One definition of living memory doesn’t mean things that we remember ourselves but, loosely, what the oldest generation still largely represented and cognizant remembers the oldest generation when they were young recalling from their life experience. Since the oldest generation that exists in significant numbers of mentally/physically healthy people today would have been born around WW1 (give or take a little) and able to remember the 1920s fairly well, they would have known people who could have remembered the Civil War fairly well from their own childhood/young adulthood, so I’d say the Civil War is basically the border for living memory in America today.
That said, I’m curious what living memory is for most Dopers.
I was born in December 1966. Most of my playmates growing up were born in the 19th century and I knew my great-aunts (twins born in 1889) extremely well (both lived well into their 90s). I also knew their brother who was born in 1881, but not as well (he lived to be 100 but I only met him a few times, whereas the aunts lived first near and later with me.) So my own personal living memory would be the turn of the 19th/20th century (I keep forgetting that “turn of the century” has to be specified now), or roughly the advent of cars and planes.
I was raised by grand parents. GM born in 1897 GF born in 1893. We had a neighbor who was 100 when I was 15, in 1961 so sh was born in 1840. She told us about coming west in a conestoga wagon.
Sampiro,
Your playmates were all over 66 years old? How odd. Did you ever have other children to play with?
All my great-grandparents except one died before I was born (or very shortly thereafter). The one who did live, that I remember, died when I was about 13, but I don’t remember her telling any stories of her youth (she was a bitter old thing…didn’t like to deal with people much). So, if that counts, she was born in the early 1900s (don’t know the year, but it was in the aughts.)
If I had to get personal stories, the furthest back I get is my grandfathers, who have told me plenty about their childhood in the late 20s, early 30s. I’d personally count that as my living memory…Depression Era.
I have no living relatives born earlier than 1938. I was too young to have the kind of relationship with my grandparents where they would sit around and tell me stories of their youth, before they died. Really, I couldn’t fill up a paragraph on any of them. So I guess my earliest living memories start in the early 1940s. Unless I’m misunderstanding the question.
My paternal grandfather was a Confederate soldier, but he died 18 years before I was born. I guess the oldest person that I can remember was my maternal grandfather. He was born in 1866.
I’m sitting here looking at a quilt that was pieced together with fabric from his tobacco sacks during the Great Depression.
I remember crying at his funeral in January 1950. Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown? I was six years old.
I was born in 1959 and the oldest person I knew was my grandfather who was born in 1893. He told me about his boyhood in Sicily so that takes us back to circa 1900. He joined the U.S. Army during World War I and served in France. When I learned French, 60 years after WWI, he said “merci beaucoup” to me.
One set of my great-grandparents was alive until I was in my early 20s. Papa was in his late 80s when he died, so (doing math on my fingers here) he was born around 1895-ish. I have lots of memories of him telling me about emigrating to the US in the early 1900s and the old Chicago jazz clubs in the 1920s.
My husband’s maternal great-great-grandmother kept diaries from when she was a child, so like picunurse, we have some “memories” of traveling west by wagon train. She even had a story of the family’s camp being thoroughly investigated by “Red Indians” - she was told to give them candy to keep them friendly.
My oldest relatives were a great-aunt born in 1898, sister to my grandma, born in 1900. Neither talked much about their younger days, but as little girls they used to collect pins on a ribbon. Imagine 4-or-5-year-olds being allowed pins today.
One grandpa, born in Kansas in 1902, worked in Chautauqua, delivered phonographs and records on a bicycle, got a joy ride in a Velie Monocoupe, and once heard Bix Beiderbecke live. In 1930, he sent my grandma an engagement ring by Western Air Express. The plane crashed. They found the ring and sent it on.
Another (I never knew him), born in Bridgeport, CT in 1899, was shabbes goy for a neighborhood Jewish family back before WWI. He was a Socialist who stood guard on a bank on the night in 1927 when Sacco & Vanzetti were put to death, just in case the anarchists or the Commies tried any tricks. He was friends growing up with piano star Frankie Carle. He later became a Bridgeport alderman. His favorite saying was, “Most guys stop being Socialists when they get two shirts.”
