The only one I knew was my maternal grandmother’s mother. She lived until I was 10 or so, and I did get to know her a bit. The last time I remember seeing her was when she came to visit us with my grandmother and my Mom’s older sister (we lived in eastern Tennessee, they lived in central NC). They came in a pickup truck. Her husband had died around the time I was born. There is a family story of him marrying his first wife without her parents’ consent and bolting to Knoxville, TN, where he was arrested.
I am named after my maternal great grandfather. He was a wainwright (wagon maker) in Chicago. He died in 1895 when my grandfather was only 3 so even he did not know his father. But I have a bunch of stuff about him:
Numerous books with his signature. I write just like him! I have his marriage license. And two letters to G-G grandfather back home in Norwalk, Ohio. The first one is actually by Lillian, my great grandmother introducing herself to the family as Dennis will probably not get around to it. Sounds like me, again.
The second one is more poignant. Again, it is written by Lillian. Dennis has just collapsed at work and brought home. His brother took over the job at the wagon factory or else Dennis might have lost his job. From the description of his left side being paralyzed it is now apparent he had a stroke. On the back of the letter is a hastily scrawled message the next morning before sending the letter. It reads, “No change”. He lingered on a few months.
On my mother’s side, my grandmother’s parents were both born and raised in the Lansing, Michigan area. They came to Washington just before it became a state and settled in the Mt.Vernon area. They both worked on Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet boats between Tacoma and Vancouver, BC. He died in a car accident in 1936, she died in 1957, about 6 months after I was born.
My grandfather’s parents never married. She was born in Seabeck, Washington and lived most of her life in the Shelton area. He came to Canada in the late 1890’s from Ireland and intended to never leave. He ended up in British Columbia. In 1903 he met my grandmother in a logging camp near Bremerton, he work as a logger, she worked in the camp kitchen. She ended up pregnant. He was deported back to Canada because his visa expired. My grandfather was born February of 1904. 3 years later they met up again, she ended up pregnant and had another son. In 1909 he was deported back to Canada. Canada deported him back to Ireland. She never saw or heard from him again. She met someone and they married, he raised her two boys like they were his. They had a daughter together. My great grandmother died in 1968, 2 years after my grandfather died. When a cousin of mine passes, that will end the family name that was brought to us from an illegal alien from Ireland.
On father’s side, my grandmother’s parents both born in Georgia. She was from a well-known family that served during the Civil War. He was also from a well-known family. He was convicted of a “high crime” in 1911 and served time in prison. She ran a boarding house in Kings Bay, Georgia as a way to support her 3 daughters. She died in 1951. He passed in 1942 and for some reason no one can find, was buried in Franklin, Tennessee.
My grandfather’s parents have the most information available. Both are descendants of well-known immigrants from England, both established towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut. There are even Wikipedia pages about them. Both also have extensive family trees online. She was born in Leyden, Massachusetts in 1862 and died in Bradenton, Florida in 1942. He was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1858 and died in Bradenton in 1937. They are buried together in Northfield, Massachusetts. Together they had 10 children and outlived 5 of them
5 of 8 have pages on Find-A-Grave. The only one I ever met was my maternal grandfather’s mother. I also have a picture of her. I also have a picture of someone that might be my paternal grandmother’s father. Found it using a Google image search, the name matches but I can’t verify it is a descendant of mine.
Two of my great grandparents were alive when I was born, both my Father’s Mother’s parents. One died when I was 2, so I don’t remember him, but I have some memories of my Great Grandmother “Mom” as she died when I was 8.
My parents have done fairly extensive genealogy, however, so I have endured lectures about my family history.
My father’s father’s father was abandoned by his father as a child, as he chose to leave behind his job as a librarian and his wife and 4 children, to go camping for the next 30 years. He did help to form the Great Smoky Mountains National park, and got a mountain named after him, but it left a distaste for the idea of camping in my family. When I joined Boy Scouts, my grandfather gave me a bit of a lecture, though I didn’t really understand the significance of it at the time. To be fair, I think I’d rather be camping than stuck with 4 kids, though working in a library actually sounds pretty nice.
