I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for the family of my 5th great-grandparents Burges and Jerusha (--?--) Metcalf in ABC Biography of the Burgess and Jerusha (--?--) Metcalf Family of New England, based on my genealogical research over 38 years.
I wondered what Burgess Metcalf might have told his grandchildren in a life memoir in early 1816.
1) I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to "Please write a life memoir for Burgess Metcalf based on the attached biography, as he might tell to his grandchildren in 1816."
2) The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:
As I Remember It
The Life of Burgess Metcalf, Told in His Own Words
Piermont, New Hampshire — March, 1816
"Come, children. Pull your chairs closer to the fire. It is cold tonight, and your old grandfather has a great deal to tell you — if these lungs will hold out long enough to say it all."
Where I Come From
I was born on the twenty-eighth of August, in the year seventeen hundred and forty-one, in the town of Medway, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That was a different world, children — a world where the King of England still ruled these lands, and where a man's whole life might be lived and ended within ten miles of where he drew his first breath.
My father was Michael Metcalf, a solid, hard-working man. My mother was Melatiah Hamant before she married him, and they wed in Medway in the year seventeen-twenty-eight, thirteen years before I arrived. I was the seventh of eight children — the fourth son — so you can imagine the household I entered. Noisy. Full of elbows at the supper table.
My brothers and sisters were Oliver, Michael, the girl Melatiah (named for our mother), Amity, Abijah, Sarah, then me, and lastly little Silas, born four years after me in Rutland. Eight children in all. Oliver was twelve years older than me, so by the time I was walking and getting into mischief, he was practically a grown man. My sister Sarah and I were close enough in age that we kept each other company as children, though she always had more sense than I did.
My mother, God rest her, died when I was but ten years old. Seventeen fifty-one. I remember that year with a heaviness I have never fully set aside. She was forty-seven years old. After that, the house was quieter in a way that had nothing to do with noise.
My father was not a man to linger. He had mouths to feed and work to do, and he moved us all north — to Keene, in Cheshire County, New Hampshire Colony. I was about nine when we went. Keene was a young town then, carved out of the wilderness not long before. But it had good soil and good neighbors, and it was there I became a young man.
My brother Michael — two years older than Oliver, sharp and restless — he did not live to see the war's end. He died at Bennington in August of seventeen seventy-seven, fighting for the very liberty we now enjoy. I think of him whenever I watch the sun come up over the Connecticut River. He was a stubborn man and a brave one, and I miss him still.
Your Grandmother Jerusha
Now, I expect some of you have wondered where your grandmother came from, and I must tell you honestly — I have wondered the same thing myself, these forty-odd years of marriage. She does not speak much of her family, and the records, if there ever were any, I have not found.
What I know is this: she was born around seventeen fifty, somewhere in New Hampshire Colony, and she was in or about Keene when I was a young man there. I do not recall the first moment I saw her. I only recall that at some point she was simply there, and then I could not imagine a life without her.
We married before seventeen seventy. I was twenty-eight or so, she perhaps twenty. She was a quiet woman but not a weak one. Do not mistake stillness for softness, children. Your grandmother has weathered things that would have broken stouter hearts: ten children, a husband gone to war, hard winters, the death of young Joseph at only fifteen years of age. She has not complained of any of it, not once that I have heard.
Some say her name before marriage was Chandler. Perhaps it was. We named your uncle Chandler, and that may be where the notion comes from. But I will leave that mystery to those of you with the patience and cleverness to untangle it. What matters is who she is, not what she was called before she was mine.
Going to Piermont
In August of seventeen seventy-three, I purchased Lot Nine in Range One in the town of Piermont — paying seventy pounds to a man named Richard Jenness of Rye for the privilege. I was thirty-two years old, Jerusha was about twenty-three, and we already had three children underfoot: Ephraim, little Samuel, and Burgess, just turned one year old that very month.
Piermont was barely a town then. It had been established not ten years before, and the land along the River Road was raw and full of stumps and stones. There were neighbors — the Chandler family settled here too, not long after us — but it was a young community, and those of us who came early had to make it what it was.
We came by ox-cart, mostly, with what we could carry. The lot sat along the Connecticut River, and on a clear day you could see across to Vermont. I thought it was the finest piece of land I had ever laid eyes on, and I have not changed my opinion in forty-three years of looking at it.
That first winter was hard. I will not pretend otherwise. But we had built enough of a shelter before the snows came, and we had neighbors who helped, and we helped them in return. That is how it was done. That is how everything was done. A man alone on the frontier is a dead man. A man with good neighbors is a farmer.
The children kept coming, God bless them. Sally in seventy-four. Cyrus in seventy-six. Meletiah in seventy-nine. Mary — your Aunt Polly — around seventeen eighty. Joseph in eighty-one. Then a long spell, and finally your Aunt Jerusha in eighty-nine, and young Chandler, the baby of the lot, born in ninety-eight when I was already fifty-seven years old. Ten children in all. Some would say that is too many. I say it is exactly right.We lost Joseph. Fifteen years old, in March of seventeen ninety-six. I do not speak of it easily, even now. He was a fine boy. Some losses do not soften with age — they only become more familiar, like an old scar that still aches when the cold comes in.
The War
I was thirty-four years old when the trouble with England finally boiled over. The spring of seventeen seventy-five — Lexington, Concord, and then the whole thing lit like a dry field in August. I had a farm, a wife, children, and a great deal to lose. But a man cannot stand aside when his country calls. Or at least I could not.
