I was born in 1957 and knew my great-grandfather (1865-1965). My mother (born 1921) remembers coal stoves, silent films, ice boxes, “Golden Age” radio shows, and the rare horsedrawn truck (which was, OK, very old-fashioned by the time she was a kid).
I also was friends with Lillian Gish (1893-1993). When she was making Birth of a Nation, she and Griffith interviewed people who’d been in Ford’s Theater the night Lincoln was shot, to get the details accurate. So two people separate me from Lincoln (or from Laura Keene, as you will).
My great-grandmother on my mom’s side was born in 1866. In about 1960 (the year before she died) she could still remember being afraid of “wild” Indians in Iowa (probably Sioux), and giving bands of them flour and lard so they would go away without hurting anyone. This would have been about 1878, before the end of the Indian wars. I’m sure her perception of the Indians was colored by fear, and the memory remained vivid until she was about 95.
My stepmother just passed away at 97. At the end her memory was almost entirely gone, but a few years ago she recounted how she went to school in a horse-drawn surrey in eastern Washington state.
I had a great-grandfather who lived to be 98, but I only saw him a couple of times when I was too young myself to remember anything he said. He lived in Oregon, and I in California.
I’m afraid if we had to depend on word of mouth for our knowledge of history many of us would remain fairly ignorant. Thank goodness for books, and for people who wrote letters.
Since Mary Todd Lincoln (who as memory serves was related to D.W. Griffith) met Sarah Bernhardt that puts you within the 6 Degrees of most of late 19th century society (though Olivia de Havilland, an actress living in Paris, probably puts you a lot closer than that).
Most of my living memory comes from my father (1907-1985), and my mother (1918- 2001). By the time I was born in 1963, both sets of grandparents had passed away.
But my father lived a full and adventurous life and traveled the world, before he settled down in 1955. Not only was he the first in his family to graduate from college, he was the first in his small hometown. He was one of the first volunteers to serve in the Merchant Marines. Before that, he had served in the Navy. By the time WWII started, he was a civilian. Not wanting to miss out on the action, he became a Photo Journalist.
He loved to tell of his adventures. But as a kid I thought his stories were boring. Now I wish I’d paid more attention.
I was born in 1959. My father was born in 1893 (that’s not a typo). He emigrated here from Greece when he was 17. Two years later, he helped a Greek doctor in his apartment building tend to Titanic survivors.
Mine probably comes from my paternal grandmother, who had a few very dim memories of her life in Italy, before her family emigrated to America in 1904. But all I remember of those handed-down memories is pizza, made with dough, olive oil, and little fishies.
My maternal-maternal great-grandmother was older than that, but we didn’t see her often enough for me to remember her. My sister (two years older than me) does, though, and remembers her telling of the loom they had in the attic when she was a little girl. Or more accurately, the attic itself was the loom: There was a row of nails on opposite walls, and the warp was strung from wall to wall, through a combination treadle/banger that hung free in the middle. One person would stand on each side, you’d pass the shuttle through to the other person, then you’d each take one end of the treadle and bang it against the already-woven part, to push the new row of weft up against the others. Then push the treadle the other way, pass the shuttle back, and repeat.
The family story is that my great-grand mother, who I did know and who died when I was in college, walked out of her family’s farmhouse in south-central Wisconsin one morning when she was seven or eight years old and found the whole valley filled with thick smoke. She asked her mother what had happened and her mother told here that it was smoke from a big fire in Chicago. Yes, it was the Great Chicago Fire.
The man that ran the green house in my home town and for whom I worked as a highschool kid, told about being in the army in WWI – in the days just before and after the armistice his unit out marched its logistical tail and the troops had nothing to eat but turnips they foraged from the field along the road.
My great-aunt’s husband – I remember her, but not him – had served in the Union Army and is claimed to have been a drummer boy with a Pennsylvania regiment with the Army of the Potomac and to have been at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was a railroad man. I have his oil can that was converted into a beer stein as a retirement gift. I suppose there was a gold watch, too, but I don’t know what happened to that.
My maternal grandfather’s mother saw Lincoln’s funeral train in Chicago in 1865. I never knew her, but she lived with my mother’s family when my mother was a child. My mother is ninty years old so I suppose it counts as her living memory.
My paternal grandfather who did when I was three years old was in the Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection.