Most of my other Great Grandparents were farmers, didn’t do anything too exciting or notable. My parents actually have some of their antique farm equipment in their attic. Not sure if that’s actually worth anything.
my dad told me if anyone asked, his grandpa played piano in a whorehouse. come to find out, what he did for a living was disgraceful and the family decided working in a whorehouse was much more respectable. mind you, these are southern baptist bible-thumpers telling me to lie. i still don’t know what it was he did. i’m afraid to look.
My one set of great-grandparents was spoken of often in my family - my great grandfather was murdered at the start of the Russian Revolution, resulting in the family scattering and coming west. It was considered a sort of founding event for my family, and there was even a (very fictionalized) film made with that event as the inciting incident.
I vaguely know basic information about one other set of great-grandparents, and the other two sets essentially nothing.
Makes you think what your decendends, if you have any, will think and say about you. Probably a topic for another thread.
I’m jealous of those of you who got to know, or even met, your great grandparents. Mine were long gone by the time I came along. Seems like my whole family tree waited to have kids.
The tradition continues… I was in my high 30s when I had kids. They’re in their 30s and in no hurry, they’ll probably start having kids when I’m in my 70s.
Just their names. I know one worked as a tailor. It’s hard to find records for Jews living in Russia and eastern Europe.
One generation back, I know one great great grandmother was a high-class prostitute.
I just know general details about most of my grandparents’ parents. But my paternal grandfather’s cousin wrote a memoir about his family (i.e., my grandfather’s uncle’s family) coming to Saskatchewan and that book has been scanned into a PDF and preserved online by the University of Calgary. It has some interesting history about my great-grandfather as well, since the families were relatively close.
My great-grandma (paternal grandma’s mother) was alive until I was 12 or 13. So I knew her. She came here from Calabria, Italy in 1912 along with her husband and my 2-year-old grandma. They lived in a “Little Italy” in our area for quite a few years before moving to the neighborhood that she lived in until she died. (My grandma and grandpa lived in the same neighborhood when they got married and so did my mom and dad.) She never learned to read or write and could only speak a few words of English. The rest of my “greats” died either before I was born or when I was very young. I kind of remember one of my mom’s grandma’s but it’s pretty hazy. I did Ancestry.com and was able to make a pretty extensive family tree. So I have that info and the info that was passed down from my mom and dad.
I only know that my mother’s mother’s father was a cobbler. That’s it. I don’t even know much about two of my grandparents, the two who died years before I was born.
My mothers side they were onion farmers in Ohio then Michigan. There was a murder suicide with one of the great uncles…his wife took up with some one and he was found in the barn dead. Ruled a suicide, but he was a CO in WW2, and went to jail! Why would he kill himself? Hummmmm… a mystery!
On Mom’s side, I knew Great Gramma Katherina(yes that is how it was spelled) immigrated to the US through Russia with $15 and the first thing she did(as the story goes) was to buy a most fabulous hat with a flower arrangement and a bird on it for $12.50. We have pictures of her with the hat, the rest may be merely family legend. I remember meeting her once as a small child.
Dad’s side, well, we know Grandpa(Dad’s Dad) was an Arkansawyer. He never knew his actual birthdate, no records to be found, not even a family bible. Nobody has ever related any info about Dad’s Mom’s family to me.
My father’s grandfather came from Russia in the 1880s, and was considered a holy, learned man, the kind who spent his time reading the Torah. Some of his kids made a lot of money in the restaurant business in NY. He eventually went back to Russia with his youngest daughter (not unusual) which was a bad move for her. He was dead before 1941.
Ha! I have a picture of my maternal great grandmother who was an immigrant from Hungary (and the picture would have been taken very shortly – probably less than a year or two – after she came) wearing a FABulous hat. I’m sure she hadn’t brought it with her. Great grandfather was a coal miner, so it wasn’t because she was flush with cash.
I may have mis-heard this at a young age and quite possibly skipped a generation, but my mother’s father’s father (Northern Alabama) married a full-blooded Cherokee woman. I’m guessing post-Civil War. That’s all.
