Remembering a Grandmother

Prologue: in the "Your Stories Matter" series

My research today took me on a long and winding road, starting at my grandmother’s front door. I had several small stories about her already written in various formats and with a variety of themes. Today, I wanted to consolidate those into a comprehensive story of Harriet Priscilla (Wright) Allery as a companion piece to the one I created for my grandchildren. That one is called Message from Grandma Harriet, and AI assisted me to write that in her voice and to pass on a legacy to my grandchildren.

Today’s story about Harriet was brought together with help from my AI assistant, by using this prompt in Claude:

I mistakenly thought that Claude could read these directly from their website, but it alerted me to the fact that,

My next task was to place these articles in my Google Drive and provide Claude with access to their content by adding their URLs.

Claude then showed these as Docs, see above. From here, I repeated my prompt, and Claude responded with a comprehensive story about my grandmother. This story called Harriet Priscilla (Wright) Allery is available here.

Adding Visuals

Some experimentation with the image generator Flux 1 Kontext, I asked for some colourised and realistic photographic images from uploaded black and whites from my media archive.

I was amazed at the clarity and the likenesses produced by this AI tool. (Note: I have it available in my Abacus.AI account.) Simple prompts like these were used:

Here is how it transformed this old black and white photograph of Harriet as a younger woman.

Bringing it all together!

Both pieces have now been completed and are posted on my WeAre.xyz family history blogs here:

A Tapestry of Tailors: Volume 2
Harriet Priscilla (Wright) Allery: A Life of Love, Loss, and Resilience

Message from Grandma Harriet

If you are keen to find out more about how AI tools can assist you, leave a comment below or visit the Essential Genealogy Academy.