Oh, not as old as my great-grandfather’s memories mentioned above, but I have something y’all might find kind of neat: back in 1910, my husband’s grandmother sailed to Europe with her mother, to meet up with some opera company - we THINK she was supposed to be auditioning for the opera itself, but no one’s real clear on that part anymore. She was ultimately headed to Italy, but thought she’d take a tour of Europe first. She arrived in Germany a day before the Kaiser. Soldiers attempted to move tourists out of the area for their own safety as fast as they could. Grandma - then a sprightly young lady in her early 20s - informed the soldiers that her mother most certainly would NOT be riding in a cattle car and thank you VERY much for asking, but if it was all the same to them, she’d just as soon wait for the next passenger train. Since there were no passenger trains scheduled at that point, Grandma and her mother were placed in the engine car, right alongside the guy driving the train. Grandma demanded - and got - tea and a cushion for her mother. They were delivered safely from Germany and continued on their trip, which landed them finally in Italy in early 1911.
We have a photo album of that trip, with photos of Grandma aboard the RMS Olympic (the Titanic’s sister ship.)
My great-grandmother was born in 1888 and she was around to tell stories until 1973 when I was 14. I’ve known older people but I myself was older so my great-grandmother’s memories as recounted in her stories go back about as far as any first-hand accounts I’ve heard. She spoke on occasion of her girlhood, so I’m laying claim to the late 1890s.
This is one of the most fascinating threads I’ve read in all of my time here. I am just amazed at everyone’s stories!
Eve, I was a fan of Lillian Gish and I think that if I remember correctly, she died the same weekend as the first bombing of the WTC on a snowy February day. (I was travelling up the East coast for a wedding.) What a woman!
My father said that as a child it frightened him to listen to my grandfather and his brothers talk about the Civil War. My Great Uncle John was a member of the Home Guard and became a general thug for a long time after the war. He was friends with Jesse James who used to come “to visit”, but that was before my father’s time.
One of my cousins (who died in the early 1930’s) claims to have interviewed one of the assassins of the Romanoffs. He wrote about it in a book called Seven League Boots.
It just gets kind of irritating, because everyone in my family is a left-wing extremist, to coin a phrase, already. My dad and my sister are registered members of the Green Party, for heaven’s sake, and yet my bubbe is absolutely positive my dad voted for George Bush. Please! My dad uses magnetic poetry to write haiku expressing his loathing for George Bush on the fridge! Apparently, wanting to talk about something other than politics EVER = Republican.
One of the oldest “living memories” I have is R rated, but I’ll mention it because it’s funny. I heard this from my mother who got it from her mother who got it from my grandfather, who’d have probably locked her in the basement if he had known she told the story to one of his children.
My grandfather, Mustang, was one of 15 children of an Alabama hillbilly muletrader and had never been out of the southeast when he joined the army during WW1. He was in his mid 20s at the time and had a reputation with the ladies back home- he was a bachelor but he wasn’t a virgin and he had no hang-ups about premarital sex (even as a very old man, but that’s another story), so he wasn’t a total babe-in-the-wood where women were concerned.
His unit (I’ve no idea what unit that was or whether we’re talking platoon, brigade, or what- all the details are lost) forced the Germans to withdraw from a French town in one of the few battles he saw. (Soon he received just enough of an injury to require him spending the rest of the war making coffins and building bridges, which would later be his career). To express their appreciation, the ladies of the town’s brothels entertained the servicemen free of charge.
My grandfather was a tall lanky redhead. His lady took him to her room, undressed him, undressed herself, and then with a pitcher and bowl began to bathe him, something he wasn’t at all accustomed to and thought was a little odd. Then…
she got onto her knees and began to fellate him. No woman had ever done this to him before, he had never even heard of it being done [remember- Alabama hillcountry- premarital sex was something you had with a young widow or consenting cousin behind the barn almost fully clothed and rather unimaginatively] and it terrified him- he honestly thought she was crazy.
He ran from the room, down the stairs and into the street of the French town stark naked, and his military buddies locked the door behind him while laughing their asses off. He was stopped as he ran down the street by a high ranking officer on horseback who ordered him to explain himself and was clearly ready to courtmartial if not flog him. He tried explaining what had happened and as he did the officer started laughing so hard that he had to stop him because he couldn’t breathe. He ordered one of the men accompanying him to give Mustang his overcoat and escort him back to the brothel. There was no disciplinary action, but he never lived it down for the duration of the war.