On my father’s side I barely know anything about my grandparents, much less farther back. His mother was sent as a child from Odessa to New York, to relatives, to save her life. Everyone related to her who remained died in the pogroms. My father’s father emigrated from Latvia as a young man. All I know about his family was that ‘they were tinkers’. Again, everyone remaining was obliterated. Both of those people died before I knew them, my grandmother in childbirth when my father was eight, my grandfather, back in Flatbush, died of heart attack (maybe) when I was eight.
My mother’s side were all German and German-Swiss peasant emigrants who settled in Wisconsin in the late 19th century, and became dairy farmers. All I know about them is a few dim photographs, and names. I don’t know if they were alive when I was born. My mother’s side never did much of any talking about the past, and rarely about anything else either. Questions were discouraged.
Three were alive when I was born, though one (my mother’s maternal grandfather) died very shortly thereafter. I knew my mother’s maternal grandmother, and my father’s maternal grandmother, both of whom died when I was in elementary school.
All of my great-grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. All native Yiddish speakers.
Mother’s maternal side: I think they were from what is now Romania or at least that part of Europe. Her grandfather was a coppersmith, who pissed away all the money he earned gambling, and molested his three daughters (and pimped out at least one of them, my great-aunt) and most of his granddaughters (including my mother when she was very young). He was a monster, and it’s surprising there is not more family drama as a result of his crimes. Her grandmother, who died when I was 10, I know little about, except that she probably knew about what he was doing and didn’t protect her daughters, though maybe that was fear of retribution. I don’t know.
Mother’s paternal side: From what is now Belarus near its border with the Baltic states. Her grandfather was a stonemason/bricklayer. He owned a house in South Philadelphia and a small apartment house nearby. He died before my mother was born, but my grandfather told me some stuff about him. He was religious–never worked on Shabbat, and made his own Passover wine every year. I have some of his prayer books (in Hebrew and Yiddish–no English), prayer shawls (sadly full of holes), and t’fillin (phylacteries, also very deteriorated). Mom’s grandmother was extremely kind and generous to everyone, sometimes at the expense of giving away so much food to visitors that she went a little hungry. There are tales that the family home would get visitors who were stars of Yiddish theater, including Molly Picon, best known for playing Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof, who lived in Philly.
Father’s paternal side: I know absolutely nothing about his grandmother, even her name. She died years before he was born. I’m not even certain if she came to the States or died in Europe. The family did not immigrate all at once–my grandfather didn’t come until around 1929, long after his siblings and (at least) his father. His grandfather was a Rabbi and shochet (ritual slaughterer), who apparently kept chickens for sale in the family basement (price included kosher slaughtering, presumably). I think he died when my dad was fairly young.
Father’s maternal side: They were from what is now Ukraine, I think. In the old country, her younger sister and one of his brothers became engaged, and because the younger sister couldn’t marry before the older one, she came to the US to marry his brother, who was already here. Her sister and his brother ended up in southern Brazil, so I have a big bunch of cousins in Porto Allegre. His grandfather died before Dad was born, apparently from a hernia caused, so the story goes, from hauling around barrels of bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Family lore has it that my great-grandmother would walk my grandmother around a local park with her baby sister in a carriage that had bottles of booze in it. People would stop them to lean over and coo at the baby, drop a little cash in the carriage, and grab a bottle. Don’t know if that actually happened, but it’s too good not to repeat. My great-grandmother lived with my grandparents after they were married, so Dad and his siblings grew up with her in the house, and she stayed in the house until she died around 1970.
My father’s paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, both widowed, married each other around the time my grandfather immigrated (the rest of my grandparents were born in the US). That’s how my grandparents met. They were technically step-siblings, which is slightly icky, but he was 18 when he got here, and she was 16, so they didn’t grow up together, which I think makes it sort of ok. Sort of.
OK, there are a lot of great stories so far in this thread, but this one is top 5! Very cool - sounds like a scene from a movie, and even if not 100% accurate, there is always a shred of truth in every story like this.