I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for the family of my 5th great-grandparents John and Hannah (Colby) Underhill in ABC Biography of the John and Hannah (Colby) Underhill Family of New Hampshire (1745-1816), based on my genealogical research over 38 years.
I wondered what John Underhill might have told his grandchildren in a life memoir in 1814.
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic for John Underhill's life memoir)1) I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 to "Please write a life memoir for John Underhill based on the attached biography, as he might tell to his grandchildren in 1814."
2) The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is:
As I Remember It
Being the Life Recollections of
Sergeant John Underhill
of Chester and Plainfield, New Hampshire (1745 – 1816)
As told to his grandchildren -- Plainfield, New Hampshire, 1814
Come, sit close — the fire is low and the night is long
Well now. You want your old grandfather to talk, do you? John's children, Jonathan's little ones — all of you crowded in here like kittens in a basket. All right then. Move that stool, there. Put another log on. If I am going to tell you the whole of it, we shall need more warmth before I am done.
I am sixty-nine years old this summer, and there are mornings I feel the weight of every one of them. My hands are stiff before noon. My back — well, we shall say nothing about my back. But my memory, that is still sharp. Sharp enough, anyway, to carry you back to Chester, to the old Long Meadow road, to a time when this land was still a colony of the King of England, and none of us had yet learned the word republic.
I was born on the twentieth of June, 1745, in Chester, Rockingham County — though in those days we called it New Hampshire Colony, and beyond our northern farms lay a wilderness that men like your great-great-grandfather had only just begun to push back. Chester was a young town then, settled not thirty years before by Scots-Irish families who came with strong backs and strong opinions and not much else. We fit right in.
My Father's House
My father was John Underhill — yes, same name; it caused no end of confusion at the tavern — and my mother was Joanna Healey before she married him. They wed in 1741, and by the time I arrived I was already the third child, with my sister Betty and my brother William ahead of me. Before all was said and done there were ten of us at that table. Ten children. Think of that. Betty, William, myself, then Molly, Moses, David, Samuel, Jeremiah, Sarah, and last of all little Joanna, who came along when I was nearly grown. My mother fed us all, clothed us all, kept us all out of serious mischief — though Moses tested her patience considerable. I do not think my father ever counted us all at once for fear of the number.
We lived near the brick school house on the Long Meadow road — you will hear more of that road before I am done, for it runs through the whole of my life. The soil in Chester is thin and stony, as New Hampshire soil tends to be, but we knew no other kind and did not miss what we had never had. Father kept cattle and grew rye and corn, and in the winters we did what all New Hampshire farmers do: we endured.
I was a boy during the French and Indian War — King George's War, some called it then. There was fear in those years that the French and their Indian allies would come south from Canada and fall upon the settlements. The men of Chester kept their muskets primed. I remember my father coming home from a militia muster, telling my mother something in a low voice that she did not repeat to us children. I was perhaps eight or nine. I did not know it then, but I was learning the face of a man who carries fear quietly, so that those around him can sleep.
Hannah
I will tell you about your grandmother now, because no honest account of my life makes any sense without her.
The Colby family came to Chester from Amesbury, Massachusetts, sometime around 1760 — Hannah's father, Joseph Colby, moving his family north for the land, the way families did. Hannah was the fourth of five children, born on the fourteenth of February, 1744, though by the old calendar some wrote it as 1744 and some as 1745. It was Valentine's Day, which she thought was either a good omen or a great joke depending on her mood.
I first knew her as a neighbor's daughter. She had dark eyes and a direct way of looking at you that made you feel she was deciding something important about your character. She was quick with figures, quicker than most men I have known, and she had a laugh that carried across a room. I was smitten from the first time I heard it, though it took me the better part of two years to do anything useful about it.
We married in 1767, in Chester. I was twenty-two. She was twenty-two. We were young and thought we knew everything, which is the natural condition of the young and which I have long since forgiven in myself.
Her father, Joseph Colby, died in 1768, the year after we married. He left behind a sixty-acre homestead on the Long Meadow road — the same road where I had grown up, would you believe it. In 1774, we bought that land from Hannah's brother Joseph for one hundred and sixty-five pounds. It was Lot Number Forty, and it became ours. That farm was where we raised our children. That is where we spent the best years of our lives.