Mustang also told about a comrade in arms who got so drunk one night that he became convinced that a large dead frog in the middle of his road was his brother (mainly because his buddies assured him it was) and fell to his knees and cried over it. (It was a big frog, but hardly anything you’d mistake for a human unless you were thousands of miles from home and 1 cc of whiskey from passing out.)
His name was Irving, but he was called Mustang from the time he was a little boy. Irving was a name that appeared on his paychecks and his headstone and that was about it.
My great aunt told my sister about moving to Texas in a covered wagon, right after the battle for independence. She especially remembered carefully packing her books, since there were few on the frontier.
She grew up and became the first woman pharmacist in Texas, then quit and became a suffragist when she learned that the stockboys at the store made more than she did. Eventually she got women the right to vote in the state primary (which had more power than the general election in the Solid South), worked for national suffrage, then was the only woman from Reconstruction to Ann Richards to run for governor in her own right–this was in the 1930s, to force Coke Stevenson to take a position on the New Deal (Stevenon was against it, but he felt that he was above taking political positions.)
It doesn’t go back as far, but my father was one of eight children, born in Galveston in the twenties and raised through the depression, and the five sons all served in the Pacific during WWII. “The Eight” stayed close until they died, and I grew up hearing the family anecdotes which illuminated much of Twentieth Century American history; the depresison, the war and life around organized crime, along with a lot of details particular to Galveston’s history. Admittedly, few people will really care that my dad (an toddler at the time) fell off of a catwalk and was washed several blocks away in the silt that they used to raise Galveston island, or that the reason he never ate mustard as an adult was because a gallon jar cost a quarter when he was young and he grew up eating mustard sandwiches because they couldn’t afford much else, but stories like this helped me to learn that history is about all of us.
My wife and I were visiting her grandfather and asked about life in the old days. We didn’t know what we had asked. He took a breath, then said “We didn’t wear buttons on our shirts when we first moved to Ohio. This was back in (the 17th century, before the American Revolution.)” He went on to tell about the family’s life in the following three hundred years. His ancestors were dairy farmers since the dawn of history, first in Germany, then in America. He was the last to raise dairy cattle, and my father in law was the last to work in the dairy industry.
I was born in 1962. My paternal grandmother, who I remember very well, was born in 1881, and lived to be almost 108. She died when I was 27.
Her father was a Confederate veteran, who was disabled by a minie ball which severed a nerve in his elbow at the battle of Gaines Mill. I still remember stories from my relatives who knew him about how bitter he was from his Civil War experience, and how he held a lifelong grudge against all Yankees.
His father was a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek and Seminole Wars, as a member of the Georgia militia. I think about this every time I travel through southern Alabama or the Florida panhandle, which were battlegrounds in the Indian wars for him.
My Great-grandmother was born around 1900 and died just short of her 100th birthday. I don’t recall a lot of her stories but I guess that’s where my living memory goes back to.
The thing this thread has reminded me of, though, is that apparently Patrick Moore counts among his friends both Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong. I think that’s pretty frickin’ cool.
It’s really kind of surprising how rich the Galveston history is, huh? My paternal grandparents and the paternal great-grandparents except for my paternal great grandfather grew up there, while he moved down there as a boy, and was a laborer who helped build the original Causeway (the old one that’s a railroad bridge now). I used to hear all the wild-ass stories about organized crime, the 1900 storm, and the surprising (for 1920s Texas) ethnic diversity of Galveston. Blacks, Mexicans, Germans, Italians, Jews and regular old white rednecks all called it home.
I’ve heard stories that were passed down by word of mouth for a couple of generations about the Battle of Galveston, and the Union occupation of Texas. I’ve also personally heard fishing lore about winds and tides that dates back to the 1890’s from my grandfather, who heard it from a buddy of his who was probably 50 years older than he was(they worked together).
I was born in 1948. My father’s mother died at age 94 in 1963; she was born in 1869 and lived for a while in Dodge City, KS. Her family was apparently good friends with Wyatt Earp while he was a deputy marshal in Dodge City and she remembered him coming to dinner at their house more than once.
As a young child, I was absolute fascinated that my grandmother had met Wyatt Earp.