I was born in 1960. My great-grandmother was 99 years older than me (born in 1861). I met her once (when I was 13), so I guess my living memory extends back to the beginning of the Civil War or so.
Well, I have a brother and sister who are 7 and 9 years older than I am that I played with sometimes, but mainly I played with my aunts (b. 1889), my grandfather (b. 1893) and my babysitter (b. ca. 1900). I grew up on a cattle farm two miles from the nearest neighbor who wasn’t a blood relative or my babysitter and my family didn’t associate much with “the natives”, so until I started elementary school I’d never played with kids my own age (which was cool because you didn’t have to worry near as much about somebody having a stroke when you played ball).
Great question, Sampiro. My living memory stretches back to the Dark Ages. Honest. My paternal grandmother and grandfather, both born in 1900, grew up in extreme northern Italy, northeast of Lake Como way up in the mountains. Their two villages were right next to each other, pop. 80 and 60 respectively. When they (my grandparents) left in the early 20’s, these villages still had no electricity or running water, no tractors or fuel for them, burned wood for warmth and candles for light. Each village had one communal oven that everyone would gather fuel for, and in which the women would bake bread for the entire week.
Because of the extreme poverty and isolation, as far as day to day living stuff, not much had changed for many hundreds of years. So of course I exaggerate, but on the other hand, my claim has some truth to it.
My grandfather was born in the late 1870s, in a *shtetl *(small Jewish community, like in Fiddler on the Roof) that was sometimes in Russia and sometimes in Poland. I remember him telling me how all the young Jewish men had gotten drafted, to fight in some war the Czar had started. Not caring much about the Czar or his war, my grandfather became a draft dodger, and eventually found his way to America. Somehow, over the following few years, he brought all his siblings over as well.
He also told me that all his relatives who did not make it over here, were eventually wiped out in the holocaust.
When I was a kid (was born in 1927), I still remember some very old Civil War veterans that showed up on Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day). The amazing thing is that some of them said they recalled their grandfathers talking about being in the Revolutionary War.
I still think this is amazing that this spans the history of our nation.
So I guess actually it could be pushed back a bit- Klondike Geoff is only in his 70s and he can “remember [once removed]” the Civil War, and there are many very sound-minded 90-somethings around, so they eople a decade older than him could probably “remember [once removed]” the Mexican-American War (or that era, rather). So the antebellum era is still well within living memory.
I don’t know why I find this fascinating. Maybe it’s my Creek-Indian blood (the Creeks believed that your spirit remained earthbound until the last person who remembered you died because in memories they held a piece of you, which I always thought was a super cool concept).
My grandmother was born in 1911 and grandpa was born in 1909. In high school I did a history project that involved interviewing my grandparents to compile a timeline of major family and historical events. They told me stories about their childhoods, including what it was like during the flu epidemic of 1918.
All of my great-grandparents died before I was born. My parents have told me some stories about them, but they’re my parents’ memories, not my great-grandparents’. So I guess my earliest memories would go back to my grandmothers. My grandma (mom’s mom) told me about her uncles coming back to Nebraska from fighting in World War I when she was a child, and my bubbe (dad’s mom) told me about growing up in Brooklyn, in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish tenement, and how when she was still young, her family set across the country to live in Los Angeles. My grandma has Alzheimer’s now and doesn’t know who I am anymore, but my bubbe is mentally sound and I could ask her more stuff - if I can put up with her tirades about George Bush. (I think she’s afraid I’ll become a Republican if she doesn’t expound on the evils of the Bush family in great, great, great detail.)
Sampiro,My Grandma Walls lived to be 114. At least that’s what they said. She didn’t have a birth certificate or anything. But she always said she was born in 1861. She was from Oklahoma, her father was a share-cropper as were her first two husbands (she was married 3 times).
