 |
| Gabriel departing Valparaiso. Made in Ideogram. |
I know there's a wide variety of opinion about using AI in genealogy and family history circles. As I continue testing image generation for various scenes in my family's branches, this tool is growing on me and I'm impressed with what it can do. The example above is an imagined scene of my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez, departing the port of Valparaiso, Chile in 1858 for a new life in Mexico.
Gabriel was likely about 20 when he left Chile. He reported in his informacion matrimonial in 1863 that he had been in Altar, Sonora for the past five years, providing an estimated arrival in Mexico of 1858. It's possible he arrived in Mexico even earlier, but I don't know. I certainly don't have a photo, he died in 1873 at the age of 34.
My prompt was pretty simple, "a twenty-year old merchant boarding a ship in Valparaiso, Chile in 1858, looking back at the harbor. He has dark hair and a moustache." I like that Ideogram returns four options. The other generated images didn't quite fit the time period or the look that I was expecting to see for a representation of Gabriel.
At the time, this journey from Valparaiso to Guaymas, Sonora (Gabriel's likely landing spot) would have taken 3-4 weeks, maybe longer, with multiple stops along the way in locations such as Peru, Panama, and south of Guaymas on the Mexican coast. According to a query with Claude, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company sailed along the coast from October 1848, and some of those records are preserved through the Pacific Mail Steamship Collection through the Huntington Library.
