Recently, I’ve decided to commit one day a week to my genealogy. Over the years, my passion has evolved into client work, blog posts, YouTube videos, and presentations. Don’t get me wrong; I love doing all that, but even with AI to help me, I don’t seem to have time to work on my research.

This past Sunday would be the start of something different, because I wanted to try my friend Randy Seaver’s process for creating Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC).  I looked at my tree and thought about messaging Randy to see where to start. I hesitated to start with my parents because I don’t think I have enough information in their profiles. At least I think there should be more.

Randy has completed this process for his entire family of direct-line relations, back to his second great-grandparents (all 16), and that was when he initially wrote the article, so I’m sure he’s gone on further. So I made a note to work more on my parents’ profiles for later.

This might not be as easy as I thought, but I wanted to accomplish something, so I decided to look at my grandfather, Francis Richard Middlebrough, my mom’s dad. Surely I had enough to do a profile for him? There was some tidying that needed to be done. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I add documented items into the profile, it creates “places” on the timeline that end up at the bottom, despite the actual important event having a place. I’m sure there is a way to prevent that, but I did have to tidy some up. If you know what I’m talking about and what needs to be done to avoid that… let me know.

I checked each line in Grandpa Frank’s timeline and adjusted the wording. I even turned to Facebook to ask my cousin if they had a more accurate date for when Grandpa and Grandma retired because they had sold their home in Edmonton and moved to a house that they had moved to an acreage near Lac La Nonne, Alberta. I wanted to capture that in his profile. Now I was pretty much set.

I then saw I had a few hints for my grandfather, so I thought I’d have a quick look. This is Mistake #One; it wasn’t quick.

One of my challenges with my grandfather, Francis (Frank), is that his father was also Francis (Frank), so when you get a hint, you always have to figure out which Frank they are talking about. Two hints were for his obituary, which I already had info on, and one was for an obituary for someone else, with Francis being a pallbearer at a funeral for a lady named Aramanda Audibert.

This pallbearer hint wasn’t quick because I had to figure out who the pallbearer was: my grandpa or his father. I never figured that out completely (and really….. was it important, and should it be part of the profile at all?). But I did want to learn more about the person who’d died, partly because they were only 22 years old, and I wondered what their connection to the family might have been.

Suffice it to say that the newspaper articles didn’t hint at what the cause of death was, and the only way I’d find that out was if I purchased her death certificate, and I wasn’t going to do that.

But what was the connection? I noticed that this lady’s funeral was at the church my great-grandparents attended, and my grandfather would have also gone. The event was in 1931, and my grandfather would have been 21. So, because this lady was 22, it could have been my grandfather’s friend or someone my great-grandfather knew, because he was quite involved with the church. The lady was survived by a sister, Lucienne, and her grandparents.

So off I went researching Lucienne, and discovered that their mother had passed away 5 years earlier, and there was no family connection to my family. I only continued with this research because I found out that Lucienne had gotten married, and I found an article that Lucienne’s husband was charged with the death of their child.

This story reminded me of something Crista Cowan told me when I was at RootsTech this year: When you’re doing your genealogy, you shouldn’t be afraid of what you might discover. Although this wasn’t my family, if it had been, it would have been a heart-wrenching story to find.

After finishing everything on the timeline, I was ready to try Randy’s process. Randy has been working on his ancestors for a very long time, and he not only has all his information in RootsMagic, but he’s also done a biography on his blog. So he takes the bio from his  52 Ancestors/Relatives Biographies page on Genea-Musings and makes that into a PDF.

I don’t have this kind of bio, but I did a copy and paste from the LifeStory created on my Ancestry bio page for Frank, and also a PDF of the profile for Frank created on MyHeritage’s AI Biographer™. (If you’re not sure how to do this, you can check out my video and a blog I wrote about these processes.)

I then added Randy’s prompt (with one small add shown in red).

You are an expert genealogist. Please create a draft biography from the attached file and the information entered below. Including parents, siblings, spouses, and children (with birth and death dates and places), summarize life events, and add historical facts as appropriate, but do not add or embellish any extra genealogical details. Use section headings. Expand the information in each section to add more details. The tone should be casual and suitable for family members.

In less than a second, this is what I got.

