I used other vanilla NPCs or followers made by other modders (you are awesome, BTW), but I knew they weren’t 100% my folk as I imagined them, and since they’ve been with me for so long that I now considered them a part of my family, I just had to do them myself.
When I went back to play Skyrim in my current Fantasy obsession (aka trying to rewrite my first novels and make them better) I knew I had to recreate my characters as followers in the game. FebruSkyrim Special Edition: Making a Custom NPC Follower