The Trouble with the King
I must speak now of the years when everything changed, because you cannot understand who you are without knowing what your grandfather did and why.
By the early 1770s, the trouble with England had been building for years. The Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the soldiers in Boston — we heard of all of it in Chester, and we argued about it at meeting and at the tavern and over the fence between farms. All of the men were in the town militia and we trained regularly. Some men were cautious. Some were hot-headed. Most of us were somewhere in between — angry at being taxed and ordered about, but also aware that war is an awful thing and not to be wished for lightly.
I had a wife. I had children coming. We had just bought our farm. I had everything to lose. And yet when the time came, I went.
In July of 1777 — our country had been at war for two years by then, and things were not going well — the call came for men to join General Stark's brigade and march north to block the British. General John Burgoyne was pushing south from Canada with a large army, and if he was not stopped, he might split the colonies in two. I enlisted on the twenty-first of July as a Corporal in Captain Stephen Dearborn's company of Colonel Stickney's regiment. Hannah was home with the children — Joseph was seven, Amos was five, Nancy was three. She did not weep when I left, at least not where I could see.
The Battle of Bennington
We marched north and then west, a company of New Hampshire farmers with muskets and determination and not much else. On the sixteenth day of August, 1777, we met the enemy near the town of Bennington — though the fighting was actually in New York, just across the border, which is the sort of thing that only matters after the fact.
General Stark gave a speech before the battle that I have never forgotten. He pointed at the enemy camp and said — and I paraphrase, for I am old and memory condenses — that we would defeat those red-coats before nightfall, or Molly Stark would be a widow. The men roared. I roared with them, though I confess my stomach was not as brave as my voice.
The enemy was mostly Hessian soldiers — Germans hired by the British king to fight his battles for him, because he could not find enough Englishmen willing to come over and be shot at by New Hampshire farmers. They were professional soldiers, well-equipped. We were militia. The difference, I learned that day, matters less than people suppose, when the militia is fighting for its own land.
I will not pretend I was a hero. I loaded and fired, loaded and fired, stayed with my company, did not run. The noise of it — the smoke and the screaming and the terrible percussion of the guns — is not something you can describe to someone who has not heard it. I will only say that time does strange things in a battle. Some moments last an age. Others vanish entirely.
We won. Stark's men routed them — captured over seven hundred prisoners, killed two hundred more, took four cannon and a thousand muskets. It was a famous victory, and New Hampshire has been proud of it ever since, as well she should be.On that same day, the sixteenth of August, I was promoted to Sergeant. One of the officers, Lieutenant Ezekiel Lane was killed, and John Lane was named Lieutenant, and I became the Sergeant. But from that day forward I was Sergeant John Underhill, and I have worn the title quietly, without much fuss, for nearly forty years now.
I was discharged on the twenty-eighth of September, having traveled one hundred and ninety-two miles in service. I was paid thirteen pounds, fourteen shillings, and eight pence. I walked home to Chester with my fellow soldiers. Hannah met me at the door and looked me over carefully, the way she always did when I had been somewhere dangerous, checking for damage. Then she put me to work splitting wood, because the stack was low and winter was coming. That was Hannah.
The Second Time
You might think that one war was enough. But a few years later, in 1780, Chester was called upon to raise six men for service in the far north — the Coos country, up near Canada. The war was still grinding on. The frontier still needed watching.
I went again. This time we marched a hundred miles north to the Haverhill area in what they called the Cohos region. I was one of three men trusted to carry and distribute the travel money for the soldiers — two dollars a mile, a hundred miles, which adds up to a sum worth protecting. We served until the end of December. The north country in December is a hard place, and I am not sorry I was young and strong when I saw it.
I came home again. Hannah checked me for damage again. The wood was low again.
Our Children
Let me speak of your parents and their brothers and sisters, for they are the best thing Hannah and I ever did.
