After developing the AI-assisted ABC Biography of Elijah Pickrell McKnew (1836-1912) and Jane (Whittle) McKnew (1847-1921) Family of San Francisco, California, I wondered how they had experienced and survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
(The McKnew Family after the 1906 Earthquake - from family sources, colorized by AI Google Gemini
I asked Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to write a story about the McKnbeww family's experiences:
The
Day the Earth Shook: The McKnew Family Story
April
18, 1906 - 5:12 AM
The house at 4131 19th Street near Castro was still dark when the
world began to end.
It started with a low rumble, like distant thunder, but coming
from below. Seventy-year-old Elijah McKnew stirred in his bed,
confused. Then the shaking began.
"Elijah!" Jane cried out, reaching for her husband in
the darkness.
But there was no time for words. The earthquake hit with savage
force, and suddenly the entire house was bucking and heaving like a
wild animal. The noise was deafening—the groaning of wood, the
shattering of glass, the crash of furniture toppling, the thunder of
the earth itself tearing apart beneath them.
In her room down the hall, eighteen-year-old Belle Alberta
screamed. Edna Catherine, twenty-two, grabbed her younger sisters May
Jane (twenty) and Gladys Hazel (thirteen) and pulled them toward the
doorway. Their brother Leland Joseph, sixteen, stumbled from his
room, disoriented and terrified.
"Get outside!" Elijah shouted, though his voice could
barely be heard over the chaos. "Everyone out! Now!"
The family stumbled through the violently shaking house, holding
onto walls and each other, dodging falling plaster and pictures
crashing from walls. A kerosene lamp fell and shattered, its oil
spreading across the floor—mercifully, it didn't ignite. The
chandelier in the dining room swung wildly, then crashed to the floor
with an explosive sound.
Jane grabbed Gladys's hand and pulled her toward the front door.
The floor rolled beneath their feet like ocean waves. Gladys fell to
her knees, and her mother hauled her back up with a strength born of
pure terror.
"Mama!" Belle cried out behind them.
"Keep moving!" Jane commanded. "Don't stop!"
They burst through the front door and into the street just as the
violent shaking began to subside. All around them, their neighbors
were doing the same—flooding into 19th Street in their
nightclothes, children crying, men shouting, women praying.
The shaking lasted forty-five to sixty seconds, though it felt
like an eternity. When it finally stopped, an eerie silence fell over
the street, broken only by the sound of people crying and calling out
to loved ones, and the distant crash of buildings still collapsing.
Elijah stood in the street in his nightshirt, his arms around
Jane, both of them trembling. He counted: Belle, Edna, May, Leland,
Gladys—all five children still at home were safe. Thank God. Their
older children—Allethia, Alfred, Henry, Alice, Lilly, George—lived
elsewhere in the city. Were they safe? There was no way to know.
"Look," Leland said quietly, pointing east.
Smoke was rising from the direction of downtown. Not just one
plume—many. Within minutes, they could see the orange glow of fire
against the dawn sky.
The Fire Begins
By 6:00 AM, the full horror of the situation became clear. The
house was damaged but standing—cracks ran through the walls, the
chimney had partially collapsed, windows were shattered, and the
interior was in chaos. But it was intact. Many of their neighbors
weren't so lucky. Down the street, the Johnsons' house had partially
collapsed. Other buildings leaned at crazy angles.
But the immediate danger wasn't from the earthquake anymore. It
was from the fire.
"Pa, look," Leland said, pointing toward the growing
clouds of smoke. "It's spreading."
Elijah had fought in no wars, but he had the instincts of a
survivor. "We need to evacuate the house. Bring out what we
can."
"Surely the fire won't come this far," Jane said, but
her voice was uncertain.
"Maybe not," Elijah replied. "But if it does, we'll
lose everything. Better to be ready."
The family spent the next hours in organized chaos. The
aftershocks kept coming—terrifying jolts that sent them running
back into the street, hearts pounding. But between the shocks, they
worked.
Saving What They Could
They started with the essentials. Leland and Elijah carried out
the heavy cast-iron stove—backbreaking work, but the stove
represented survival. If they lost everything else, at least they
could cook.