I was commissioned an Ensign in the Fifth Company of the Twelfth New Hampshire Regiment on the fifth of September, seventeen seventy-five. Ensign — that means I carried the colors. The flag. There is a weight to that, children, that is more than the cloth itself.
I will not tell you the war was glorious. There was mud and cold and hunger, and men sick with fevers that had no business being on a battlefield. But there were also moments I would not trade for anything.
The great one came in October of seventeen seventy-seven. We marched to meet Burgoyne — General John Burgoyne of His Majesty's Army, who had come down from Canada with the intention of splitting our cause in two. He was a proud man with a great army, and we were a scrappy collection of farmers and tradesmen and men who had simply decided they had had enough.
On the seventeenth of October, at a place called Saratoga in New York, General Burgoyne surrendered his entire army to General Gates. Nearly six thousand British and Hessian soldiers, laying down their arms. I was there. I watched it happen. I cannot tell you what it felt like except to say that I understood, for the first time with my whole body rather than just my mind, that we might actually win this war.
And we did. It took several more years of suffering, but we did. France came in on our side not long after Saratoga — they had been watching, and Burgoyne's surrender convinced them we were worth wagering on. So in a way, that cold October day in New York helped win the whole thing.
I came home to Jerusha and the children and the farm on the River Road. She said nothing dramatic when I walked in. She simply put a bowl of porridge in front of me and sat down across the table and looked at me the way she always has — like she is deciding whether I am still worth keeping. I must have passed the inspection, because here I am.
Building a Town
A man does not only build a farm. He builds a community, or he does not survive. That is the lesson of the frontier, and I learned it early.
I served as Surveyor of Highways in eighty-nine — making sure the roads were kept passable, which in New Hampshire is a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. I sat as a juror in ninety-four. I helped fix the bounds of the school lands in ninety-seven and served as Moderator that same year. A Moderator runs the town meetings — makes sure men speak in turn and do not come to blows, which is harder than it sounds when the subject is taxes.
The church was the center of it all. In seventeen seventy-nine, I and many others signed a pledge to support the preaching of the Gospel in Piermont. Eighty dollars, assessed by the selectmen. It was not a small sum, but it was the right thing.
In eighteen-three, when the Congregational Church was formally organized, I was among its founding members. Your uncle John — your father's son — became a deacon there later. The faith passes down, children, if you let it. I hope you will let it.
We paid our taxes. We kept our fences. We helped our neighbors dig out after the heavy snows and we lent out our oxen when someone's team went lame. That is the whole of civic life, I think, underneath all the speechifying. You show up. You do your part. You do not ask whether you feel like it that morning.
Your father Burgess — I am proud of that boy. He took over much of the land in ninety-eight when I was getting on in years. We drew up a legal arrangement: he holds the deed, but your grandmother and I have the right to live here and work the land as long as we draw breath. Five hundred dollars was the agreed sum. It was a fair deal and a kind one, and I have never had cause to regret it.
The tax records will show you what we were, if ever you need to know. In eighteen-and-two, I had two oxen, a horse, three-year horses, cows, mowing land, tillage, pasture, buildings. A working farm. Nothing grand, but nothing shameful either. A man who can feed his family from his own ground and owe nothing to anyone is a free man. That is all I ever wanted to be.
What I Want You to Know
I am seventy-four years old as I sit here. My bones ache in the cold, and I do not sleep as well as I once did, and I find myself talking to people who are no longer living more often than I probably should. But my mind is clear, and I have not lost the thread of what matters.
Your grandmother will likely outlive me. She has always been the sturdier of the two of us, whatever it may look like from the outside. When I am gone, be good to her. Help her with what she cannot do herself. She will not ask. You must offer.
I want you to know that this land — this piece of New Hampshire on the Connecticut River — was not given to us. It was chosen, and paid for, and cleared, and farmed, and fought for. The Revolution was not a story that happened to other people. It happened to us. I was there. Your great-uncle Michael died for it. Do not take it lightly.
I want you to know that your grandmother Jerusha is the best decision I ever made, and I have made some good ones. Forty-some years of marriage and I have not grown tired of her company. That is the rarest thing in the world, children, and I want you to look for it when your own time comes. Do not settle for comfortable. Look for the person whose company you will still want when you are old and cold and losing your teeth.
I want you to know your family. Your aunts and uncles — Ephraim up in Vermont, Cyrus heading that way too, Meletiah with her thirteen little Nileses, Polly and her Underhills, young Jerusha with the Bickfords, Chandler just starting out. They are spread wide now, but they are yours. When the world is hard — and it will be hard, I promise you that — family is what you have.
And finally, I want you to know that a good life is not a dramatic one. I have seen my share of drama — war, loss, hard winters, the death of a child. But the shape of a good life is quieter than all that. It is work done honestly. It is land tended faithfully. It is a wife looked at across a table every morning for forty years and thought: yes. Still yes.
That is enough for tonight. The fire is dying down, and your grandmother is giving me the look that means I have been talking too long.
She is probably right.
She usually is.
— Burgess Metcalf, Ensign, Ret., Piermont, New Hampshire, Spring 1816
~~~~~~~~
Burgess Metcalf died 26 September 1816. Jerusha Metcalf followed him on 9 June 1817, aged 67. They rest together at River Road Cemetery, Bradford, New Hampshire.
3) The Video Overview of Burgess Metcalf'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.
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