Joseph came first, in 1770. He was a serious boy who grew into a serious man — he has been up in Vermont these many years, in Cabot and Marshfield, farming and raising a family of his own. I am proud of him.
Amos came in April of 1772. Amos was the one who could charm anyone, man or beast, into doing what he wanted. He married Mary Metcalf up in Piermont and they have done well. They moved to Erie County, New York in about 1810. I expect he will outlive us all, the rascal.
Nancy came in 1774, and Susan in 1778. Girls in this family have always had more sense than the boys, and those two were no exception.
Your father John was born in 1776 — the very year of the Declaration, which Hannah took as a sign of something, though she was never entirely specific about what. He is settled in Grafton with Mary Esther, and I am glad of it.
And then there is Jonathan — born the ninth of August, 1779, right here in Chester. Jonathan is the one who came with me when I bought this house in Plainfield. He married Sophia Slack right here in Plainfield in 1805, and they have built something worth building.
Six children your grandmother and I brought into this world, between 1770 and 1779. Hannah labored for every one of them on that farm on the Long Meadow road, in a house that was never quite warm enough in January and never quite cool enough in July, and she never once complained about it where I could hear.
Your Grandmother
Hannah died on the twelfth of September, 1791. She was forty-six years old. I will not dwell long here, because some things a man carries close and does not put into words for others to examine. I will only say that the house on the Long Meadow road was a different place after she was gone, and that I was a different man.
I stayed in Chester for some years after. I lived a while in Candia nearby. In 1801, I sold the homestead — seventy-eight acres by then, expanded from the original sixty — to Mary Brown, for six hundred dollars. It was time. The children were grown and scattered. The farm held too many voices in the walls.
I bought land in Plainfield that same year, from Nathaniel Garland, fifty-seven acres for seven hundred dollars. A man needs something to stand on. I held it until 1806, when I passed it to Jonathan, and he took me in along with it.That was eight years ago now. I am comfortable here. I am not without my creakings and complaints, but I am comfortable.
What I Would Have You Know
You are young, all of you. The youngest of you — I look at your face and I see your father in it, and I see Hannah in it, and I see something that is entirely your own, which is as it should be. You will do things in your lives that I cannot imagine. This country of ours is young too, and restless, and full of a confidence that sometimes frightens me and sometimes fills me with a joy I cannot name.
We were a colony when I was born. A possession of a king who had never set foot on this soil and did not know the name of a single man or woman who worked it. By the time your fathers were born, we were something new — a republic, the first real republic since the Romans, or so Mr. Jefferson would have us believe, and perhaps he is right.
I did not fight at Bennington because I was brave. I fought because the land was mine and the family was mine and no king three thousand miles away had the right to tell me otherwise. That is not heroism. That is simply a man standing on his own ground.
You come from a long line of people who stood on their own ground. Chester folk. New Hampshire folk. People who looked at stony soil and a short growing season and a winter that lasts half the year and said: yes, this will do, we will make something here. And we did.
Your grandmother made something here. Your father made something here. I made something here, however imperfectly. Now it is your turn.
There, now. The fire is low and your old grandfather is tired. You have had the whole of it, or as much of it as I can give you tonight. Go to bed, all of you. Leave me to the fire a while. I will sit here and think about the Long Meadow road.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sergeant John Underhill died in Plainfield, New Hampshire, in 1816. He was seventy years old.
A Note to the Reader
The words above are imagined, but the facts are real. John Underhill was born in Chester, New Hampshire in 1745, served in the Revolutionary War, farmed the Long Meadow road for three decades, and died in Plainfield in 1816. Every date, every place, every name of family and neighbor is drawn from the historical record. What is invented is only the voice — the warmth of a grandfather by the fire, trying to give the past to those who will carry it forward.
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3) The Video Overview of John Underhill's life memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is:
4) I edited the Claude memoir text to correct minor inconsistencies and errors. Every large language model (LLM) AI tool writes descriptive text much better than I can write. The AI tools are very perceptive, insightful and inspiring, creating engaging text in seconds, including local and national historical events and social history detail when requested.
5) This is historical fiction, based on my own genealogical research. It is what John Underhill might have told his grandchildren in 1814.
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