… and how could I find out? Yes, he “could be,” but I’d like to know for sure.
Background: Years ago I posted a thread entitled something like “My dad’s birthday can beat up your dad’s birthday”… and won. My father, born 1-12-1889, widowed in 1949, married my MUCH YOUNGER mother in 1963. I was born in 1964, and my younger brother was born in 1965.
So, I’m now wondering… since my father served in the US Army during the last three months of WWI (saw no combat) and is considered at least a WWI-era veteran, could my 52-year-old brother be the youngest known child of such a veteran?
I see lots of threads about Civil War offspring and widows but none about the “Great War.”
That is a cool personal fact but I doubt it is a record of even close to it. John Tyler, 10th President of the U.S., born in 1790 still has two grandsons that are still alive. My own great-great grandfather was one of the last living Civil War Veterans that lived until 1949 and my own grandfather (still very much alive) and a WWII veteran himself knew him quite well even in adulthood. WWI is easy to get to generationally.
I call this phenomenon generation or history skipping. You can go really far in just a few generations under the right circumstances. I was born in 1973 but I knew my great-grandmother quite well before she died at 94 out of spite. She grew up when there were no cars and planes hadn’t been invented yet she got to witness the moon landings. It was an incredible time in history to live through. I talked to her quite a bit when I was a child. She told me all about everything she knew about the 1880’s and even what her parents saw well before that,
I don’t want to dismiss your claim but keep in mind that the last surviving Civil War widows died out well after 2005. There are always some oddities around.
Given the fact that men are capable of producing children for their entire life, there have to be a few really young children of WWI vets around somewhere that are much younger than their 50’s. I can’t tell you where they are but it is statistically inevitable.
Werner Janssen had three children with his second wife (m. 1963). I can’t find any dates, but assuming all children were born into marriage, and are still alive, one of them should beat your brother.
Just keep in mind that President Tyler has 2 living Grandsons.
Snopes: Are John Tyler's Grandchildren Still Alive? | Snopes.com
This is the President John Tyler, who served as the tenth President of the United States from 1841 to 1845. So based on this wonderful factoid, it seems unlikely your brother is the youngest. Probably many vets had kids just as late or later.
I am also a product of this. I just turned 50. Some of my friends had fathers who were Viet Nam vets. My father went through Parris Island in 1945. My grandfather was born in 1883 and was too old for WWI. He died when I was 9 and I remember talking with him about Jersey City in the horse and buggy days.
Re: generation skipping, I’ve often thought it would be interesting to add the dimension of time to the seven degrees of separation. When I was born in the late Fifties, there were still a few Americans alive who had been born before the Civil War, some into slavery. We know there were Americans old enough to remember the American Revolution who were still alive during the Civil War. In fact, the last veteran of the Revolution died in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended. So it would have been possible for me to have shaken the hand of someone who had shaken the hand of someone who remembered the American Revolution. True, we would have been very young hand-shakers, but nonetheless…
Since my grandfather (a late bloomer), knew Henry Ford, I’m just two generational handshakes away from Ford. Since Ford knew Thomas Edison, I’ve been one contemporary (for that time period) handshake and two generational handshakes away from Thomas Edison. You undoubtedly have more interesting connections. It certainly makes history more immediate, as I found when I was teaching.
Sir John Richardson, the biographer of Picasso, is the son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, who was a veteran of some of the British campaigns in Africa in the 1870s. Even more remarkably, Sir Wodehouse was knighted 112 years before his son.