My brother says I collect stinky paper. Fair. Old books, old watches, anything with somebody's name and a date on it. I don't really care about the object. I care about who had it. This one is a Dickens Story Teller from 1884, a cheap Chicago reprint of stories from Dickens's magazine. Nothing special as a book. But on the flyleaf, in that perfect loopy 1800s handwriting they drilled into kids: "Coral E. Moore. Dec 25th 1887. East St Louis Ill." A Christmas present. Some 11 year old girl got a book for Christmas 138 years ago and wrote her name in it before the day was over. Isn't it kind of crazy that it's still here? The book is 142 years old. It outlasted her, her parents, her house, and probably a dozen owners in between, and somehow nobody threw it out, burned it, flooded it, or used it for packing. So I took a picture of the page with my phone and asked Claude to find her. I honestly expected nothing. A girl named Moore in 1887 is not a lot to go on. It read the handwriting first. Called the middle initial a B. I said it was an E. The marriage record says E. (I have not let this go.) Then it went through the Illinois marriage index, the state death index, old East St. Louis newspapers a university digitized, and Find a Grave. About an hour, and every fact came with a link. Here's Coral. Born on a farm in Missouri in 1876. Family moved to East St. Louis in 1884. She shows up in the local paper about 30 times as a teenager, parties at the house on St. Clair Avenue, a summer trip to southwest Missouri, that kind of thing. Her obituary called her "one of the most sociable and lovable of children." She married a railroad clerk named George Wood when she was 20. He was one of two guys in his office who survived the 1896 St. Louis tornado. His health never came back. He died in 1900 and she took care of him the whole way through. She died in 1903. She was 27. They're buried next to each other in Belleville, Illinois. Her stone is so weathered you can't read it anymore. Her name in my book looks like she wrote it yesterday. I don't have a big lesson here. Mostly I'm still a little stunned that a phone picture and an hour got me from three lines of ink to a whole person. The AI didn't do anything I couldn't have done myself. It just did it in an afternoon instead of a year, and it let me keep asking "ok but who was she" until there was an answer.