"The photograph albums!" Jane insisted. "And the
family Bible!"
Edna and Belle brought out stacks of photographs, including the
precious ones from their wedding, from the children's births, from
their years in Tuolumne County. These couldn't be replaced. May Jane
grabbed the family Bible where all their births and marriages were
recorded.
They carried out chairs, tables, bedding, clothes, dishes, food
from the pantry. The street began to look like an outdoor market,
with families' entire lives spread out on the pavement. Mattresses,
furniture, trunks, birdcages, even pianos—neighbors helped each
other carry out their possessions, creating corridors through the
accumulated goods.
Young Gladys was assigned to watch their pile of belongings while
the others made trip after trip. She sat on a trunk, still in her
nightgown with a coat thrown over it, watching the smoke grow thicker
in the distance.
A neighbor, Mrs. Chen, came over with her own children. "The
fire's jumped Market Street," she said quietly to Jane. "It's
burning toward us."
Waiting and Watching
By afternoon, the smoke had turned day into twilight. Ash fell
from the sky like grey snow. The family set up their stove right
there on 19th Street and Jane made coffee and heated soup. It felt
surreal—cooking dinner in the middle of the street while their city
burned.
More family members started arriving. Alfred found them around
2:00 PM, having walked from his home on Lloyd Street, worried sick
about his parents. Henry and his family, who lived next door, were on
the street also. Edna’s beau, Paul Schaffner, came to check on her
and said the Schaffner house on Castro Street was damaged but still
standing.
"Have you seen George?" Jane asked anxiously. "Or
Allethia? Alice? Lilly?"
"George is safe—I saw him near City Hall," Henry
reported. "It's completely destroyed, Mama. Just ruins."
As the afternoon wore on, the fire drew closer. They could hear it
now—a low roar like a distant waterfall, punctuated by explosions
as gas mains ignited. The heat was palpable even from blocks away.
Soldiers and police were everywhere, trying to maintain order.
They came through the neighborhood warning people to be ready to
evacuate further if necessary. Some were dynamiting buildings to
create firebreaks, and each explosion made everyone jump.
"It's only one block away," Edna said quietly, watching
the flames leap into the sky to the north of them.
Elijah stood with his sons, watching the inferno. He'd worked for
forty years to build this life, to own this home free and clear. And
now it might all burn.
"If it goes, it goes," he said quietly. "We're
alive. That's what matters."
But Jane wept quietly, thinking of all the things still inside—her
mother's wedding ring from England and Australia, the children's baby
clothes she'd saved, letters from relatives long dead.
The Long Night
They spent the night on the street. The family huddled together on
mattresses and blankets, taking turns sleeping while others kept
watch. The sky glowed orange, and the air was thick with smoke and
ash. Around them, thousands of other families did the same. Some sang
hymns. Others prayed. A few men played cards by lamplight, needing
something—anything—to distract from the horror.
Gladys couldn't sleep. She kept thinking about her school, her
friends, her teacher Miss Patterson. Were they safe? Was the school
building still standing?
"Try to rest, sweetheart," Jane whispered, stroking her
youngest daughter's hair. But how could anyone rest with their city
burning?
By midnight, they could see the flames clearly—a wall of fire
consuming everything in its path. It had reached within one block of
their home. One single block.
Elijah, Henry, and Leland wet down the house with buckets of water
from the street pump, hoping desperately that it might help if embers
landed on their roof. Their neighbors did the same. Everyone worked
together, passing buckets in lines, calling out warnings when new
fires sparked nearby.
The Miracle
Dawn of April 19th brought exhaustion and disbelief. The fire had
stopped. Somehow, impossibly, it had stopped just one block north of
19th Street. Their house still stood.
"How?" Belle whispered.
"The wind changed," a firefighter told them. "And
we got the firebreak to hold on Mission Street. You folks are lucky.
Real lucky."
Lucky. Elijah looked at the devastation just blocks away—nothing
but smoking ruins, entire neighborhoods simply gone. And then he
looked at his house, damaged but standing, his family safe, his
neighbors' homes intact.
"Yes," he said quietly. "We're lucky."