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Francis Richard Middlebrough

June 2, 1910 – January 2, 1996
Edmonton, Alberta ➝ Barrhead, Alberta

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Early Life

Francis Richard Middlebrough, known to most as Frank, was born on June 2, 1910, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was the first child of Francis Johnson Middlebrough and Ellen Aindow, both of whom had emigrated from Lancashire, England. His birth came during a time of great change and growth in Alberta, when the promise of land and opportunity drew many families like the Middlebroughs from the UK to the Canadian prairies.

Frank was soon joined by three younger sisters:

• Veronica “Ronnie” (b. 1911, West Derby, England – d. 1997)
• Edna (b. 1914, Beverly, Alberta – d. 1973)
• Muriel Mary (b. 1922, Beverly, Alberta – d. 1988)

In 1912, when Frank was just a toddler, the family traveled back to England briefly and returned to Canada that same year, arriving in Saint John, New Brunswick. By around 1916, they were living in the town of Beverly, which was then just outside Edmonton. His father served overseas during World War I, and while he was away, young Frank, his mother Ellen, and his sisters were involved in a train crash in 1917 — a traumatic event that the family survived together.

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Marriage and Family Life

On August 31, 1929, at the age of 19, Frank married Mary Loretta Beaton at St. Francis Church in North Edmonton. Mary was born on August 27, 1909, in Lethbridge, Alberta. The early years of their marriage coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, but despite the economic challenges, they built a large and loving family.

Together, Frank and Mary had seven children over 15 years:

1. Violet Marie Beaton (b. 1928, before marriage)
2. Frances Josephine Middlebrough (b. 1930 – d. 2003)
3. Edna Margaret Middlebrough (b. 1932 – d. 2008)
4. Richard William Middlebrough (b. 1934 – d. 2022)
5. Eleanor Louise Middlebrough (b. 1936 – d. 2015)
6. Kenneth Theodore Middlebrough (b. 1937 – d. 2023)
7. Donald Gordon Middlebrough (b. 1944)

Family life was often centered around hard work and home. Frank worked various jobs, including at Swifts and later at the Edmonton Stockyard and Canada Packers, living primarily in North Edmonton. The family moved several times, including a stint on a farm near Alcomdale, Alberta.

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Career and Homesteading

Like many men of his generation, Frank wore many hats over the years. In his early twenties, he tried to homestead land in Alcomdale, though the land was eventually deemed unsuitable for farming. He later returned to work in Edmonton, primarily in the meat-packing and livestock industries. The 1939 and 1945 Henderson directories list him as working at the stockyard and Canada Packers, living at 12921 – 66 Street.

In 1947, the family moved to a log cabin west of Alcomdale, embracing a more rural life again before eventually selling the property in 1954. After retirement in 1975, Frank and Mary settled into a quieter pace of life, first moving to a property near Lac La Nonne, and later into a seniors facility in Barrhead.

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Later Years and Legacy

Frank retired in June 1975, and he and Mary relocated to a home just off Highway 651 on Range Road 25. They later lived on land near Lac La Nonne owned by their son Richard, and eventually moved into a care home in Barrhead.

Francis Richard Middlebrough passed away on January 2, 1996, at the age of 85. He was cremated, and his passing marked the end of a life that spanned from horse-drawn carts to the internet age. Mary survived him by five years, passing in 2001.

Frank’s legacy lives on in his large family — children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — and in the stories of resilience, love, and perseverance that shaped his life. Whether through his work at the stockyards, his time on the land, or simply sitting around the kitchen table, Frank left behind a life that mattered.

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What do you think? I think it’s a good start. I could use this and expand on it, add photos, and more details about locations, which Ancestry can do. You’ll find that feature on the FamilyStory profile, where you’ll see Ask AncestryAI

This was my progress in just a few days (I worked on it a bit on Monday). As I mentioned, I can use this, add some photos, and put it in the family book I’m working on. So here are my calls to action for you.

Call To Action

Take one of your ancestor biographies, either one on Ancestry or MyHeritage or in your genealogy program, copy and paste it, or create a PDF and upload it to either ChatGPT (that’s what I used) or Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is what Randy usually uses. See what it gives you. You may realize that a book is more doable than you know.

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