents a lesson for nothing." Della said it lightly, but there was a small, practical pride under it — the pride of a young woman who had found a way to earn something of her own, in a house that did not have a great deal of money to spare.
Dinner — the noon meal, the largest of the day — was beans and bacon and the last of Sunday's cornbread, eaten quickly because the men were wanted back in the livery stable, and because the sewing was waiting for Abbey the moment the dishes were done.
This was Abbey's own trade, separate from the general housework: she had taken in sewing since before Concordia, since Shannon, since further back than that if she were honest about it, and this afternoon it was a dress length for Mrs. Pruitt from down the road, who was stout through the middle and particular about her sleeves, and a shirt to be made over for David, who had grown another inch through the shoulders since spring and split the seams of his good one.
She worked at the treadle machine by the west window, where the light was best in early afternoon, with Matie across from her with a mending basket and Della, once the dinner dishes were done, practicing scales at the parlor piano through the open door between the rooms — not loudly, but steadily, the same passages worked over and smoothed out by patient repetition, the sound of it threading through the whole afternoon like another kind of stitching.
"Do you ever miss Wisconsin?" Matie asked, apropos of nothing, threading a needle against the light.
Abbey considered this while she guided the fabric under the needle. "I miss the trees, some. Kansas is a fine enough country but it does not care to grow a proper tree without a great deal of persuading. I don't know that I miss the place itself so much as I miss being young in it. That is a different thing than missing the place."
From the parlor, the scales paused. "I don't miss anywhere," Della called through, "so long as there's a piano in it. I'd have been perfectly content in Missouri if the Mungers had let me go on using theirs."
"You were eleven, Della. I doubt the Mungers were consulted much on the matter."
"They ought to have been asked all the same." The scales resumed.
Afternoon
The heat came on hard by three o'clock, the particular flat, relentless heat of a Kansas summer afternoon, and Abbey took a basin of cool water and a cloth out to where Devier and David were working, more from long habit than because either man would ask for it.
"You'll kill yourselves out here by August," she said, handing Devier the cloth first.
"Man's got to see to his stock." Devier wiped his face and neck and handed it back without much ceremony, though she noted he drank the water she'd brought readily enough. "Bay's walking sound now. Told you it was a stone."
"You did tell me." She looked to David, who accepted the cloth with somewhat better grace than his father had shown. "And how is your leg, David — the one you're nursing along with such devotion since Sunday?"
"Fine, Mother." He had the grace to look faintly sheepish. "Papa was right about the horse."
"I shall have that carved on his tombstone, in due course. He Was Right About The Horse." This got the smallest crack of a smile out of Devier, which was, from him, roughly equivalent to another man's belly laugh, and Abbey took the empty basin back toward the house satisfied with the exchange.
Evening
Supper was simpler than dinner — cold meat from midday, bread, a stewed dried-apple dish that Matie had put together while Abbey finished the last of the day's sewing — and afterward, with the worst of the heat finally breaking as the sun dropped toward the flat horizon, the family sat out on the porch step in the blue evening light, the way they generally did when the day's work was properly done.
Devier smoked his pipe and said little, which was his custom. David talked some of the wheat prices, which he'd heard discussed in town, and whether it was worth the freight to ship to Concordia's depot rather than hauling further on. Matie hummed something under her breath, mending still in her lap though the light was nearly too poor for it. Della sat a step below the others with her arms wrapped around her knees, and after a while began to hum along with Matie, the two of them falling without quite meaning to into some old hymn tune their mother had sung over the washtub for years, until it was hard to say which of them had started it.
Abbey sat with her hands finally, blessedly idle in her lap, and looked out over the darkening fields toward where the last light was going gold and then gray along the horizon, and thought — as she often did at this hour — of her sisters, scattered now across three states, and of the two small graves back in Wisconsin that she carried with her the way a person carries anything too heavy to set down and too precious to leave behind. She thought too, watching Della hum in the near-dark with that same patient concentration she brought to the Whitfield girl's scales, that this one at least seemed to have found the shape of her own life already, here in this plain Kansas house, long before she would ever think to leave it.
"Bed," she said at last, when the light had gone fully out of the sky and the mosquitoes had begun in earnest. "Your father will have us up with the roosters regardless of how late we sit out here admiring the stars."
"Yes, Mother," the three of them said, in the identical put-upon tone of children who had heard this exact instruction some several thousand times in their lives, and the family went in together out of the warm Kansas dark, to sleep, and to rise again before the light, and do it all again.
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Author’s Note: This is a work of historical fiction imagining an ordinary day, grounded in documented facts about the family's location, ages, and circumstances in 1883. No specific record of this day survives — the details of the household, chores, and conversations are invented to give a plausible sense of daily life.
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The AI Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is in (and on my YouTube channel):
This is historical fiction based on known events in the lives of my ancestors -- it might have been this way. Devier and Abigail (Vaux) Smith are my 2nd great-grandparents through their daughter Abbbie Ardelle "Della" (Smith) Carringer (1882-1944), and I have significant information about this family from the available records, but I know nothing about their day-to-day lives.
As always, I am amazed at what life was like in any place over 140 years ago. This description of Abbey's family life in 1883 Kansas is interesting and so different from our current daily activities.
After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit this Smith family in 1883 Kansas and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and witness accounts.
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