But the city they knew was gone. Over the next days, as they
ventured out to assess the damage, the full scope of the catastrophe
became clear. Downtown was destroyed. Chinatown was ashes. Nob Hill's
mansions were ruins. The beautiful City Hall with its grand dome had
collapsed into rubble.
Young Leland walked with his father to Market Street and stood
staring at the devastation. Everything was gone—just block after
block of smoking ruins, brick chimneys standing like lonely sentinels
among the destruction.
"How do we come back from this?" Leland asked.
Elijah put his hand on his son's shoulder. "The same way
we've always done everything. One day at a time. We work. We rebuild.
We endure."
The Photograph
A few days later, when things had calmed enough, a photographer
came through the neighborhood documenting the survivors. The McKnew
family gathered in front of their house with their belongings still
spread out on the street.
"Stand there," the photographer directed them. "Yes,
just like that."
They stood together—Elijah and Jane, their children, their stove
and furniture arranged around them, the house number "4131"
clearly visible above the door behind them. They looked tired,
shell-shocked, but they were together. They had survived.
The photograph would become a treasured family heirloom. Decades
later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would look at it and
marvel. "That's great-grandfather and great-grandmother McKnew,"
they would say. "They survived the great earthquake."
Rebuilding
In the weeks that followed, the family moved back into their
damaged house and began repairs. Elijah, now seventy, worked
alongside his sons to fix the chimney, patch the walls, replace
broken windows. Jane and her daughters cleaned, scrubbed away the
soot and dust, and slowly restored order to their home.
The city around them buzzed with activity. Refugees camped in
parks. Relief supplies poured in from around the country. Temporary
buildings sprang up. And slowly, incredibly, San Francisco began to
rebuild.
At dinner one night, several weeks after the earthquake, much of
the extended family gathered around their repaired dining table—now
back inside the house instead of on the street.
"I heard today that they're planning to rebuild City Hall
even bigger than before," George reported.
"Good," Elijah said. "This city has always been
resilient. It survived the gold rush, it'll survive this."
Jane looked around at her family—her husband of forty years,
their five children at home, and the older children and grandchildren
who had come by to check on them. She thought of their journey
together, from the mining camps of Tuolumne County to this moment.
"We lost things," she said quietly. "But we didn't
lose what matters most. We didn't lose each other."
Gladys reached over and squeezed her mother's hand.
Outside, the sounds of hammering and sawing filled the air. All
over the Castro district, all over San Francisco, people were
rebuilding. The city would rise again from the ashes, more beautiful
than before.
And at 4131 19th Street, the McKnew family—who had crossed
oceans and continents, who had survived the goldfields and raised
eleven children, who had endured loss and hardship and now earthquake
and fire—they endured.
They always had.
Epilogue: Six Years Later
In 1912, when Elijah died peacefully at age seventy-six, his
obituary noted that he had been a "devoted father" who had
lived in San Francisco for thirty-six years. It didn't mention that
six of those years had been spent watching the city rise from ruins,
that he had helped rebuild not just his own home but his neighbors'
as well, that he had lived long enough to see San Francisco more
beautiful and vibrant than ever before.
But his family remembered. They remembered the night in the
street, the fear and the courage, the way their father had stood
strong when everything was falling apart.
And they remembered that photograph—all of them together,
survivors, their house still standing, the number 4131 visible above
the door. A monument not to destruction, but to resilience. Not to
what was lost, but to what endured.
The McKnew family had survived the great San Francisco earthquake
of 1906.
And they would never forget it.
==================================
3) The Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is below.
4) The Google NotebookLM Infographic is:
5) I have no easy way to double-check these responses from Claude. I don't have many book resources for these subjects and this locality, but there are published books available for this time period and general location. The families mentioned are my wife's ancestral families and I have significant information about their lives from the available records, but know nothing about their daily lives. My wife, Linda, knew her grandmother Edna (McKnew) Leland very well, but I don't know if Edna ever told the story of surviving the earthquake. Linda's brother, Paul, found the sepia photograph (colorized above) in the trash can when the family was emptying Edna's home after she died in 1974.
6) After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit the McKnew family in San Francisco and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and eyewitness accounts.
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Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver
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