MODS _ please feel free to move this as you see fit…
I remember talking to my great great grandmother when I was a boy, and she told me a joke that her father had told her… (Sadly I don’t remember the joke… I was probably too young to get the referents, so didn’t remember it… something about hand made shoes and a shoe maker’s daughter). Her father was born in 1852…
So I have 2 degrees of separation from a man born in 1852.
How far back gan you go?
(To count it has to be directly relayed information… you talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone, each going back a generation or so)
I was born on February 28th, which is my grandmother’s anniversary and also the birthday of my great grandmother. I can’t peg the year right now but it’s early 1900’s.
My mother was born in 1924
My sister was born in 1942
My niece was born in 1962
Her daughter was born in 1985
Her first child was born in 2004
5 living generations, like the OP. If my mom talks to her great great grandaughter about something my grandmother (b. 1890?) told her about her grandfather…
My mom has parts of our family tree traced back to the year 1200 or something.
My great grandmother’s second marriage was to a man born in 1899. He told tales of his great grandfather who was born in the 1820s. So that takes me back almost 200 years in two degrees.
My great-grandfather came to the U.S. in 1859. I don’t know when he was born, except that he came here as an adult. He lived to a ripe old age and my mother remembered him.
Like lobotomyboy63 my father’s family tree goes back to the Middle Ages.
My great aunt had clear memories of conversations she had as a young girl with her great-grandfather. He was born in 1799 and died in the early 1900s. I have a photograph of him that I was going to post in the thread devoted to ancestors but I never got around to doing it.
My great grandfather was born in 1832 but I never had the chance to speak to my grandfather about him, as much as I would have loved to do it.
On a related note, as a little girl my great-grandmother (who lived until I was 20) met and shook the hands of then-president Theodore Roosevelt and Old West showman Buffalo Bill Cody.
My mother (who is now 89) was told by her father (born in Russia in the late 19th century) that his nanny remembered Napoleon’s army invading when she was a girl.
I am not looking for mere geneology here, however, but direct connections (such as the handshake stories or the napoleonic wars posts)
I was talking about this idea at work, and one woman, who is of native american back ground, remembers talking to her great grandmother, who’s mother told her of a buffalo hunt in 1870’s.
So we are looking for direct transmission of “lore” about a specific person or time accross multiple generations.