On Old Spanish Trail in ’31,
George borrowed a car for a night of fun.
Forty miles per hour around a curve unseen,
The Chevrolet sedan rolled like a wayward machine!
Poor Priscilla Theriot in the left-rear seat,
Was thrown from the car in a most ungraceful feat.
Into a muddy ditch, waist-deep she fell,
“I’m drowning!” she thought, as far as she could tell.
Five broken ribs and a fractured spine,
For ninety days in bed, she’d recline.
A back brace required for six months more,
While George claimed he’d never seen that curve before!
“Twenty-five thousand dollars!” her lawyers would plead,
For clothing, lost wages, and medical need.
Her new fur coat and hat were utterly ruined,
Even her college ring – vanished, to her chagrin!
The Fourteenth Judicial Court had its say,
Four thousand dollars George would have to pay.
From February to April in thirty-two,
The case dragged on as court cases do.
Priscilla said George wasn’t to blame,
But her lawsuit proceeded just the same.
Working at Muller’s for fifteen per week,
Justice in forma pauperis she would seek.
They’d planned for the Beaumont fair that night,
When the borrowed Chevy gave them quite a fright.
Jim Cleaton helped her from the muck and mire,
While George’s legal troubles grew ever dire.
Who could predict this fateful crash,
And courtroom battles over medical cash,
Would bloom a romance that time would bless?
How they fell in love is anyone’s guess!
From plaintiff and defendant to husband and wife,
George and Priscilla built a beautiful life.
Their grandchild now tells how these two met:
A rollover, a lawsuit, and no regrets!
Much is spoken about in the professional genealogical community concerning ‘filling in the dash’ between birth and death dates. Often, we do this with dry facts, levels of confidence, and graphic citations. But what if we could put a spin on this, innovate ways to tell stories of those who lived before us in creative and memorable ways?
In this project, I started with a trip to the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of the Court’s office in Lake Charles, Louisiana. My mission was to review and copy public records concerning a civil court action from 1932. My grandmother, Priscilla Theriot, sued my grandfather, George Tassin, for damages caused by George’s driving in November 1931. He was 26, and she was 22. While unfamiliar with each other at that time, they married three years later in the summer of 1934.
I extracted salient genealogical and historical facts from the case file and prepared a detailed six-page research narrative applying the Genealogical Proof Standard’s core principles.
Next, I fed the report to LLM Claude 3.7 Sonnet and prompted the AI bot to read the document, consider all the extracted data, and produce a funny poem. I specifically instructed the LLM not to go beyond the scope of the narrative and particularly not to add demographic or physical characteristics. The resulting poem appears here after only a few edits I made.
Lastly, I needed an image for this blog post. I employed both LLM Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT model 4o to devise a detailed prompt describing the appearance of both of my grandparents as they looked in the early 1960s. I chose this later time because of the available images from this era and because this is how I remember them. The resulting image is surprisingly similar to the likeness each had during an evening at my grandfather’s rustic cabin in the early 1960s.
Leveraging public records, the proof standard, and modern artificial intelligence, I can now tell the story of the peculiar way my grandparents met. A story worth telling.
Aaron Tassin, MLIS 